Ajax Benander

Counterfactual Evaluation by Reopening Information States

We develop a counterfactual semantics based on reopening partial information states. Evaluation first removes enough stated content to leave the antecedent’s attributes unresolved, retaining what the chosen scope protects, then asserts the antecedent and considers the surviving c...

Causality from Indexed Information States: Screening, Intervention, and the Bell Obstruction

Wood and Spekkens showed that classical causal explanations of Bell-inequality violations require fine-tuning, and the program they opened asks for a causal vocabulary that privileges no member of the classical triad, “A causes B,” “B causes A,” “a common cause produces both.” Th...

Exclusivity as Achievement: Relocating Mutual Exclusion to the Interior, and the Logical Primitive That Falls Out

Classical metaphysics treats the mutual exclusivity of alternatives as primitive: or, in its physical reading, excludes by nature. This paper argues the polarity should be reversed. Exclusivity is an achievement — stated, interior, structural content of the alternatives them-selv...

Newcomb's Problem Without a Fixed Past: A Decision Rule From Observer-Indexed Determinacy

Newcomb’s problem has divided decision theory for five decades over a single question: whether a predictor’s already-made choice is fixed at the moment the agent decides. Evidential and causal decision theory give opposite verdicts, and the disagreement has proved stable because...

The Optimal Earth: A Paradigmatic Re-Rendition of Natural History from Coupled Improbability

Earth’s history contains features that look, in retrospect, as though they had to go right: an impact that ended a dynasty, an oxygenation event, a moon of anomalous size. The received way of reading such a history is as a tally — each lucky step an independent factor, the factor...

Quantum Mechanics from Records: Measurement Structure on a Finite Path-Kernel Domain

We give a finite path-kernel representation of record-conditioned quantum statistics, with a qualitative admissibility classification and an explicit restriction operation. The primitives are consistency constraints on observer-indexed information states: determinacy indexed to a...

Determinacy as a Two-Place Relation: The Category Mistake in Quantum Interpretation, and the Dissolution of the Paradox Set

A realist about quantum mechanics wants two things the standard interpretations will not sell together: enough counterfactual structure to say what an unperformed experiment would have shown, and no hidden valuation for the Bell theorems to kill. This paper argues that both can b...

Causality from Indexed Information States: Screening, Intervention, and the Bell Obstruction

Wood and Spekkens showed that classical causal explanations of Bell-inequality violations require fine-tuning, and the program they opened asks for a causal vocabulary that privileges no member of the classical triad, “A causes B,” “B causes A,” “a common cause produces both.” Th...

Aethic Reasoning in Brief: From a Counterfactual Semantics to the Quantum Measurement Problem

A realist about quantum mechanics must say what unperformed measurements would have shown, and the theorems of Bell and Kochen–Specker forbid the obvious way of saying it: a standing valuation of the unmeasured. Every possible-worlds semantics for counterfactuals evaluates at com...

Counterfactual Evaluation by Perturbation of Information States: Deleting the Ordering, Not Refining It

We propose a semantics for counterfactuals on which evaluation never leaves the evaluator: to assess if X had happened, Y would have happened, one perturbs the evaluator’s own information state — reopen the antecedent’s entry at a declared scope, restate it to the antecedent’s va...

Quantum Mechanics from Records: Measurement Structure on a Finite Path-Kernel Domain

We give a finite path-kernel representation of record-conditioned quantum statistics, with a qualitative admissibility classification and an explicit restriction operation. The primitives are consistency constraints on observer-indexed information states: determinacy indexed to a...

Exclusivity as Achievement: Relocating Mutual Exclusion to the Interior, and the Logical Primitive That Falls Out

Classical metaphysics treats the mutual exclusivity of alternatives as primitive: or, in its physical reading, excludes by nature. This paper argues the polarity should be reversed. Exclusivity is an achievement — stated, interior, structural content of the alternatives them-selv...

The Copernican Method Against the Copernican Principle: Anthropic Typicality over Partial Information States

Given one natural-historical result carried in a companion development, three commitments, each independently plausible, cannot all be true: that one’s own situation is typical among observer-situations; that typicality is assessed under the cosmic weighting over possible histori...

The Weight Algebra of Aethae: A Two-Layer Commutative Semiring for Superposition and Pruning

An Aethus, in the companion framework, is a deductively closed partial assignment of answers to attributes together with the superposition structure over its unanswered attributes, which may be restricted rather than full; unanswered attributes are read as superposition, and inco...

Determinacy as a Two-Place Relation: The Category Mistake in Quantum Interpretation, and the Dissolution of the Paradox Set

A realist about quantum mechanics wants two things the standard interpretations will not sell together: enough counterfactual structure to say what an unperformed experiment would have shown, and no hidden valuation for the Bell theorems to kill. This paper argues that both can b...