相关论文: Defining Civilization utilizing Anthropic Reasonin…

Intelligence is a difficult concept to define, despite many attempts at doing so. Rather than trying to settle on a single definition, this article introduces a broad perspective on what intelligence is, by laying out a cascade of…

Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…

Consciousness is notoriously hard to define with objective terms. An objective definition of consciousness is critically needed so that we might accurately understand how consciousness and resultant choice behaviour may arise in biological…

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…

Astrobiology is usually defined as the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe. As such it is inherently interdisciplinary and cannot help but engender a worldview infused by cosmic and evolutionary…

In designing an intelligent system that must be able to explain its reasoning to a human user, or to provide generalizations that the human user finds reasonable, it may be useful to take into consideration psychological data on what types…

This paper suggests that a universal solution to the Fermi paradox exists and can be derived directly from the definition of life and/or intelligence, therefore eliminating the need for any questionable assumptions and even for the…

A brief explanation of the meaning of the anthropic principle - as a prescription for the attribution of a priori probability weighting - is illustrated by various cosmological and local applications, in which the relevant conclusions are…

We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…

In this paper we offer a formal definition of Artificial Intelligence and this directly gives us an algorithm for construction of this object. Really, this algorithm is useless due to the combinatory explosion. The main innovation in our…

Stereotypical reasoning assumes that the situation at hand is one of a kind and that it enjoys the properties generally associated with that kind of situation. It is one of the most basic forms of nonmonotonic reasoning. A formal model for…

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…

It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…

The definition of thermodynamic entropy is dependent on one's assignment of physical microstates to observed macrostates. As a result, low entropy in the distant past could be equivalently explained by selection of a particular observer. In…

A mechanism is proposed that allows to interpret the temporal evolution of a physical system as a result of the inability of an observer to record its whole state and a simple example is given. It is based on a review of the concepts of…

Ambitious civilizations that expand for resources at an intergalactic scale could be observable from a cosmological distance, but how likely is one to be visible to us? The question comes down to estimating the appearance rate of such…

The term emergence is increasingly used across scientific disciplines to describe phenomena that arise from interactions among a system's components but cannot be readily inferred by examining those components in isolation. While often…

Systems thinking is a way of making sense about the world in terms of multilevel, nested, interacting systems, their environment, and the boundaries between the systems and the environment. In this paper we discuss the evolution of systems…

There is a lively debate in the current literature on epistemology on which type of ignorance may provide a moral excuse. A good candidate is the one in which an agent has never thought about or considered as true a proposition $p$. From a…

Exploring the Universe is one of the great unifying themes of humanity. Part of this endeavour is the search for extraterrestrial life. But how likely is it that we will find life, or that if we do it will be similar to ourselves? And…