Related papers: What's the trouble with anthropic reasoning?
We discuss the Carter's formula about the mankind evolution probability following the derivation proposed by Barrow and Tipler. We stress the relation between the existence of billions of galaxies and the evolution of at least one…
I review the major concordances and controversies of the meeting concerning observations. Cosmologists are nearing agreement on the global cosmological parameters of the Universe. A few parameters still have large error bars, notably…
I cast doubt upon the desired consistency between the anthropic principle and modern cosmology.
We discuss the theory of dark energy based on maximally extended supergravity and suggest a possible anthropic explanation of the present value of the cosmological constant and of the observed ratio between dark energy and energy of matter.
The original formulation of the (weak) anthropic principle was prompted by a question about objective time at a macroscopic level, namely the age of the universe when ``anthropic'' observers such as ourselves would be most likely to emerge.…
One of the innovative approaches in contemporary philosophical ontology consists in the assumption of a plurality of ontologies based on different metaphysical presuppositions. Such presuppositions involve, among others, the identification…
The principles of General Relativity allow for a non-vanishing cosmological constant, which can possibly be interpreted at least partially in terms of quantum-fluctuations of matter fields. Depending on sign and magnitude it can cause…
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 argue that if string theory as an approach to the fundamental laws of physics is correct, then there is almost no room for anthropic arguments in cosmology. The quark and lepton masses and interaction strengths are determined.
As machine learning and algorithmic decision making systems are increasingly being leveraged in high-stakes human-in-the-loop settings, there is a pressing need to understand the rationale of their predictions. Researchers have responded to…
This paper sets out to resolve how agents ought to act in the Sleeping Beauty problem and various related anthropic (self-locating belief) problems, not through the calculation of anthropic probabilities, but through finding the correct…
An anthropic explanation for evident smallness of the value of the dark energy implies the existence of a time-dependent component of the scalar field, serving, together with a negative-valued cosmological constant, as one of two components…
We examine the possibility that a significant component of the energy density of the universe has an equation-of-state different from that of matter, radiation or cosmological constant ($\Lambda$). An example is a cosmic scalar field…
The effective coupling `constants' of physics, especially the cosmological constant, are observed to have highly biophilic values. If this is not a hugely improbable accident, or a consequence of some mysterious logical necessity or of some…
Many cosmologists (myself included) have advocated volume weighting for the cosmological measure problem, weighting spatial hypersurfaces by their volume. However, this often leads to the Boltzmann brain problem, that almost all…
The Doomsday argument and anthropic reasoning are two puzzling examples of probabilistic confirmation. In both cases, a lack of knowledge apparently yields surprising conclusions. Since they are formulated within a Bayesian framework, they…
We explore the possibility that the dark energy is due to a potential of a scalar field and that the magnitude and the slope of this potential in our part of the universe are largely determined by anthropic selection effects. We find that,…
Several recent papers have suggested that the cosmological constant Lambda directly influences the gravitational deflection of light. We place this problem in a cosmological context, deriving an expression for the linear potentials which…
The discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating in time is a major discovery which still awaits adequate explanation. It is generally agreed that this implies a cosmic repulsion as a result of the existence of a…
In this paper we consider the implications of a cosmological constant for the evolution of the universe, under a set of assumptions motivated by the holographic and horizon complementarity principles. We discuss the ``causal patch"…