Related papers: Pessimism and Cynicism as Physical Entities
The current public sense of anxiety in dealing with disinformation as manifested by so-called fake news is acutely displayed by the reaction to recent events prompted by a belief in conspiracies among certain groups. A model to deal with…
Informational entropy is often identified as physical entropy. This is surprising because the two quantities are differently defined and furthermore the former is a subjective quantity while the latter is an objective one. We describe the…
In our previous articles ("The Information and the Matter", v1, v5; more systematically the informational conception is presented in arXiv paper "The Information as Absolute", 2010) it was rigorously shown that the Matter is some…
Determinism and indeterminism in physical theories are reviewed and some broader implications of determinism are discussed.
A natural way of quantifying the ``amount of information'' in decision problems yields a globally concave value for information. Another (in contrast, adversarial) way almost never does.
The aim of this paper is to show that the concept of probability is best understood by dividing this concept into two different types of probability, namely physical probability and analogical probability. Loosely speaking, a physical…
When different information sources on a given topic are combined, they interact in a nontrivial manner for a rational receiver of these information sources. Suppose that there are two information sources, one is genuine and the other…
In this paper we provide a simple random-variable example of inconsistent information, and analyze it using three different approaches: Bayesian, quantum-like, and negative probabilities. We then show that, at least for this particular…
There is a persistent confusion about determinism and predictability. In spite of the opinions of some eminent philosophers (e.g., Popper), it is possible to understand that the two concepts are completely unrelated. In few words we can say…
The problem of quantification of emotions in the choice between alternatives is considered. The alternatives are evaluated in a dual manner. From one side, they are characterized by rational features defining the utility of each…
I propose here a new concept of information based on two relevant aspects of its expression. The first related to the undeniable fact that the expression of information modifies the physical state of its receiver. The second to the…
Here we briefly discuss how negative numbers, or "negative probabilities", can naturally arise in probabilistic expressions and be given an operational interpretation. Like the use of negative numbers in arithmetical expressions, the use of…
This paper develops a model of reference-dependent assessment of subjective beliefs in which loss-averse people optimally choose the expectation as the reference point to balance the current felicity from the optimistic anticipation and the…
Although the same mathematical expression is used to describe physical diffusion and stochastic diffusion, there are intrinsic similarities and differences in their nature. A comparative study shows that characteristic terms of physical and…
We discuss the physical nature of quantum information, in particular focussing on tasks that are achievable by some physical realizations of qubits but not by others.
Recent developments in foundations of physics have given rise to a class of views suggesting that physically meaningful descriptions must always be relativized to a physical perspective. In this article I distinguish between strong physical…
Many widely different problems have a common mathematical structure wherein limited knowledge lead to ambiguity that can be captured conveniently using a concept of invisibility that requires the introduction of negative values for…
A variety of physical unknowables are discussed. Provable lack of physical omniscience, omnipredictability and omnipotence is derived by reduction to problems which are known to be recursively unsolvable. "Chaotic" symbolic dynamical…
The quantum-mechanical description of the world, including human observers, makes substantial use of entanglement. In order to understand this, we need to adopt concepts of truth, probability and time which are unfamiliar in modern…
In this paper, we relate the philosophical literature on pessimism traps to information cascades, a formal model derived from the economics and mathematics literature. A pessimism trap is a social pattern in which individuals in a…