Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been proposed as a potential way in which welfare states could be made more responsive to the ever-shifting evolutionary challenges of institutional adaptation in a dynamic environment. It has been proposed as a tool of “real freedom” (Van Parijs) and as a tool of making the welfare state more efficient. (Friedman) From the point of view of complexity theory and evolutionary economics, I argue that only a welfare state model that is “polycentrically” (Polanyi, Hayek) organized (...) as an evolving network of distributed decision-making can respond to the challenges of complexity in an adaptively efficient manner. UBI has the theoretical possibility to facilitate flexible, bottom-up innovation, since a) it embodies the “rule of law” principles of generality, nondiscrimination, simplicity, and transparency, and b) it grants people widespread freedom to experiment, innovate, and deviate from established practices and norms; but whether it can be made to work as intended depends on a number of variables in its design. I situate my research in the contemporary UBI debate around automation and technological development, which I interpret creatively through the lens of contemporary evolutionary political economy. I advance a syncretic model of institutional design based upon the shared insights of the Santa Fe, Neo-Hayekian, and Neo-Schumpeterian schools of evolutionary economics that, following Adam Thierer and Michael Munger, I call the framework of Permissionless Innovation (PI). Under the PI framework, which is a development of the tradition of evolutionary liberalism (Hume, Smith, Mandeville, Mill, Hayek, Polanyi, Schumpeter, Hodgson), individuals are granted the default right to innovate without having to ask for permission, and the right to basic income, which they can use to support their right to innovate, mutate, and experiment. This framework is a liberal framework to the extent it relies on widespread human freedom as a means of fostering innovation and social learning. And it is an evolutionary framework to the extent that it seeks to facilitate evolutionary socioeconomic processes for the sake of social progress and welfare advancement. I proceed to show, through an analysis of how innovation operates in both the economy and the cultural domain, that UBI can be used as an important cornerstone of an evolutionary liberal model of “ecostructural” governance that treats the socioeconomic order as an ecological garden of spontaneous growths, adaptations, and innovations. I call this the Permissionless Innovation Universal Basic Income (PIUBI) framework. In it, the right to innovate, deviate, and mutate is upheld as the “gold standard” of institutional design whereby individuals are granted widespread freedoms combined with the provision of UBI and other innovation-fostering (carefully bound) services and regulations. In the coming decades, UBI may even enable poor people to take better advantage of Human Enhancement Technologies (HETs) and other experimental innovations. Such a framework is compatible with a fast pace of evolutionary development, but the regulatory model accompanying such a framework must be capable of responding to evolutionary lock-ins, maladaptive innovations, self-destructive behaviour on the part of UBI recipients, and the management of catastrophic and existential risks. In the end, I will have shown that the PIUBI framework can be justified as a plausible default institutional mechanism for responding to radical uncertainty, but it needs to be experimentally adapted to changing circumstances with the help of various situation-specific, polycentric, multi-level, approaches. (shrink)

In his insightful book, Trust in a Polarized Age, Kevin Vallier (2021) convincingly shows that the legitimacy and sustainability of liberal democratic institutions are dependent upon the maintenance of social and institutional trust. This insight, I believe, has value beyond the illustrious halls of post-Rawlsian, post-Gausian thought. Indeed, while I remain skeptical towards some of the premises of public reason liberalism, I am convinced that any liberal democratic political philosopher who takes the trust literature seriously and who has made their (...) (pragmatic or principled) peace with redistribution has good reasons to sympathize with the general outlines of the institutional palette that emerges out of his book. In this article, I will take for granted Vallier’s assumption that the erosion of social and institutional trust is a serious problem. This motivates investigating the trust-bearing attributes of the redistributive welfare state and the “principle of social insurance” that underpins it. I reconstruct and critically analyse Vallier’s case for a liberal democratic welfare state. I show that he makes a convincing public reason argument for universal social insurance but proceeds too hastily to exclude the principle of unconditionality from consideration. The rest of my paper consists of defending this claim by presenting two kinds of arguments— empirical and theoretical—that I think public reason liberals like Vallier, according to their own commitments, should be motivated to incorporate into their comprehensive discussion of the public justifications for and against basic income. They will show that Universal Basic Income (UBI), although it remains contentious, has some features that could appeal to a diverse citizenry, and thus tilt the balance of public reason judgments towards UBI. (shrink)

Classical liberals have a long and convoluted history with the welfare state. Welfare policy has engaged liberals ever since the debates round poor relief, land ownership, and distributive justice in authors like John Locke, Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, and Henry George. However, the majority of the welfare state debate, from David Hume and Adam Smith to Milton Friedman and Richard Epstein, has been conducted primarily on the basis of rule-consequentialist reasoning, weighing the expected (long-term) costs and benefits of different institutional (...) rules. Classical liberals tend to be primarily concerned with welfare in the “happiness of individuals” sense and only secondarily with welfare in the “government handout” sense. This necessitates an investigation into the expected benefits and costs of various institutional rules and social policies. As a result, any disagreements about the best institutional pathway forward must be settled through comparative institutional analysis. Today, it seems to me that the classical liberal perspective must choose between two alternative pathways, each of which has its pros and cons, and each of which seems compatible with the abstract and general rules of the market society: 1) The Minimally Redistributive State based on a classical liberal constitution supported by robust market institutions and a civil society mosaic of polycentric mutual aid networks; or 2) The Welfare State of Law which, in addition to all of the above, adds a few carefully rule-bound and market-conforming redistributive mechanisms, the most important of which is the robust guarantee of something like a conditional minimum income scheme or an unconditional UBI/NIT scheme. In addition, the 3) “Third Way” models of the Social Market Economy and the Free Market Welfare State are also sometimes included as a third option. (shrink)

The movement for the Unity of Science has been making headway for a number of years, and each year more workers in the various scientific domains have expressed their interest in it by participating in the discussion of its aims and its specific problems. A characteristic feature of this movement which explains this growing interest is that it does not propose a “super-science” which is to legislate to the special sciences. Its proposal of a Unity of Science is of a (...) different kind, not based upon some grand metaphysical view of any sort. Those who are active within this movement are emphatic in their insistence that instead of aiming at a synthesis of the different sciences on the basis of a prior and independent philosophy, the special sciences will themselves supply their own synthesizing glue. For appreciating the significance of this movement it is therefore necessary to keep in mind that its tendency is toward a unified science, departmentalized into special sciences, and not toward an artificial and speculative juxtaposition of an autonomous philosophy and an autonomous group of sciences. (shrink)

This essay comprises two chapters from the first part of Bollnow’s book on moods, namely the second chapter on the concept of Stimmung and the third chapter on Stimmungen as the sustaining foundation of the soul. It argues that moods constitute the simplest and most original form in which human life comes to know itself. Moods are understood as a specific harmony between, first, the inner and outer world; second, the states of the body and the soul; and, third, the (...) individual faculties of the soul. Moods differ from emotions in the narrow sense, which are always intentionally directed towards a specific object, whereas moods do not have any specific object; they are states of being, structuring and coloring human existence as a whole. Hence, no system of moods is provided, but their extensive diversity is indicated. Furthermore, transient, unsteady, or “moody” moods are distinguished from persistent or basic moods. (shrink)

Encyclopaedism” is the systematically pursued activity within the Unity of Science Movement, devoted to the collecting of scientific statements of the logic of science logic, mathematics, physics, biology and other sciences, including all the “cross connections” between the given disciplines.

This article analyses the phenomenology and ontology of videogames through the lens of semiotics. The difference between games and more traditional narrative models (such as those found in books and movies) lies on the structural level. The game narrative needs to be ‘written’ (played) before it can be ‘read’ (interpreted). Games provide fluidity of interactive immersion: the interface as the place of the merger between the player and the game. A connection, without delay, is established between the movement of the (...) player’s hands and the virtual movement across virtual space-times of the virtual characters/events on the screen. The connection is cybernetic, of course, and real. The actuality of the virtual is established as the action of the finger movements of the player. Games require at least a minimum degree of interaction. The player has a role as the master of the code, as the last string of code attached to complete the sequence. Such is the definition of the Cinematic under the formal demands of the Ludic: the defining-delimiting-restricting background which nonetheless, by its very (fixed) presence, provides the nurturing ground for the appearance and presence of (fluid) malleability as the ‘gap’ or ‘lack’ in the structure to be filled – in whatever manner – by the player in the act of his or her (world-constitutive) existential engagement. (shrink)

Why humanism, still/again? The very same question was asked – not for the first time, nor for the last – by Sartre, in a rhetorical mood, in his 1946 landmark treatise, L’existentialisme est un humanisme, a work which propounded many of the topics and doctrines that were to become the core of the new French existentialist movement in philosophy and literature. In differentiating “his” philosophy from the other humanist traditions of the time – from those allied with it, like Marxism, (...) to those hostile to it, like Christianity – he chose to define “existentialist” humanism as radically distinct from “essentialist” or “classical” humanism (basically everything pre-Sartre or pre-Existentialism). Humanism he defined as “une theorie qui prend l’homme comme fin et comme valeur supérieure." In his reading of history, this pre-existentialist humanism of his forebears, as represented by Enlightenment’s offspring, unduly emphasized such things as “human nature”, “human rights” (god-given or natural) and social law-likeness – all essentialist, anti-individualistic theories of the human condition. Existentialism wanted to strip away the last vestiges of any essentialist salvaging of the absoluteness of Man’s condition: “l’homme est libre, l’homme est liberté”; “Nous sommes seuls, sans excuses … l’homme est condamné à être libre." Instead of history or the social condition being the sculptor of man, it is man himself who is the author of his own destiny and of the course of history. This open up possibilities of progress but also temptations of hubris and disaster. (shrink)

The satisfiability problem for the two-variable fragment of first-order logic is investigated over finite and infinite linearly ordered, respectively wellordered domains, as well as over finite and infinite domains in which one or several designated binary predicates are interpreted as arbitrary wellfounded relations. It is shown that FO 2 over ordered, respectively wellordered, domains or in the presence of one well-founded relation, is decidable for satisfiability as well as for finite satisfiability. Actually the complexity of these decision problems is essentially (...) the same as for plain unconstrained FO 2 , namely non-deterministic exponential time. In contrast FO 2 becomes undecidable for satisfiability and for finite satisfiability, if a sufficiently large number of predicates are required to be interpreted as orderings, wellorderings, or as arbitrary wellfounded relations. This undecidability result also entails the undecidability of the natural common extension of FO 2 and computation tree logic CTL. (shrink)

We study the expressive power in the finite of the logic Fixed-Point+Counting, the extension of first-order logic which is obtained through adding both the fixed-point constructor and the ability to count. To this end an isomorphism preserving (`generic') model of computation is introduced whose PTime restriction exactly corresponds to this level of expressive power, while its PSpace restriction corresponds to While+Counting. From this model we obtain a normal form which shows a rather clear separation of the relational vs. the arithmetical (...) side of the algorithms involved. In parallel, we study the relations of Fixed-Point+Counting with the infinitary logics L r ∞ω (∃ ≥ m ) m∈ω and the corresponding pebble games. The main result, however, involves the concept of an arithmetical invariant. By this we mean a functor taking every finite relational structure to an expansion of (an initial segment of) the standard arithmetical structure. In particular its values are linearly ordered structures. We establish the existence of a family of arithmetical invariants (J r ) r≥ 1 with the following properties: $\bullet$ The invariants themselves can be evaluated in polynomial time. $\bullet$ A class of finite relational structures is definable in Fixed-Point+Counting if and only if membership can be decided in polynomial time on the basis of the values of one of the invariants. $\bullet$ The invariant J r classifies all finite relational structures exactly up to equivalence with respect to the logic L r ∞ω (∃ ≥ m ) m∈ω . We also give a characterization of Fixed-Point+Counting in terms of sequences of formulae in the L r ωω (∃ ≥ m ) m∈ω : It corresponds exactly to the polynomial time computable families (φ n ) n∈ω in these logics. Towards a positive assessment of the expressive power of Fixed-Point+Counting, it is shown that the natural extension of fixed-point logic by Lindström quantifiers, which capture all the PTime computable properties of cardinalities of definable predicates, is strictly weaker than what we get here. This implies in particular that every extension of fixed-point logic by means of monadic Lindstrom quantifiers, which stays within PTime, must be strictly contained in Fixed-Point+Counting. (shrink)

Lyndon's Interpolation Theorem asserts that for any valid implication between two purely relational sentences of first-order logic, there is an interpolant in which each relation symbol appears positively (negatively) only if it appears positively (negatively) in both the antecedent and the succedent of the given implication. We prove a similar, more general interpolation result with the additional requirement that, for some fixed tuple U of unary predicates U, all formulae under consideration have all quantifiers explicitly relativised to one of the (...) U. Under this stipulation, existential (universal) quantification over U contributes a positive (negative) occurrence of U. It is shown how this single new interpolation theorem, obtained by a canonical and rather elementary model theoretic proof, unifies a number of related results: the classical characterisation theorems concerning extensions (substructures) with those concerning monotonicity, as well as a many-sorted interpolation theorem focusing on positive vs. negative occurrences of predicates and on existentially vs. universally quantified sorts. (shrink)

There are properties of finite structures that are expressible with the use of Hilbert's ε-operator in a manner that does not depend on the actual interpretation for ε-terms, but not expressible in plain first-order. This observation strengthens a corresponding result of Gurevich, concerning the invariant use of an auxiliary ordering in first-order logic over finite structures. The present result also implies that certain non-deterministic choice constructs, which have been considered in database theory, properly enhance the expressive power of first-order logic (...) even as far as deterministic queries are concerned, thereby answering a question raised by Abiteboul and Vianu. (shrink)

Different opinions about the simplicity of God may be connected with different understandings of how abstract terms are used to name the properties which are affirmed of a being. If these terms are taken to signify parts of that being, this being is not a simple one. Thomas Aquinas, who attributes essence, existence and perfections to God, nevertheless thinks that these are not different parts of God. When essence, existence and perfections are attributed to God, they all denominate the same, (...) the Being of the first cause. For Aquinas, this is a consequence of his way of introducing the language about God by basing it upon the philosophical ways leading to God as first cause. Awareness of this connection between Divine attributes and the arguments for God’s existence is crucial for an adequate understanding of Aquinas’ position. (shrink)