-
66182.016532
We apply recent ideas about complexity and randomness to the philosophy of laws and chances. We develop two ways to use algorithmic randomness to characterize probabilistic laws of nature. The first, a generative chance law, employs a nonstandard notion of chance. The second, a probabilistic constraining law, impose relative frequency and randomness constraints that every physically possible world must satisfy. The constraining notion removes a major obstacle to a unified governing account of non-Humean laws, on which laws govern by constraining physical possibilities; it also provides independently motivated solutions to familiar problems for the Humean best-system account (the Big Bad Bug and the zero-fit problem). On either approach, probabilistic laws are tied more tightly to corresponding sets of possible worlds: some histories permitted by traditional probabilistic laws are now ruled out as physically impossible. Consequently, the framework avoids one variety of empirical underdetermination while bringing to light others that are typically overlooked.
-
69413.016598
Consider this sequence of events:
- Tuesday: Alice’s memory is scanned and saved to a hard drive. - Wednesday: Alice’s head is completely crushed in a car crash. - Thursday: Alice’s scanned memories are put into a fresh brain. …
-
165083.01661
In 2004, a team of scientists discovered hydrocarbons called anthracene and pyrene in an amazing structure called the Red Rectangle! Here two stars 2300 light years from us are spinning around each other while pumping out a huge torus of icy dust grains and hydrocarbon molecules. …
-
223967.016619
What is it for y to be objectively qualitatively overall at least as similar to x as z is? This paper defends a version of the following answer: it is for y to be at least as similar to x as z is in every qualitative respect. On the version defended in this paper, this analysis arguably entails that it is possible for some things to objectively qualitatively resemble each other more than they do other things. However, it also arguably entails that, given how the world contingently is, many things (if not all things) are incomparable in objective qualitative resemblance, where y and z are so incomparable to x iff: i) it is not the case that y is at least as objectively qualitatively similar to x as z is, and ii) it is not the case that z is at least as objectively qualitatively similar to x as y is.
-
226996.016631
Hardly for the first time in my life, this weekend I got floridly denounced every five minutes—on SneerClub, on the blog of Peter Woit, and in my own inbox. The charge this time was that I’m a genocidal Zionist who wants to kill all Palestinian children purely because of his mental illness and raging persecution complex. …
-
331511.016638
The levels-of-selection debate is generally taken to be a debate about how natural selection can occur at the various levels of biological organization. In this article, we argue that questions about levels of selection should be analysed separately from questions about levels of organization. In the deflationary proposal we defend, all that is necessary for multilevel selection is that there are cases in which particles are nested in collectives, and that both the collectives and the particles that compose them each separately undergo natural selection. We argue that adopting this deflationary account helps to disentangle the levels of selection and the levels of organization, and thereby contributes to advancing the levels-of-selection debate. ORCIDs: Eronen, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2028-3338; Ramsey, https://orcid.org/0000 -0002-8712-5521.
-
331532.016646
The definition of tool use has long been debated, especially when applied beyond humans. Recent work argues that the phenomena included within tool use are so broad and varied that there is little hope of using the category for scientific generalizations, explanations, and predictions about the evolution, ecology, and psychology of tool users. One response to this argument has been the development of tooling as a replacement for tool use. In this article, we analyze the tool use and tooling frameworks. Identifying advantages and limitations in each, we offer a synthetic approach that suggests promising avenues for future research.
-
334896.016656
Today I gave $10,000 to Doctors Without Borders, since they’re doing a lot of good work in Gaza. I made this gift in memory of Mariam Abu Dagga, a freelance photographer who was killed in the Nasser Hospital in the Gaza Strip on August 25th this year. …
-
401102.016664
[An excerpt from Beyond Right and Wrong.] Some rights can be expected to promote overall well-being. Utilitarianism endorses these. Other rights lack this utilitarian property: they protect people against harmful interventions, but at greater cost to others who miss out on helpful interventions as a result. …
-
412114.016671
I discuss the nature of the puzzle about the time-asymmetry of radiation and argue that its most common formulation is flawed. As a result, many proposed solutions fail to solve the real problem. I discuss a recent proposal of Mathias Frisch as an example of the tendency to address the wrong problem. I go on to suggest that the asymmetry of radiation, like the asymmetry of thermodynamics, results from the initial state of the universe. 1. Introduction. There is a puzzle about radiation. In our experience, waves display a clear time-asymmetry. Waves appear to spread outwards after their sources move; they do not converge on sources which then begin to move. Water waves diverge after a pebble is dropped in a pond; they do not travel inwards to a spot from which a pebble is then ejected. We see electromagnetic waves emerge after charges accelerate, not converge on charges which then begin to accelerate. Yet the equations governing wave phenomena are symmetric in time, allowing for both the kinds of waves we see and the time-reversal of these processes. Then where does the observed asymmetry of radiation come from?
-
421127.016678
Ugliness is the opposite of beauty. So we may learn what beauty is, by investigating ugliness, and turning the result upside-down. Ugliness is deformity. Two arguments for this thesis may be given: an argument from the dictionary, and an argument from the writings of famous long-dead philosophers. …
-
424279.016685
Suppose a man has already murdered most of your family, including several of your children, for no other reason than that he believes your kind doesn’t deserve to exist on earth. The murderer was never seriously punished for this, because most of your hometown actually shared his feelings about your family. …
-
495416.016692
What do large language models actually model? Do they tell us something about human capacities, or are they models of the corpus we’ve trained them on? I give a non-deflationary defence of the latter position. Cognitive science tells us that linguistic capabilities in humans rely supralinear formats for computation. The transformer architecture, by contrast, supports at best a linear formats for processing. This argument will rely primarily on certain invariants of the computational architecture of transformers. I then suggest a positive story about what transformers are doing, focusing on Liu et al. (2022)’s intriguing speculations about shortcut automata. I conclude with why I don’t think this is a terribly deflationary story. Language is not (just) a means for expressing inner state but also a kind of ‘discourse machine’ that lets us make new language given appropriate context. We have learned to use this technology in one way; LLMs have also learned to use it too, but via very different means.
-
503458.016699
Mental multiplication is an advanced, abstract cognitive task that separates adults from non-human animals, AI systems, and young children. We present a biologically and psycholog- ically plausible spiking neural model of simple mental multipli- cation, expanding on previous work on mental addition [1, 2].
-
507690.016706
I specialize in trillion-dollar ideas: policy reforms which, if implemented, would generate trillions of dollars of net social benefits. Ideas like open borders, educational austerity, and by-right construction. …
-
510741.016713
You can cut a hole in a cube that’s big enough to slide an identical cube through that hole! Think about that for a minute—it’s kind of weird. Amazingly, nobody could prove any convex polyhedron doesn’t have this property! …
-
581335.016721
Suppose there are two opaque boxes, A and B, of which I can choose one. A nearly perfect predictor of my actions put $100 in the box that they thought I would choose. Suppose I find myself with evidence that it’s 75% likely that I will choose box A (maybe in 75% of cases like this, people like me choose A). …
-
594082.016728
In 2015, Amy Finkelstein, Nathaniel Hendren, and Erzo Luttmer released an NBER working paper called “The Value of Medicaid: Interpreting Results from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment.” The paper’s results were a slap in the face of Social Desirability Bias — and the authors boldly advertised them right in the abstract:
Our baseline estimates of Medicaid's welfare benefit to recipients per dollar of government spending range from about $0.2 to $0.4, depending on the framework, with at least two-fifths – and as much as four-fifths – of the value of Medicaid coming from a transfer component, as opposed to its ability to move resources across states of the world. …
-
597102.016735
I’ve been wondering what to allow and what to disallow in terms of AI. I decided to treat AI as basically persons and I put this in my Metaphysics syllabus:
Even though (I believe) AI is not a person and its products are not “thoughts”, treat AI much like you would a person in writing your papers. …
-
597102.016743
Here’s a plausible immediate regret principle:
- It is irrational to make a decision such that learning that you’ve made this decision immediately makes it rational to regret that you didn’t make a different decision. …
-
597103.01675
When I was in 5th grade, I read a fun little book called Donkey’s Can’t Sleep in Bathtubs and Other Crazy Laws. Since I didn’t know any economics at the time, the idea of “crazy laws” was novel to me. …
-
598078.016757
Interactions between agents are supported through a continuous process of detecting and responding to behaviors that are contingent upon the other agent’s behavior. Here, we explore the temporal dependence of these mechanisms, focusing on the role of timescale compatibility in inter-agent interactions. Using continuous-time recurrent neural networks (CTRNNs) to control embodied agents in a minimal social interaction task, we demonstrate that effective interactions require agents to operate on compatible timescales. Our results indicate that time scale mismatches disrupt agents’ ability to distinguish other agents from non-social entities, revealing a timescale threshold beyond which agents begin mis-classifying slower agents as static objects and faster agents as non-social animate objects.
-
741643.016764
We present a causal model for the EPR correlations. In this model, or better framework for a model, causality is preserved by the direct propagation of causal influences between the wings of the experiment. We show that our model generates the same statistical results for EPR as orthodox quantum mechanics. We conclude that causality in quantum mechanics can not be ruled out on the basis of the EPR-Bell- Aspect correlations alone.
-
741666.016772
This paper is divided in two parts. In part I, I argue against two attempts to naturalise the notion of scientific representation, by reducing it to isomorphism and similarity. I distinguish between the means and the constituents of representation, and I argue that isomorphism and similarity are common (although not universal) means of representation; but that they are not constituents of scientific representation. I look at the prospects for weakened versions of these theories, and I argue that only those that abandon the aim to naturalise scientific representation are likely to be successful. In part II of the paper, I present a deflationary conception of scientific representation, which minimally characterises it by means of two necessary conditions: representation is essentially intentional and it has the capacity to allow surrogate reasoning and inference. I then defend this conception by showing that it successfully meets the objections and difficulties that make its competitors, such as isomorphism and similarity, untenable. In addition the inferential conception explains the success of various means of representation in their appropriate domains, and it sheds light on the truth and accuracy of scientific representations.
-
746096.016779
The early study Tennant [11] sought to show how the role played by formal semantics in furnishing models that would invalidate unprovable first-order arguments from premise-sets to conclusions could be taken over by proofs and disproofs. (A disproof of a set of premises is a proof of ⊥, i.e., absurdity, from it.) For any given invalid first-order argument, these latter would be proofs and disproofs in Peano Arithmetic (PA), employing suitable substitutions of arithmetical predicates for the primitive predicates involved in the argument. PA-proofs would be furnished for the premises of the invalid argument, and a PA-disproof would be furnished for its conclusion. This was an early move towards a general proof-theoretic semantics—the approach to By a theorem of Hilbert and Bernays [4], these arithmetical predicates can be taken to be of arithmetical complexity no greater than Δ .
-
748784.016787
Suppose I am choosing between options A and B. Evidential decision theory tells me to calculate the expected utility E(U|A) given the news that I did A and the expected utility E(U|B) given the news that I did B, and go for the bigger of the two. …
-
765575.016794
Economists have long scoffed at know-it-all business and financial gurus with the rhetorical question, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” And sometimes the gurus use the same question to scoff at know-it-all economists. …
-
768652.016801
When thinking about big social problems like climate change or factory farming, there are two especially common failure modes worth avoiding:
Neglecting small numbers that incrementally contribute to significant aggregate harms. …
-
768653.016808
As part of the summer break, I’m publishing old essays that may be of interest for new subscribers. This post has been originally published January 13, 2023. If not already the case, do not hesitate to subscribe to receive free essays on economics, philosophy, and liberal politics in your mailbox! …
-
840796.016815
An important feature of theoretical projects that aim to promote social justice is their commitment to empowering those in oppressive circumstances so that they can solve their own problems. There are two reasons to take this approach. First, the oppressed have situated knowledge of the circumstances that others lack. But situated knowledge may not be enough to prompt critique. The second is that because both knowledge and values are shaped by social practices, a collective engagement with historically and materially grounded practices can provide a new frame for agency that enables a creative and potentially emancipatory restructuring of social relations. I argue that such path dependency of values is compatible with social justice being objective, but not to be discovered by theory alone.