Constraints on Determinism: Bell Versus Conway–Kochen

Constraints on determinism: Bell versus Conway–Kochen∗

Bell’s Theorem from 1964 and the (Strong) Free Will Theorem of Conway and Kochen from 2009 both exclude deterministic hidden variable theories (or, in modern parlance, ‘ontological models’) that are compatible with some small fragment of quantum mechanics, admit ‘free’ settings of the archetypal Alice&Bob experiment, and satisfy a locality condition called Parameter Independence. We clarify the...

Digital versus analogue genetic determinism

Relating genotypes to phenotypes is problematic not only owing to the extreme complexity of the interactions between genes, proteins and high-level physiological functions but also because the paradigms for genetic causality in biological systems are seriously confused. This paper examines some of the misconceptions, starting with the changing definitions of a gene, from the cause of phenotype ...

On the “Duel” Nature of History: Revisiting Contingency versus Determinism

What is the relationship between external—physical and biological—influences on increasingly complex matter over billions of years? In his most recent book, Islands in the Cosmos: the Evolution of Life on Land, Dale Russell attempts to answer this question. Russell is the senior curator of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and, among other things, is well known for p...

On Regular Sets of Bounds and Determinism versus Nondeterminism

This paper illustrates the richness of the concept of regular sets of time bounds and demonstrates its application to problems of computational complexity. There is a universe of bounds whose regular subsets allow to represent several time complexity classes of common interest and are linearly ordered with respect to the confinality relation which implies the inclusion between the corresponding...

On determinism versus unambiquous nondeterminism for decision trees