Related papers: Deterministic Theories
Counterfactual definiteness is supposed to underlie the Bell theorem. An old controversy exists among those who reject the theorem implications by rejecting counterfactual definiteness and those who claim that, since it is a direct…
Even if never elucidated, the question of determinism is a standing question along the history of human thinking. A physical system evolves in a deterministic way if its future is completely determined once we have fixed some present…
In this article, we propose to use the formalism of quantum mechanics to describe and explain the so-called "abnormal" behaviour of agents in certain decision or choice contexts. The basic idea is to postulate that the preferences of these…
Information is everywhere in nature which is very uncertain and unpredictable. But information, in itself, is a very ambiguous term. In this cursory write-up, we attempt to understand the formal meaning of information by quantifying…
One main goal of argumentation theory is to evaluate arguments and to determine whether they should be accepted or rejected. When there is no clear answer, a third option, being undecided, has to be taken into account. Indecision is often…
Analyzing decision problems under uncertainty commonly relies on idealizing assumptions about the describability of the world, with the most prominent examples being the closed world and the small world assumption. Most assumptions are…
How should my own decisions affect my beliefs about the outcomes I expect to achieve? If taking a certain action makes me view myself as a certain type of person, it might affect how I think others view me, and how I view others who are…
The 20th century has revealed two important limitations of scientific knowledge. On the one hand, the combination of Poincar\'e's nonlinear dynamics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle leads to a world picture where physical reality is,…
Quantum theory has been proved as an outstanding mystery in modern science. The predictions of science have turned out to be probabilistic. The principle of determinism has failed. For systems like weather, earthquakes, rolling dices etc...…
One of quantum theory's salient features is its apparent indeterminism, i.e. measurement outcomes are typically probabilistic. We formally define and address whether this uncertainty is unavoidable or whether post-quantum theories can offer…
A recent flurry of research activity has attempted to quantitatively define "fairness" for decisions based on statistical and machine learning (ML) predictions. The rapid growth of this new field has led to wildly inconsistent terminology…
The notion of a real-valued function is central to mathematics, computer science, and many other scientific fields. Despite this importance, there are hardly any positive results on decision procedures for predicate logical theories that…
What is the meaning of physical causal closure? Jaegwon Kim explicitly adopts a conception of causation according to which physical causation is effectively identified with deterministic physical lawfulness, and equates it with physical…
This paper is motivated by the questions of how to give the concept of probability an adequate real-world meaning, and how to explain a certain type of phenomenon that can be found, for instance, in Ellsberg's paradox. It attempts to answer…
A canonical formalism and constraint analysis for discrete systems subject to a variational action principle are devised. The formalism is equivalent to the covariant formulation, encompasses global and local discrete time evolution moves…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
We introduce and study a natural class of fields in which certain first-order definable sets are existentially definable, and characterise this class by a number of equivalent conditions. We show that global fields belong to this class, and…
In the context of theories of the connection between mind and brain, physicalism is the demand that all is basically purely physical. But the concept of "physical" embodied in this demand is characterized essentially by the properties of…
This article examines the subtle relationship between chaos and randomness, two concepts that, although they refer to seemingly unpredictable phenomenon, are based on fundamentally different principles. Chaos manifests in deterministic…
The present discussion concerning certain fundamental physical theories (such as string theory and multiverse cosmology) has reopened the demarcation problem between science and non-science. While parts of the physics community see the…