Related papers: Conflict between anthropic reasoning and observati…
The idea of a multiverse -- an ensemble of universes or universe domains -- has received increasing attention in cosmology, both as the outcome of the originating process that generated our own universe, and as an explanation for why our…
The entropy of the observable universe is increasing. Thus, at earlier times the entropy was lower. However, the cosmic microwave background radiation reveals an apparently high entropy universe close to thermal and chemical equilibrium. A…
We draw on the predictive processing theory of perception to explain why healthy, intelligent, honest, and psychologically normal people might easily misperceive lights in the sky as threatening or extraordinary objects, especially in the…
Does inflation provide a compelling explanation for why the universe is so large, so flat, and so old, and a predictive theory of density perturbations? In this brief contribution (based on the role of the author as moderator of the…
An epoch of accelerated expansion, or inflation, in the early universe solves several cosmological problems. While there are many models of inflation only recently has it become possible to discriminate between some of the models using…
If our universe underwent inflation, its entropy during the inflationary phase was substantially lower than it is today. Because a low-entropy state is less likely to be chosen randomly than a high-entropy one, inflation is unlikely to…
Language technologies that accurately model the dynamics of events must perform commonsense reasoning. Existing work evaluating commonsense reasoning focuses on making inferences about common, everyday situations. To instead investigate the…
Artificially intelligent systems, given a set of non-trivial ethical rules to follow, will inevitably be faced with scenarios which call into question the scope of those rules. In such cases, human reasoners typically will engage in…
How did the human species evolve the capacity not just to communicate complex ideas to one another but to hold such conversations from across the globe, using remote devices constructed from substances that do not exist in the natural…
Abductive reasoning, reasoning for inferring explanations for observations, is often mentioned in scientific, design-related and artistic contexts, but its understanding varies across these domains. This paper reviews how abductive…
Understanding the behavior of the universe at large depends critically on insights about the smallest units of matter and their fundamental interactions. Inflationary cosmology is a highly successful framework for exploring these…
The theory of rational choice assumes that when people make decisions they do so in order to maximize their utility. In order to achieve this goal they ought to use all the information available and consider all the choices available to…
In the context of models where the dark energy density $\rD$ is a random variable, anthropic selection effects may explain both the "old" cosmological constant problem and the "time coincidence". We argue that this type of solution to both…
We discuss the large-scale structure of the universe in inflationary cosmology and the implications that it may have for the long-term future of civilizations. Although each civilization is doomed to perish, it may be possible to transmit…
Why is the universe comprehensible? How is it that we can come to know its regularities well-enough to exploit them for our own gain? In this essay I argue that the nature of our comprehension lies in the mutually agreed upon methodology we…
We revisit our 2013 claim [arXiv:1303.7476] that the Universe is the result of a conspiratorial plot, and find that it cannot be trusted, because even the belief in this conspiracy likely results from a conspiracy. On the basis of…
We investigate how individuals form expectations about population behavior using statistical inference based on observations of their social relations. Misperceptions about others' connectedness and behavior arise from sampling bias…
Explaining the behaviour of intelligent systems will get increasingly and perhaps intractably challenging as models grow in size and complexity. We may not be able to expect an explanation for every prediction made by a brain-scale model,…
This article deals with plausible reasoning from incomplete knowledge about large-scale spatial properties. The availableinformation, consisting of a set of pointwise observations,is extrapolated to neighbour points. We make use of belief…
This paper offers a synthesis of the positions in the literature regarding controversies about the multiverse. After reviewing some simple elements of modern cosmology and its observational limitations, we will present the history of the…