Related papers: Against Self-Location
A theorem of Hegerfeldt (Instantaneous spreading and Einstein causality in quantum theory, Ann. Phys. Leipzig vol. 7, 716-725 (1998)) establishes, for a class of quantum systems, a dichotomy between those which are permanently localized in…
The traditional concept of knowledge is a justified true belief. The bulk of contemporary epistemology has focused primarily on that task of justification. Truth seems to be a quite obvious criterion-does the belief in question correspond…
A fascinating hypothesis is that human and animal intelligence could be explained by a few principles (rather than an encyclopedic list of heuristics). If that hypothesis was correct, we could more easily both understand our own…
Explaining sophisticated machine-learning based systems is an important issue at the foundations of AI. Recent efforts have shown various methods for providing explanations. These approaches can be broadly divided into two schools: those…
In an information-rich world, people's time and attention must be divided among rapidly changing information sources and the diverse tasks demanded of them. How people decide which of the many sources, such as scientific articles or…
We consider the problem of distribution-free predictive inference, with the goal of producing predictive coverage guarantees that hold conditionally rather than marginally. Existing methods such as conformal prediction offer marginal…
Developing a better understanding of surprising or counterintuitive phenomena has constituted a significant portion of deep learning research in recent years. These include double descent, grokking, and the lottery ticket hypothesis --…
In this work, we develop a formal system of inductive logic. It uses an infinitary language that allows for countable conjunctions and disjunctions. It is based on a set of nine syntactic rules of inductive inference, and contains classical…
We tackle the problem of consciousness by taking the naturally selected, embodied organism as our starting point. We provide a formalism describing how biological systems such as human bodies self-organize to hierarchically interpret…
The premise that consciousness has a quantum mechanical basis or correlate implies that its workings have a nonlocal component. To check whether consciousness as an entity leaves a physical trace, we propose that laboratory searches for…
When an agent can articulate why something works, we typically take this as evidence of genuine understanding. This presupposes that effective action and correct explanation covary, and that coherent explanation reliably signals both. I…
In the absence of empirical confirmation, scientists may judge a theory's chances of being viable based on a wide range of arguments. The paper argues that such arguments can differ substantially with regard to their structural similarly to…
The ideas of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty are widely used to reason about the probabilistic predictions of machine-learning models. We identify incoherence in existing discussions of these ideas and suggest this stems from the…
Bell theorems show how to experimentally falsify local realism. Conclusive falsification is highly desirable as it would provide support for the most profoundly counterintuitive feature of quantum theory - nonlocality. Despite the…
People reason heuristically in situations resembling inferential puzzles such as Bertrand's box paradox and the Monty Hall problem. The practical significance of that fact for economic decision making is uncertain because a departure from…
Over time, there have hen refinements in the way that probability distributions are used for representing beliefs. Models which rely on single probability distributions depict a complete ordering among the propositions of interest, yet…
Bayesian inference is limited in scope because it cannot be applied in idealized contexts where none of the hypotheses under consideration is true and because it is committed to always using the likelihood as a measure of evidential…
Most work on physical reasoning, both in artificial intelligence and in cognitive science, has focused on closed-world reasoning, in which it is assumed that the problem specification specifies all relevant objects and substance, all their…
In Probabilistic Logic Nilsson uses the device of a probability distribution over a set of possible worlds to assign probabilities to the sentences of a logical language. In his paper Nilsson concentrated on inference and associated…
There is evidence that the numbers in probabilistic inference don't really matter. This paper considers the idea that we can make a probabilistic model simpler by making fewer distinctions. Unfortunately, the level of a Bayesian network…