Summarization of legal case judgement documents is a practical and challenging problem, for which many summarization algorithms of different varieties have been tried. In this work, rather than developing yet another summarization algorithm, we investigate if intelligently ensembling (combining) the outputs of multiple (base) summarization algorithms can lead to better summaries of legal case judgements than any of the base algorithms. Using two datasets of case judgement documents from the Indian Supreme Court, one with extractive gold standard summaries and the (...) other with abstractive gold standard summaries, we apply various ensembling techniques on summaries generated by a wide variety of summarization algorithms. The ensembling methods applied range from simple voting-based methods to ranking-based and graph-based ensembling methods. We show that many of our ensembling methods yield summaries that are better than the summaries produced by any of the individual base algorithms, in terms of ROUGE and METEOR scores. (shrink)

The on-going debate over the ‘admissible contents of perceptual experience’ concerns the range of properties that human beings are directly acquainted with in perceptual experience. Regarding vision, it is relatively uncontroversial that the following properties can figure in the contents of visual experience: colour, shape, illumination, spatial relations, motion, and texture. The controversy begins when we ask whether any properties besides these figure in visual experience. We argue that ‘ensemble properties’ should be added to the list of visually admissible (...) properties. Ensemble properties are features that belong to a set of perceptible objects as a whole as opposed to the individuals that constitute that set. They include such features as the mean size of an array of shapes or the average emotional expression of an array of faces. Recent work in vision science has yielded compelling evidence that the visual system routinely encodes such properties. We argue that epistemological considerations provide strong reasons to think that these properties figure in visual experience. Judgements about ensemble properties are immediately warranted by our perceptual experience, and the only plausible way that a perceptual experience could confer this warrant is if it confers awareness of ensemble properties. (shrink)

Marcher ensemble, porter une table à plusieurs, participer à une manifestation, et même discuter, sont autant d’exemples de coopération humaine – d’action conjointe. Par opposition, les mouvements d’une foule dans la rue, la course simultanée d’individus vers un abri lorsque l’orage se déclare ne sont que des actions collectives. Mais comment distinguer les unes des autres? Quand pouvons-nous dire que des personnes ont vraiment agi ensemble? Et comment expliquer qu’ils coopèrent même lorsque le risque d’échec est considérable? Cet (...) ouvrage se propose de répondre à ces questions, en se penchant sur toutes les dimensions de la coopération : les buts collectifs, la connaissance commune, ainsi que les facteurs psychologiques, cognitifs et stratégiques qui la favorisent. À partir de notions telles que l’identification de groupe, on défendra en particulier la thèse que certains types d’actions de masse, comme les manifestations, peuvent constituer des exemples légitimes de coopération. (shrink)

Incomplete preferences displaying ‘mildly sweetened’ structure are common, yet theoretically problematic. This paper examines the properties of the rankings induced by the set of all coherent completions of the mildly sweetened partial preference structure. Building on these properties, I propose an ensemble-based refinement of Hare’s prospectism criterion for rational choice when preferences are incomplete. Importantly, this ensemble-based refinement is immune to Peterson’s weak money pump argument. Hence, ensemble prospectism ensures outcome rationality. Furthermore, by recognizing the structural isomorphism (...) between mildly sweetened preference structures and Cover’s splitting rule in Blackwell’s Pick the Largest Number problem, ensemble prospectism can be shown to yield better-than-even odds of selecting the ex-post higher utility option—despite the absence of all-things-considered preferences ex ante. (shrink)

In this paper I will reconstruct and analyze a famous argument by Stuart Kauffman about complex systems and evolution, in order to highlight the use in theoretical biology of a kind of non-mechanistic and non-causal explanation which I propose to call, following Kauffman, ensemble explanation. The aim is to contribute to the ongoing philosophical debate about non-causal explanations in the special sciences, kinds of explanation apparently extraneous to the received causal-mechanistic view. Ensemble explanations resemble quite closely the explanations (...) of the structural kind proposed by Philippe Huneman, which—unlike mechanistic explanations—do not explain by exposing the causal structure of a phenomenon, but... (shrink)

The characteristic features of ensemble dance improvisation (EDI) make it an interesting case for theories of intentional collective action. These features include the high degree of freedom enjoyed by each individual, and the lack of fixed hierarchical roles, rigid decision procedures, or detailed plans. In this article, we present a “reductive” approach to collective action, apply it to EDI, and show how the theory enriches our perspective on this practice. We show, with the help of our theory of collective (...) action, that EDI (as typically practiced) constitutes a significant collective achievement, one that manifests an impressive, spontaneous, jointly cooperative and individually highly autonomous activity that meets demanding aesthetic standards. Its being good in this way is not a mere extrinsic feature of the artwork, but part of its aesthetic value. We end by discussing how this value is easily missed by classic aesthetics, but is revealed by more contemporary frameworks like social aesthetics. (shrink)

Nous proposons de penser ensemble les concepts d’espace et de temps : ils concernent les mêmes degrés de liberté des éléments du monde et fonctionnent toujours en tandem. Leurs fondements doivent être discutés, non dans une pensée de la substance (chacun est défini par une série de caractères qui lui sont propres), mais dans une pensée de la relation (chacun se définit en opposition à l’autre). Nous opposons des relations spatiales à des relations temporelles, ou encore des relations d’immobilité (...) à des relations de mobilité relative. La décision de la frontière entre ces deux ensembles de relations est sujette à arbitraire : nous avons une grande flexibilité dans les définitions asso­ciées des paramètres d’espace et de temps ; elle ne fait pas non plus l’économie de difficultés conceptuelles ou logiques semblables à celles rencontrées dans la mécanique quantique. Il faut revoir dans cette perspective autant le concept de temps que celui d’espace : le temps ne coule pas, il est changement de relation, il est mouvement ; l’espace est abstrait à partir de relations constantes ou morceaux constants de mouvement. Les mouvements relatifs qui expriment ces relations, changeantes ou non, contiennent toujours un aspect spatial et un aspect temporel, comme pile et face de la même réalité. Nous proposons de voir plus généralement dans toute relation un aspect spatial (l’écart qui sépare les deux termes de la relation) et un aspect temporel (le parcours du chemin qui les relie). Sur cette base, nous proposons un programme de re­cherche pour reprendre un certain nombre de problèmes fondamentaux de la physique contemporaine, ainsi que des pistes pour reprendre ce que nous di­sons du temps et de l’espace dans les sciences humaines et sociales, la culture, et jusque dans la vie quotidienne. (shrink)

Forecasting blood glucose values for patients can help prevent hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia events in advance. To this end, this study proposes an intelligent ensemble deep learning system to predict BG values in 15, 30, and 60 min prediction horizons based on historical BG values collected via continuous glucose monitoring devices as an endogenous factor and carbohydrate intake and insulin administration information as exogenous factors. Although there are numerous deep learning algorithms available, this study applied five algorithms, namely, recurrent neural (...) network, which is optimized for sequence data, and RNN-based algorithms, stacked LSTM, bidirectional LSTM, and gated recurrent unit). Then, a genetic algorithm was applied to the five prediction models to optimize their weights through ensemble techniques and to yield the final predicted BG values. The performance of the proposed model was compared to that of the autoregressive integrated moving average model as a baseline. The results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms the baseline in terms of the root mean square error and continuous glucose error grid analysis. For the valid 29 diabetic patients for the multivariate models, the RMSE was 11.08, 19.25, and 31.30 mg/DL for 15, 30, and 60 min PH, respectively. When the same data were applied to univariate models, the RMSE was 11.28, 19.99, and 33.13 mg/DL for 15, 30, and 60 min PH, respectively. Both the univariate and multivariate models showed a statistically significant difference compared with the baseline at a 5% statistical significance level. Instead of using a model with a single algorithm, applying a GA based on each output of a model with multiple algorithms was found to play a significant role in improving model performance. (shrink)

If Greek New Comedy never presented more than three concurrent speakers, then any scene in the Palliata with four or more concurrent speakers contains renovations. Plautus uses ensemble scenes to underscore lively or dramatically significant symposia, eavesdropping, or family reunions and be-trothals, especially at the finale. Terence uses ensemble scenes more pervasively for shorter, calmer, and less significant episodes. The authorship of the Greek original may influence the extent of ensemble scenes. Plautus probably created ensemble scenes (...) by rearranging entrances and exits and by endowing mute characters with speech, often transforming silent women into important speaking characters. (shrink)

The article takes under consideration three versions of the ensemble interpretation of quantum mechanics and discusses the interconnection of these interpretations with the philosophy of science. To emphasize the specifics of the problem of interpretation of quantum mechanics in the USSR, the Marxist ideology is taken into account. The present paper continues the author’s previous analysis of ensemble interpretations which emerged in the USA and USSR in the first half of the 20th century. The author emphasizes that the (...) ensemble approach turned out to be a dead end for the development of the interpretation of quantum mechanics in Russia. The article also argues that in Soviet Russia, the classical Copenhagen approach to quantum mechanics was used. The Copenhagen approach was developed by Lev Landau in 1919–1931 and became the basis of the Landau-Lifshitz famous course on quantum mechanics, one of the classics of twentieth-century physics literature. Although Vladimir A. Fock’s approach to the interpretation of quantum mechanics differs from the standard presentation by Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz, Fock put forward a very important principle that complementarity is a “firmly established law of nature”. The fundamental writings of Lev Landau, Vladimir Fock and Igor Tamm, the authors of the mid-twentieth century, did a lot to defend the standard point of view such as the popular interpretations by Landau and Lifshitz. This approach can be traced back to Landau’s early writings and to Fock’s criticism of the ensemble approach. (shrink)

A new ensemble interpretation of quantum mechanics is proposed according to which the ensemble associated to a quantum state really exists: it is the ensemble of all the systems in the same quantum state in the universe. Individual systems within the ensemble have microscopic states, described by beables. The probabilities of quantum theory turn out to be just ordinary relative frequencies probabilities in these ensembles. Laws for the evolution of the beables of individual systems are given (...) such that their ensemble relative frequencies evolve in a way that reproduces the predictions of quantum mechanics.These laws are highly non-local and involve a new kind of interaction between the members of an ensemble that define a quantum state. These include a stochastic process by which individual systems copy the beables of other systems in the ensembles of which they are a member. The probabilities for these copy processes do not depend on where the systems are in space, but do depend on the distribution of beables in the ensemble.Macroscopic systems then are distinguished by being large and complex enough that they have no copies in the universe. They then cannot evolve by the copy law, and hence do not evolve stochastically according to quantum dynamics. This implies novel departures from quantum mechanics for systems in quantum states that can be expected to have few copies in the universe. At the same time, we are able to argue that the center of masses of large macroscopic systems do satisfy Newton’s laws. (shrink)

The idea of ensembles which are both pre- and post-selected was introduced by Aharonov, Bergmann, and Lebowitz and developed by Aharonov and his school. To derive formulae for the probabilities of outcomes of a measurement performed on such an ensemble at a time intermediate between pre-selection and post-selection, the latter group introduces a two-vector formulation of quantum mechanics, one vector propagating in the forward direction in time and one in the backward direction. The formulae which they obtain by this (...) radical generalization are vindicated by a rigorous derivation using Bayes’s theorem together with standard quantum mechanical predictions regarding ensembles that are only pre-selected. Their own two-vector derivation, however, suffers from a serious lacuna. (shrink)

Nowadays, online product reviews have been at the heart of the product assessment process for a company and its customers. They give feedback to a company on improving product quality, planning, and monitoring its business schemes in order to increase sale and gain more profit. They are also helpful for customers to select the right products in less effort and time. Most companies make spam reviews of products in order to increase the products sales and gain more profit. Detecting spam (...) product reviews is a challenging issue in NLP. Numerous machine learning approaches have attempted to detect and classify the product reviews as spam or nonspam. However, in order to improve the classification accuracy, this study has introduced an ensemble machine learning model that combines predictions from multilayer perceptron, K-Nearest Neighbour, and Random Forest and predicts the outcome of the review as spam or real, based on the majority vote of the contributing models. In order to accomplish the task of spam review classification, the proposed ensemble and other benchmark boosting approaches are tested with 25 statistical features extracted from mobile application reviews of Yelp Dataset. Then, three different selection techniques are exploited to diminish the feature space and filter out the top 10 optimal features. The effectiveness of the proposed ensemble, the individual models, and other benchmark boosting approaches is again evaluated with 10 optimal features in terms of classification accuracy. Experimental outcomes illustrate that the proposed ensemble model outperformed the individual classifiers and state-of-the-art boosting approaches like Generalized Boost Regression Model, Extreme Gradient Boost, and AdaBoost Regression Model in terms of classification accuracy. (shrink)

Dans un environnement organisationnel instable et concurrentiel, l'usage des outils de groupware serait tributaire de la convergence entre, d'une part, les formes de communication permises par ces outils et, d'autre part, les stratégies relationnelles mises en oeuvre pour développer la confiance entre les acteurs. Les pratiques de collaboration qui font appel aux technologies informatiques de travail en groupe dépendraient alors de cette logique d'usage. Une recherche empirique, réalisée dans des entreprises et des centres de recherche de la Silicon Valley, conforte (...) ces hypothèses.In a changing and competitive organizational environment, the use of groupware tools seems to rely on the convergence of the communication allowed by these tools and the relational strategies necessary to develop trust. Consequently, computer supported collaborative practices would depend on this logic of use. Empirical research realised in firms and in research centres in Silicon Valley tends to confirm these hypotheses. (shrink)

Representation of quantum states by statistical ensembles on the quantum phase space in the Hamiltonian form of quantum mechanics is analyzed. Various mathematical properties and some physical interpretations of the equivalence classes of ensembles representing a mixed quantum state in the Hamiltonian formulation are examined. In particular, non-uniqueness of the quantum phase space probability density associated with the quantum mixed state, Liouville dynamics of the probability densities and the possibility to represent the reduced states of bipartite systems by marginal distributions (...) are discussed in detail. These considerations are used to study ensembles of hybrid quantum-classical systems. In particular, nonlinear evolution of a single hybrid system in a pure state and unequal evolutions of initially equivalent ensembles are discussed in the context of coupled hybrid systems. (shrink)

Do we see more than we can report? Psychologists and philosophers have been hotly debating this question, in part because both possibilities are supported by suggestive evidence. On one hand, phenomena such as inattentional blindness and change blindness suggest that visual awareness is especially sparse. On the other hand, experiments relating to iconic memory suggest that our in-the-moment awareness of the world is much richer than can be reported. Recent research has attempted to resolve this debate by showing that observers (...) can accurately report the color diversity of a quickly flashed group of letters, even for letters that are unattended. If this ability requires awareness of the individual letters’ colors, then this may count as a clear case of conscious awareness overflowing cognitive access. Here we explored this requirement directly: can we perceive ensemble properties of scenes even without being aware of the relevant individual features? Across several experiments that combined aspects of iconic memory with measures of change blindness, we show that observers can accurately report the color diversity of unattended stimuli, even while their self-reported awareness of the individual elements is coarse or nonexistent — and even while they are completely blind to situations in which each individual element changes color mid-trial throughout the entire experiment. We conclude that awareness of statistical properties may occur in the absence of awareness of individual features, and that such results are fully consistent with sparse visual awareness. (shrink)

How can one ‘see’ the operationalization of contemporary visual culture, given the imperceptibility and apparent automation of so many processes and dimensions of visuality? Seeing – as a position from a singular mode of observation – has become problematic since many visual elements, techniques, and forms of observing are highly distributed through data practices of collection, analysis and prediction. Such practices are subtended by visual cultural techniques that are grounded in the development of image collections, image formatting and hardware design. (...) In this article, we analyze recent transformations in forms of prediction and data analytics associated with spectacular performances of computation. We analyze how transformations in the collection and accumulation of images as ensembles by platforms have a qualitative and material effect on the emergent sociotechnicality of platform ‘life’ and ‘perception’. Reconstructing the visual transformations that allow artificial intelligence assemblages to operate allows some sense of their heteronomous materiality and contingency. (shrink)

Projections of future climate change cannot rely on a single model. It has become common to rely on multiple simulations generated by Multi-Model Ensembles (MMEs), especially to quantify the uncertainty about what would constitute an adequate model structure. But, as Parker points out (2018), one of the remaining philosophically interesting questions is: “How can ensemble studies be designed so that they probe uncertainty in desired ways?” This paper offers two interpretations of what General Circulation Models (GCMs) are and how (...) MMEs made of GCMs should be designed. In the first interpretation, models are combinations of modules and parameterisations; an MME is obtained by “plugging and playing” with interchangeable modules and parameterisations. In the second interpretation, models are aggregations of expert judgements that result from a history of epistemic decisions made by scientists about the choice of representations; an MME is a sampling of expert judgements from modelling teams. We argue that, while the two interpretations involve distinct domains from philosophy of science and social epistemology, they both could be used in a complementary manner in order to explore ways of designing better MMEs. (shrink)

En Belgique, l’enseignement de la religion et de la morale est toujours organisé sur base du pacte scolaire de 1958. Or, le paysage convictionnel s’est profondément modifié, sous le double impact de la sécularisation et de l’immigration. L’idée d’une réforme s’impose de plus en plus comme une évidence, mais elle se heurte à des obstacles juridiques et politiques. Ce livre constitue un plaidoyer en faveur de l’organisation d’un cours commun d’éthique, de citoyenneté et de culture religieuse et philosophique (ECCR). Il (...) met en évidence l’impérieuse nécessité d’introduire ce cours indispensable à l’apprentissage du vivre ensemble. (shrink)

Multiobjective evolutionary algorithms have witnessed prosperity in solving many-objective optimization problems over the past three decades. Unfortunately, no one single MOEA equipped with given parameter settings, mating-variation operator, and environmental selection mechanism is suitable for obtaining a set of solutions with excellent convergence and diversity for various types of MaOPs. The reality is that different MOEAs show great differences in handling certain types of MaOPs. Aiming at these characteristics, this paper proposes a flexible ensemble framework, namely, ASES, which is (...) highly scalable for embedding any number of MOEAs to promote their advantages. To alleviate the undesirable phenomenon that some promising solutions are discarded during the evolution process, a big archive that number of contained solutions be far larger than population size is integrated into this ensemble framework to record large-scale nondominated solutions, and also an efficient maintenance strategy is developed to update the archive. Furthermore, the knowledge coming from updating archive is exploited to guide the evolutionary process for different MOEAs, allocating limited computational resources for efficient algorithms. A large number of numerical experimental studies demonstrated superior performance of the proposed ASES. Among 52 test instances, the ASES performs better than all the six baseline algorithms on at least half of the test instances with respect to both metrics hypervolume and inverted generational distance. (shrink)

Sur la décomposition des ensembles de points en parties respectivement congruentes.

Climate scientists often apply statistical tools to a set of different estimates generated by an “ensemble” of models. In this paper, I argue that the resulting inferences are justified in the same way as any other statistical inference: what must be demonstrated is that the statistical model that licenses the inferences accurately represents the probabilistic relationship between data and target. This view of statistical practice is appropriately termed “model-based,” and I examine the use of statistics in climate fingerprinting to (...) show how the difficulties that climate scientists encounter in applying statistics to ensemble-generated data are the practical difficulties of normal statistical practice. The upshot is that whether the application of statistics to ensemble-generated data yields trustworthy results should be expected to vary from case to case. (shrink)

The financial market is a highly complex and dynamic system that has great commercial value; thus, many financial elite are drawn to research on the subject. Recent studies show that machine learning methods perform better than traditional statistical ones. In our study, based on the characteristics of financial sequence data, we propose a wrapped ensemble approach using a supervised learning algorithm to predict stock price volatility of China’s stock markets. To check our new approach, we developed an intelligent financial (...) forecast system and used the Hushen 300 index data to test our model; it proves that our model performs better than a single algorithm. We also compared our model with the famous ensemble approach of bagging, and the result shows that our model is better. (shrink)

Through several historical case studies from the last 300 years, Luis de Miranda shows how the phrase 'esprit de corps' acts as a combat concept with a clear societal impact. He also reveals how interconnected, yet distinct, French, English and American modern intellectual and political thought is.

In quantum mechanics, the wavefunction predicts probabilities of possible measurement outcomes, but not which individual outcome is realised in each run of an experiment. This suggests that it describes an ensemble of states with different values of a hidden variable. Here, we analyse this idea with reference to currently known theorems and experiments. We argue that the ψ-ontic/epistemic distinction fails to properly identify ensemble interpretations and propose a more useful definition. We then show that all local ψ-ensemble (...) interpretations which reproduce quantum mechanics violate Statistical Independence. Theories with this property are commonly referred to as superdeterministic or retrocausal. Finally, we explain how this interpretation helps make sense of some otherwise puzzling phenomena in quantum mechanics, such as the delayed choice experiment, the Elitzur-Vaidman bomb detector, and the Extended Wigner's Friends Scenario. (shrink)

Many policy decisions take input from collections of scientific models. Such decisions face significant and often poorly understood uncertainty. We rework the so-called confidence approach to tackle decision-making under severe uncertainty with multiple models, and we illustrate the approach with a case study: insurance pricing using hurricane models. The confidence approach has important consequences for this case and offers a powerful framework for a wide class of problems. We end by discussing different ways in which model ensembles can feed information (...) into the approach, appropriate to different collections of models. (shrink)

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has successfully combated modern-day slavery by transforming the ways that over a dozen major brands, including Taco Bell, Subway, and Wal-Mart, manage their supply chains. The CIW’s efforts over more than 20 years have effectively stopped enslavement practices, including abuses such as wage theft and peonage indebtedness. We conducted a field ethnography, interviews, and archival analyses to understand this success. We find that the CIW employs a decentered, egalitarian, and ensemble approach to their (...) multiplicities of alliances by collectively “animating” themselves and their partners through ensemble leadership. This combination of alliances, along with worker-driven monitoring, brings life to the CIW motto “We are all leaders.” Translating this motto into daily practice is how the CIW virtually eradicates enslavement practices in corporate supply chains. (shrink)

In recent years, with the continuous improvement of urban public transportation capacity, citizens’ travel has become more and more convenient, but there are still some potential problems, such as morning and evening peak congestion, imbalance between the supply and demand of vehicles and passenger flow, emergencies, and social local passenger flow surged due to special circumstances such as activities and inclement weather. If you want to properly guide the local passenger flow and make a reasonable deployment of operating buses, it (...) is necessary to grasp the changing law of public transportation short-term passenger flow. This paper builds a short-term passenger flow prediction model for urban public transportation based on the idea of integrated learning. The goal is to use the integrated model to accurately predict the short-term passenger flow of urban public transportation, using Multivariable Linear Regression, K-Nearest Neighbor, eXtreme Gradient Boosting, and Gated Recurrent Unit as the four seed models, and then use regression algorithm to integrate the model and predict the passenger flow, station boarding and landing, and cross-sectional passenger flow data of the typical representative line 428 in the “Huitian Area” of Beijing from January 1, 2020, to May 31, 2020. Finally, the prediction results of the submodels are compared with those of the integrated model to verify the superiority of the integrated model. The research results of this paper can enrich the short-term passenger flow forecasting system of urban public transportation and provide effective data support and scientific basis for the passenger flow, vehicle management, and dispatch of urban public transportation. (shrink)

Lire ensemble: cela devrait s'entendre en plus d'un sens, au fil croise d'au moins quatre lectures. La premiere et la seconde sont la double attention, explicite ou plus secrete, que Derrida et Levinas ont accordee, chacun, a leurs oeuvres respectives et a l'effet de celles-ci sur leur cheminement. L'un et l'autre se sont ecoutes et cela fait deja deux lectures. A chaque moment de son histoire, la philosophie rassemble des penseurs autour d'une (ou plusieurs) oeuvre(s) singuliere(s) a laquelle ils (...) se confrontent communement. Ils forment alors autour d'elle parfois contre elle la constellation de ses lecteurs, dans la conviction, partagee, qu'aucun pas ne saurait etre accompli hors cette confrontation. Pour tous deux, outre la phenomenologie husserlienne, une oeuvre s'est imposee plus qu'aucune autre: Etre et temps de Heidegger qu'ils n'ont cesse de lire et relire, sinon ensemble, du moins en echo. A celle-ci, bien d'autres pourraient etre ajoutees, a commencer par celles qui auraient pour foyer les recits de Blanchot ou les poesies de Celan voici une troisieme facon d'entendre ce qui les associe. Mais on a parle de quatre lectures. La derniere est celle qui preside doublement a l'organisation de ce volume. Il ne s'agit plus de ce que Derrida et Levinas ont lu ensemble, mais de la facon dont nous les lisons ensemble a la fois l'un et l'autre et a plusieurs. (shrink)

In any probabilistic theory, we say that a bipartite state ω on a composite system AB steers its marginal state ω B if, for any decomposition of ω B as a mixture ω B =∑ i p i β i of states β i on B, there exists an observable {a i } on A such that the conditional states $\omega_{B|a_{i}}$ are exactly the states β i . This is always so for pure bipartite states in quantum mechanics, a fact (...) first observed by Schrödinger in 1935. Here, we show that, for weakly self-dual state spaces (those isomorphic, but perhaps not canonically isomorphic, to their dual spaces), the assumption that every state of a system A is steered by some bipartite state of a composite AA consisting of two copies of A, amounts to the homogeneity of the state cone. If the state space is actually self-dual, and not just weakly so, this implies (via the Koecher-Vinberg Theorem) that it is the self-adjoint part of a formally real Jordan algebra, and hence, quite close to being quantum mechanical. (shrink)

Panpsychism claims that the vast majority of conscious subjects in our world are inanimate and physical. Ensemble explanations account for striking phenomena by placing them within an ensemble of outcomes, most of which are not striking. This paper develops an explanatory problem for panpsychism: panpsychism renders two appealing ensemble explanations unsatisfactory. Specifically, we argue that panpsychism renders unsatisfactory the multiverse explanation of why a universe supports life and the many-planets explanation of why a planet supports life.