Related papers: A Formal Sociologic Study of Free Will
Particularly in transgender and nonbinary (TGNB) communities, it is an increasingly common practice to publicly share one's personal pronouns so that we may be gendered correctly in others' speech. Many of us have nuanced desires for how we…
Indirect reciprocity is a plausible mechanism for sustaining cooperation: people cooperate with those who have a good reputation, which can be acquired by helping others. However, this mechanism requires the population to agree on who has…
A general theory of innovation and progress in human society is outlined, based on the combat between two opposite forces (conservatism/inertia and speculative herding "bubble" behavior). We contend that human affairs are characterized by…
Graph games of infinite length are a natural model for open reactive processes: one player represents the controller, trying to ensure a given specification, and the other represents a hostile environment. The evolution of the system…
Exclusive social groups are ones in which the group members decide whether or not to admit a candidate to the group. Examples of exclusive social groups include academic departments and fraternal organizations. In the present paper we…
Religiosity is one of the most important sociological aspects of populations. All religions may evolve in their beliefs and adapt to the society developments. A religion is a social variable, like a language or wealth, to be studied like…
Fairness is one of the most desirable societal principles in collective decision-making. It has been extensively studied in the past decades for its axiomatic properties and has received substantial attention from the multiagent systems…
I discuss the meaning of probability in the Everett-Wheeler interpretation of quantum mechanics, together with the problem of defining histories. To resolve these, I propose an understanding of probability arising from a form of temporal…
It is often argued that bottom-up causation under a physicalist, reductionist worldview precludes free will in the libertarian sense. On the one hand, the paradigm of classical mechanics makes determinism inescapable, while on the other,…
Direct reciprocity and conditional cooperation are important mechanisms to prevent free riding in social dilemmas. But in large groups these mechanisms may become ineffective, because they require single individuals to have a substantial…
This article describes epistemological distinctions between science and history. Science investigates models of natural law using repeatable experiments as the ultimate arbiter. In contrast, history investigates past events by considering…
Levels of sociality in nature vary widely. Some species are solitary; others live in family groups; some form complex multi-family societies. Increased levels of social interaction can allow for the spread of useful innovations and…
We introduce and study a general model of social network formation and evolution based on the concept of preferential link formation between similar nodes and increased similarity between connected nodes. The model is studied numerically…
We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred.…
From what is known today about the elementary particles of matter, and the forces that control their behavior, it may be observed that still a host of obstacles must be overcome that are standing in the way of further progress of our…
How to distribute welfare in a society is a key issue in the subject of distributional justice, which is deeply involved with notions of fairness. Following a thought experiment by Dworkin, this work considers a society of individuals with…
Social institutions are systems of shared norms and rules that regulate people's behaviors, often emerging without external enforcement. They provide criteria to distinguish cooperation from defection and establish rules to sustain…
Selection, the tendency of some traits to become more frequent than others in a population under the influence of some (natural or artificial) agency, is a key component of Darwinian evolution and countless other natural and social…
We consider the problem of the evolution of a code within a structured population of agents. The agents try to maximise their information about their environment by acquiring information from the outputs of other agents in the population. A…
Thirty years ago, Wooldridge and Jennings defined intelligent agents through four properties: autonomy, reactivity, pro-activeness, and social ability. Today, advances in AI can empower everyday objects to become such intelligent agents. We…