Related papers: Against Self-Location
In "Defeating Dr. Evil with Self-Locating Belief", Adam Elga proposes and defends a principle of indifference for self-locating beliefs: if an individual is confident that his world contains more than one individual who is in a state…
Significant controversy remains about what constitute correct self-locating beliefs in scenarios such as the Sleeping Beauty problem, with proponents on both the "halfer" and "thirder" sides. To attempt to settle the issue, one natural…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
Possibility theory offers a framework where both Lehmann's "preferential inference" and the more productive (but less cautious) "rational closure inference" can be represented. However, there are situations where the second inference does…
We critically discuss the apparent lack of logical rigor pervading the debate on quantum nonlocality. Strong convictions often prevail over rational assessment, leading to the acceptance of loose ideas that become entrenched dogmas. The…
In this paper, we reject commonly accepted views on fundamentality in science, either based on bottom-up construction or top-down reduction to isolate the alleged fundamental entities. We do not introduce any new scientific methodology, but…
(l) I have enough evidence to render the sentence S probable. (la) So, relative to what I know, it is rational of me to believe S. (2) Now that I have more evidence, S may no longer be probable. (2a) So now, relative to what I know, it is…
The dominant theories of rational choice assume logical omniscience. That is, they assume that when facing a decision problem, an agent can perform all relevant computations and determine the truth value of all relevant logical/mathematical…
Counterfactual definiteness is supposed to underlie the Bell theorem. An old controversy exists among those who reject the theorem implications by rejecting counterfactual definiteness and those who claim that, since it is a direct…
I purport to show why old and new claims on the role of counterfactual reasoning for the EPR argument and the Bell theorem are unjustified: once the logical relation between locality and counterfactual reasoning is clarified, the use of the…
This paper proposes a careful separation between an entity's epistemic system and their decision system. Crucially, Bayesian counterfactuals are estimated by the epistemic system; not by the decision system. Based on this remark, I prove…
A critical failure mode of current lifelong agents is not lack of knowledge, but the inability to decide how to reason. When an agent encounters "Is this coin fair?" it must recognize whether to invoke frequentist hypothesis testing or…
In human consciousness perceptions are distinct or atomistic events despite being perceived by an apparently undivided inner observer. This paper applies both classical (Boolean) and quantum logic to analysis of the Liar paradox which is…
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…
At the beginning of a dynamic game, players may have exogenous theories about how the opponents are going to play. Suppose that these theories are commonly known. Then, players will refine their first-order beliefs, and challenge their own…
A century ago, discoveries of a serious kind of logical error made separately by several leading mathematicians led to acceptance of a sharply enhanced standard for rigor within what ultimately became the foundation for Computer Science. By…
Two opposing tendencies paradoxically coexist in terrestrial consciousness -- the insistent quest for intelligent signals from other civilizations and the persistent aversion to any attempts to transmit such signals from Earth toward…
Fair decisions require ignoring irrelevant, potentially biasing, information. To achieve this, decision-makers need to approximate what decision they would have made had they not known certain facts, such as the gender or race of a job…
We define notions of cautiousness and cautious belief to provide epistemic conditions for iterated admissibility in finite games. We show that iterated admissibility characterizes the behavioral implications of "cautious rationality and…
We revisit anthropic arguments purporting to explain the measured value of the cosmological constant. We argue that different ways of assigning probabilities to candidate universes lead to totally different anthropic predictions. As an…