Related papers: Conflict between anthropic reasoning and observati…
Physical cosmology tries to understand the Universe at large with its origin and evolution. Observational and experimental situations in cosmology do not allow us to proceed purely based on the empirical means. We examine in which sense our…
The discovery of a small cosmological constant has stimulated interest in the measure problem. One should expect to be a typical observer, but defining such a thing is difficult in the vastness of an eternally inflating universe. We propose…
Inferring from inconsistency and making decisions are two problems which have always been treated separately by researchers in Artificial Intelligence. Consequently, different models have been proposed for each category. Different…
Cognitive theories for reasoning are about understanding how humans come to conclusions from a set of premises. Starting from hypothetical thoughts, we are interested which are the implications behind basic everyday language and how do we…
Scientists have measured that what we can see of space is about a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion (10^81) times the volume of an average human. Inflationary theory suggests that the entirety of space…
Humans display a tendency to pay more attention to bad outcomes, often in a disproportionate way relative to their statistical occurrence. They also display euphorism, as well as a preference for the current state of affairs (status quo…
We attempt to dissolve the measurement problem using an anthropic principle which allows us to invoke rational observers. We argue that the key feature of such observers is that they are rational (we need not care whether they are…
We re-examine claims that anthropic arguments provide an explanation for the observed smallness of the cosmological constant, and argue that correlations between the cosmological constant value and the existence of life can be demonstrated…
Evidence for fine-tuning of physical parameters suitable for life can perhaps be explained by almost any combination of providence, coincidence or multiverse. A multiverse usually includes parts unobservable to us, but if the theory for it…
Understanding how biological organisms make decisions is of fundamental importance in understanding behavior. Such an understanding within evolutionary game theory so far has been sought by appealing to bounded rationality. Here, we present…
Growth of the world population and the world economic growth were hyperbolic in the past 2,000,000 years. Recently, from around 1950, they started to be diverted to slower trajectories but they are still close to the historical hyperbolic…
The emergence of opinion polarization within human communities -- the phenomenon that individuals within a society tend to develop conflicting attitudes related to the greatest diversity of topics -- has been a focus of interest for…
We present a model where some proportion of extraterrestrial civilizations expand uniformly over time to reach a cosmological scale. We then ask what humanity could infer if a sky survey were to find zero, one, or more such civilizations.…
A traditional approach to assessing emerging intelligence in the theory of intelligent systems is based on the similarity, "imitation" of human-like actions and behaviors, benchmarking the performance of intelligent systems on the scale of…
Some attack scientific rationality, others defend it, but both miss the point. What both parties take to be scientific rationality is actually a species of irrationality masquerading as scientific rationality. The current orthodox…
Where is everybody? This phrase distills the foreboding of what has come to be known as the Fermi Paradox - the disquieting idea that, if extraterrestrial life is probable in the Universe, then why have we not encountered it? This conundrum…
Eternal inflation predicts our observable universe lies within a bubble (or pocket universe) embedded in a volume of inflating space. The interior of the bubble undergoes inflation and standard cosmology, while the bubble walls expand…
Eternal inflation is a seemingly generic consequence of theories that give rise to accelerated expansion of the universe and possess multiple vacuum states. Making predictions in an eternally inflating universe is notoriously difficult…
Earth-like planets are expected to provide the greatest opportunity for the detection of life beyond the Solar System. However our planet cannot be considered a fair sample, especially if intelligent life exists elsewhere. Just as a…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…