Related papers: A Formal Sociologic Study of Free Will
We study the concept of free will by defining a mathematical model that extends Newton's laws of motion, in such a way that bodies are replaced with agents endowed with free will. In our model the free will of agents is not entirely free,…
Free will is sometimes summarised in the philosophical literature as the subjective impression felt by an individual that he or she is the ultimate source or cause of his or her own choices. The two most common arguments for denying the…
Free will is an old philosophical enigma that has been recently revived by neuropsychology. We restrict ourselves to the problem that determinism seems to allow only an illusion of freedom but random decissions do not contain any freedom…
It is argued that the concept of free will, like the concept of truth in formal languages, requires a separation between an object level and a meta-level for being consistently defined. The Jamesian two-stage model, which deconstructs free…
The impression of free will is the feeling according to which our choices are neither imposed from our inside nor from outside. It is the sense we are the ultimate cause of our acts. In direct opposition with the universal determinism, the…
In quantum gravity there is no notion of absolute time. Like all other quantities in the theory, the notion of time has to be introduced "relationally", by studying the behavior of some physical quantities in terms of others chosen as a…
The question of "Justice" still divides social research and moral philosophy. Several Theories of Justice and conceptual approaches compete here, and distributive justice remains a major societal controversy. From an evolutionary point of…
It is considered the study of determinism in the theories of physics. Based on fundamental postulates of physics, it is proved that the evolution of the universe is univocally determined, proving ultimately that free will does not exist. In…
The issue of whether we make decisions freely has vexed philosophers for millennia, Resolving this is vital for solving a diverse range of problems, from the physiology of how the brain makes decisions (and how we assign moral…
Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented. Physical approach, which takes advantage of their extensively quantified mortality, establishes that its dominant fraction yields…
Prosocial behaviors are encountered in the donation game, the prisoner's dilemma, relaxed social dilemmas, and public goods games. Many studies assume that the population structure is homogeneous, meaning all individuals have the same…
Actual individual preferences are neither complete (=total) nor antisymmetric in general, so that at least every quasi-order must be an admissible input to a satisfactory choice rule. It is argued that the traditional notion of…
Why are human societies unstable? Theories based on the observation of recurring patterns in historical data indicate that economic inequality, as well as social factors are key drivers. So far, models of this phenomenon are more…
The so-called "free will axiom" is an essential ingredient in many discussions concerning hidden variables in quantum mechanics. In this paper we argue that "free will" can be defined in different ways. The definition usually employed is…
Free will discourse is primarily centred around the thesis of determinism. Much of the literature takes determinism as its starting premise, assuming it true for the sake of discussion, and then proceeds to present arguments for why, if…
Since its early beginnings, mankind has put to test many different society forms, and this fact raises a complex of interesting questions. The objective of this paper is to present a general population model which takes essential features…
The power law is ubiquitous in natural and social phenomena, and is considered as a universal relationship between the frequency and its rank for diverse social systems. However, a general model is still lacking to interpret why these…
In social learning environments, agents acquire information from both private signals and the observed actions of predecessors, referred to as history. We define the value of history as the gain in expected payoff from accessing both the…
Mortality is an instrument of natural selection. Evolutionary motivated theories imply its irreversibility and life history dependence. This is inconsistent with mortality data for protected populations. Accurate analysis yields mortality…
The fact that humans cooperate with non-kin in large groups, or with people they will never meet again, is a long-standing evolutionary puzzle with profound implications. Cooperation is linked to altruism, the capacity to perform costly…