Related papers: Defining Civilization utilizing Anthropic Reasonin…
We introduce a logic for reasoning about evidence, that essentially views evidence as a function from prior beliefs (before making an observation) to posterior beliefs (after making the observation). We provide a sound and complete…
Anthropic models can give testable predictions, which can be confirmed or falsified at a specified confidence level. This is illustrated using the successful prediction of the cosmological constant as an example. The history and the nature…
Sensemaking and narrative are two inherently interconnected concepts about how people understand the world around them. Sensemaking is the process by which people structure and interconnect the information they encounter in the world with…
Nature has found one method of organizing living matter, but maybe other options exist -- not yet discovered -- on how to create life. To study the life "as it could be" is the objective of an interdisciplinary field called Artificial Life…
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 define an inference system to capture explanations based on causal statements, using an ontology in the form of an IS-A hierarchy. We first introduce a simple logical language which makes it possible to express that a fact causes another…
Civilization produces knowledge, which acts as the driving force of its development. A macro-model of civilization that accounts for the effect of knowledge production on population, energy consumption and environmental conditions is…
Explanations of model behavior are commonly evaluated via proxy properties weakly tied to the purposes explanations serve in practice. We contribute a decision theoretic framework that treats explanations as information signals valued by…
The aim of this study is to formally express awareness for modeling practical agent communication. The notion of awareness has been proposed as a set of propositions for each agent, to which he/she pays attention, and has contributed to…
Einstein wrote memorably that `The eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility.' This paper argues that the universe must be comprehensible at some level for information gathering and utilizing subsystems such…
Bayesian probability theory is used to analyze the oft-made assumption that humans are typical observers in the universe. Some theoretical calculations make the {\it selection fallacy} that we are randomly chosen from a class of objects by…
A growing effort in NLP aims to build datasets of human explanations. However, the term explanation encompasses a broad range of notions, each with different properties and ramifications. Our goal is to provide an overview of diverse types…
We propose a new definition of actual cause, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. We show that the definition yields a plausible and elegant account of causation that handles well examples which have caused problems for…
Emergence is a pregnant property in various fields. It is the fact for a phenomenon to appear surprisingly and to be such that it seems at first sight that it is not possible to predict its apparition. That is the reason why it has often…
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence on exoplanets is a rich field of conceptual exploration. Author introduces two definitions that could help to narrow down the possibilities that an extraterrestrial civilization may or may not…
``The purpose of life is to obtain knowledge, use it to live with as much satisfaction as possible, and pass it on with improvements and modifications to the next generation.'' This may sound philosophical, and the interpretation of words…
Time series interpretation aims to provide an explanation of what is observed in terms of its underlying processes. The present work is based on the assumption that the common classification-based approaches to time series interpretation…
The theoretical base for consciousness, in particular an explanation of how consciousness is defined by the brain, has long been sought by science. We propose a partial theory of consciousness as relations defined by typical data. The…
Although definitions of technology exist to explain the patterns of technological innovations, there is no general definition that explain the role of technology for humans and other animal species in environment. The goal of this study is…
In the last years the debate on complexity has been developing and developing in transdisciplinary way to meet the need of explanation for highly organized collective behaviors and sophisticated hierarchical arrangements in physical,…