相关论文: Why Occam's Razor

We discuss views about whether the universe can be rationally comprehended, starting with Plato, then Leibniz, and then the views of some distinguished scientists of the previous century. Based on this, we defend the thesis that…

An interesting consequence of the modern cosmological paradigm is the spatial infinity of the universe. When coupled with naturalistic understanding of the origin of life and intelligence, which follows the basic tenets of astrobiology, and…

The ideas of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty are widely used to reason about the probabilistic predictions of machine-learning models. We identify incoherence in existing discussions of these ideas and suggest this stems from the…

Anthropic arguments in multiverse cosmology and string theory rely on the weak anthropic principle (WAP). We show that the principle, though ultimately a tautology, is nevertheless ambiguous. It can be reformulated in one of two unambiguous…

This article offers a gentle introduction to the axiom of choice. We introduce the axiom, discuss some common objections to it, and present three kinds of reasons to accept it. Although the exposition is aimed at non-experts in set theory,…

Input-output maps are prevalent throughout science and technology. They are empirically observed to be biased towards simple outputs, but we don't understand why. To address this puzzle, we study the archetypal input-output map: a…

The Bayes factor is the gold-standard figure of merit for comparing fits of models to data, for hypothesis selection and parameter estimation. However it is little used because it is computationally very intensive. Here it is shown how…

The purpose of this paper is to propose an extension to Lee Smolin's hypothesis that our own universe belongs to a population of universes evolving by natural selection. Smolin's hypothesis explains why the parameters of physics possess the…

Clarifying the nature of the quantum state $|\Psi\rangle$ is at the root of the problems with insight into counter-intuitive quantum postulates. We provide a direct-and math-axiom free-empirical derivation of this object as an element of a…

Ensemble pruning, selecting a subset of individual learners from an original ensemble, alleviates the deficiencies of ensemble learning on the cost of time and space. Accuracy and diversity serve as two crucial factors while they usually…

Different types of reasoning impose different structural demands on representational systems, yet no systematic account of these demands exists across psychology, AI, and philosophy of mind. I propose a framework identifying four structural…

Algorithms can be used to prove and to discover new theorems. This paper shows how algorithmic skills in general, and the notion of invariance in particular, can be used to derive many results from Euclid's algorithm. We illustrate how to…

We propose a fundamental theory on ensemble learning that answers the central question: what factors make an ensemble system good or bad? Previous studies used a variant of Fano's inequality of information theory and derived a lower bound…

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…

Anthropic reasoning often begins with the premise that we should expect to find ourselves typical among all intelligent observers. However, in the infinite universe predicted by inflation, there are some civilizations which have spread…

Creating models from past observations and ensuring their effectiveness on new data is the essence of machine learning. However, selecting models that generalize well remains a challenging task. Related to this topic, the Rashomon Effect…

We tackle the problem of consciousness by taking the naturally selected, embodied organism as our starting point. We provide a formalism describing how biological systems such as human bodies self-organize to hierarchically interpret…

This paper is dedicated to a robust ordinal method for learning the preferences of a decision maker between subsets. The decision model, derived from Fishburn and LaValle (1996) and whose parameters we learn, is general enough to be…

Limitation of computational resources is considered as a universal principle that for simulation is as fundamental as physical laws are. It claims that all experimentally verifiable implications of physical laws can be simulated by the…

We study the role of the information deposited in the environment of an open quantum system in course of the decoherence process. Redundant spreading of information -- the fact that some observables of the system can be independently…