Related papers: Against Self-Location
The search for a scientific theory of consciousness should result in theories that are falsifiable. However, here we show that falsification is especially problematic for theories of consciousness. We formally describe the standard…
Objective probability in quantum mechanics is often thought to involve a stochastic process whereby an actual future is selected from a range of possibilities. Everett's seminal idea is that all possible definite futures on the pointer…
Baroque questions of set-theoretic foundations are widely assumed to be irrelevant to physics. In this article, I demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect. I show that the fundamental physical question of whether a theory is…
The possibility of algorithmic consciousness depends on the assumption that conscious states can be copied or repeated by sufficiently duplicating their underlying physical states, leading to a variety of paradoxes, including the problems…
Could an AI have conscious experiences? Any answer to this question should conform to Evidentialism - that is, it should be based not on intuition, dogma or speculation but on solid scientific evidence. I argue that such evidence is hard to…
Hance and Hossenfelder recently claim that the extensive experimental confirmations of Bell's Theorem do not in fact demonstrate that nature is nonlocal, but merely that nature can be local only if the distant detector settings in a…
Uncertainty may be taken to characterize inferences, their conclusions, their premises or all three. Under some treatments of uncertainty, the inferences itself is never characterized by uncertainty. We explore both the significance of…
Recently, the notions of subjective constraint monotonicity, epistemic splitting, and foundedness have been introduced for epistemic logic programs, with the aim to use them as main criteria respectively intuitions to compare different…
Resource allocation is fundamental to a variety of societal decision-making settings, ranging from the distribution of charitable donations to assigning limited public housing among interested families. A central challenge in this context…
The main purpose of this article is to get a handle on determining how far a non-rational singularity is from being rational, or in other words, introduce a measure of the failure of a singularity being rational.
Bayesian inference has theoretical attractions as a principled framework for reasoning about beliefs. However, the motivations of Bayesian inference which claim it to be the only 'rational' kind of reasoning do not apply in practice. They…
This paper extends the literature on the strict-tolerant logical approach by applying its methods to intuitionistic and minimal logic. In short, the strict-tolerant approach modifies the usual notion of logical consequence by stipulating…
Machine Learning research, including work promoting fair or equitable algorithms, often relies on the concept of a data-generating probability distribution. The standard presumption is that since data points are 'sampled from' such a…
On broadly Copernican grounds, we are entitled to assume that apparently behaviorally sophisticated extraterrestrial entities ("aliens") would be conscious. Otherwise, we humans would be inexplicably, implausibly lucky to have…
This paper establishes a formal framework, grounded in mathematical logic and order theory, to analyze the inherent limitations of radical transparency. We demonstrate that self-referential disclosure policies inevitably encounter…
Non-deductive reasoning systems are often {\em representation dependent}: representing the same situation in two different ways may cause such a system to return two different answers. Some have viewed this as a significant problem. For…
In many applications, it is important to be able to explain the decisions of machine learning systems. An increasingly popular approach has been to seek to provide \emph{counterfactual instance explanations}. These specify close possible…
The classical view of epistemic logic is that an agent knows all the logical consequences of their knowledge base. This assumption of logical omniscience is often unrealistic and makes reasoning computationally intractable. One approach to…
In this paper we present a robust, efficient and affordable approach to self-localization which does not require neither GPS nor knowledge about the appearance of the world. Towards this goal, we utilize freely available cartographic maps…
Human reasoning often involves working over limited information to arrive at probabilistic conclusions. In its simplest form, this involves making an inference that is not strictly entailed by a premise, but rather only likely given the…