Related papers: Conflict between anthropic reasoning and observati…
Low-level "adaptive" and higher-level "sophisticated" human reasoning processes have been proposed to play opposing roles in the emergence of unpredictable collective behaviors like crowd panics, traffic jams, and market bubbles. While…
It is often thought that the existence of other worlds cannot be scientifically verified and therefore should be treated as philosophical speculation. In this article, I describe several methods for determining if other worlds exist, even…
Probably not, because there are lots of manifestly unanthropic ways of producing entropy. We demonstrate that the Causal Entropic Principle (CEP), as a replacement for the anthropic principle to explain the properties of the observed…
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…
The world view suggested by quantum cosmology is that inflating universes with all possible values of the fundamental constants are spontaneously created out of nothing. I explore the consequences of the assumption that we are a `typical'…
Models of open inflation with a variable density parameter $\Omega$ provide the most natural way to reconcile an open universe with inflation. The use of anthropic principle is essential to derive observational predictions of such models. I…
The doomsday argument is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the total lifetime of the human race. By examining the case of an individual lifetime, I conclude that the argument is fundamentally related to consciousness. I derive…
A modern assessment of the classical Boltzmann-Schuetz argument for large-scale entropy fluctuations as the origin of our observable cosmological domain is given. The emphasis is put on the central implication of this picture which flatly…
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…
Contradiction is often seen as a defect of intelligent systems and a dangerous limitation on efficiency. In this paper we raise the question of whether, on the contrary, it could be considered a key tool in increasing intelligence in…
The theory of the inflationary multiverse changes the way we think about our place in the world. According to its most popular version, our world may consist of infinitely many exponentially large parts, exhibiting different sets of…
Recent advances in string theory and inflationary cosmology have led to a surge of interest in the possible existence of an ensemble of cosmic regions, or universes, among the members of which key physical parameters, such as the masses of…
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. It is argued that essentially all inflationary models lead to (future-)eternal…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Public observation logic (POL) reasons about agent expectations and agent observations in various real world situations. The expectations of agents take shape based on certain protocols about the world around and they remove those possible…
In the context of open inflation, we calculate the probability distribution for the density parameter $\Omega$. A large class of two field models of open inflation do not lead to infinite open universes, but to an ensemble of inflating…
The Drake equation has been used many times to estimate the number of observable civilizations in the Galaxy. However, the uncertainty of the outcome is so great that any individual result is of limited use, as predictions can range from a…
The notion that there are many "universes" with different properties is one answer to the question of "why is the universe so hospitable to life?" This notion also naturally follows from current ideas in eternal inflation and string/M…
Given a sufficiently large universe, numerous civilizations almost surely exist. Some of these civilizations will be short-lived and die out relatively early in their development, i.e., before having the chance to spread to other planets.…
It has been claimed that the observed magnitude of the vacuum energy density is consistent with the distribution predicted in anthropic models, in which an ensemble of universes is assumed. This calculation is revisited, without making the…