Related papers: A Formal Sociologic Study of Free Will
The claim of the freedom of the will (understood as an individual who is transcendent to Nature) in the name of XXth century scientific knowledge, against the perspective of XVIIIth-XIXth century scientific materialism, is analysed and…
We study the design of voting mechanisms in a binary social choice environment where agents' cardinal valuations are independent but not necessarily identically distributed. The mechanism must be anonymous -- the outcome is invariant to…
A sharing community prospers when participation and contribution are both high. We suggest the two, while being related decisions every peer makes, should be given separate rational bases. Considered as such, a basic issue is the viability…
Breaking a norm elicits both material and emotional consequences, yet how this coupling arose evolutionarily remains unclear. We investigate this question in light of emerging work suggesting that normativity's building blocks emerged…
Many facts are learned through the intermediation of individuals with special access to information, such as law enforcement officers, officials with a security clearance, or experts with specific knowledge. This paper considers whether…
A simple weakly frequency dependent model for the dynamics of a population with a finite number of types is proposed, based upon an advantage of being rare. In the infinite population limit, this model gives rise to a non-smooth dynamical…
We give a semantics to iterated update by a preference relation on possible developments. An iterated update is a sequence of formulas, giving (incomplete) information about successive states of the world. A development is a sequence of…
We discuss the possibility of freedom of action in embodied systems that are, with no exception and at all scales of their body, subject to physical law. We relate the discussion to a model of an artificial agent that exhibits a primitive…
Many have proposed that free will would use quantum indeterminism. Strict adherence to the Born rule, which follows from the no-signal condition, seems to block this possibility. I propose here that if state collapse really does occur then…
In a society, a proportion of the individuals can benefit from creativity without being creative themselves by copying the creators. This paper uses an agent-based model of cultural evolution to investigate how society is affected by…
Canids display a wide diversity of social systems, from solitary to pairs to packs, and hence they have been extensively used as model systems to understand social dynamics in natural systems. Among canids, the dog can show various levels…
We study how a consensus emerges in a finite population of like-minded individuals who are asymmetrically informed about the realization of the true state of the world. Agents observe a private signal about the state and then start…
The personal network of relationships is structured in circles of friendships, that go from the most intense relationships to the least intense ones. While this is a well established result, little is known about the stability of those…
We study social welfare relations (SWRs) on an infinite population. Our main result is a new characterization of a utilitarian SWR as the \emph{largest} SWR (in terms of subset when the weak relation is viewed as a set of pairs) which…
Physics has long lived with a schizophrenia that desires determinism for measured systems while demanding that experimenters decide what to measure on a whim. Intriguingly, such a free will assumption for experimenters has thwarted many…
The goal of this paper is to provide mathematically rigorous tools for modelling the evolution of a community of interacting individuals. We model the population by a measure space where the measure determines the abundance of individual…
Human social hierarchy has the unique characteristic of existing in two forms. Firstly, as an informal hierarchy where leaders and followers are implicitly defined by their personal characteristics, and secondly, as an institutional…
Iterated games are a fundamental component of economic and evolutionary game theory. They describe situations where two players interact repeatedly and have the possibility to use conditional strategies that depend on the outcome of…
We address the question of why particular laws were selected for the universe, by proposing a mechanism for laws to evolve. Normally in physical theories, timeless laws act on time-evolving states. We propose that this is an approximation,…
This paper addresses the theoretical conditions necessary for some subject of study to survive forever. A probabilistic analysis leads to some prerequisite conditions for preserving, say, electronic data indefinitely into the future. The…