are free will and causal determinism compatible with each other? this is one of the most important questions central to discussions relating to free will. the problem is that causal determinism makes us encounter challenging dilemmas, either way leading us to deny free will: (1) causal determinism is either true or not true; (2) if causal determinism is true, we do not have free will; since all...

Preferences are ubiquitous in our everyday life. They essential the decision making process of individuals. Recently, they have also been employed to represent ethical principles, normative systems or guidelines. In this work we focus on a ceteris paribus semantics for deontic logic: state affairs where larger set respected prescriptions is preferable some violated. Conditional preference netwo...

I argue that central Buddhist tenets and meditation methodology support a view of free will similar to Harry Frankfurt’s optimistic view and contrary to Galen Strawson’s pessimistic view. For Frankfurt, free will involves a relationship between actions, volitions, and “metavolitions” (volitions about volitions): simplifying greatly, volitional actions are free if the agent approves of them. For...

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...

Tiling systems that recognize two-dimensional languages are intrinsically non-deterministic models. We introduce the notion of deterministic tiling system that generalizes deterministic automata for strings. The corresponding family of languages matches all the requirements of a robust deterministic class. Furthermore we show that, differently from the one-dimensional case, there exist many cla...

Complex networks are generally composed of dense sub-networks called communities. Many algorithms have been proposed to automatically detect such communities. However, they are often unstable and behave nondeterministically. We propose here to use this non-determinism in order to compute groups of nodes on which community detection algorithms agree most of the time. We show that these groups of...