This book reconsiders key issues, such as description and explanation,
which affect data analytics. For starters: the soul does not exist. Once
released from this cumbersome roommate, we are left with complex
biological systems: namely, ourselves, who must configure their
environment in terms of worlds that are compatible with what they sense.
Far from supplying yet another cosmogony, the book provides the
cultivated reader with computational tools for describing and
understanding data arising from his surroundings, such as climate
parameters or stock market trends, even the win/defeat story of his son
football team. Besides the superposition of the very many universes
considered by quantum mechanics, we aim to manage families of worlds
that may have generated those data through the key feature of their
compatibility. Starting from a sharp engineering of ourselves in term of
pairs consisting of genome plus a neuron ensemble, we toss this feature
in different cognitive frameworks within a span of exploitations ranging
from probability distributions to the latest implementations of machine
learning. From the perspective of human society as an ensemble of the
above pairs, the book also provides scientific tools for analyzing the
benefits and drawbacks of the modern paradigm of the world as a service.