Against philosophical proofs against common sense

Mental Attitudes and Common Sense Psychology: the Case against Elimination

Rational Proofs against Rational Verifiers

Rational proofs, introduced by Azar and Micali (STOC 2012), are a variant of interactive proofs in which the prover is rational, and may deviate from the protocol for increasing his reward. Guo et al. (ITCS 2014) demonstrated that rational proofs are relevant to delegation of computation. By restricting the prover to be computationally bounded, they presented a one-round delegation scheme with ...

Group insurance against common shocks

Abstract We study insurance against common shocks in cooperatives and other productive groups of individuals. In those groups, and due to strategic interactions among group members, insurance decisions may be preferably taken at the group level rather than the individual level. We highlight two kinds of potential problems with individual insurance: the first one is a free-riding problem because...

Defenseless against the common cold

New genetic mapping studies explain why a certain mouse strain is predisposed to developing fatal leukemia. Turcotte et al., reporting on page 881, identify a point mutation in the transcription factor IRF-8 (interferon regulatory factor 8) that abolishes its function and sets the stage for a second, leukemia-triggering mutation. The recombinant mouse strain BXH-2 is known to develop first a my...

Consciousness regained? Philosophical arguments for and against reductive physicalism

This paper is an overview of recent discussions concerning the mind-body problem, which is being addressed at the interface between philosophy and neuroscience. It focuses on phenomenal features of consciousness or "qualia," which are distinguished from various related issues. Then follows a discussion of various influential skeptical arguments that question the possibility of reductive explana...