This book appeals to students, researchers and professionals working in philosophy and related fields on decision theory applied to artificial intelligence. These chapters stem from the topical conference series, 'Decision Theory and the Future of AI' which began in 2017 as a collaboration between the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) and the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge, and the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP) at LMU Munich. The range of topics, and even more so the range of authors and their home disciplines and affiliations, are a tribute to the richness of the territory, both in intellectual and in community-building terms. Previously published in Synthese Volume 198, supplement issue 27, November 2021 Chapter Approval-directed agency and the decision theory of Newcomb-like problems is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Pragmatists have traditionally been enemies of representationalism but friends of naturalism, when naturalism is understood to pertain to human subjects, in the sense of Hume and Nietzsche. In this volume Huw Price presents his distinctive version of this traditional combination, as delivered in his Rene Descartes Lectures at Tilburg University in 2008. Price contrasts his view with other contemporary forms of philosophical naturalism, comparing it with other pragmatist and neo-pragmatist views such as those of Robert Brandom and Simon Blackburn. Linking their different 'expressivist' programmes, Price argues for a radical global expressivism that combines key elements from both. With Paul Horwich and Michael Williams, Brandom and Blackburn respond to Price in new essays. Price replies in the closing essay, emphasising links between his views and those of Wilfrid Sellars. The volume will be of great interest to advanced students of philosophy of language and metaphysics.

Pragmatists have traditionally been enemies of representationalism but friends of naturalism, when naturalism is understood to pertain to human subjects, in the sense of Hume and Nietzsche. In this volume Huw Price presents his distinctive version of this traditional combination, as delivered in his Rene Descartes Lectures at Tilburg University in 2008. Price contrasts his view with other contemporary forms of philosophical naturalism, comparing it with other pragmatist and neo-pragmatist views such as those of Robert Brandom and Simon Blackburn. Linking their different 'expressivist' programmes, Price argues for a radical global expressivism that combines key elements from both. With Paul Horwich and Michael Williams, Brandom and Blackburn respond to Price in new essays. Price replies in the closing essay, emphasising links between his views and those of Wilfrid Sellars. The volume will be of great interest to advanced students of philosophy of language and metaphysics.

In philosophy as in ordinary life, cause and effect are twin pillars on which much of our thought seems based. But almost a century ago, Bertrand Russell declared that modern physics leaves these pillars without foundations. Russell's revolutionary conclusion was that "the law of causality is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm."
Russell's famous challenge remains unanswered. Despite dramatic advances in physics, the intervening century has taken us no closer to an explanation of how to find a place for causation in a world of the kind that physics reveals. In particular, we still have no satisfactory account of the directionality of causation -- the difference between cause and effect, and the fact that causes typically precede their effects. In this important collection of new essays, 13 leading scholars revisit Russell's revolution, in search of reconciliation.
The connecting theme in these essays is that to reconcile causation with physics, we need to put ourselves in the picture: we need to think about why creatures in our situation should present their world in causal terms.

Why is the future so different from the past? Why does the past affect the future and not the other way round? The universe began with the Big Bang - will it end with a `Big Crunch'?

Now in paperback, this book presents an innovative and controversial view of time and contemporary physics. Price urges physicists, philosophers, and anyone who has ever pondered the paradoxes of time to look at the world from a fresh perspective, and throws fascinating new light on some of the great mysteries of the universe.

The arrow of time and the meaning of quantum mechanics are two of the great mysteries of modern physics. This important new book throws fascinating new light on both issues, and connects them in a wholly original way.

Price shows that for over a century physicists have fallen repeatedly into the same trap when trying to understand the arrow of time: treating the past and future in different ways. To overcome this natural tendency, we need to imagine a point outside time - an Archimedean viewpoint as Price calls it - from which to think about the arrow of time in an unbiased way.

Taking this Archimedean viewpoint Price asks why we assume that the past affects the future but not vice-versa, and argues that causation is much more symmetric in microphysics: to a limited extent - the future does affect the past. Thus Price avoids the usual paradoxes of quantum mechanics, without succumbing to the rival paradoxes of causal loops and time travel.

In philosophy as in ordinary life, cause and effect are twin pillars on which much of our thought seems based. But almost a century ago, Bertrand Russell declared that modern physics leaves these pillars without foundations. Russell's revolutionary conclusion was that 'the law of causality is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm'. Russell's famous challenge remains unanswered. Despite dramatic advances in physics, the intervening century has taken us no closer to an explanation of how to find a place for causation in a world of the kind that physics reveals. In particular, we still have no satisfactory account of the directionality of causation - the difference between cause and effect, and the fact that causes typically precede their effects. In this important collection of new essays, 13 leading scholars revisit Russell's revolution, in search of reconciliation. The connecting theme in these essays is that to reconcile causation with physics, we need to put ourselves in the picture: we need to think about why creatures in our situation should present their world in causal terms.