Related papers: The Trouble with "Puddle Thinking": A User's Guide…
There is a scientific and ethical imperative to embrace a multidimensional, continuous view of ancestry and move away from continental ancestry categories
The claimed unanimity of the scientific community about the human culpability for global warming is questioned. Up today there exists no scientific proof of human culpability. It is not the number of authors of a paper, which validates its…
It is the purpose of the present article to collect arguments for, that there should exist in fact -- although not necessarily yet found -- some law, which imply an adjustment to special features to occur in the future. In our own "complex…
Recent years have seen both a revival of space programs, mostly propelled by private industry's increasing interest, but also the emergence of strong resistance to human space activities on several levels. This is partly a manifestation of…
The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an…
It is shown that in d=11 supergravity, under a very reasonable ansatz, the nearly flat spacetime in which we are living must be 4-dimensional without appealing to the Anthropic Principle. Can we dispel the Anthropic Principle completely…
The problem of interpreting quantum theory on a large (e.g. cosmological) scale has been commonly conceived as a search for objective reality in a framework that is fundamentally probabilistic. The Everett programme attempts to evade the…
It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant…
This brief article presents the introduction and draft of the fundamental ideas developed at length in the book of the same title, which gives a challenging point of view about science and its history/philosophy/sociology. Science is in…
Cosmology differs in some respects significantly from other sciences, primarily because of its intimate association with issues of a conceptual and philosophical nature. Because cosmology in the broader sense relates to the world views held…
Human-Centric NLP often claims to prioritise human needs and values, yet many implementations reveal an underlying AI-centric focus. Through an analysis of case studies in language modelling, behavioural testing, and multi-modal alignment,…
The anthropocentric cultural idea that humans are active agents exerting control over their environments has been largely normalized and inscribed in practices, policies, and products of contemporary industrialized societies. This view…
Anthropic reasoning is a form of statistical reasoning based upon finding oneself a member of a particular reference class of conscious beings. By considering empirical distribution functions defined over animal life on Earth, we can deduce…
In 2007 an international conference engaged a reflection on the present conditions for sciences and scientific practice, to initiate a dialogue between science, philosophy, epistemology and sociology. Starting from many examples taken from…
Recent advances in string theory and inflationary cosmology have led to a surge of interest in the possible existence of an ensemble of cosmic regions, or universes, among the members of which key physical parameters, such as the masses of…
Despite the success of our best models in Theoretical Physics, especially concerning Cosmology and Particle Physics, we still face persistent challenges. Among them we have the cosmological singularity problem, understanding the late-time…
We argue that if string theory as an approach to the fundamental laws of physics is correct, then there is almost no room for anthropic arguments in cosmology. The quark and lepton masses and interaction strengths are determined.
Increasingly encompassing models have been suggested for our world. Theories range from generally accepted to increasingly speculative to apparently bogus. The progression of theories from ego- to geo- to helio-centric models to universe…
Even when completely and consistently formulated, a fundamental theory of physics and cosmological boundary conditions may not give unambiguous and unique predictions for the universe we observe; indeed inflation, string/M theory, and…
I offer an analysis of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and its relevancy for the scientific endeavour. I submit that the world is not, and cannot be, rational - only some brained beings are. The Principle of Sufficient Reason is not a…