Related papers: Likelihood criteria for the universe
The uncertainty associated with probing the quantum state is expressed as the effective abundance (measure) of possibilities for its collapse. New kinds of uncertainty limits entailed by quantum description of the physical system arise in…
We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time…
The relative abundances of exotic environments provides us with (uninformed) bounds on the habitability of those environments relative to our own, on the basis that our presence here is not too atypical. For instance, since red stars…
Although various limits on the predicability of physical phenomena as well as on physical knowables are commonly established and accepted, we challenge their ultimate validity. More precisely, we claim that fundamental limits arise only…
When we want to predict the future, we compute it from what we know about the present. Specifically, we take a mathematical representation of observed reality, plug it into some dynamical equations, and then map the time-evolved result back…
Starting with a likelihood or preference order on worlds, we extend it to a likelihood ordering on sets of worlds in a natural way, and examine the resulting logic. Lewis earlier considered such a notion of relative likelihood in the…
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…
We investigate the most general phase space of configurations, consisting of the collection of all possible ways of assigning elementary attributes, "energies", to elementary positions, "cells". We discuss how this space defines a…
Random sampling in high dimensions has successfully been applied to phenomena as diverse as nuclear resonances, neural networks and black hole evaporation. Here we revisit an elegant argument by the British physicist Dennis Sciama, which…
Existing physical theories do not predict every feature of our experience but only certain regularities of that experience. That difference between what could be observed and what can be predicted is one kind of limit on scientific…
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…
Suspicions that the world might be some sort of a machine or algorithm existing ``in the mind'' of some symbolic number cruncher have lingered from antiquity. Although popular at times, the most radical forms of this idea never reached…
In the modern quantum mechanics of cosmology observers are physical systems within the universe. They have no preferred role in the formulation of the theory nor in its predictions of third person probabilities of what occurs. However,…
I describe reasons to think we are living in an eternally inflating multiverse where the observable "constants" of nature vary from place to place. The major obstacle to making predictions in this context is that we must regulate the…
Starting with a likelihood or preference order on worlds, we extend it to a likelihood ordering on sets of worlds in a natural way, and examine the resulting logic. Lewis (1973) earlier considered such a notion of relative likelihood in the…
This paper questions the generally accepted assumption that one can make a random choice that is independent of the rest of the universe. We give a general description of any setup that could be conceived to generate random numbers. Based…
This paper presents a plausible reasoning system to illustrate some broad issues in knowledge representation: dualities between different reasoning forms, the difficulty of unifying complementary reasoning styles, and the approximate nature…
The purpose of this paper is (i) to expound the specification of a universe, according to those parts of mathematical physics which have been experimentally and observationally verified in our own universe; and (ii) to expound the possible…
Fuzziness and randomicity widespread exist in natural science, engineering, technology and social science. The purpose of this paper is to present a new logic - uncertain propositional logic which can deal with both fuzziness by taking…
Despite the success of modern physics in formulating mathematical theories that can predict the outcome of quantum-scale experiments, the physical interpretations of these theories remain controversial. In this manuscript, we propose a new…