Related papers: Anthropic Reasoning and Quantum Cosmology

Historically, appearance of the quantum theory led to a prevailing view that Nature is indeterministic. The arguments for the indeterminism and proposals for indeterministic and deterministic approaches are reviewed. These include collapse…

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…

This article starts out with a detailed example illustrating the utility of applying quantum probability to psychology. Then it describes several alternative mathematical methods for mapping fundamental quantum concepts (such as state…

While a large body of work has scrutinized the meaning of conditional sentences, considerably less attention has been paid to formal models of their pragmatic use and interpretation. Here, we take a probabilistic approach to pragmatic…

We propose an approach to explaining why naive large quantum fluctuations are not the right estimate for the cosmological constant. We argue that the universe is in a superposition of many vacua, in such a way that the resulting…

A theory is universal contextual if its prediction cannot be reproduced by an ontological model satisfying both preparation and measurement noncontextuality assumptions. In this report, we first generalize the logical proofs of quantum…

The systematic biases seen in people's probability judgments are typically taken as evidence that people do not reason about probability using the rules of probability theory, but instead use heuristics which sometimes yield reasonable…

There have lately been a variety of attempts to connect, or even explain, if not in fact, reduce human consciousness to quantum mechanical processes. Such attempts tend to draw a sharp and fundamental distinction between the role of…

The general use of subjective probabilities to model belief has been justified using many axiomatic schemes. For example, ?consistent betting behavior' arguments are well-known. To those not already convinced of the unique fitness and…

We develop a general formulation of quantum statistical mechanics in terms of probability currents that satisfy continuity equations in the multi-particle position space, for closed and open systems with a fixed number of particles. The…

Prediction is the making of statements, usually probabilistic, about future events based on current information. Retrodiction is the making of statements about past events based on current information. We present the foundations of quantum…

Cosmology has come a long way from being based on a small number of observations to being a data-driven precision science. We discuss the questions "What is observable?", "What in the Universe is knowable?" and "What are the fundamental…

Church's hypothesis and Godel's theorem may provide constraints on mental processes.As a relief quantum entanglement may lead to a definite proposal as regards the nature of reality and how much of it we are able to know and how do we know…

How can quantum mechanics be (i) the fundamental theoretical framework of contemporary physics and (ii) a probability calculus that presupposes the events to which, and on the basis of which, it assigns probabilities? The question is…

Some contemporary views of the universe assume information and computation to be key in understanding and explaining the basic structure underpinning physical reality. We introduce the Computable Universe exploring some of the basic…

In this article, we propose to use the formalism of quantum mechanics to describe and explain the so-called "abnormal" behaviour of agents in certain decision or choice contexts. The basic idea is to postulate that the preferences of these…

A logic is defined that allows to express information about statistical probabilities and about degrees of belief in specific propositions. By interpreting the two types of probabilities in one common probability space, the semantics given…

The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been discussed since this theme first was brought up by Einstein and Bohr. This article describes a proposal for a new foundation of quantum theory, partly drawing upon ideas from statistical…

A version of quantum theory is derived from a set of plausible assumptions related to the following general setting: For a given system there is a set of experiments that can be performed, and for each such experiment an ordinary…

The predictions that quantum theory makes about the outcomes of measurements are generally probabilistic. This has raised the question whether quantum theory can be considered complete, or whether there could exist alternative theories that…