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1149888.821187
I hope this is my last post for a while on Integrated Information Theory (IIT), in Aaronson’s simplified formulation. One of the fun and well-known facts is that if you have an impractically large square two-dimensional grid of interconnected logic gates (presumably with some constant time-delay in each gate between inputs and outputs to prevent race conditions) in a fixed point (i.e., nothing is changing), the result can still have a degree of integrated information proportional to the square root of the number of gates. …
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1159520.821353
There’s a straightforward sense in which we ought to do whatever we have (all things considered) most reason to do. But permissibility is a laxer notion than this. Conceptually, it may be permissible to do less than what we have most reason to do. …
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1168149.821367
As I’m writing the final words of my manuscript and – hopefully – would-be book tentatively titled “Social Choice and Public Reason,” I’ve been rereading some classics of social choice theory to find some material relevant for the general introduction. …
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1221174.82138
It’s a cliché about philosophers that they ponder the meaning of life. But, by and large, they don’t. Philosophers rarely consider the question and when they do, they often dismiss it as nonsense. Among those who take life’s meaning seriously, many do so only to proclaim that it has none: life is meaningless or absurd.
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1221627.821391
Recent research indicates gender differences in the impact of stress on decision behavior, but little is known about the brain mechanisms involved in these gender-specific stress effects. The current study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine whether induced stress resulted in gender-specific patterns of brain activation during a decision task involving monetary reward. Specifically, we manipulated physiological stress levels using a cold pressor task, prior to a risky decision making task. Healthy men (n ¼ 24, 12 stressed) and women (n ¼ 23, 11 stressed) completed the decision task after either cold pressor stress or a control task during the period of cortisol response to the cold pressor. Gender differences in behavior were present in stressed participants but not controls, such that stress led to greater reward collection and faster decision speed in males but less reward collection and slower decision speed in females. A gender-by-stress interaction was observed for the dorsal striatum and anterior insula. With cold stress, activation in these regions was increased in males but decreased in females. The findings of this study indicate that the impact of stress on reward-related decision processing differs depending on gender.
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1223385.821402
There is a strikingly rich array of messages that Alphie could, given the right background conditions, communicate to Betty by means of this utterance. For a few examples among many, consider (1)-(26). 1. Carrie will be in the ballroom of the Palmer House Hilton at 1:05pm. 2. Alphie believes that Carrie will be in the ballroom of the Palmer House Hilton at 1:05pm. 3. Alphie has compelling evidence that Carrie will be in the ballroom of the Palmer House Hilton at 1:05pm. 4. Whether Carrie will be in the ballroom of the Palmer House Hilton at 1:05pm is relevant for the purposes of Alphie and Betty’s conversation. 5. Alphie believes that Betty didn’t already know that Carrie will be in the ballroom of the Palmer House Hilton at 1:05pm. 6. Carrie is not presently in the ballroom of the Palmer House Hilton. 7. Carrie will be able to give her talk. 8. Carrie will be late for her talk. 9. Carrie is not in San Francisco. 10. Betty should stall, rather than canceling the session and asking everybody to leave the ballroom. 11. Alphie believes that whether Carrie will be in the ballroom of the Palmer House Hilton at 1:05pm is relevant for the purposes of Alphie and Betty’s conversation.
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1237233.821427
Stephen Yablo’s notion of proportionality, despite controversies surrounding it, has played a significant role in philosophical discussions of mental causation and of high-level causation more generally. In particular, it is invoked in James Woodward’s interventionist account of high-level causation and explanation, and is implicit in a novel approach to constructing variables for causal modeling in the machine learning literature, known as causal feature learning (CFL). In this article, we articulate an account of proportionality inspired by both Yablo’s account of proportionality and the CFL account of variable construction. The resulting account has at least three merits. First, it illuminates an important feature of the notion of proportionality, when it is adapted to a probabilistic and interventionist framework. The feature is that at the center of the notion of proportionality lies the concept of “determinate intervention effects.” Second, it makes manifest a virtue of (common types of) high-level causal/explanatory statements over low-level ones, when relevant intervention effects are determinate. Third, it overcomes a limitation of the CFL framework and thereby also addresses a challenge to interventionist accounts of high-level causation.
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1237264.82144
Despite its being one of Roger Penrose’s greatest contributions to spacetime physics, there is a dearth of philosophical literature on twistor theory. The one exception to this is (Bain, 2006)—but although excellent, there remains much more to be said going beyond that article on the foundations and philosophy of twistor theory. In this article, we seek to make some progress in this direction, by (a) presenting an introduction to twistor theory which should be (reasonably) accessible to philosophers, (b) considering how the spacetime–twistor correspondence interacts with the blossoming philosophical literature on theoretical equivalence, and (c) exploring the bearing which twistor theory might have on philosophical issues such as the status of dynamics, the geometrisation of physics, spacetime ontology, the emergence of spacetime, and symmetry-to-reality inferences. We close with an elaboration of a variety of further opportunities for philosophical investigation into twistor theory.
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1237290.821451
By focusing on biorobotics, this article explores the epistemological foundations necessary to support the transition from biological models to technological artifacts. To address this transition, I analyze the position of the German philosopher Thomas Fuchs, who represents one possible approach to the problem of the relationship between bio-inspired technology and biology. While Fuchs defends the idea of a unique ontological space for humans, this article contends that his categorical distinctions face challenges in establishing a robust epistemic foundation necessary to ground the transition from biology to technology.
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1237354.821461
This paper explores the integration of Michael Strevens’ concept of idealizations with my previous framework of similarity spaces and context-dependence to develop a comprehensive account of ideal explanations in scientific practice. Idealizations, which involve deliberate falsifications, play a crucial role in distinguishing between causally relevant and irrelevant factors in scientific models. Context-dependent mapping provides a structured approach to handling complementarities and context-dependent phenomena by mapping different observational contexts to distinct sets of physical laws. By combining these two ideas, I will construct an idealized context-dependent mapping structure and discuss how ideal similarity spaces within the framework of context-dependent mapping can enhance our understanding of complex scientific phenomena, especially those involving wave-particle duality and black hole complementarity. I also aim to discuss the types of idealizations that may exist within explanation and examine their relations to the mapping.
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1397074.821472
Eating is a fundamental behavior in which all organisms must engage in order to procure the material and energy from their environment that they need to maintain themselves. Since controlling eating requires procuring, processing, and assessing information, it constitutes a cognitive activity that provides a productive domain for pursuing cognitive biology as proposed by Ladislav Kováč. In agreement with Kováč, we argue that cognition is fundamentally grounded in chemical signaling and processing. To support this thesis, we adopt Cisek’s strategy of phylogenetic refinement, focusing on two animal phyla, Porifera and Placozoa, organisms that do not have neurons, muscles, or an alimentary canal, but nonetheless need to coordinate the activity of cells of multiple types in order to eat. We review what research has revealed so far about how these animals gather and process information to control their eating behavior.
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1423935.821482
I’m still thinking about Integrated Information Theory (IIT), in Aaronson’s simplified formulation. Aaronson’s famous criticisms show pretty convincingly that IIT fails to correctly characterize consciousness: simple but large systems of unchanging logic gates end up having human-level consciousness on IIT. …
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1531128.821494
The name “capitalism” derives from Marx’s false analogy between medieval land ownership and the “ownership of the means of production.” However, unlike medieval land, capital goods can be rented out, e.g., by Frank Knight’s entrepreneur, and then the capital owner does not hold those management or product rights. What then is the characteristic institution in our civilization? It is the voluntary renting of workers. What then is the relationship between Classical Liberalism, the dominant philosophy behind Economics, and a lifetime labour contract? Frank Knight had plenty to say about the doctrine of inalienable rights which disallows such contracts.
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1538709.821507
Philosophers are fond of wild hypotheticals: psychophysicists confined to black-and-white rooms, trolleys targeting victims with unnerving precision, magic rings that turn those who wear them invisible (and perhaps unjust). …
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1562278.821517
One of the most urgent challenges facing the left is the need to come to terms with the meanings of “imperialism” and “anti-imperialism” in our time. When the workers of the world are facing increasingly dire conditions of labor and survival, and the possibility of direct military confrontation between and among the globe’s major economic powers seems less remote every day, it is crucially important for Marxists to assess the nature of the international class struggle in the current
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1583449.821527
Effective field theory (EFT) is a computationally powerful theoretical framework, finding application in many areas of physics. The framework, applied to the Standard Model of particle physics, is even more empirically successful than our theoretical understanding would lead us to expect. I argue that this is a problem for our understanding of how the Standard Model relates to some successor theory. The problem manifests as two theoretical anomalies involving relevant parameters: the cosmological constant and the Higgs mass. The persistent failure to fix these anomalies from within suggests that the way forward is to go beyond the EFT framework.
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1583467.821539
When Kuhn first published his Structure of Scientific Revolutions he was accused of promoting an “irrationalist” account of science. Although it has since been argued that this charge is unfair in one aspect or another, the early criticism still exerts an influence on our understanding of Kuhn. In particular, normal science is often characterized as dogmatic and uncritical, even by commentators sympathetic to Kuhn. I argue not only that there is no textual evidence for this view but also that normal science is much better understood as being based on epistemically justified commitment to a paradigm and as pragmatic in its handling of anomalies. I also argue that normal science is an example of what I call Kuhn’s program of revisionary rational reconstruction.
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1583487.821549
In this paper I issue a challenge to what I call the “Independence Thesis of Theory Assessment” (ITTA). According to ITTA, the evidence for (or against) a theory must be assessed independently from the theory explaining the evidence. I argue that ITTA is undermined by cases of evidential uncertainty, in which scientists have been guided by the explanatory power of their theories in the assessment of the evidence. Instead, I argue, these cases speak in favor of a model of theory assessment in which explanatory power may indeed contribute to the stabilization of the evidential basis.
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1583506.82156
This paper revisits Lakatos’s meta-philosophy concerning the use of historical facts for the purpose of philosophical theorizing about science. Despite Lakatos’s bad reputation on that question – which mostly springs from his suggestion that the actual history could be detailed in the footnotes of texts of rational reconstructions of science – Lakatos in fact had quite reasonable things to say about the meta-philosophy of science. In particular, Lakatos’s writings contain the idea that any philosophical methodology of science should aim at the maximization of rationally explainable facts, albeit without pretence to ever be able to explain all historical facts as rational. I will discuss this idea in the light of the contemporary meta-philosophical literature. Finally, the paper argues with Kuhn that there are many unappreciated analogies between Kuhn’s and Lakatos’s accounts of science and that Lakatos’s account is, contrary to what Lakatos himself claimed, not more rational than Kuhn’s, even by Lakatos’s own meta-philosophical criteria.
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1583526.821573
Predictivism is the thesis that evidence successfully predicted by a scientific theory counts more (or ought to count more) in the confirmation of that theory than already known evidence would. One rationale that has been proposed for predictivism is that predictive success guards against ad hoc hypotheses. Despite the intuitive attraction of predictivism, there is historical evidence that speaks against it. As valuable as the historical evidence is, however, it is largely indirect evidence for the epistemic attitudes of individual – albeit prominent – scientists. This paper presents the results of an empirical study of scientists’ attitudes toward predictivism and ad hoc-ness (n=492), which will put the debate on a more robust empirical footing. The paper also draws attention to a tension between the ad hoc-ness avoidance rationale of predictivism and the ways philosophers have spelled out the notion of ad hocness.
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1583545.821584
Successful replication is a hallmark of scientific truth. Discordant evidence refers to the situation where findings from different studies of the same phenomenon do not agree. Although evidential discordance can spur scientific discovery, it also gives scientists a reason to rationally disagree and thereby compromises the formation of scientific consensus. Discordance indicates that facts about the phenomenon of interest remain unsettled and that a finding may not be reliably replicable. We single out persistent evidential discordance as a particularly difficult problem for the epistemology of science, and distinguish between different causes of evidential discordance – non-systematic error, noise, and bias. Unlike discordance brought about by non-systematic error or noise, persistent discordance often cannot be rationally resolved by temporarily suspending judgment and collecting more data within existing lines of inquiry. We suggest that the analysis of enriched lines of evidence (Boyd 2018) provides a useful approach to diagnosing and evaluating episodes of persistent evidential discordance. Attention to the line of evidence, which extends from raw data to an evidential claim supporting or disconfirming a hypothesis, can help researchers to locate the source of discordance between inconsistent findings. We argue that reference to metadata, information about how the data were generated and processed, can be a key step in the process of resolving normative questions of correctness, i.e., whether a line of evidence provides a legitimate answer to a particular research question. We illustrate our argument with two cases: the alleged discovery of gravitational waves in the late 1960s, and the social priming controversy in experimental psychology.
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1583577.821595
Some debates about the role of non-epistemic values in science discuss the so-called Value-Free Ideal together with the autonomy thesis, to the point that they may be assumed to be intertwined. As I will argue in this article, the two are independent from one another, are supported by different arguments, and ought to be disentangled. I will also show that the arguments against value-freedom and supporting a value-laden conception of science, are different from the arguments against autonomy and supporting democratized science. Moreover, while some of the arguments against autonomy and for democratized science may actually be consistent with value-freedom, they conflict with some philosophical views about the internal diversity of well-designed epistemic communities. This article distinguishes the Value-Free Ideal and the autonomy thesis, as well as their antitheses, and investigates their relations to some of the socio-epistemological models of the social organization of scientific research. Its aim is to make explicit some incompatibilities between different normative frameworks developed in philosophy of science.
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1641246.821608
The aim of this paper is to present a constructive solution to Frege’s puzzle (largely limited to the mathematical context) based on type theory. Two ways in which an equality statement may be said to have cognitive significance are distinguished. One concerns the mode of presentation of the equality, the other its mode of proof. Frege’s distinction between sense and reference, which emphasizes the former aspect, cannot adequately explain the cognitive significance of equality statements unless a clear identity criterion for senses is provided. It is argued that providing a solution based on proofs is more satisfactory from the standpoint of constructive semantics.
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1711638.821618
As predicted, the nationalist parties have slightly improved their scores in the European parliamentary elections. Put together, the parties belonging to the European Conservatives & Reformists and Identity & Democracy groups have won 131 seats over the 720 of the European Parliaments, to which we should also add part of the 100 seats earned by non-aligned parties. …
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1724037.821628
Let’s start with some uncontroversial facts. In 1817–1818, Beethoven composed the Piano Sonata No. 29 in B flat major, Opus 106, which is known as the Hammerklavier Sonata. In 1970, Glenn Gould performed the Hammerklavier in Toronto. In 1995, András Schiff performed the Hammerklavier in New York. We can conclude that there is something— the Hammerklavier—that Beethoven composed and that Gould and Schiff performed. But what sort of thing is this?
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1751353.821638
This is a report on the project “Axiomatizing Conditional Normative Reasoning” (ANCoR, M 3240-N) funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The project aims to deepen our understanding of conditional normative reasoning by providing an axiomatic study of it at the propositional but also first-order level. The focus is on a particular framework, the so-called preference-based logic for conditional obligation, whose main strength has to do with the treatment of contrary-to-duty reasoning and reasoning about exceptions. The project considers not only the meta-theory of this family of logics but also its mechanization.
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1814178.821649
Pain, Ross; University of Bristol, Philosophy interventionism, transitions in human evolution, cultural complexity, causation Theorists of human evolution are interested in understanding major shifts in human behavioral capacities (e.g., the creation of a novel technological industry, such as the Acheulean). This task faces empirical challenges arising both from the complexity of these events and the time-depths involved. However, we also confront issues of a more philosophical nature, such as how to best think about causation and explanation. This article considers such fundamental questions from the perspective of a prominent theory of causation in the philosophy of science literature, namely, the interventionist theory of causation. A signature feature of this framework is its recognition of a family of distinct types of causes. We set out several of these causal notions and show how they can contribute to explaining transitions in human behavioral complexity. We do so, first, in a preliminary way, and then in a more detailed way, taking the origins of behavioral modernity as our extended case study. We conclude by suggesting some ways in which the approach developed here might be elaborated and extended.
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1814285.821659
Structural representations are likely the most talked about representational posits in the contemporary debate over cognitive representations. Indeed, the debate surrounding them is so vast virtually every claim about them has been made. Some, for instance, claimed structural representations are di erent from indicators. Others argued they are the same. Some claimed structural representations mesh perfectly with mechanistic explanations, others argued they can’t in principle mash. Some claimed structural representations are central to predictive processing accounts of cognition, others rebuked predictive processing networks are blissfully structural representation free. And so forth. Here, I suggest this confusing state of a airs is due to the fact that the term “structural representations” is applied to a number of distinct conceptions of representations. In this paper, I distinguish four such conceptions, argue that these four conceptions are actually distinct, and then show that such a fourfold distinction can be used to clarify some of the most pressing questions concerning structural representations and their role in cognitive theorizing, making these questions more easily answerable.
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1814314.821671
The timing of the origin of flowering plants (Angiosperm) is hotly debated. It has been suggested that the disagreement between the fossil record of angiosperm origin strongly conflicts with the origin estimates generated by molecular clocks. I argue that this conflict reveals lessons about whether or under what conditions scientific disagreement is likely to bear fruit. Specifically, I point to issues of evidence quality and social epistemic structures which deserve more attention in understanding the productivity of disagreement.
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1814343.821681
The Kuhnian view of theory choice (post Structure) leaves a lot of space for a diversity of theory choice preferences. It remains mysterious, however, how scientists could ever converge on a theory, given this diversity. This paper will argue that there is a solution to the problem of convergence, which can be had even on Kuhn’s own terms.