Meaning, Autonomy, Symbolic Causality, and Free Will

Causality, lexicon, and discourse meaning

This paper is about causality, defined as a specific relation between eventualities on an event-state chain, called a ‘causal chain’. Though causality is a dynamic temporal relation, the expression of causality in discourse contrasts with temporal discourses, in which temporal order between eventualities is parallel to the sequential order of linguistic segments in discourse. Causal discourses ...

Derk Pereboom: Meaning in Life without Free Will

Here is what is sure to be a good piece, since it comes from a good and strong philosopher. Its title tells all -or anyway a lot. But because of the distractions of your editor's philosophical life, in particular a conference in a schloss in Bavaria after a conference in the gentler hills of Idaho, it takes its place without any words of proper introduction. Indeed without having been properly ...

Measuring Autonomy and Emergence via Granger Causality

Concepts of emergence and autonomy are central to artificial life and related cognitive and behavioral sciences. However, quantitative and easy-to-apply measures of these phenomena are mostly lacking. Here, I describe quantitative and practicable measures for both autonomy and emergence, based on the framework of multivariate autoregression and specifically Granger causality. G-autonomy measure...

Autonomy, respect for autonomy and weakness of will.

A study of Determinism and Free-will in Persian Proverbs

Proverbs as a part of colloquial literature are always nourished by religion, culture, traditions, and philosophical beliefs of a community, and thus they mirror the common beliefs of a people. The frequent repletion of a proverb pregnant with a specific thought makes that type of thought a behavioral pattern and affects the actions and behaviors of the people of a society. In the Iranian socie...