Related papers: Defining Civilization utilizing Anthropic Reasonin…
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…
In this paper, we make a review on the concepts of rationality across several different fields, namely in economics, psychology and evolutionary biology and behavioural ecology. We review how processes like natural selection can help us…
We propose new definitions of (causal) explanation, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. The definition is based on the notion of actual cause, as defined and motivated in a companion paper. Essentially, an explanation is a…
Physical cosmology tries to understand the Universe at large with its origin and evolution. Observational and experimental situations in cosmology do not allow us to proceed purely based on the empirical means. We examine in which sense our…
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…
Anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human traits to technology, is an automatic and unconscious response that occurs even in those with advanced technical expertise. In this position paper, we analyze hundreds of thousands of research…
Argumentation theory is a powerful paradigm that formalizes a type of commonsense reasoning that aims to simulate the human ability to resolve a specific problem in an intelligent manner. A classical argumentation process takes into account…
Anthropic principle can help us to understand many properties of our world. However, for a long time this principle seemed too metaphysical and many scientists were ashamed to use it in their research. I describe here a justification of the…
Explanation constitutes an archetypal feature of human rationality, underpinning learning and generalisation, and representing one of the media supporting scientific discovery and communication. Due to the importance of explanations in…
This document is written with the intention to describe in detail a method and means by which a computer program can reason about the world and in so doing, increase its analogue to a living system. As the literature is rife and it is…
Without an agreed-upon definition of intelligence, asking "is this system intelligent?"" is an untestable question. This lack of consensus hinders research, and public perception, on Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly since the rise…
Contradiction is often seen as a defect of intelligent systems and a dangerous limitation on efficiency. In this paper we raise the question of whether, on the contrary, it could be considered a key tool in increasing intelligence in…
Reasoning is fundamental to human intelligence, and critical for problem-solving, decision-making, and critical thinking. Reasoning refers to drawing new conclusions based on existing knowledge, which can support various applications like…
We re-examine claims that anthropic arguments provide an explanation for the observed smallness of the cosmological constant, and argue that correlations between the cosmological constant value and the existence of life can be demonstrated…
What is reasoning? This question has driven centuries of philosophical inquiry, from Aristotle's syllogisms to modern computational complexity theory. In the age of large language models achieving superhuman performance on benchmarks like…
Imagining what life on other planets, and intelligent life in particular, may be like is a long-running theme in human culture. It is a manifestation of the innate human curiosity about the Cosmos, and it has inspired numerous works of art…
Conceptualization, a fundamental element of human cognition, plays a pivotal role in human generalizable reasoning. Generally speaking, it refers to the process of sequentially abstracting specific instances into higher-level concepts and…
Human knowledge is made up of the conceptual structures of many communities of interest. In order to establish coherence in human knowledge representation, it is important to enable communication between the conceptual structures of…
Probably not, because there are lots of manifestly unanthropic ways of producing entropy. We demonstrate that the Causal Entropic Principle (CEP), as a replacement for the anthropic principle to explain the properties of the observed…
The anthropic explanation for the peculiarly small observed value of the cosmological constant $\Lambda_{\rm obs}$ argues that this value promotes the formation of stars, planets, and ultimately of observers such as ourselves. I show that a…