Related papers: The Recursive Panopticon Hypothesis
A new solution to the Fermi Paradox is presented: probes or visits from putative alien civilizations have a very low probability until a civilization reaches a certain age (called the Contact Era) after the onset of radio communications. If…
In this note, we present a hypothesis for the emergence of the phenomenon of sleep in organisms with sufficiently developed central nervous systems. We argue that sleep emerges because individual neurons must periodically enter a resting…
No present observations suggest a technologically advanced extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) has spread through the galaxy. However, under commonplace assumptions about galactic civilization formation and expansion, this absence of…
Can reproduction alone in the context of survival produce intelligence in our machines? In this work, self-replication is explored as a mechanism for the emergence of intelligent behavior in modern learning environments. By focusing purely…
Provided significant future progress in artificial intelligence and computing, it may ultimately be possible to create multiple Artificial General Intelligences (AGIs), and possibly entire societies living within simulated environments. In…
Recently, small models with latent recursion have obtained promising results on complex reasoning tasks. These results are typically explained by the theory that such recursion increases a networks depth, allowing it to compactly emulate…
Many hypotheses have been raised to explain the famous Fermi paradox. One of them is that self-replicating probes could have explored the whole Galaxy, including our Solar System, and that they are still to be detected. In this scenario, it…
Why did the big bang occur, why do the laws and constants of nature as well as the boundary conditions seem so fine-tuned for life, what is the role of intelligence and self-consciousness in the universe, and how can it escape cosmic…
We introduce and study a learning theory which is roughly automatic, that is, it does not require but a minimum of initial programming, and is based on the potential computational phenomenon of self-reference, (i.e. the potential ability of…
The finitely repeated Prisoners' Dilemma is a good illustration of the discrepancy between the strategic behaviour suggested by a game-theoretic analysis and the behaviour often observed among human players, where cooperation is maintained…
If a civilization wants to maximize computation it appears rational to aestivate until the far future in order to exploit the low temperature environment: this can produce a $10^{30}$ multiplier of achievable computation. We hence suggest…
The response time of physical computational elements is finite, and neurons are no exception. In hierarchical models of cortical networks each layer thus introduces a response lag. This inherent property of physical dynamical systems…
This paper suggests that a universal solution to the Fermi paradox exists and can be derived directly from the definition of life and/or intelligence, therefore eliminating the need for any questionable assumptions and even for the…
Cooperation is the foundation of ecosystems and the human society, and the reinforcement learning provides crucial insight into the mechanism for its emergence. However, most previous work has mostly focused on the self-organization at the…
We propose an approach to explaining why naive large quantum fluctuations are not the right estimate for the cosmological constant. We argue that the universe is in a superposition of many vacua, in such a way that the resulting…
Autonomous agents powered by LLMs and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) are proficient consumers of digital content but remain unidirectional, a limitation we term epistemic asymmetry. This isolation leads to redundant reasoning and…
The number of people able to end Earth's technical civilization has heretofore been small. Emerging dual-use technologies, such as biotechnology, may give similar power to thousands or millions of individuals. To quantitatively investigate…
The Fermi paradox highlights the dichotomy between the lack of physical contact with other civilizations and the expectation that technological civilizations are assumed likely to evolve in many locations in the Milky Way galaxy, given the…
In repeated-game applications where both the collusive and non-collusive outcomes can be supported as equilibria, researchers must resolve underlying selection questions if theory will be used to understand counterfactual policies. One…
The influence of recent detections of a finite vacuum energy ("cosmological constant") on our formulation of anthropic conjectures, particularly the so-called Final Anthropic Principle is investigated. It is shown that non-zero vacuum…