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2065926.963382
We present a causal model for the EPR correlations. In this model, or better framework for a model, causality is preserved by the direct propagation of causal influences between the wings of the experiment. We show that our model generates the same statistical results for EPR as orthodox quantum mechanics. We conclude that causality in quantum mechanics can not be ruled out on the basis of the EPR-Bell- Aspect correlations alone.
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2065949.963513
This paper is divided in two parts. In part I, I argue against two attempts to naturalise the notion of scientific representation, by reducing it to isomorphism and similarity. I distinguish between the means and the constituents of representation, and I argue that isomorphism and similarity are common (although not universal) means of representation; but that they are not constituents of scientific representation. I look at the prospects for weakened versions of these theories, and I argue that only those that abandon the aim to naturalise scientific representation are likely to be successful. In part II of the paper, I present a deflationary conception of scientific representation, which minimally characterises it by means of two necessary conditions: representation is essentially intentional and it has the capacity to allow surrogate reasoning and inference. I then defend this conception by showing that it successfully meets the objections and difficulties that make its competitors, such as isomorphism and similarity, untenable. In addition the inferential conception explains the success of various means of representation in their appropriate domains, and it sheds light on the truth and accuracy of scientific representations.
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2070379.963529
The early study Tennant [11] sought to show how the role played by formal semantics in furnishing models that would invalidate unprovable first-order arguments from premise-sets to conclusions could be taken over by proofs and disproofs. (A disproof of a set of premises is a proof of ⊥, i.e., absurdity, from it.) For any given invalid first-order argument, these latter would be proofs and disproofs in Peano Arithmetic (PA), employing suitable substitutions of arithmetical predicates for the primitive predicates involved in the argument. PA-proofs would be furnished for the premises of the invalid argument, and a PA-disproof would be furnished for its conclusion. This was an early move towards a general proof-theoretic semantics—the approach to By a theorem of Hilbert and Bernays [4], these arithmetical predicates can be taken to be of arithmetical complexity no greater than Δ .
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2073067.963538
Suppose I am choosing between options A and B. Evidential decision theory tells me to calculate the expected utility E(U|A) given the news that I did A and the expected utility E(U|B) given the news that I did B, and go for the bigger of the two. …
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2089858.963547
Economists have long scoffed at know-it-all business and financial gurus with the rhetorical question, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” And sometimes the gurus use the same question to scoff at know-it-all economists. …
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2092935.963555
When thinking about big social problems like climate change or factory farming, there are two especially common failure modes worth avoiding:
Neglecting small numbers that incrementally contribute to significant aggregate harms. …
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2092936.963563
As part of the summer break, I’m publishing old essays that may be of interest for new subscribers. This post has been originally published January 13, 2023. If not already the case, do not hesitate to subscribe to receive free essays on economics, philosophy, and liberal politics in your mailbox! …
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2165079.96357
An important feature of theoretical projects that aim to promote social justice is their commitment to empowering those in oppressive circumstances so that they can solve their own problems. There are two reasons to take this approach. First, the oppressed have situated knowledge of the circumstances that others lack. But situated knowledge may not be enough to prompt critique. The second is that because both knowledge and values are shaped by social practices, a collective engagement with historically and materially grounded practices can provide a new frame for agency that enables a creative and potentially emancipatory restructuring of social relations. I argue that such path dependency of values is compatible with social justice being objective, but not to be discovered by theory alone.
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2180495.963579
Reminder: everyone is welcome here, but paid subscriptions are what enable me to devote the necessary time to researching and writing this newsletter, including pieces like this one on Katie Johnson, the woman who alleged Trump sexually assaulted her at the age of thirteen at a party of Jeffrey Epstein’s. …
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2250078.963587
It’s widely held that we perceive not only low-level properties, such as colors and shapes, but also high-level properties, such as the property of being a dog or of being a moving train. Debate about which types of property we perceive has recently eclipsed the question of how perceiving itself operates. We focus here on that latter question, proposing an account on which perception of low-level properties occurs by way of mental qualities alone, whereas perception of high-level properties occurs by way of mental qualities together with conceptual content of the type that figures in thinking. It is central to our account that mental qualities have a type of representational character unique to them, so that mental qualities can interact representationally with conceptual content in perceiving. We present a number of advantages of this account, including how it fits with a range of experimental findings, and address several objections to it.
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2257500.963594
I have toyed with a pair of theories. The first is what I call gaze-dualism. On gaze-dualism, our sensory conscious experiences are constituted by a non-physical object—the soul—“gazing” at certain brain states. …
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2257500.963603
There is a vast and rather radical diversity in the inner conscious lives of human beings. Start with the differences in dreams: some people know immediately whether they are dreaming and others do not; some are in control of their dreams and others are not; some dream in color and others do not. …
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2263816.963611
1. Liu’s Theory
The title is a reference to Cixin Liu’s science fiction novel, The Dark Forest, from the Three Body Problem trilogy. (That trilogy, by the way, is among the greatest works of science fiction.) …
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2265786.963618
This paper critically analyses the “attention economy” within the framework of cognitive science and techno-political economics, as applied to both human and machine interactions. We explore how current business models, particularly in digital platform capitalism, harness user engagement by strategically shaping attentional patterns. These platforms utilize advanced AI and massive data analytics to enhance user engagement, creating a cycle of attention capture and data extraction. We review contemporary (neuro)cognitive theories of attention and platform engagement design techniques and criticize classical cognitivist and behaviourist theories for their inadequacies in addressing the potential harms of such engagement on user autonomy and wellbeing. 4E approaches to cognitive science, instead, emphasizing the embodied, extended, enactive, and ecological aspects of cognition, offer us an intrinsic normative standpoint and a more integrated understanding of how attentional patterns are actively constituted by adaptive digital environments. By examining the precarious nature of habit formation in digital contexts, we reveal the techno-economic underpinnings that threaten personal autonomy by disaggregating habits away from the individual, into an AI managed collection of behavioural patterns. Our current predicament suggests the necessity of a paradigm shift towards an ecology of attention. This shift aims to foster environments that respect and preserve human cognitive and social capacities, countering the exploitative tendencies of cognitive capitalism.
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2266820.963626
A few months into the pandemic, my wife and I adopted a new pastime: we would complete the New York Times crossword puzzle every day. The puzzle gets more difficult as the week goes on, Mondays being easiest, with the qualitative peak on Saturday and the quantitative Sunday, when the crossword is nearly twice as large. …
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2346758.963633
When bad news gets me down, I often get insomnia. I wake up in the middle of the night, start thinking about how we’re all doomed, and can’t easily stop. To break out of these doom loops, I do elaborate visualization exercises. …
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2353294.963641
Wilhelm Keitel was made chief of staff of the Armed Forces in 1938. If that sounds like a vote of confidence, in fact Hitler regarded the man with disdain: Keitel had “the brains of a movie usher.” So why promote him? …
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2423746.963648
In the first lecture, I argued that societies are complex dynamic systems and that in order to promote social change we must attend to material meso-level systems, e.g., heath care systems, education systems, criminal justice systems, and the like, and their patriarchal, White supremacist, and capitalist dynamics. This complex systems approach – together with attention to the social formation of subjects within practices – helps us capture the phenomenon of intersectional oppression and is suited to the strategic thinking needed for social transformation.
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2587854.963656
It is a stark truth that the prison system in the United States is a moral catastrophe. Many of those who go to prison are routinely subject to battery, assault, and rape, or live in constant fear thereof. Incarcerated individuals are forced to align with gangs to protect themselves. They are treated by guards and other prison officials in deeply dehumanizing ways, subjected to psychological torture through solitary confinement and other measures, and sometimes inhabit literally unlivable conditions.
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2613739.963664
Cognitive scientists ascribe inferential processes to (neuro)cognitive systems to explain many of their capacities. Since these ascriptions have different connotations, philosophical accounts of inference could help clarify their assumptions and forestall potential confusion. However, many existing accounts define inference in ways that are out of touch with successful scientific practice – ways that overly intellectualise inference, construe inference in complete opposition to association, and imply that inferential processes prevent minds from being in contact with the outside world. In this chapter, we combine Siegel’s (2017) Response Hypothesis with insights from basal cognition and ecological rationality to sketch a philosophically viable, updated account of inference in (neuro)cognitive systems. According to this view, inference is a kind of rationally evaluable transition from some inputs or current representations to some conclusion or output representation. This notion of inference aligns with and can illuminate scientific practices in disparate fields, while eschewing a commitment to a consciously accessible language-like neural code or a formal system of mental logic, highlighting the continuity between inferential and associative processes, and allowing for a non-indirect mind-world relationship, where minds are genuinely open and responsive to their environment.
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2696024.963683
This paper assesses the prospects for an externalist perspective for somatic medicine—the view that health and disease of the body might sometimes be constitutively dependent on factors external to the organism. After briefly reviewing the grounds for psychiatric externalism, I argue that similar considerations are already implicit in somatic medical practice, particularly in immunology, public/population health, and occupational therapy. I then argue that the interactionist and population-minded externalist approach to biomedicine represents an important practical application of more general trends in biological theory; namely, the growing rejection of individualistic and reductionistic thinking.
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2696045.963691
Machine learning (ML) is a major scientific success. Yet, ML models are notoriously considered black boxes, where this black boxness may refer to details of the ML model itself or details concerning its outcomes. Hence, there is a flourishing field of “eXplainable Artificial Intelligence” (XAI), providing means for rendering several aspects of ML more transparent. However, given their tremendous success, why would we even want to explain black boxed ML models with XAI? I here suggest that, in order to answer this question, we first need to distinguish between proximate and ultimate aims in using XAI: While the proximate aim may be uniformly to provide instruments for explaining aspects of ML to relevant stakeholders, the ultimate aim varies with the context of deployment. Furthermore, I argue that in science, the ultimate aim is the understanding of scientific phenomena. I then sketch three paths along which understanding of phenomena may be gained by means of ML and XAI. In a coda, I address the possibility of gaining understanding from ML directly, without explanations and XAI.
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2696068.963699
Particle physicists have been among the early adopters of Machine Learning (ML) methods, the most notable ML systems being Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Today, ML's use in Particle Physics (PP) ranges from the reconstruction of signals inside the detector to the simulation of events and the determination of statistical ratios in the nal analysis. Most intriguingly, there is some evidence which suggests that DNNs might be able to independently acquire complex physical conceptsconcepts that are relevant for the discovery and understanding of new particles and phenomena. We here argue that these two possibilities, that of discovering novel concepts per se, and that of discovering novel phenomena by means of them, pose epistemic challenges for particle physicists. In turn, we will analyse ways of mitigating these challenges, both actual and at present merely possible.
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2696097.963706
This article examines the phenomenon of electron localization from a conceptual perspective, without going into technical details. In particular, it analyzes two cases in which electrons are confined to a specific region near one or more atoms, but with different characteristics: electron localization in molecules and in crystalline solids. The features and requirements for localization in each case are discussed, along with their specific interpretative challenges and the various proposals put forward to address them.
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2796677.963714
As part of the summer break, I’m publishing old essays that may be of interest for new subscribers. This post has been originally published March 29, 2023. If not already the case, do not hesitate to subscribe to receive free essays on economics, philosophy, and liberal politics in your mailbox! …
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2811401.963721
A general class of presupposition arguments holds that the background knowledge and theory required to design, develop, and interpret a machine learning (ML) system imply a strong upper limit to ML’s impact on science. I consider two proposals for how to assess the scientific impact of ML predictions, and I argue that while these accounts prioritize conceptual change, the presuppositions they take to be disqualifying for strong novelty are too restrictive. I characterize a general form of their arguments I call the Concept-free Design Argument: that strong novelty is curtailed by utilizing prior conceptualizations of target phenomena in model design.
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2811424.963729
Despite its growing appeal for the study of consciousness, the notion of entropy has yet to lead to widely supported new insights about the nature of phenomenal experience. Typically, entropy measures of brain activity are found to correlate with cognitive functions that are assumed to index consciousness. Taking a very different approach, this theoretical framework does not conflate consciousness with any function. It presents a series of premises to argue that consciousness is fundamentally characterized as inactionable perception, i.e. that does not give rise to macrophysical action. This is then fitted in a framework of perception and action as informational changes in a dynamical neural state space. In this model, inactionable perception naturally arises as the prediction-driven increase of concept-related entropy. This entails an increase of (Shannon) information while its efficacy to produce macrophysical effects decreases, which is here referred to as information dissipation, analogously to energy dissipation in thermodynamic systems. It results from inefficient sensorimotor coupling with the environment, which occurs when behavior is not fixed relative to the stimulus. Despite the posited inefficacy of conscious perception, it consists of action-specific information and can therefore be interpreted as potential behavior. Starting from fundamental properties, this framework may provide a new and coherent conceptual basis for a fuller understanding of what consciousness is and how it relates to the physical world. Although many of its implications remain to be explored, it appears consistent with empirical findings, and prompts subtle reinterpretations of some classical results in perception research.
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2843030.963737
Astronomers have found a truly huge black hole! It’s in the massive galaxy in the center here, called the Cosmic Horseshoe. The blue ring is light from a galaxy behind the Cosmic Horseshoe, severely bent by gravity. …
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2893441.963745
How many ways are there to punctuate a sentence? When I wrote about the topic more than two years back, I counted fourteen basic punctuation marks:
apostrophe, brace, bracket, colon, comma, dash, ellipsis, exclamation, hyphen, parenthesis, period, question, quotation, and (last but not least) semicolon. …
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2926666.963753
The family of relevant logics can be faceted by a hierarchy of increasingly fine-grained variable sharing properties—requiring that in valid entailments A → B, some atom must appear in both A and B with some additional condition (e.g., with the same sign or nested within the same number of conditionals). In this paper, we consider an incredibly strong variable sharing property of lericone relevance that takes into account the path of negations and conditionals in which an atom appears in the parse trees of the antecedent and consequent. We show that this property of lericone relevance holds of the relevant logic BM (and that a related property of faithful lericone relevance holds of B) and characterize the largest fragments of classical logic with these properties. Along the way, we consider the consequences for lericone relevance for the theory of subject-matter, for Logan’s notion of hyperformalism, and for the very definition of a relevant logic itself.