Isolation and folk physics

There is a huge chasm between the notion of lawful determination that figures in fundamental physics, and the notion of causal determination that figures in the "folk physics" of everyday objects. In everyday life, we think of the behavior of an ordinary object as being determined by a small set of simple conditions. But in fundamental physics, no such conditions suffice to determine an ordinary object's behavior. What bridges the chasm is that fundamental physical laws make the folk picture of the world approximately true in certain domains. How? In part, by entailing that many objects are approximately isolated from most of their environments. Dynamical laws yield this result only in conjunction with appropriate statistical assumptions about initial conditions

Bayesianism, Infinite Decisions, and Binding

We pose and resolve several vexing decision theoretic puzzles. Some are variants of existing puzzles, such as ‘Trumped’ (Arntzenius and McCarthy 1997), ‘Rouble trouble’ (Arntzenius and Barrett 1999), ‘The airtight Dutch book’ (McGee 1999), and ‘The two envelopes puzzle’ (Broome 1995). Others are new. A unified resolution of the puzzles shows that Dutch book arguments have no force in infinite cases. It thereby provides evidence that reasonable utility functions may be unbounded and that reasonable credence functions need not be countably additive. The resolution also shows that when infinitely many decisions are involved, the difference between making the decisions simultaneously and making them sequentially can be the difference between riches and ruin. Finally, the resolution reveals a new way in which the ability to make binding commitments can save perfectly rational agents from sure losses

Confession of a causal decision theorist

(1) Suppose that you care only about speaking the truth, and are confident that some particular deterministic theory is true. If someone asks you whether that theory is true, are you rationally required to answer "yes"? (2) Suppose that you face a problem in which (as in Newcomb's problem) one of your options---call it "taking two boxes"---causally dominates your only other option. Are you rationally required to take two boxes? Those of us attracted to causal decision theory are under pressure to answer "yes" to both questions. However, it has been shown that many existing decision theories are inconsistent with doing so (Ahmed 2014). A simple proof shows that the same goes for an even wider class of theories: all "suppositional" decision theories. The moral is that causal decision theorists must either answer "no" to one of the above questions, or else abandon suppositional decision theories

Against the no-difference argument

There are 1,000 of us and one victim. We each increase the level at which a "discomfort machine" operates on the victim---leading to great discomfort. Suppose that consecutive levels of the machine are so similar that the victim cannot distinguish them. Have we acted permissibly? According to the "no-difference argument" the answer is "yes" because each of our actions was guaranteed to make the victim no worse off. This argument is of interest because if it is sound, similar arguments threaten intuitive moral verdicts about many cases in which a large number of individual choices cumulatively make a great difference, while each choice seems to make no difference on its own. But the argument is not sound, as is shown by a simple objection based on a plausible dominance principle---an objection that avoids challenges that have been brought against previous criticisms of the no difference argument

Counterfactuals, dispositions, and conscious experience : essays on entropy

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (p. 79-81).Chapter 1 of this thesis concerns counterfactual conditionals. David Lewis has offered a natural and influential analysis of counterfactuals. But the analysis fails to take into account the asymmetry of entropy, and comes to grief precisely because of that failure. The cause of the grief is that processes involving the increase of entropy are exceedingly sensitive to small changes in their final conditions. Chapter 2 concerns robust dispositions. Drop an ordinary rock into hydrofluoric acid, and-almost no matter what is going on far away--it will dissolve. In other words, the rock displays a disposition to dissolve that is robust with respect to small variations in its environment. Why is it that so many objects display robust dispositions to melt, cool down, explode, hatch, and so on? Because entropy increases over time. Chapter 3 concerns conscious experience. Take any world with fundamental dynamical laws rather like ours, but in which entropy doesn't increase. Take any system in that world that changes state by changing thermodynamically. That system has no experiences whatsoever. That's because (in such worlds), in order to have an experience it is necessary to display certain robust dispositions. And such systems fail to display the requisite dispositions.by Adam Newman Elga.Ph.D

Fragmentation and information access

In order to predict and explain behavior, one cannot specify the mental state of an agent merely by saying what information she possesses.  Instead one must specify what information is available to an agent relative to various purposes.  Specifying mental states in this way allows us to accommodate cases of imperfect recall, cognitive accomplishments involved in logical deduction, the mental states of confused or fragmented subjects, and the difference between propositional knowledge and know-ho

Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure , Return On Equity dan Nilai Perusahaan

This research aims to know: (1) The influence of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Disclosure partially on firm value (2) The influence of Return on Equity (ROE) partially on firm value (3) The influence of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Disclosure and Return on Equity (ROE) simultaneously on firm value. The population of this research are the winners of 7th Indonesia Sustainability Reporting Award (ISRA) and 8th Indonesia Sustainability Reporting Award (ISRA). The sampling technique that used for this research is purposive sampling. Total number of sample are taken from 9 firms with 4 years research period which was from 2009 to 2012. The analysis of data uses multiplied regression. The result of this research shows that: (1) Partially, the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Disclosure has not significant effect to firm value (2) Partially, Return on Equity (ROE) has significant effect to firm value (3) Simultaneously, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Disclosure and Return on Equity (ROE) has significant effect to firm value.

Financial Crisis, Global Liquidity and Monetary Exit Strategies

We develop a roadmap of how the ECB should further reduce the volume of money (money supply) and roll back credit easing in order to prevent inflation. The exits should be step-by-step rather than one-off. Communicating about the exit strategy must be an integral part of the exit strategy. Price stability should take precedence in all decisions. Due to vagabonding global liquidity, there is a strong case for globally coordinating monetary exit strategies. Given unsurmountable practical problems of coordinating exit with asymmetric country interests, however, the ECB should go ahead - perhaps joint with some Far Eastern economies. Coordination of monetary and fiscal exit would undermine ECB independence and is also technically out of reach within the euro area

Evidence: A Guide for the Uncertain

Assume that it is your evidence that determines what opinions you should have. I argue that since you should take peer disagreement seriously, evidence must have two features. (1) It must sometimes warrant being modest: uncertain what your evidence warrants, and (thus) uncertain whether you’re rational. (2) But it must always warrant being guided: disposed to treat your evidence as a guide. Surprisingly, it is very difficult to vindicate both (1) and (2). But diagnosing why this is so leads to a proposal—Trust—that is weak enough to allow modesty but strong enough to yield many guiding features. In fact, I claim that Trust is the Goldilocks principle—for it is necessary and sufficient to vindicate the claim that you should always prefer to use free evidence. Upshot: Trust lays the foundations for a theory of disagreement and, more generally, an epistemology that permits self-doubt—a modest epistemology

Imperfect Memory and the Preference for Increasing Payments

In this paper we show how imperfect memory can imply a preference for increasing payments. We model an agent making a decision regarding effort in two periods where the cost of effort is imperfectly known. Before making the first decision, the agent receives a signal related to the cost of effort, which is subsequently forgotten. Before the second decision, the agent makes an inference regarding the content of this signal based on the publicly available information: the action taken and the wage paid. A preference for increasing payments naturally emerges from our model. With the auxiliary assumption that obtaining wage income requires an unknown cost of effort and obtaining rental income requires a known, zero cost of effort, our results provide an explanation for the experimental findings of Loewenstein and Sicherman (1991). These authors find evidence of a stronger preference for increasing income from wages rather than income from rent. Additionally, our model makes the novel prediction that this preference for increasing payments will only occur when the contracts are neither very likely nor very unlikely to cover the cost of effort