Related papers: Conflict between anthropic reasoning and observati…
This paper uses anthropic reasoning to argue for a reduced likelihood that superintelligent AI will come into existence in the future. To make this argument, a new principle is introduced: the Super-Strong Self-Sampling Assumption (SSSSA),…
The Anthropic Principle has been with us since the 1970s. This Principle is advanced to account for the "fine tuning" of the 25 constants of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Were these constants very different, life could not exist.…
Inflation produces super-horizon sized perturbations that ultimately return within the horizon and are thought to form the seeds of all observed large scale structure in the Universe. But inflationary predictions can only be compared with…
A wide range of stochastic processes that model the growth and decline of populations exhibit a curious dichotomy: with certainty either the population goes extinct or its size tends to infinity. There is a elegant and classical theorem…
The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe. The expectation that the universe should be…
Counterfactual Thinking is a human cognitive ability studied in a wide variety of domains. It captures the process of reasoning about a past event that did not occur, namely what would have happened had this event occurred, or, otherwise,…
A general theory of innovation and progress in human society is outlined, based on the combat between two opposite forces (conservatism/inertia and speculative herding "bubble" behavior). We contend that human affairs are characterized by…
A generic prediction of inflation is that the thermalized region we inhabit is spatially infinite. Thus, it contains an infinite number of regions of the same size as our observable universe, which we shall denote as $\O$-regions. We argue…
Imagining what life on other planets, and intelligent life in particular, may be like is a long-running theme in human culture. It is a manifestation of the innate human curiosity about the Cosmos, and it has inspired numerous works of art…
Extracting predictions from cosmological theories that describe a multiverse, for what we are likely to observe in our domain, is crucial to establishing the validity of these theories. One way to extract such predictions is from…
An interesting consequence of the modern cosmological paradigm is the spatial infinity of the universe. When coupled with naturalistic understanding of the origin of life and intelligence, which follows the basic tenets of astrobiology, and…
There are investigated the generalized methods of cognition of the Existing, i.e. everything that is able to influence to the cognizer, and everything differed from the Existing is postulated as indistinguishable from the non-existing and…
Anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human traits to technology, is an automatic and unconscious response that occurs even in those with advanced technical expertise. In this position paper, we analyze hundreds of thousands of research…
The observed value $\Lambda_{\rm obs}$ of the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ is extremely smaller than theoretical expectations, and the anthropic argument has been proposed as a solution to this problem because galaxies do not form when…
Objects are a centerpiece of the mathematical realm and our interaction with and reasoning about it, just as they are of the physical one (if not more). And humans' mathematical reasoning must ultimately be grounded in our general…
As observers of the universe we are physical systems within it. If the universe is very large in space and/or time, the probability becomes significant that the data on which we base predictions is replicated at other locations in…
Everlasting inflation has far-reaching implications for cosmology and the standing of self-localizing inferences made by observers, which have been subjects of renewed interest in light of the growing acceptance of theory landscapes and the…
Despite the extraordinary successes the two great bastions of $20^{th}$ century science (Quantum Theory and General Relativity) are troubled with serious conceptual and mathematical difficulties. As a result, further growth of fundamental…
Human settlements on Earth are scattered in a multitude of shapes, sizes and spatial arrangements. These patterns are often not random but a result of complex geographical, cultural, economic and historical processes that have profound…
The aim of this of this paper is to study infinite games and to prove formally some properties in this framework. As a consequence we show that the behavior (the madness) of people which leads to speculative crashes or escalation can be…