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We introduce an increasing-complexity, open-ended, and human-agnostic metric to evaluate foundational and frontier AI models in the context of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) claims. Unlike…
Rapid advances in artificial intelligence necessitate a re-examination of the epistemological foundations upon which we attribute consciousness. As AI systems increasingly mimic human behavior and interaction with high fidelity, the concept…
We analyze the arguments allegedly supporting the so-called Self-Indication Assumption (SIA), as an attempt to reject counterintuitive consequences of the Doomsday Argument of Carter, Leslie, Gott and others. Several arguments purportedly…
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.…
We consider models for inference which involve observers which may have multiple copies, such as in the Sleeping Beauty problem. We establish a framework for describing these problems on a probability space satisfying Kolmogorov's axioms,…
A large number of essays address the Sleeping Beauty problem, which undermines the validity of Bayesian inference and Bas Van Fraassen's 'Reflection Principle'. In this study a straightforward analysis of the problem based on probability…
The place of an anthropic argument in the discrimination between various cosmological models is to be reconsidered following the classic criticisms of Paul C. W. Davies and Frank J. Tipler. Different versions of the anthropic argument…
Abstract argumentation has emerged as a method for non-monotonic reasoning that has gained popularity in the symbolic artificial intelligence community. In the literature, the different approaches to abstract argumentation that were refined…
Many astronomical surveys prompt follow-up observations, but the decision process through which candidates are selected for follow-up can be difficult to model. This poses a challenge when inferring properties of the intrinsic population of…
Determining whether another system, biological or artificial, possesses phenomenal consciousness has long been a central challenge in consciousness studies. This attribution problem has become especially pressing with the rise of large…
In recent years, the world has witnessed various primitives pertaining to the complexity of human behavior. Identifying an event in the presence of insufficient, incomplete, or tentative premises along with the constraints on resources such…
The Doomsday argument and anthropic reasoning are two puzzling examples of probabilistic confirmation. In both cases, a lack of knowledge apparently yields surprising conclusions. Since they are formulated within a Bayesian framework, they…
In this paper we investigate possible solutions to the coincidence problem in flat phantom dark energy models with a constant dark energy equation of state and quintessence models with a linear scalar field potential. These models are…
The anthropic principle is an inevitable constraint on the space of possible theories. As such it is central to determining the limits of physics. In particular, we contend that what is ultimately possible in physics is determined by…
Recent work uses entropy-based signals at multiple representation levels to study reasoning in large language models, but the field remains largely empirical. A central unresolved puzzle is why internal entropy dynamics, defined under the…
According to our current conception of physics, any valid physical theory is supposed to describe the objective evolution of a unique external world. However, this condition is challenged by quantum theory, which suggests that physical…
Simpson's paradox is an obstacle to establishing a probabilistic association between two events $a_1$ and $a_2$, given the third (lurking) random variable $B$. We focus on scenarios when the random variables $A$ (which combines $a_1$,…
We study how macroscopic observational constraints restrict admissible microscopic explanatory structures when no intrinsic order or dynamics is assumed a priori. Starting from an unordered collection of measurement outcomes, we formulate…
We propose analyzing conditional reasoning by appeal to a notion of intervention on a simulation program, formalizing and subsuming a number of approaches to conditional thinking in the recent AI literature. Our main results include a…
We propose a novel approach for answering and explaining multiple-choice science questions by reasoning on grounding and abstract inference chains. This paper frames question answering as an abductive reasoning problem, constructing…