Related papers: How to Select Observers
Scientific theories need to be testable by observations, say using Bayes' theorem. A complete theory needs at least the three parts of dynamical laws for specified physical variables, the correct solution of the dynamical laws (boundary…
This paper sets out to resolve how agents ought to act in the Sleeping Beauty problem and various related anthropic (self-locating belief) problems, not through the calculation of anthropic probabilities, but through finding the correct…
As physics searches for invariants in observations, this paper looks for invariants of probabilistic observation without assuming physical structure. Structure emerges from the basic assumption of science that new information shall lead to…
Bayesian probability theory is used to analyze the oft-made assumption that humans are typical observers in the universe. Some theoretical calculations make the {\it selection fallacy} that we are randomly chosen from a class of objects by…
The way a rational agent changes her belief in certain propositions/hypotheses in the light of new evidence lies at the heart of Bayesian inference. The basic natural assumption, as summarized in van Fraassen's Reflection Principle…
Referring to a standard context of voting theory, and to the classic notion of voting situation, here we show that it is possible to observe any arbitrary set of elections' outcomes, no matter how paradoxical it may appear. On this purpose…
After commenting briefly on the role of the typicality assumption in science, we advocate a phenomenological approach to the cosmological measure problem. Like any other theory, a measure should be simple, general, well-defined, and…
Many modern cosmological scenarios feature large volumes of spacetime in a de Sitter vacuum phase. Such models are said to be faced with a "Boltzmann Brain problem" - the overwhelming majority of observers with fixed local conditions are…
Selection effects in cosmology are often invoked to "explain" why some of the fundamental constant of Nature, and in particular the cosmological constant, take on the value they do in our Universe. We briefly review this probabilistic…
Extracting predictions from cosmological theories that describe a multiverse, for what we are likely to observe in our domain, is crucial to establishing the validity of these theories. One way to extract such predictions is from…
We attempt to dissolve the measurement problem using an anthropic principle which allows us to invoke rational observers. We argue that the key feature of such observers is that they are rational (we need not care whether they are…
One of the innovative approaches in contemporary philosophical ontology consists in the assumption of a plurality of ontologies based on different metaphysical presuppositions. Such presuppositions involve, among others, the identification…
A goal of most interpretations of quantum mechanics is to avoid the apparent intrusion of the observer into the measurement process. Such intrusion is usually seen to arise because observation somehow selects a single actuality from among…
[Abridged] Some cosmological theories propose that the observable universe is a small part of a much larger universe in which parameters describing the low-energy laws of physics vary from region to region. How can we reasonably assess a…
To make predictions for an eternally inflating "multiverse", one must adopt a procedure for regulating its divergent spacetime volume. Recently, a new test of such spacetime measures has emerged: normal observers - who evolve in pocket…
Optimizing recommender systems based on user interaction data is mainly seen as a problem of dealing with selection bias, where most existing work assumes that interactions from different users are independent. However, it has been shown…
The doomsday argument is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the total lifetime of the human race. By examining the case of an individual lifetime, I conclude that the argument is fundamentally related to consciousness. I derive…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
In the absence of a fundamental theory that precisely predicts values for observable parameters, anthropic reasoning attempts to constrain probability distributions over those parameters in order to facilitate the extraction of testable…
One of quantum theory's salient features is its apparent indeterminism, i.e. measurement outcomes are typically probabilistic. We formally define and address whether this uncertainty is unavoidable or whether post-quantum theories can offer…