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16732.70581
There continues to be significant confusion about the goals, scope and nature of modelling practice in neuroeconomics. This paper aims to dispel some such confusion by using one of the most recent critiques of neuroeconomic modelling as a foil. The paper argues for two claims. First, currently, for at least some economic model of choice behaviour, the benefits derivable from neurally-informing an economic model do not involve special tractability costs. Second, modelling in neuroeconomics is best understood within Marr’s three-level of analysis framework and in light of a co-evolutionary research ideology. The first claim is established by elucidating the relationship between the tractability of a model, its descriptive accuracy, and its number of variables. The second claim relies on an explanation of what it can take to neurally-inform an economic model of choice behaviour.
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248211.706039
We discuss the challenges that the standard (Humean and non-Humean) accounts of laws face within the framework of quantum gravity where space and time may not be fundamental. This paper identifies core (meta)physical features that cut across a number of quantum gravity approaches and formalisms and that provide seeds for articulating updated conceptions that could account for QG laws not involving any spatio-temporal notions. To this aim, we will in particular highlight the constitutive roles of quantum entanglement, quantum transition amplitudes and quantum causal histories. These features also stress the fruitful overlap between quantum gravity and quantum information theory. Keywords: spacetime, laws of nature, quantum gravity, quantum entanglement, transition amplitude, quantum causal histories.
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277116.706054
In thought insertion, patients claim to have thoughts which are not their own. I offer an account of the thought insertion delusion by utilising the notion of commitment, that is, the experience of a conscious state as being appropriate or fitting. The proposed explanation of thought insertion relies on two main tenets. One is that the experience of a thought as being one's own is the experience of regarding that thought as being correct. The other is that patients with thought insertion do not experience being committed to the thoughts that they disown. I extend this account to the case of patient RB, who disowns some of his conscious memories, and to the case of anarchic hand syndrome, in which patients disown some of their conscious actions.
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469328.706066
According to the causal-historical theory of reference, natural kind terms refer in virtue of complicated causal relations the speakers have to their environment. A common objection to the theory is that purely causal relations are insufficient to fix reference in a determinate fashion. The so-called hybrid view holds that what is also needed for successful fixing are true descriptions associated in the mind of the speaker with the referent. The main claim of this paper is that the objection fails: reference fixing of natural kind terms can be purely causal. The main argument draws inspiration from recent theoretical advances made in metaphysics of kinds by Marion Godman, Antonella Mallozzi, and David Papineau. The main claim is that their notion of super-explanatory properties may explain how reference of many kind terms can be fixed purely causally.
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524369.706079
The main message of Neuroethics is that neuroscience forces us to reconceptualize human agency as marvelously diverse and flexible. Free will can arise from unconscious brain processes. Individuals with mental disorders, including addiction and psychopathy, exhibit more agency than is often recognized. Brain interventions should be embraced with cautious optimism. Our moral intuitions, which arise from entangled reason and emotion, can generally be trusted. Nevertheless, we can and should safely enhance our brain chemistry, partly because motivated reasoning crops up in everyday life and in the practice of neuroscience itself. Despite serious limitations, brain science can be useful in the courtroom and marketplace. Recognizing all this nuance leaves little room for anxious alarmism or overhype and urges an emphasis on neurodiversity. The result is a highly opinionated tour of neuroethics as an exciting field full of implications for philosophy, science, medicine, law, and public policy.
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527097.706094
In the first part I argued that the primary form of Kripkenstein’s skeptical challenge is to explain what it is for an expression to have a particular meaning in a speaker’s idiolect (rather than another) (Kripke 1982: 11, Reiland 2023c). Having presented the challenge, Kripkenstein goes through and criticizes answers in terms of explicit instructions, dispositions to use, simplicity, experiential states, taking the state to be primitive, and Fregean sense, and concludes that it can’t be answered.
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531948.706104
Let “phenomenal dogmatism” be the thesis that some experiences provide some beliefs with immediate justification, and do so purely in virtue of their phenomenal character. A basic question-mark looms over phenomenal dogmatism: Why should the fact that a person is visited by some phenomenal feel suggest the likely truth of a belief? In this paper, I press this challenge, arguing that perceptually justified beliefs are justified not purely by perceptual experiences’ phenomenology, but also because we have justified second-order background beliefs to the effect that the occurrence of certain perceptual experiences is indicative of the likely truth of certain corresponding beliefs. To bring this out, I contrast “perceptual dogmatism” with “moral dogmatism”: the thesis that some emotional experiences provide some moral beliefs with immediate justification, and do so purely in virtue of their phenomenal character. I argue that moral dogmatism is much less antecedently appealing, precisely because the counterpart second-order beliefs here are much less plausible.
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584855.706115
At several key points throughout his Treatise, Hume refers to certain “general rules” which, he claims, we are “mightily addicted to”, and which frequently make us “carry our maxims beyond those reasons, which first induc’d us to establish them” (T 3.2.9.3). As Michael Gill (2006, 221) observes, Hume typically italicizes the term ‘general rules’, thus seemingly referring to “a specific, well-defined piece of his technical apparatus”. Unfortunately, Hume never explains what he means by the term. Nevertheless, he clearly thinks that general rules influence many of our beliefs, passions, and moral judgments. It is therefore important to understand exactly how Hume understands them. This is my aim in this paper.
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606371.706124
Last time I presented a class of agent-based models where agents hop around a graph in a stochastic way. Each vertex of the graph is some ‘state’ agents can be in, and each edge is called a ‘transition’. …
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700323.706135
Emotional hardcore and other music genres featuring screamed vocals are puzzling for the appreciator. The typical fan attaches appreciative value to musical screams of emotional pain all the while acknowledging it would be inappropriate to hold similar attitudes towards their sonically similar everyday counterpart: actual human screaming. Call this the screamed vocals problem. To solve the problem, I argue we must attend to the anti-sublimating aims that get expressed in the emotional hardcore vocalist’s choice to scream the lyrics. Screamed vocals help us see the value in rejecting (a) restrictive social norms of emotional expressiveness and (b) restrictive artistic norms about how one ought to express or represent pain in art, namely that if one is going to do so they must ensure the pain has been ‘beautified’. In developing this second point I argue that emotional hardcore is well-suited (though not individually so) for putting pressure on longstanding views in the history of aesthetics about the formal relationship between art and human pain.
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758034.706145
It is a familiar story that, where Kant humbly draws a line beyond which cognition can’t reach, Husserl presses forward to show how we can cognize beyond that limit. Kant supposes that cognition is bound to sensibility and that what we experience in sensibility is mere appearance that does not inform us about the intrinsic nature of things in themselves. By contrast, for Husserl, it makes no sense to say we experience anything other than things in themselves when we enjoy sensory perception. Kant’s conception, then, by doing just that, is nonsensical. I argue that Husserl’s account does not deliver on its promise. Things as they are in themselves are just as cognitively out of reach on Husserl’s understanding of them as they are on Kant’s. Further, the charge of nonsense Husserl raises against Kant’s conception of things in themselves applies—indeed, with greater force—to his own.
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784202.706155
Illusionists and a posteriori physicalists agree entirely on the metaphysical nature of reality—that all concrete entities are composed of fundamental physical entities. Despite this basic agreement on metaphysics, illusionists hold that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, whereas a posteriori physicalists hold that it does. One explanation of this disagreement would be that either the illusionists have too demanding a view about what consciousness requires, or the a posteriori physicalists have too tolerant a view. However, we will argue that this divergence of opinion is merely an upshot of the semantic indeterminacy of the term ‘conscious’ and its cognates. We shall back up this diagnosis by showing how semantic indeterminacy of the kind in question is a pervasive feature of language. By illustrating this pattern with a range of historical examples, we shall show how the dispute between the illusionists and their a posteriori physicalist opponents is one instance of a common kind of terminological imprecision. The disagreement between the illusionists and the a posteriori physicalists is thus not substantial. In effect, the two sides differ only about how to make an indeterminate term precise. The moral is that they should stop looking for arguments designed to settle the dispute in their favour.
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863580.706171
It is one thing to believe something, and it is another to grasp it. For example, everyone knows that life is short, but most of us arguably do not fully grasp this fact. Grasping this fact can have a notable effect on our cognition and behavior, prompting us to reconsider how to best spend our limited time. Similarly, most of us know but seldom grasp that children are starving all around the world and that we could, if we put in a sufficient collective effort, halt much of this suffering. Grasping these facts makes us more inclined to donate to charity—or at least makes us more inclined to feel guilty if we don't. As both of these examples illustrate, grasping seems to be something above and beyond mere belief or knowledge, and it seems to make an important difference to our cognitive and decision-making processes.
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1091231.706181
Work in philosophy of mind often engages in descriptive phenomenology, i.e., in attempts to characterize the phenomenal character of our experience. Nagel’s famous discussion of what it’s like to be a bat demonstrates the difficulty of this enterprise (1974). But while Nagel located the difficulty in our absence of an objective vocabulary for describing experience, I argue that the problem runs deeper than that: we also lack an adequate subjective vocabulary for describing phenomenology. We struggle to describe our own phenomenal states in terms we ourselves find adequately expressive. This paper aims to flesh out why our phenomenological vocabulary is so impoverished – what I call the impoverishment problem. As I suggest, this problem has both practical and philosophical import. After fleshing out the problem in more detail, I draw some suggestive morals from the discussion in an effort to point the way forward towards a solution.
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1104350.706192
I distinguish five types of discrimination, three of which are personal-level and distinctively visual. I explain their implication relations. Then I argue that the plausibility of the claim that seeing something requires discriminating it, as opposed to simply attributing some properties to it, hinges on the type of discrimination under consideration. A weak form of discrimination trivializes the debate. Stronger notions of discrimination, however, cannot be understood without attribution. Attribution appears to form the fundamental level of personal-level representation.
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1170999.706209
I propose a novel (interpretation of) quantum theory, which I will call Environmental Determinacy-based or EnD Quantum Theory (EnDQT). In contrast to the well-known quantum theories, EnDQT has the benefit of not adding hidden variables, and it is not in tension with relativistic causality by providing a local causal explanation of quantum correlations without measurement outcomes varying according to, for example, systems or worlds. It is conservative, and so unlike theories such as spontaneous collapse theories, no modifications of the fundamental equations of quantum theory are required to establish when determinate values arise, and in principle, arbitrary systems can be in a superposition for an arbitrary amount of time. According to EnDQT, at some point, some systems acquired the capacity to have and give rise to other systems having determinate values, and where this capacity propagates via local interactions between systems. When systems are isolated from the systems that belong to these chains of interactions, they can, in principle, evolve unitarily indefinitely. EnDQT provides novel empirical posits that may distinguish it from other quantum theories. Furthermore, via the features of the systems that start the chains of interactions, it may provide payoffs to other areas of physics and their foundations, such as cosmology.
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1220014.706221
In Plato’s Philebus, Socrates’ second account of ‘false’ pleasure (41d-42c) outlines a form of illusion: pleasures that appear greater than they are. I argue that these pleasures are perceptual misrepresentations. I then show that they are the grounds for a methodological critique of hedonism. Socrates identifies hedonism as a judgment about the value of pleasure based on a perceptual misrepresentation of size, witnessed paradigmatically in the ‘greatest pleasures’.
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1321145.706231
I often talk about how philosophy needs better discovery systems, and try to find ways to clearly communicate my own work (e.g. summarizing My Big Ideas, and my main “myth-busting” updates to our disciplinary conventional wisdom)—while inviting others to do likewise. …
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1574973.706241
An increasingly prevalent approach to studying human cognition is to construe the mind as optimally allocating limited cognitive resources among cognitive processes. Under this bounded rationality approach (Icard 2018, Simon 1980), it is common to assume that resource-bounded cognitive agents approximate normative solutions to statistical inference problems, and that much of the bias and variability in human performance can be explained in terms of the approximation strategies we employ. In this paper, we argue that this approach restricts itself to an unnecessarily narrow scope of cognitive models, which limits its ability to explain how humans flexibly adapt their representations to novel environments. We argue that more attention should be paid to how we form our cognitive representations in the first place, and advocate for pluralistic framework which jointly optimizes over both representations and algorithms for manipulating them. We identify several fundamental trade-offs that manifest in this joint optimization, and draw on recent work to motivate a unified formal framework for this analysis. We illustrate a simplified version of this analysis with a case study in social cognition, and outline several new directions for research that this approach suggests.
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1681955.706252
I here defend microphysical manyism. According to microphysical manyism, each composite or higher-level object is a mere plurality of microphysical particles. After clarifying the commitments of the view, I offer two physicalist-friendly arguments in its favour. The first argument appeals to the Canberra Plan. Here I argue that microphysical particles acting in unison play the theoretical roles associated with composite objects - that they do everything that we think of composite objects as doing - and thus that composite objects are to be identified with pluralities of microphysical particles. Along the way I rebut the objections that pluralities of particles don’t display the right emergent, ‘lingering’, or modal properties to be good candidates for identification with higher-level objects. In the second argument I claim that microphysical manyism is uniquely able to capture a compelling and widespread physicalist intuition concerning the intimate nature of the relationship between higher-level, composite objects and the microphysical world.
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1693463.706262
The things we do – our actions – can be contrasted with the things that merely happen to us. The dominant view distinguishes actions from happenings on the grounds that the former are essentially brought about and guided by intentions. Merleau-Ponty offers an alternative account, according to which doings are primarily initiated and guided by the agent's apprehension of her environment. Intentions may still play a role in bringing about action, but they are not essential, and the way they influence behaviour is conceived differently on his view. In this paper, I consider two important factors that contribute to our actions: habit and attention. Surprisingly, these have been largely ignored by proponents of the dominant view, despite their significance for agency. Here, I argue that whilst neither can be satisfactorily accommodated on the dominant model, Merleau-Ponty's framework offers a nice explanation of them. This gives us some reason to prefer a Merleau-Pontyian account to the dominant view. I will begin by outlining the dominant model in more detail.
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1693512.706273
Solipsism is the view that the I – my self – is, in some sense, alone. There are different forms of solipsism, which vary along two dimensions. First, solipsistic views can differ in how alone they take the I to be: one might claim that the I is the only self in a world of objects or non-‐selves. Or one could take the I to be all that there is. Second, there are different views one might take up concerning the nature of these claims. They can be understood as metaphysical claims about what exists; epistemological claims about what can be known; or as phenomenological claims about the character of experience. (These options are not mutually exclusive.) The standard view is that solipsism in all its varieties is at best, a deeply unattractive position, and at worst, absurd. It is surely undeniable that I share the world with other people. Moreover, this fact features in my experience and is knowable by me. Nevertheless, both Merleau-‐Ponty and Wittgenstein – two of the twentieth century's most profound and interesting thinkers – hold that solipsism expresses something important about the human condition. My aim in this paper is to articulate what they take solipsism to express. Much has been written about Wittgenstein's views on solipsism (see, e.g., Anscombe 1959, Hacker 1986, Diamond 1991, Pears 1996). Merleau-‐Ponty's ideas about solipsism and our relations with others have also received a fair amount of attention in the literature (see, e.g., Madison 1981, Carman 2008, Romdenh-‐Romluc 2011, Morris 2012). Thus, one might wonder what more there is to say on the topic. I hope to show here that revisiting these ideas is a fruitful enterprise.
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1739623.706284
We know that Twitter is not what it used to be, but if you were around the Twittersphere in 2019, you may remember a series of long discussions, by very well-known neuroscientists, on the nature of neural representation. Reading from the bleachers, many philosophers like us couldn’t help but notice that some of the themes discussed in these threads were very familiar. Indeed, they were uncannily similar to the way philosophers of mind argued in the 1970s and 1980s about the prospects of naturalizing intentionality. While the recent debates were couched in terms of multivariate analyses, pattern similarity, and repetition suppression, they were ultimately about how to understand misrepresentation, representational content, and even reference to abstract and non-existent entities, albeit in the context of contemporary cognitive neuroscience. The time was then ripe to try to bring together both philosophers and neuroscientists interested in the nature of representation, so they could talk to and learn from each other.
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1742937.706294
Pissing away my life in a haze of doomscrolling, sporadic attempts to “parent” two rebellious kids, and now endless conversations about AI safety, I’m liable to forget for days that I’m still mostly known (such as I am) as a quantum computing theorist, and this blog is still mostly known as a quantum computing blog. …
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1920925.706303
A non-solipsist form of presentness is usually thought to require the non-relative copresentness of space-like separated events, where this requirement further implies the non-relative simultaneity of these events. Since special relativity is thought to rule out any global, non-relative simultaneity, typical non-solipsist forms of presentness are taken to be inconsistent with special relativity. To address this problem, we re-explain the relationship between the non-solipsism of presentness and co-presentness by appealing to metaphysical indeterminacy. We propose presentness indeterminacy, the thesis that where an event, p, is determinately present, any event in space-like relation to p lacks a determinate tense. We argue that for many theories of time, indeterminate co-presentness is all that the non-solipsism of presentness requires. Since there is no determinate co-presentness, the inconsistency between presentness and special relativity in these theories disappears.
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1920952.706318
The dispute about whether there is indeterminacy in the world is long and inconclusive. At first glance, it seems like quantum mechanics ought to provide a quick, empirical resolution to the debate: prima facie, a photon in a superposition of right-polarized and left-polarized states has an indeterminate polarization. But quantum mechanics has not provided any such resolution; the controversy drags on. In this paper, I suggest some reasons for this impasse, and lay out a path forward.
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2037440.70633
Engineering failure investigations seek to reconstruct the actual causes of major engineering failures. The investigators need to establish the existence of certain past events and the actual causal relationships that these events bear to the failures in question. In this paper, I examine one method for reconstructing the actual causes of failure events, which I call “feature dependence”. The basic idea of feature dependence is that some features of an event are informative about the features of its causes; therefore, the investigators can use the features of a known failure event to reconstruct details of its causes. I make explicit the structure of feature dependence and the evidential basis of its key premises, and show how feature dependence works in the investigation of the American Airlines Flight 191 accident.
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2148359.706346
I develop Tetsurō Watsuji’s relational model of the self as “betweenness”. I argue that Watsuji’s view receives support from two case studies: solitary confinement and dementia. Both clarify the constitutive interdependence between the self and the social and material contexts of “betweenness” that define its lifeworld. They do so by providing powerful examples of what happens when the support and regulative grounding of this lifeworld is restricted or taken away. I argue further that Watsuji’s view helps see the other side of this deprivation, how reconstructing aspects of betweenness is, at the same time, a reconstruction of the self. I conclude by briefly indicating further consequences of this view.
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2317320.706357
Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) holds that the senses, imagination, and passions aim at survival and the satisfaction of the body’s needs, rather than truth or the good of the mind. Each of these faculties makes a distinctive and, indeed, an indispensable contribution to the preservation of life. Commentators have largely focused on how the senses keep us alive. By comparison, the imagination and passions have been neglected. In this paper, I reconstruct Malebranche’s account of how the imagination contributes to the preservation of the body by compensating for the limitations of the senses. First, the imagination represents non-actual states of affairs, such as probable or possible future states. Second, the imagination forges new and often helpful associations based on past experiences. Third, the imagination (mis)represents that objects will cause pleasure and pain, thereby imbuing them with emotional significance they would otherwise lack. Together, these features flesh out Malebranche’s view that the imagination is necessary for the preservation of life.
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2368754.706371
In this paper we examine moving spotlight theories of time: theories according to which there are past and future events and an objective present moment. In Section 1, we briefly discuss the origins of the view. In Section 2, we describe the traditional moving spotlight view, which we understand as an ‘enriched’ B-theory of time, and raise some problems for that view. In the next two sections, we describe versions of the moving spotlight view that we think are better and which solve those problems. In Section 3, we describe a version of the view that combines permanentism – the thesis that all things always exist – with propositional temporalism, the thesis that some propositions are sometimes true and sometimes false. In Section 4, we discuss a version of the view that is like an ‘enriched’ presentism. We conclude with some brief thoughts on issues that remain outstanding.