Related papers: How to Select Observers
Many seemingly paradoxical effects are known in the predictions for outcomes of intermediate measurements made on pre- and post-selected quantum systems. Despite appearances, these effects do not demonstrate the impossibility of a…
A perceived problem with the standard flat-lambda model is that in the far future spacetime becomes an exponentially expanding de Sitter space, filled with Gibbons-Hawking thermal radiation, and given infinite time there will appear an…
Many researchers have applied classical statistical decision theory to evaluate treatment choices and learn optimal policies. However, because this framework is based solely on realized outcomes under chosen decisions and ignores…
Elections constitute a paradigm of decision-making problems that have puzzled experts of different disciplines for decades. We study two decision-making problems, where groups make decisions that impact only themselves as a group. In both…
We consider two straightforward rules that govern the stochastic choice in a single quantum mechanical event. They are shown to lead to absurd results if an objective state reduction is allowed to compete with an observer state reduction.…
Interpretations of quantum theory have traditionally assumed a "Galilean" observer, a bare "point of view" implemented physically by a quantum system. This paper investigates the consequences of replacing such an…
The disjunction effect in human decision making is often taken to show that the classical law of total probability is violated, motivating quantum-like models. We re-examine this claim for the Prisoner's Dilemma disjunction effect. Under…
Conditional selective inference requires an exact characterization of the selection event, which is often unavailable except for a few examples like the lasso. This work addresses this challenge by introducing a generic approach to estimate…
Anthropic reasoning is a critical tool to understand probabilities, especially in a large universe or multiverse. According to anthropic reasoning, we should consider ourselves typical among members of a reference class that must include…
We discuss several issues related to a recent proposal for defining classical spatial averages to be used in the so-called cosmological backreaction problem. In the large averaging-volume limit all gauge dependence disappears and different…
The perception-related origins of physical measures and standards are considered within the framework of the general observer theory. The impact of observer characteristics on the development of observer-centric physics, physical concepts…
Ensemble theories have received a lot of interest recently as a means of explaining a lot of the detailed complexity observed in reality by a vastly simpler description ``every possibility exists'' and a selection principle ({\em Anthropic…
I argue for an approach to the Foundations of Physics that puts the question in the title center stage, rather than asking "what is the case in the world?". This approach, algorithmic idealism, attempts to give a mathematically rigorous…
Quantum interference phenomena are widely viewed as posing a challenge to the classical worldview. Feynman even went so far as to proclaim that they are the only mystery and the basic peculiarity of quantum mechanics. Many have also argued…
Averaging in general relativity is a complicated operation, due to the general covariance of the theory and the non-linearity of Einstein's equations. The latter of these ensures that smoothing spacetime over cosmological scales does not…
Type-and-effect systems help the programmer to organize data and computational effects in a program. While for traditional type systems expressive variants with sophisticated inference algorithms have been developed and widely used in…
Many cosmologists (myself included) have advocated volume weighting for the cosmological measure problem, weighting spatial hypersurfaces by their volume. However, this often leads to the Boltzmann brain problem, that almost all…
Although time is one of our most intuitive physical concepts, its understanding at the fundamental level is still an open question in physics. For instance, time in quantum mechanics and general relativity are two distinct and incompatible…
This article deals with plausible reasoning from incomplete knowledge about large-scale spatial properties. The availableinformation, consisting of a set of pointwise observations,is extrapolated to neighbour points. We make use of belief…
This essay considers a simple model of observers that are influenced by the world around them. Consistent quantification of information about such influences results in a great deal of familiar physics. The end result is a new perspective…