Related papers: Pessimism and Cynicism as Physical Entities

Traditional evaluation of information access systems has focused primarily on average utility across a set of information needs (information retrieval) or users (recommender systems). In this work, we argue that evaluating only with average…

A decision is an act or event of decision taking. Decision making always includes decision taking, the latter not involving significant exchanges with non-deciding agents. A decision outcome is a piece of storable information constituting…

The mutual information between a set of stimuli and the elicited neural responses is compared to the corresponding decoded information. The decoding procedure is presented as an artificial distortion of the joint probabilities between…

In many engineering applications it is useful to reason about "negative information". For example, in planning problems, providing an optimal solution is the same as giving a feasible solution (the "positive" information) together with a…

Information is everywhere in nature which is very uncertain and unpredictable. But information, in itself, is a very ambiguous term. In this cursory write-up, we attempt to understand the formal meaning of information by quantifying…

Phishing is a form of cybercrime and a threat that allows criminals, phishers, to deceive end users in order to steal their confidential and sensitive information. Attackers usually attempt to manipulate the psychology and emotions of…

With vast amounts of high-quality information at our fingertips, how is it possible that many people believe that the Earth is flat and vaccination harmful? Motivated by this question, we quantify the implications of an opinion formation…

We analyze the notion that physical theories are quantitative and testable by observations in experiments. This leads us to propose a new, Bayesian, interpretation of probabilities in physics that unifies their current use in classical…

Rational decision making in its linguistic description means making logical decisions. In essence, a rational agent optimally processes all relevant information to achieve its goal. Rationality has two elements and these are the use of…

Traditionally, semantics has been seen as a feature of human language. The advent of the information era has led to its widespread redefinition as an information feature. Contrary to this praxis, I define semantics as a special kind of…

We believe, in the sense of supporting ideas and considering them correct while dismissing doubts about them. We take sides about ideas and theories as if that was the right thing to do. And yet, from a rational point of view, this type of…

It is argued that the nature of probability is essentially informational rather than physical and that quantum mechanical predictions should be viewed as logical inferences made on the basis of the information content of a given…

Information energy is shown here to have properties similar to those of dark energy. The energy associated with each information bit of the universe is found to be defined identically to the characteristic energy of a cosmological constant.…

In the context of theories of the connection between mind and brain, physicalism is the demand that all is basically purely physical. But the concept of "physical" embodied in this demand is characterized essentially by the properties of…

The process of doing Science in condition of uncertainty is illustrated with a toy experiment in which the inferential and the forecasting aspects are both present. The fundamental aspects of probabilistic reasoning, also relevant in real…

The relationship between brains and computers is often taken to be merely metaphorical. However, genuine computational systems can be implemented in virtually any media; thus, one can take seriously the view that brains literally compute.…

There are many ways we can not know. Even in systems that we created ourselves, as, for example, systems in mathematical logic, Go\"edel and Tarski's theorems impose limits on what we can know. As we try to speak of the real world, things…

A particular science is not only defined by its object of study, but also by the point of view and method under which it considers that same object. Taking space and time as an illustrative example, our main aim here is to bring out an…

The idea that a material can exhibit negative compressibility is highly consequential for research and applications. As new forms for this effect are discovered, it is important to examine the range of possible mechanisms and ways to design…

Metaphysics is traditionally conceived as aiming at the truth -- indeed, the most fundamental truths about the most general features of reality. Philosophical naturalists, urging that philosophical claims be grounded on science, have often…