Let ℋ be a finite-dimensional complex Hilbert space and D the set of density matrices on ℋ, i.e., the positive operators with trace 1. Our goal in this note is to identify a probability measure u on D that can be regarded as the uniform distribution over D. We propose a measure on D, argue that it can be so regarded, discuss its properties, and compute the joint distribution of the eigenvalues of a random density matrix distributed according to this (...) measure. (shrink)

In a quantum universe with a strong arrow of time, we postulate a low-entropy boundary condition to account for the temporal asymmetry. In this paper, I show that the Past Hypothesis also contains enough information to simplify the quantum ontology and define a unique initial condition in such a world. First, I introduce Density Matrix Realism, the thesis that the quantum universe is described by a fundamental density matrix that represents something objective. This stands in sharp contrast to Wave Function (...) Realism, the thesis that the quantum universe is described by a wave function that represents something objective. Second, I suggest that the Past Hypothesis is sufficient to determine a unique and simple density matrix. This is achieved by what I call the Initial Projection Hypothesis: the initial density matrix of the universe is the normalized projection onto the special low-dimensional Hilbert space. Third, because the initial quantum state is unique and simple, we have a strong case for the \emph{Nomological Thesis}: the initial quantum state of the universe is on a par with laws of nature. This new package of ideas has several interesting implications, including on the harmony between statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, the dynamic unity of the universe and the subsystems, and the alleged conflict between Humean supervenience and quantum entanglement. (shrink)

A century after the discovery of quantum mechanics, the meaning of quantum mechanics still remains elusive. This is largely due to the puzzling nature of the wave function, the central object in quantum mechanics. If we are realists about quantum mechanics, how should we understand the wave function? What does it represent? What is its physical meaning? Answering these questions would improve our understanding of what it means to be a realist about quantum mechanics. In this survey article, I review (...) and compare several realist interpretations of the wave function. They fall into three categories: ontological interpretations, nomological interpretations, and the sui generis interpretation. For simplicity, I will focus on non-relativistic quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Phoebe Waller-Bridge is not an unknown name. The writer, actor, and producer has been a part of various comedy TV series and films. However, she has a pattern in her comedy writing and character creation that is obvious in the TV series – Fleabag (2016–2019) and Crashing (2016). In both these series, one cannot miss the obvious similarity between the characters she wrote and played – characters who knew what they wanted and did not hesitate to make attempts to achieve (...) it, even when it meant defying the conventional rules of social relationships and breaking out of the gender identities set by society for women. In fact, other characters created around these female characters seem to lack the same courage, which leads to the creation of comical situations but also often results in these characters facing emotional obstacles that they eventually overcome. The women in both shows not only choose to reject predefined gender identities, but also make choices and take risks while being aware of the consequences. Throughout their journeys of embracing their free consciousnesses, these characters illustrate Jean Paul Sartre’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s process of transcending their facticity, thus avoiding bad faith. Implicit in Waller-Bridge’s work is the argument that we could do better to be – and encourage other women to be – the types of women that her protagonists are. (shrink)

“The women here in Los Terreros are worried,” Don Alonzo says. “Last year, one of them died from invasive cervical cancer. Thirty-eight years old. Never had a pap in her life.” He leans back in his chair and sighs. “Her husband wouldn’t let her, said he didn’t see the point.” A tabby cat rubs against his legs. “So now the women, they keep worrying. They’ve had the day your group is coming memorized for weeks, maybe months.”Don Alonzo is the local (...) health officer, a thin man in his late sixties, never without his cowboy hat and tattered backpack. We sit in front of his house atop a steep hill in Los Terreros, a small Honduran community about a hundred miles northeast of the country’s capital. Around us, dense green... (shrink)

Kantian Transpositions presents an important new reading of Jacques Derrida’s writings on religion and ethics. Eddis Miller argues that Derrida’s late texts on religion constitute an interrogation of the meaning and possibility of a “philosophy of religion.” It is the first book to fully engage Derrida’s claim, in “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone” to be transposing the Kantian gesture of thinking religion “within the limits of reason alone.” Miller outlines the terms (...) of this “transposition” and reads Derrida’s work as an attempt to enact such a transposition. Along the way, he stakes out new ground in the debate over deconstruction and ethics, showing—against recent interpretations of Derrida’s work—that there is an ethical moment in Derrida’s writings that cannot be understood properly without accounting for the decisive role played by Kant’s ethics. The result is the most sustained demonstration yet offered of Kant’s indispensible contribution to Derrida’s thought. (shrink)

The mathematical structure of realist quantum theories has given rise to a debate about how our ordinary 3-dimensional space is related to the 3N-dimensional configuration space on which the wave function is defined. Which of the two spaces is our (more) fundamental physical space? I review the debate between 3N-Fundamentalists and 3D-Fundamentalists and evaluate it based on three criteria. I argue that when we consider which view leads to a deeper understanding of the physical world, especially given the deeper topological (...) explanation from the unordered configurations to the Symmetrization Postulate, we have strong reasons in favor of 3D-Fundamentalism. I conclude that our evidence favors the view that our fundamental physical space in a quantum world is 3-dimensional rather than 3N-dimensional. I outline lines of future research where the evidential balance can be restored or reversed. Finally, I draw lessons from this case study to the debate about theoretical equivalence. (shrink)

Although expected utility theory has proven a fruitful and elegant theory in the finite realm, attempts to generalize it to infinite values have resulted in many paradoxes. In this paper, we argue that the use of John Conway's surreal numbers shall provide a firm mathematical foundation for transfinite decision theory. To that end, we prove a surreal representation theorem and show that our surreal decision theory respects dominance reasoning even in the case of infinite values. We then bring our theory (...) to bear on one of the more venerable decision problems in the literature: Pascal's Wager. Analyzing the wager showcases our theory's virtues and advantages. To that end, we analyze two objections against the wager: Mixed Strategies and Many Gods. After formulating the two objections in the framework of surreal utilities and probabilities, our theory correctly predicts that (1) the pure Pascalian strategy beats all mixed strategies, and (2) what one should do in a Pascalian decision problem depends on what one's credence function is like. Our analysis therefore suggests that although Pascal's Wager is mathematically coherent, it does not deliver what it purports to, a rationally compelling argument that people should lead a religious life regardless of how confident they are in theism and its alternatives. (shrink)

In this chapter I consider various potential challenges to free will from the modern mind sciences. After motivating the importance of considering these challenges, I outline the argument structure for such challenges: they require simultaneously establishing a particular condition for free will and an empirical challenge to that condition. I consider several potential challenges: determinism, naturalism, and epiphenomenalism, and explain why none of these philosophical challenges is bolstered by new discoveries from neuroscience and psychology. I then respond to relevant empirical (...) challenges to the role of consciousness and rationality in action. (shrink)

The wave function in quantum mechanics presents an interesting challenge to our understanding of the physical world. In this paper, I show that the wave function can be understood as four intrinsic relations on physical space. My account has three desirable features that the standard account lacks: it does not refer to any abstract mathematical objects, it is free from the usual arbitrary conventions, and it explains why the wave function has its gauge degrees of freedom, something that are usually (...) put into the theory by hand. Hence, this account has implications for debates in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. First, by removing references to mathematical objects, it provides a framework for nominalizing quantum mechanics. Second, by excising superfluous structure such as overall phase, it reveals the intrinsic structure postulated by quantum mechanics. Moreover, it also removes a major obstacle to ``wave function realism.''. (shrink)

From climate change, debt, and refugee crises, to energy security, environmental disasters, and terrorism, the events that lead nightly newscasts and drive public policy demand a global perspective. In the twentieth century the world sought solutions through formal institutions of international governance such as like the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the World Bank, but present-day our responses to global realities are often more provisional, improvisational, and contingent. Tracing this uneven history in order to identify principal actors, contesting (...) ideologies, and competing rhetoric, Negative Cosmopolitanism challenges the Kantian ideal of cosmopolitanism as the precondition for a perpetual global peace. Uniting researchers working on contemporary problems with those studying related issues of the past--including slavery, industrial capitalism, and corporate imperialism--essays in this volume scrutinize the entanglement of cosmopolitanism within expanding networks of trade and global capital from the eighteenth-century to the present. By doing so, the contributors pinpoint the ways in which whole populations have been unwillingly caught up in a capitalist reality that has little in common with the earlier ideals of cosmopolitanism. A model for provoking new and necessary questions about neoliberalism, biopolitics, colonialism, citizenship, and xenophobia, Negative Cosmopolitanism establishes a fresh take on the representation of globalization and modern life in history and literature. (shrink)

Energy poverty is a key detriment to labor productivity, economic growth, and social well-being. This article presents a qualitative review of literature on the potential role of intelligent communication technology, web-based standards, and smart grid technology to alleviate energy costs and improve access to clean distributed energy in developed and developing countries. It puts forward the argument that energy poverty can be addressed through the use of smarter technologies— which inform decisions we make as individual and corporate citizens, policy makers, (...) and elected officials. Furthermore, the potential application of smarter technologies and energy mapping is explored at the global, national, and provincial levels, with particular attention on their ability to affect our choice of energy and resulting economic impacts. (shrink)

It is often called “the problem of free will and determinism,” as if the only thing that might challenge free will is determinism and as if determinism is obviously a problem. The traditional debates about free will have proceeded accordingly. Typically, incompatibilists about free will and determinism suggest that their position is intuitive or commonsensical, such that compatibilists have the burden of showing how, despite appearances, the problem of determinism is not really a problem. Compatibilists, in turn, tend to proceed (...) as if showing that determinism is not a problem thereby shows that we have free will, as if determinism is the only thing that might threaten free will. In this chapter, I reject both of these elements of the traditional debate; the question of whether we have free will should neither begin nor end with the so-called problem of determinism. I present and discuss evidence from a variety of studies that suggests that incompatibilism is not particularly intuitive. Most people do not have to be talked out of incompatibilism but rather talked into it. This provides some reasons—though certainly not decisive reasons—to think that compatibilism is true. I conclude by pointing out that, even if compatibilism were true, it would not dissolve the problem of free will, because there are problems other than determinism that need to be confronted—namely, challenges to free will suggested by current and “future science,” including neuroscience and psychology. The threats to free will suggested by these sciences are distinct from the traditional threat of determinism, and they are the ones that “ordinary persons” find intuitively threatening to free will. In fact, I will argue that the reason incompatibilism about free will and determinism appears to be intuitive is that determinism is often and easily misunderstood to involve these distinct threats to free will—threats that suggest that our rational, conscious mental activity is bypassed in the process of our making decisions and coming to act. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Time Together and Time ApartNeha Choksi (bio)The drawings to scale on the following pages depict multiple views I outlined while holding in my hand a single, small particolored stone. The silhouette leaves a hole for the stone to inhabit, were it still to exist. The colored pigment that shapes the absence of the stone is made by pulverizing this same stone.I pushed the pigment aside on the recto to (...) create the evacuated silhouette. Imagining the hole bored through to the other side, I colored the verso, too. All the pigment from the stone was used up in painting these multiple views.________The Crete Senesi area in Tuscany, where I found the stone, is formed from tiny fragments of small shells and sea organisms compacted with sediments of clays and sands from a sea that covered it millions of years ago. I fancy the stone contains evidence of the missing sea.I dislocated this stone during one of my multiple walks on a local strada bianchi near my temporary residence in a tiny village in Tuscany. I shared a summer there with six other artists and the coordinator as part of the Amant Residency Siena. I painted one stone view per member of our group. I made these drawings as a gift for them, for us, for our time together, and our time apart.October 11, 2023 Mumbai7 cotton paper sheets with stone pigment paint on recto and verso Each 7 ¾ x 5 inches [End Page 64] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 65] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 66] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 67] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 68] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 69] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 70] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 71] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 72] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 73] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 74] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 75] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 76] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 77] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 78]Neha Choksi Neha Choksi, in her work across performance, moving image, sculpture, and installation, probes lived experiences that negotiate relationships in unconventional settings. Harnessing stone to plant, animal to friends, publics to philosophy, her materially bound art engages the terms of our existence in ways personal and planetary. Choksi’s work has been widely exhibited, screened, or performed in the United States, Asia, the Middle East, Australia, the UK, and Europe; and is in notable public collections worldwide. Recent honors include the Amant Siena Studio & Research Residency, the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship, the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, and the India Today Best New Media Artist of the Year Award. A monograph on a single artwork, Dismantling, was published in 2018. She currently co-edits Mimesis: Film as Performance Magazine. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Bombay.Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and SubStance, Inc... (shrink)

We discuss recent work in experimental philosophy on free will and moral responsibility and then present a new study. Our results suggest an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions. Most laypersons who take determinism to preclude free will and moral responsibility apparently do so because they mistakenly interpret determinism to involve fatalism or “bypassing” of agents’ relevant mental states. People who do not misunderstand determinism in this way tend to see it as compatible with free will and responsibility. We discuss why (...) these results pose a challenge to incompatibilists. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References.

Working from home (WFH) is a new reality and norm in today’s work culture. COVID-induced lockdown introduced the concept of WFH for many people. Blurring home and workplace boundaries was a prominent cause of disorientation in people’s lives. Hence, WFH becomes a significant phenomenon to explore as it raises the fundamental question of body and space in shaping people’s experiences. To study this, the researchers designed a phenomenological inquiry and examined the lived phenomenon of WFH during the COVID lockdown. Borrowing (...) theoretical concepts from philosophers Martin Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, they aimed to understand human experiences from an embodied perspective. They interviewed a few adults (age group 27–50) in three urban Indian cities during the first phase of the COVID-19 lockdown. The participants’ experiences were transcribed, and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was conducted. The IPA themes highlighted their varied lived experiences and lifeworld, such as distractions in working from home, their changed routines, habits, and social interaction. The findings are discussed through phenomenological psychology concepts such as embodied cognition, body memory, extended self, shared empathy, intersubjectivity and pre-reflective bodily intelligence in coping. The study’s contribution is that it advances a methodological understanding by interpreting people’s experiences from a phenomenological view of being-in-the-world in which the individual is not an isolated entity but is in the world/placed in the world with other people and the environment. (shrink)

A strongly deterministic theory of physics is one that permits exactly one possible history of the universe. In the words of Penrose (1989), "it is not just a matter of the future being determined by the past; the entire history of the universe is fixed, according to some precise mathematical scheme, for all time.” Such an extraordinary feature may appear unattainable in a world like ours. In this paper, I show that it can be achieved in a simple way and (...) discuss its implications for metaphysics and philosophy of science, including natural properties, free will, explanation, and modality. First, I propose a precise definition of strong determinism. Next, I discuss its philosophical ramifications and a toy example. Finally, I provide a realistic example of a strongly deterministic (and simple) physical theory---the Everettian Wentaculus. A surprising consequence is that whether or not our world is strongly deterministic may be empirically underdetermined. (shrink)

Aesthetics has typically been regarded as an arena where claims about truth cannot be made as questions about art seem to involve more matters of taste than knowledge. In _Real Beauty_, however, Eddy Zemach maintains that beauty, ugliness, gracefulness, gaudiness, and similar aesthetic properties are real features of public things and argues that whether these features are present is a matter of fact that can be empirically investigated. By examining the opposing nonrealistic views of Subjectivism, Noncognitivism, and Relativism, Zemach attempts (...) to show how antirealistic interpretations of art generate absurd results and leave the realistic reading as the only cogent semantic interpretation of aesthetic statements. By discussing what inclines most people to hold nonrealistic views in aesthetics, such as the fluctuations of taste in fashion, Zemach argues that Realism can account for these fluctuations. He proposes that the aesthetic value of some things is due to their relations to other things and that relation may be temporal, resulting in the need for a temporal point for the correct temporal angle from which to view things. Zemach concludes that great art reveals significant truths about reality and that significantly true statements are aesthetically valuable, hence truth is an aesthetic merit. (shrink)

If there are fundamental laws of nature, can they fail to be exact? In this paper, I consider the possibility that some fundamental laws are vague. I call this phenomenon 'fundamental nomic vagueness.' I characterize fundamental nomic vagueness as the existence of borderline lawful worlds and the presence of several other accompanying features. Under certain assumptions, such vagueness prevents the fundamental physical theory from being completely expressible in the mathematical language. Moreover, I suggest that such vagueness can be regarded as (...) 'vagueness in the world.' For a case study, we turn to the Past Hypothesis, a postulate that (partially) explains the direction of time in our world. We have reasons to take it seriously as a candidate fundamental law of nature. Yet it is vague: it admits borderline (nomologically) possible worlds. An exact version would lead to an untraceable arbitrariness absent in any other fundamental laws. However, the dilemma between fundamental nomic vagueness and untraceable arbitrariness is dissolved in a new quantum theory of time's arrow. (shrink)

If the Past Hypothesis underlies the arrows of time, what is the status of the Past Hypothesis? In this paper, I examine the role of the Past Hypothesis in the Boltzmannian account and defend the view that the Past Hypothesis is a candidate fundamental law of nature. Such a view is known to be compatible with Humeanism about laws, but as I argue it is also supported by a minimal non-Humean "governing'' view. Some worries arise from the non-dynamical and time-dependent (...) character of the Past Hypothesis as a boundary condition, the intrinsic vagueness in its specification, and the nature of the initial probability distribution. I show that these worries do not have much force, and in any case they become less relevant in a new quantum framework for analyzing time's arrows---the Wentaculus. Hence, the view that the Past Hypothesis is a candidate fundamental law should be more widely accepted than it is now. (shrink)

The Great Divide in metaphysical debates about laws of nature is between Humeans, who think that laws merely describe the distribution of matter, and non-Humeans, who think that laws govern it. The metaphysics can place demands on the proper formulations of physical theories. It is sometimes assumed that the governing view requires a fundamental / intrinsic direction of time: to govern, laws must be dynamical, producing later states of the world from earlier ones, in accord with the fundamental direction of (...) time in the universe. In this paper, we propose a minimal primitivism about laws of nature (MinP) according to which there is no such requirement. On our view, laws govern by constraining the physical possibilities. Our view captures the essence of the governing view without taking on extraneous commitments about the direction of time or dynamic production. Moreover, as a version of primitivism, our view requires no reduction / analysis of laws in terms of universals, powers, or dispositions. Our view accommodates several potential candidates for fundamental laws, including the principle of least action, the Past Hypothesis, the Einstein equation of general relativity, and even controversial examples found in the Wheeler-Feynman theory of electrodynamics and retrocausal theories of quantum mechanics. By understanding governing as constraining, non-Humeans who accept MinP have the same freedom to contemplate a wide variety of candidate fundamental laws as Humeans do. (shrink)

Philosophers working in the nascent field of ‘experimental philosophy’ have begun using methods borrowed from psychology to collect data about folk intuitions concerning debates ranging from action theory to ethics to epistemology. In this paper we present the results of our attempts to apply this approach to the free will debate, in which philosophers on opposing sides claim that their view best accounts for and accords with folk intuitions. After discussing the motivation for such research, we describe our methodology of (...) surveying people’s prephilosophical judgments about the freedom and responsibility of agents in deterministic scenarios. In two studies, we found that a majority of participants judged that such agents act of their own free will and are morally responsible for their actions. We then discuss the philosophical implications of our results as well as various difficulties inherent in such research. (shrink)

We argue, contra Joshua Knobe in a companion chapter, that most people have an understanding of free will and responsible agency that is compatible with a naturalistic vision of the human mind. Our argument is supported by results from a new experimental philosophy study showing that most people think free will is consistent with complete and perfect prediction of decisions and actions based on prior activity in the brain (a scenario adapted from Sam Harris who predicts most people will find (...) it inconsistent with free will). We explain why most people are "theory-lite" about the nature of mind and free will--they are not committed to substantive theories of the underlying causal structure of mind, such as Knobe's "transcendence vision". Rather, we suggest a "causal competition principle"--that an agent's actions will be deemed unfree when they are perceived to be fully caused by factors that do not include her reasons. This principle explains why people, including some scientists, perceive neuroscientific explanations as threatening free will when they are described in terms of neural processes fully causing actions to the exclusion of agents' reasons or reasoning processes. (shrink)

In this provocative book, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., one of our nation’s rising young African American intellectuals, makes an impassioned plea for black America to address its social problems by recourse to experience and with an eye set on the promise and potential of the future, rather than the fixed ideas and categories of the past. Central to Glaude’s mission is a rehabilitation of philosopher John Dewey, whose ideas, he argues, can be fruitfully applied to a renewal of African (...) American politics. According to Glaude, Dewey’s pragmatism, when attentive to the darker dimensions of life—or what we often speak of as the blues—can address many of the conceptual problems that plague contemporary African American discourse. How blacks think about themselves, how they imagine their own history, and how they conceive of their own actions can be rendered in ways that escape bad ways of thinking that assume a tendentious political unity among African Americans simply because they are black. Drawing deeply on black religious thought and literature, _In a Shade of Blue_ seeks to dislodge such crude and simplistic thinking and replace it with a deeper understanding of and appreciation for black life in all its variety and intricacy. Glaude argues that only when black political leaders acknowledge such complexity can the real-life sufferings of many African Americans be remedied, an argument echoed in the recent rhetoric and optimism of the Barack Obama presidential campaign. __ _I__n a Shade of Blue_ is a remarkable work of political commentary and to follow its trajectory is to learn how African Americans arrived at this critical moment in their cultural and political history and to envision where they might head in the twenty-first century. “Eddie Glaude is the towering public intellectual of his generation.”—Cornel West “Eddie Glaude is poised to become the leading intellectual voice of our generation, raising questions that make us reexamine the assumptions we hold by expanding our inventory of ideas.”—Tavis Smiley. (shrink)

This study provides an innovative approach to neutrosophic algebraic structures by introducing a new structure called Neutrosophic Soft Cubic T-ideal (NSCTID), which combines T-ideal (TID) and neutrosophic Soft Cubic Sets (NSCSs) within the framework of PS-Algebra. Within the already-existing neutrosophic cubic structures, the addition of soft sets with the characteristics of TID makes this structure more desirable. The theoretical development of the proposed structure includes the application of fundamental ideas as union, intersection, the Cartesian product, and homomorphism. We also introduce (...) the notions of NSCTID-translation and NSCTID-multiplication to further enhance the structure of NSCTID. By applying the idea of translation and multiplication, we offer improved algorithm for neutrosophic cubic sets to deal with different parameters that are satisying the TID’s distinctive characteristics. Through this thorough research, we offer an elementary understanding of NSCTID and its capabilities, providing the way to new algebraic structures. (shrink)

This collection offers cutting-edge chapters on themes related to the philosophical work of Owen Flanagan. Flanagan is an influential philosopher in the late 20th and early 21st Century, whose wide-ranging work spans philosophy of mind (especially consciousness, identity, and the self), ethics and moral psychology, comparative philosophy, and philosophical study of psychopathology (especially disorders of self, dreams, and addiction). Flanagan is the author of numerous scholarly and popular articles, and of 10 books. The chapters present proposals for productive interdisciplinary research (...) exploring the mind, ethics, personhood, consciousness, religious cognition, mental disorders, addiction, the narrative self, virtue, the social sciences, forgiveness, or comparative philosophy. (shrink)

The word parousia was used in Ptolemaic Egypt as a technical term for royal visits. In the present paper the word is studied in connection with visits of high-ranking officials. First, an identification of the officials is proposed. Then, the logistic preparations related to the visits and the burdens they constituted for the inhabitants of the Egyptian chora are treated. Finally, the possible extortions and abuses resulting from the journeys of the officials are discussed. I conclude that not only the (...) terminology and the practical organisation of the visits of the monarchs and important officials were similar, but that the underlying purposes of their appearances in the chora also derived from the same monarchic ideology. (shrink)

Starting with thinking itself, what it is and what uses it has for one as a central essence of it, also with a look at the combining of the perceptual with ...