Related papers: Anthropic reasoning in multiverse cosmology and st…
It is shown that in d=11 supergravity, under a very reasonable ansatz, the nearly flat spacetime in which we are living must be 4-dimensional without appealing to the Anthropic Principle. Can we dispel the Anthropic Principle completely…
In dialogical argumentation it is often assumed that the involved parties always correctly identify the intended statements posited by each other, realize all of the associated relations, conform to the three acceptability states (accepted,…
This paper develops a new approach to computational argumentation that is informed by philosophical and linguistic views. Namely, it takes into account two ideas that have received little attention in the literature on computational…
[Abridged] Some cosmological theories propose that the observable universe is a small part of a much larger universe in which parameters describing the low-energy laws of physics vary from region to region. How can we reasonably assess a…
I explain the difficulty of making various concepts of and relating to probability precise, rigorous and physically significant when attempting to apply them in reasoning about objects (e.g., spacetimes) living in infinite-dimensional…
In the modern quantum mechanics of cosmology observers are physical systems within the universe. They have no preferred role in the formulation of the theory nor in its predictions of third person probabilities of what occurs. However,…
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…
The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (MWI) states that the world we live in is just one among many parallel worlds. It is widely believed that because of this commitment to parallel worlds, the MWI violates common sense. Some…
The cosmological observations provide a strong evidence that there is a positive cosmological constant in our universe and thus the spacetime is asymptotical de Sitter space. The conjecture of gravity as the weakest force in the…
In the concluding remarks of Ontological Promiscuity Hobbs (1985) made what we believe to be a very insightful observation: given that semantics is an attempt at specifying the relation between language and the world, if "one can assume a…
We examine recent claims of a large set of flux compactification solutions of string theory. We conclude that the arguments for AdS solutions are plausible. The analysis of meta-stable dS solutions inevitably leads to situations where long…
Reasoning under uncertainty is a fundamental challenge in Artificial Intelligence. As with most of these challenges, there is a harsh dilemma between the expressive power of the language used, and the tractability of the computational…
If the parameters defining the physics of our universe departed from their present values, the observed rich structure and complexity would not be supported. This article considers whether similar fine-tuning of parameters applies to…
As machine learning and algorithmic decision making systems are increasingly being leveraged in high-stakes human-in-the-loop settings, there is a pressing need to understand the rationale of their predictions. Researchers have responded to…
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…
This paper sets out to resolve how agents ought to act in the Sleeping Beauty problem and various related anthropic (self-locating belief) problems, not through the calculation of anthropic probabilities, but through finding the correct…
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a popular framework for modeling combinatorial problems. However, ASP cannot easily be used for reasoning about uncertain information. Possibilistic ASP (PASP) is an extension of ASP that combines…
The transcendental expectation of string theory is that the nature of the fundamental forces, particle spectra and masses, together with coupling constants, is uniquely determined by mathematical and logical consistency, non-empirically,…
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…
Nonmonotonic reasoning is a pattern of reasoning that allows an agent to make and retract (tentative) conclusions from inconclusive evidence. This paper gives a possible-worlds interpretation of the nonmonotonic reasoning problem based on…