Related papers: Why Occam's Razor
Quantum Darwinism recognizes that decoherence imprints redundant records of preferred quasi-classical pointer states on the environment. These redundant records are then accessed by observers. We show how redundancy enables and even implies…
Can scientific discovery be made arbitrarily easy by choosing the right representation, collecting enough data, and deploying sufficiently powerful algorithms? This paper argues that the answer is fundamentally negative. We introduce the…
Most traditional artificial intelligence (AI) systems of the past 50 years are either very limited, or based on heuristics, or both. The new millennium, however, has brought substantial progress in the field of theoretically optimal and…
The usage of the anthropic principle in modern cosmology is reviewed. It is argued that its recent use to explain the observedvalues of cosmological parameters as most probable values for an ensemble of universes, is not justified. However,…
The paper reviews and discusses four ideas scattered in previous papers of the author. First, objective properties of quantum systems are not associated with observables but are defined by preparations. Second, measurable results of…
Social animals have to make collective decisions on a daily basis. In most instances, these decisions are taken by consensus, when the group does what the majority of individuals want. Individuals have to base these decisions on the…
The ability to explain why a machine learning model arrives at a particular prediction is crucial when used as decision support by human operators of critical systems. The provided explanations must be provably correct, and preferably…
When performing causal discovery, assumptions have to be made on how the true causal mechanism corresponds to the underlying joint probability distribution. These assumptions are labeled as causal razors in this work. We review numerous…
Scientists often think of the world (or some part of it) as a dynamical system, a stochastic process, or a generalization of such a system. Prominent examples of systems are (i) the system of planets orbiting the sun or any other classical…
The logical structure of Quantum Mechanics (QM) and its relation to other fundamental principles of Nature has been for decades a subject of intensive research. In particular, the question whether the dynamical axiom of QM can be derived…
Anthropic reasoning is a critical tool to understand probabilities, especially in a large universe or multiverse. According to anthropic reasoning, we should consider ourselves typical among members of a reference class that must include…
This book presents a methodology and philosophy of empirical science based on large scale lossless data compression. In this view a theory is scientific if it can be used to build a data compression program, and it is valuable if it can…
This is a philosophy-intense physics article, or, if you wish, a physics-intense philosophy article. Also, being a mathematician, I tend to view the physics, in particular the essence of quantum physics, in emphasizing the mathematical…
An attempt to redefine science in the 21st century (BK Jennings, On the Nature of Science, Physics in Canada, 63(7) 2007) has abandoned traditional notions of natural law and objective reality, blurred the distinctions between natural…
In the {\em Many Worlds Interpretation} of quantum mechanics, the range of possible worlds (or histories) provides variation, and the Anthropic Principle is a selective principle analogous to natural selection. When looked on in this way,…
Ensembles, which employ a set of classifiers to enhance classification accuracy collectively, are crucial in the era of big data. However, although there is general agreement that the relation between ensemble size and its prediction…
Random matrix theory is used to represent generic loss of coherence of a fixed central system coupled to a quantum-chaotic environment, represented by a random matrix ensemble, via random interactions. We study the average density matrix…
This paper is based on four assumptions: 1. Physical reality is made of linearly behaving components combined in non-linear ways. 2. Higher level behaviour emerges from this lower level structure. 3. The way the lower level elements behaves…
Recent work on the logical structure of non-locality has constructed scenarios where observations of multi-partite systems cannot be adequately described by compositions of non-signaling subsystems. In this paper we apply these frameworks…
Both religion and science start with basic assumptions that cannot be proved but are taken on faith. Here I note that one basic assumption that is rather common in both enterprises is the assumption that in comparing different hypotheses…