Search Results (19)

Forecast risk management is central to the financial management process. This study aims to apply Monte Carlo simulation to solve three classic probabilistic paradoxes and discuss their implementation in corporate financial management. The article presents Monte Carlo simulation as an advanced tool for risk management in financial management processes. This method allows for a comprehensive risk analysis of financial forecasts, making it possible to assess potential errors in cash flow forecasts and predict the value of corporate treasury growth under various future scenarios. In the investment decision-making process, Monte Carlo simulation supports the evaluation of the effectiveness of financial projects by calculating the expected net value and identifying the risks associated with investments, allowing more informed decisions to be made in project implementation. The method is used in reducing cash flow volatility, which contributes to lowering the cost of capital and increasing the value of a company. Simulation also enables more accurate liquidity planning, including forecasting cash availability and determining appropriate financial reserves based on probability distributions. Monte Carlo also supports the management of credit and interest rate risk, enabling the simulation of the impact of various economic scenarios on a company’s financial obligations. In the context of strategic planning, the method is an extension of decision tree analysis, where subsequent decisions are made based on the results of earlier ones. Creating probabilistic models based on Monte Carlo simulations makes it possible to take into account random variables and their impact on key financial management indicators, such as free cash flow (FCF). Compared to traditional methods, Monte Carlo simulation offers a more detailed and precise approach to risk analysis and decision-making, providing companies with vital information for financial management under uncertainty. This article emphasizes that the use of Monte Carlo simulation in financial management not only enhances the effectiveness of risk management, but also supports the long-term growth of corporate value. The entire process of financial management is able to move into the future based on predicting future free cash flows discounted at the cost of capital. We used both numerical and analytical methods to solve veridical paradoxes. Veridical paradoxes are a type of paradox in which the result of the analysis is counterintuitive, but turns out to be true after careful examination. This means that although the initial reasoning may lead to a wrong conclusion, a correct mathematical or logical analysis confirms the correctness of the results. An example is Monty Hall’s problem, where the intuitive answer suggests an equal probability of success, while probabilistic analysis shows that changing the decision increases the chances of winning. We used Monte Carlo simulation as the numerical method. The following analytical methods were used: conditional probability, Bayes’ rule and Bayes’ rule with multiple conditions. We solved truth-type paradoxes and discovered why the Monty Hall problem was so widely discussed in the 1990s. We differentiated Monty Hall problems using different numbers of doors and prizes. Full article

I argue that two theses, which get conflated tacitly but frequently in both the philosophical and the scientific literature on perception, must be distinguished. The first is that there are optimal viewpoints, viewpoints from which an object’s shape is more readily discernable than from others. The second is that there are privileged viewpoints, viewpoints that alone secure the veridicality of perception. I claim that phenomenology establishes the ubiquitousness of optimal viewpoints, but that the notion of privileged viewpoints is indefensible. It emerges when the empirical investigation of the mechanism of perception, and specifically of the role of retinal images, becomes the basis for the phenomenology of perception. Both the notion of a privileged viewpoint and the models it serves, such as the two-step model, are, I argue, untenable. To emphasize: the claims are phenomenological, not empirical, and so cannot be confirmed or refuted by empirical evidence. Optimal viewpoints are further explored by critically examining Husserl’s notion of a “sum of optima” and assessing it in the context of his claim that normal viewpoints are optimal. The paper ends with some thoughts on what the relationship between the science and the phenomenology of vision ought to be. Full article

The character “即 (jí)” in Chinese shares the meaning of “is”, indicating an identity or equivalence between two concepts. In this framework, one might expect the antecedent and the consequent of “即” to be identical in meaning, or at least for a term with a positive connotation not to be paired with one of negative connotation. However, in Tiantai Buddhism, many core propositions follow the structure “x 即 y”, where x is negative and y is positive, or vice versa. This suggests an identity between opposites, creating a paradoxical feature in the system. This essay argues that the paradox within Tiantai Buddhism is a veridical paradox, as defined by Quine, meaning it can be resolved in various ways and does not reflect a genuine contradiction in reality. While Western Buddhist philosophers and logicians have focused primarily on the paradoxes in Nāgārjuna’s thought, this essay demonstrates that Chinese Tiantai Buddhism offers practical resolutions to these paradoxes. The paper first explicates the paradox by examining its roots in Buddhist history, then explores responses to it. Finally, different methods for resolving the paradox are compared and evaluated. Full article

Understandings of how visual hallucinations appear have been highly influenced by generative approaches, in particular Friston’s Active Inference conceptualization. Their core proposition is that these phenomena occur when hallucinatory expectations outweigh actual sensory data. This imbalance occurs as the brain seeks to minimize informational free energy, a measure of the distance between predicted and actual sensory data in a stationary open system. We review this approach in the light of old and new information on the role of environmental factors in episodic hallucinations. In particular, we highlight the possible relationship of specific visual triggers to the onset and offset of some episodes. We use an analogy from phase transitions in physics to explore factors which might account for intermittent shifts between veridical and hallucinatory vision. In these triggered forms of hallucinations, we suggest that there is a transient disturbance in the normal one-to-one correspondence between a real object and the counterpart perception such that this correspondence becomes between the real object and a hallucination. Generative models propose that a lack of information transfer from the environment to the brain is one of the key features of hallucinations. In contrast, we submit that specific information transfer is required at onset and offset in these cases. We propose that this transient one-to-one correspondence between environment and hallucination is mediated more by aberrant discriminative than by generative inference. Discriminative inference can be conceptualized as a process for maximizing shared information between the environment and perception within a self-organizing nonstationary system. We suggest that generative inference plays the greater role in established hallucinations and in the persistence of individual hallucinatory episodes. We further explore whether thermodynamic free energy may be an additional factor in why hallucinations are temporary. Future empirical research could productively concentrate on three areas. Firstly, subjective perceptual changes and parallel variations in brain function during specific transitions between veridical and hallucinatory vision to inform models of how episodes occur. Secondly, systematic investigation of the links between environment and hallucination episodes to probe the role of information transfer in triggering transitions between veridical and hallucinatory vision. Finally, changes in hallucinatory episodes over time to elucidate the role of learning on phenomenology. These empirical data will allow the potential roles of different forms of inference in the stages of hallucinatory episodes to be elucidated. Full article

Illusions are important ‘tools’ in the study of perceptual processes. Their conception is typically linked to the notion of veridicality in a dual-world framework, in which we either see the macro physical world as it is (ecological approaches) or we derive a faithful representation (cognitive approaches) of it. Within such theoretical views, illusions are errors caused by inadequate sensory information (because of poor quality, insufficient quantity, contradictory, etc.). From a phenomenological stance, however, experiencing an illusion does not relate to the physical quality of the distal or proximal stimulus; rather, it depends on a comparison between the actual perception and what one believes should be perceived given the knowledge s/he has gained about the physical stimulus. Within such a framework, illusions are still considered of extreme importance in the study of the processes underpinning perception, but they are not conceived as errors. They represent instead a cognitive clash between actual perception and hypothesized perception based on some sort of comparison, thus also showing their potential as a tool for studying the underpinnings of cognitive processes. Full article

This article describes and discusses some properties of the distribution of Negative Concord Items (NCIs) in the Italo-Romance domain, taking into account both varieties of Italian and varieties of other Italo-Romance languages. More precisely, the authors examine non-negative contexts, which allow the presence of NCIs. Across all non-negative contexts, bare/pronominal NCIs are systematically allowed in more contexts than complex ones, modulo the behavior of the specific variety in relation to non-negative contexts. The phenomenon can be accounted for by assuming that the structure of complex and bare NCIs is different not only in terms of null versus lexically realized NPs. The authors argue that bare NCIs, and possibly other quantificational elements, are not paired with a null DP but with a reduced structure, i.e., a classifier-like element which contains no lexical N. Full article

Previous studies have demonstrated the effects of motor variability on motor adaptation. However, their findings have been inconsistent, suggesting that various factors affect the relationship between motor variability and adaptation. This study focused on the size of errors driving motor adaptation as one of the factors and examined the relationship between different error sizes. Thirty-one healthy young adults participated in a visuomotor task in which they made fast-reaching movements toward a target. Motor variability was measured in the baseline phase when a veridical feedback cursor was presented. In the adaptation phase, the feedback cursor was sometimes not reflected in the hand position and deviated from the target by 0°, 3°, 6°, or 12° counterclockwise or clockwise (i.e., error-clamp feedback). Movements during trials following trials with error-clamp feedback were measured to quantify implicit adaptation. Implicit adaptation was driven by errors presented through error-clamp feedback. Moreover, motor variability significantly correlated with implicit adaptation driven by a 12° error. The results suggested that motor variability accelerates implicit adaptation when a larger error occurs. As such a trend was not observed when smaller errors occurred, the relationship between motor variability and motor adaptation might have been affected by the error size driving implicit adaptation. Full article

This paper studies the selection of selling modes in a monopolistic and a competitive supply chain circumstance, where each supply chain comprises a supplier and an e-platform. The e-platform usually acts as a product reseller or serves as an online marketplace. The former is referred to as a reselling mode where the order fulfillment cost is paid by the supplier, and the latter is named as an agency selling mode where the platform pays for the order fulfillment cost. Motivated by the industrial cases, three power structures are utilized to capture the veridical market pricing. We find that the platform and the supplier’s selling mode strategies conflict in a great majority of cases, except for the region in which both the platform agency fee and the order fulfillment cost are moderate. The players can coordinate by Pareto improvement, and the improved result shows that the optimal selling modes are a reselling mode in the fierce competitive supply chain circumstance and agency selling mode in the monopolistic circumstance or the mild competitive circumstance. Surprisingly, adopting a reselling mode is not only a better choice than adopting an agency selling mode in the fierce competitive supply chain circumstance, but this makes the supply chain obtain more of a payoff than in the monopolistic circumstance. Furthermore, it is worth noting that each player choosing an agency selling mode will result in a “prisoner’s dilemma” in the competitive supply chain circumstance, where both players can obtain more payoffs with a reselling mode. In addition, the willingness of platforms and suppliers to play the role of “reseller” is the strongest under the ps structure and the weakest in the ss structure. Full article

This work presents an exploratory data analysis of the syntactic distribution of pre- and postverbal negation (N1 and N2) in a corpus of data gathered from two linguistic atlases, the Linguistic Atlas of France (ALF) and the Italo-Swiss Atlas (AIS). Metadata concerning the distribution of N1 and N2 across dialects and syntactic contexts are analyzed with the r package Rbrul. Multiple logistic regression allows us to assess how independent variables affect the presence/absence of N1/N2. Geographical and grammatical factors are examined; the latter concern mainly clause typing and negative concord, i.e., the co-occurrence of clausal negation and a negative word. The data from the two atlases are first analyzed separately and eventually merged in order to strengthen the statistical significance. Both geographical and grammatical factors prove to be significant. In particular, the preliminary findings show that N1 is more likely retained in sentences containing another negative word, the incidence of N1 varies according to the type of co-occurring negative word, and veridicality has a mild effect on N2 but not N1. Full article

Different religious traditions, beliefs, and experiences claim to have epistemic contact with the ultimate source of reality. However, this epistemic claim has encountered one of its most significant obstacles in the initial incompatibility of its multiple accounts. I argue that from the ecology of knowledges, the idea that intentions, body, and physical and social environments are constitutive elements of our experience and knowledge, we can understand both the veridical, as embodied and extended, and pluralistic, as essentially limited, nature of religious experiences and knowledges. I characterize the mystical religious experience as a state of consciousness that (allegedly) allows direct epistemic contact with the supreme reality, articulating its essentially non-ordinary nature on the basis of the radical otherness of the sacred realm, namely, its character of being eternal, infinite, and with supreme ontological, ethical, and aesthetic value. According to this proposal, the different religious perspectives are understood as different epistemic approaches dealing with these numinous features in a gradual continuum from their most impersonal to their most personal specifications. I conclude that the cognitive relevance of any religious knowledge implies explanations and interventions that, although compatible with, go beyond those of both other religious knowledges and the knowledges of the non-sacred domains. Full article

A single bout of aerobic exercise improves executive function; however, the mechanism(s) underlying this improvement remains unclear. Here, we employed a 20-min bout of aerobic exercise, and at pre- and immediate post-exercise sessions examined executive function via pro- (i.e., saccade to veridical target location) and anti-saccade (i.e., saccade mirror symmetrical to a target) performance and pupillometry metrics. Notably, tonic and phasic pupillometry responses in oculomotor control provided a framework to determine the degree that arousal and/or executive resource recruitment influence behavior. Results demonstrated a pre- to post-exercise decrease in pro- and anti-saccade reaction times (p = 0.01) concurrent with a decrease and increase in tonic baseline pupil size and task-evoked pupil dilations, respectively (ps < 0.03). Such results demonstrate that an exercise-induced improvement in saccade performance is related to an executive-mediated “shift” in physiological and/or psychological arousal, supported by the locus coeruleus norepinephrine system to optimize task engagement. Full article

What does the way that autistic individuals bypass, learn, and eventually master language tell us about humans’ genetically encoded linguistic ability? In this theoretical review, we argue that autistic non-social acquisition of language and autistic savant abilities provide a strong argument for an innate, human-specific orientation towards (and mastery of) complex embedded structures. Autistic non-social language learning may represent a widening of the material processed during development beyond oral language. The structure detection and manipulation and generative production of non-linguistic embedded and chained material (savant abilities in calendar calculation, musical composition, musical interpretation, and three-dimensional drawing) may thus represent an application of such innate mechanisms to non-standard materials. Typical language learning through exposure to the child’s mother tongue may represent but one of many possible achievements of the same capacity. The deviation from typical language development in autism may ultimately allow access to oral language, sometimes in its most elaborate forms, and also explain the possibility of the absence of its development when applied exclusively to non-linguistic structured material. Such an extension of human capacities beyond or in parallel to their usual limits call into question what we consider to be specific or expected in humans and therefore does not necessarily represent a genetic “error”. Regardless of the adaptive success or failure of non-social language learning, it is the duty of science and ethical principles to strive to maintain autism as a human potentiality to further foster our vision of a plural society. Full article

In recent years, interest has grown in measuring executive function in schizophrenia with ecological and virtual reality (VR) tools. However, there is a lack of critical analysis comparing those tools with traditional ones. This paper aims to characterize executive dysfunction in schizophrenia by comparing ecological and virtual reality assessments with traditional tools, and to describe the neurobiological and psychopathological correlates. The analysis revealed that ecological and VR tests have higher levels of verisimilitude and similar levels of veridicality compared to traditional tools. Both negative symptoms and disorganization correlate significantly with executive dysfunction as measured by traditional tools, but their relationships with measures based on ecological and VR methods are still unclear. Although there is much research on brain correlates of executive impairments in schizophrenia with traditional tools, it is uncertain if these results will be confirmed with the use of ecological and VR tools. In the diagnosis of executive dysfunction, it is important to use a variety of neuropsychological methods—especially those with confirmed ecological validity—to properly recognize the underlying characteristics of the observed deficits and to implement effective forms of therapy. Full article

Predictive remapping may be the principal mechanism of maintaining visual stability, and attention is crucial for this process. We aimed to investigate the role of attention in predictive remapping in a dual task paradigm with two conditions, with and without saccadic remapping. The first task was to remember the clock hand position either after a saccade to the clock face (saccade condition requiring remapping) or after the clock being displaced to the fixation point (fixation condition with no saccade). The second task was to report the remembered location of a dot shown peripherally in the upper screen for 1 s. We predicted that performance in the two tasks would interfere in the saccade condition, but not in the fixation condition, because of the attentional demands needed for remapping with the saccade. For the clock estimation task, answers in the saccadic trials tended to underestimate the actual position by approximately 37 ms while responses in the fixation trials were closer to veridical. As predicted, the findings also revealed significant interaction between the two tasks showing decreased predicted accuracy in the clock task for increased error in the localization task, but only for the saccadic condition. Taken together, these results point at the key role of attention in predictive remapping. Full article

A theory of consciousness, whatever else it may do, must address the structure of experience. Our perceptual experiences are richly structured. Simply seeing a red apple, swaying between green leaves on a stout tree, involves symmetries, geometries, orders, topologies, and algebras of events. Are these structures also present in the world, fully independent of their observation? Perceptual theorists of many persuasions—from computational to radical embodied—say yes: perception veridically presents to observers structures that exist in an observer-independent world; and it does so because natural selection shapes perceptual systems to be increasingly veridical. Here we study four structures: total orders, permutation groups, cyclic groups, and measurable spaces. We ask whether the payoff functions that drive evolution by natural selection are homomorphisms of these structures. We prove, in each case, that generically the answer is no: as the number of world states and payoff values go to infinity, the probability that a payoff function is a homomorphism goes to zero. We conclude that natural selection almost surely shapes perceptions of these structures to be non-veridical. This is consistent with the interface theory of perception, which claims that natural selection shapes perceptual systems not to provide veridical perceptions, but to serve as species-specific interfaces that guide adaptive behavior. Our results present a constraint for any theory of consciousness which assumes that structure in perceptual experience is shaped by natural selection. Full article