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2390643.98825
Edward Craig’s function-first methodology says we can illuminate the concept of knowledge by asking what functions the concept evolved to fulfil. To do this, Craig imagines a fictional state of nature in which humans lacked the concept. Hilary Kornblith rejects every part of Craig’s methodology. He instead develops a naturalistic epistemology, according to which we should study knowledge—not its concept—through the scientific study of animal cognition.
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2403859.988334
|A University Occupation in The Netherlands - via de Volkskrant|
Here is my best effort to reconstruct the reasoning behind these occupations. Premise 1. The Israeli government is doing terrible things in Gaza and should stop
P2. …
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2462065.988352
In Factual Difference-Making, Holger Andreas and Mario Günther propose a theory of model-relative actual causation which performs remarkably well on a number of known problematic cases. They take this to show that we should abandon our counterfactual way of thinking about causation in favour of their factual alternative. I cast doubt on this argument by offering two similar theories. First, I show that the theory of Factual Difference-Making is equivalent to a partly counterfactual theory. Second, I give a fully counterfactual theory that makes the same judgments in the scenarios discussed by Andreas and Günther.
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2462086.988366
Two recent, prominent theorems—the “no-go theorem for observer-independent facts” and the “Local Friendliness no-go theorem”—employ so-called extended Wigner’s friend scenarios to try to impose novel, non-trivial constraints on the possible nature of physical reality. While the former is argued to entail that there can be no theory in which the results of Wigner and his friend can both be considered objective, the latter is said to place on reality stronger constraints than the Bell and Kochen-Specker theorems. Here, I conduct a thorough analysis of these theorems and show that they suffer from a list of shortcomings that question their validity and limit their strength. I conclude that the “no-go theorem for observer-independent facts” and the “Local Friendliness no-go theorem” fail to impose significant constraints on the nature of physical reality.
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2502559.988378
My daughter, S, who is five, has a special stuffed unicorn who she received for her third Christmas. Once white, she is now gray: the color of love—and drool. Once replete with a magnificent mane of pale pink yarn, she now boasts a tangled, grizzled, dishwater-colored ‘do. …
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2503377.988389
Patrick Butlin, Robert Long, Eric Elmoznino, Yoshua Bengio, Jonathan Birch, Axel Constant, George Deane, Stephen M. Fleming, Chris Frith, Xu Ji, Ryota Kanai, Colin Klein, Grace Lindsay, Matthias Michel, Liad Mudrik, Megan A. K. Peters, Eric Schwitzgeb...
best-supported neuroscientific theories of consciousness. We survey several prominent scientific theories of consciousness, including recurrent processing theory, global workspace theory, higher-order theories, predictive processing, and attention schema theory. From these theories we derive ”indicator properties” of consciousness, elucidated in computational terms that allow us to assess AI systems for these properties. We use these indicator properties to assess several recent AI systems, and we discuss how future systems might implement them. Our analysis suggests that no current AI systems are conscious, but also suggests that there are no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators.
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2513787.988399
Some of our conditional knowledge is counterepistemic: it is knowledge of an indicative conditional whose antecedent is false. Counterepistemic knowledge ascriptions give rise to puzzles—and in particular, to systematic violations of factivity. I critically examine propositionalist explanations, including contextualist and descriptivist accounts, and argue that they ultimately fail to accommodate the non-triviality and consistency of counterepistemic knowledge ascriptions. Instead, I propose a non-propositional theory drawing on ideas from the literatures on belief revision and on conversational update. On the positive account, counterepistemic knowledge is not reducible to knowledge of propositions, and knowledge states are more than relations to facts known. Besides distinguishing a live class of epistemic alternatives, a knowledge state also orders the possibilities it eliminates.
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2563999.988413
Here is a very odd question that occurred to me: Is it good for there to be moral norms? Imagine a world just like this one, except that there are no moral norms for its intelligent denizens—but nonetheless they behave as we do. …
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2573963.988425
This is a stand-alone essay, but if you’re curious you can read Part 1, Against Feet Revisited. 1. Timothy Steele’s book All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing aims to offer “an explanation of English meter,” especially iambic pentameter. …
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2573964.988436
“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares are publishing a mass-market book, the rather self-explanatorily-titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. (Yes, the “it” means “sufficiently powerful AI.”) The book is now available for preorder from Amazon:
I was graciously offered a chance to read a draft and offer, not a “review,” but some preliminary thoughts. …
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2576943.988446
It can be convenient to personify moral theories, attributing to them the attitudes that would be fitting if the theory in question were true: “(Token-monistic) utilitarianism treats individuals as fungible mere means to promoting the aggregate good.” “Kantianism cares more about avoiding white lies than about saving the life that’s under threat from the murderer at the door.”
If a theory has false implications about what attitudes of care or concern are actually morally fitting, then the theory is false. …
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2591505.988457
Very short summary: In this essay, I show how the so-called AI-value alignment problem can be analyzed as a signaling game with a deception equilibrium. The evolution of deception in the context of the relationship between AIs and humans is unavoidable. …
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2624599.988468
Suppose that believing that your cancer will probably be cured would improve your chances of survival and your quality of life. Or suppose that believing that your son committed a violent crime would cause you and your relationship with him serious harm. Are practical considerations like these normative reasons for and against these beliefs? That is, do these considerations genuinely count in favor of and against having these respective beliefs in the sense that they bear on what you really ought to believe? That’s the question at the heart of the pragmatism-anti-pragmatism debate: pragmatists say, “yes,” while anti-pragmatists say, “no.” According to the anti-pragmatist, the only normative reasons for or against belief are epistemic considerations, which are those that have to do with believing the truth and avoiding error. For example, the anti-pragmatist insists that, if the evidence suggests that your cancer will probably not be cured and that your son committed a violent crime, these evidential considerations are reasons for believing these things, which bear on whether you ought to believe them; the fact that believing these things would be good or bad for you is entirely irrelevant to whether you ought to believe them.
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2626751.988483
The outstanding problem for common origin inferences (“COIs”) is to understand why they succeed when they do; and why they fail when they do. The material theory of induction provides a solution: COIs are warranted by background facts. Whether a COI succeeds or fails depends on the truth of its warranting propositions. Examples from matter theory and Newton’s Principia illustrate how COIs can fail; and an example from relativity theory illustrates a success. Hypotheses, according to the material theory, can be posited as a temporary expedient to initiate an inductive enterprise. This use of hypotheses enables COIs to serve as incentives for further research. It is illustrated with the example of the Copernican hypothesis.
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2635060.988494
Since Meyer and Dunn showed that the rule γ is admissible in E, relevantists have produced new proofs of the admissibility of γ for an ever more expansive list of relevant logics. We show in this paper that this is not cause to think that this is the norm; rather γ fails to be admissible in a wide variety of relevant logics. As an upshot, we suggest that the proper view of γ-admissibility is as a coherence criterion, and thus as a selection criterion for logical theory choice.
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2635153.988504
This is an introduction to the idea that our universe is just one of many universes: it is part of a multiverse. This idea is very topical. A multiverse of one kind or another is seriously advocated by many philosophers. And similarly for physics: many physicists advocate a multiverse---usually of a different kind than that of the philosophers. So the time seems ripe to assess the various versions of this idea. In this book, I will assess three versions of it. One is from philosophy: more specifically, from logic’s treatment of possibility. The other two are from physics: more specifically, the Everettian interpretation of quantum theory, and inflationary cosmology. I will discuss these in order; and then in a final Chapter, compare them and relate them to each other.
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2635174.988516
This paper argues that functionalism, a dominant theory in philosophy of mind, fails to adequately explain the emergence of conscious experience within the Everettian (Many-Worlds) interpretation of quantum mechanics. While the universal wavefunction contains many possible ways of decomposition, functionalism cannot account for why consciousness appears only in decohered, classical-like branches and not in other parts of the wavefunction that are equally real. This limitation holds even if those other parts do not instantiate complex functional structure. We argue that consciousness, as it is observed in many worlds, defies the predictions and explanatory resources of functionalism. Therefore, functionalism must be supplemented or replaced in order to account for the observed phenomenology.
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2635196.988526
Relational Quantum Mechanics posits that facts about the properties of physical systems are relative to other systems. As pointed out by Adlam in a recent manuscript, this gives rise to the question of the relationship between the facts that obtain relative to complex systems and the facts that obtain relative to their constituents. In this paper, I respond to Adlam’s discussion of what she calls the Combination Problem. My starting point is a maximally permissive solution that I suggest should be our default view. Subsequently, I advance three main claims. First, I argue that Adlam’s arguments in favour of a more restrictive approach is required are not compelling. Second, I argue that even if they were, she is wrong to claim that a ‘tamed’ version of RQM with postulated links between perspectives is in a better position to support such a restrictive approach. And third, I point out that the possibly most difficult aspect of the Combination Problem in fact pertains to the combination of quantum states and probabilities. While these issues do raise significant challenges for the permissive solution, I contend that they are likely to arise for any reasonable response to the Combination Problem. More tentatively, I propose a strategy to at least mitigate the difficulty that capitalises on the observer-dependence of relative quantum state assignments. Along the way, I address crucial foundational issues in Relational Quantum Mechanics, from cross-perspective communication to the link between relative facts and experiences to empirical adequacy.
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2635416.98854
How ought scarce health research resources be allocated, where health research spans “basic”, translational, clinical, health systems and public health research? In this paper I first outline a previously suggested answer to this question: the “fair-share principle” stipulates that total health research funding ought to be allocated in direct proportion with suffering caused by each disease. Second, I highlight a variety of problems the fair-share principle faces. The principle is inattentive to problems of aggregation and distribution of harms incurred from disease and benefits accrued from research, and neglects considerations of cost-effectiveness. Moreover, the principle fails to recognise that using Global Burden of Disease Study estimates as proxies for “suffering” underdetermines health research resource allocation. Importantly, in drawing on these estimates, which are disease-centric and only take “proximal” causes of health loss into account, the fair-share principle disregards the social determinants of health. Along with them, the principle ignores public health research, which often focusses on “distal” causes of health loss to improve population health and reduce health inequalities. Following the principle therefore leads to inequitable priority-setting. I conclude that despite relatively widespread appeals to it, the fair-share principle is not an ideal to aim for during priority-setting.
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2662670.988555
Every summer, I host Capla-Con, a two-day festival of nerddom. This year, Capla-Con will be at Carow Hall (4460 Rockfish Creek Lane) on the Fairfax campus of George Mason University on July 12 and 13, noon-midnight both days. …
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2686228.988566
“Degenerate Case” Dialetheism
Motivation: trouble with even the most sophisticated and beautiful gappy approaches e.g. Kripke - the ‘not true’ and samesaying. Priest’s view really is better in a way. A resting place. …
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2723489.988577
In this three-part essay, I investigate Frege’s platonist and anti-creationist position in Grundgesetze der Arithmetik and to some extent also in Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik. In Sect. 1.1, I analyze his arithmetical and logical platonism in Grundgesetze. I argue that the reference-fixing strategy for value-range names—and indirectly also for numerical singular terms—that Frege pursues in Grundgesetze I gives rise to a conflict with the supposed mind- and language-independent existence of numbers and logical objects in general. In Sect. 1.2 and 1.3, I discuss the non-creativity of Frege’s definitions in Grundgesetze and the case of what I call weakly creative definitions.
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2741658.988588
In the early 1830s, Black abolitionist Maria Stewart articulated a republican politics suited to the political condition of Black Americans in the antebellum United States. She did so by reimagining the core republican concepts of domination and civic virtue. Stewart argued that Black Americans, both enslaved and nominally free, were reduced by the white-dominated polity to a position of servitude: as merely fit to serve the good of the white Americans who dominated them and lacking any claim upon the polity’s common good themselves. At the same time, Stewart drew a nuanced distinction between servitude and service that cast Black mothers as exemplars of republican virtue, engaged in social reproductive labor that supported the common good of Black Americans as a people, in which Black mothers themselves partook. Furthermore, Stewart emphasized the liberatory power of partial sympathy- - fellow feeling among the dominated-- as a foundation for racialized civic virtue and solidarity organized around the common good of Black Americans as a people. Stewart’s is a republican politics in which the dominated struggle for their common good in the face of a polity that denies them a claim upon its own.
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2749998.988603
PEA Soup is pleased to introduce this month’s Ethics discussion, featuring David Sobel and Steven Wall’s paper ‘The Subjective/Objective Distinction in Well-Being‘ with a précis by Chris Heathwood. Précis and commentary on Sobel and Wall, “The Subjective/Objective Distinction in Well- Being” (Ethics, 2025) for PEA Soup ‘Ethics discussion’
Chris Heathwood May 26, 2025
Précis
Theories of well-being aim to identify those things that are basically or fundamentally good for subjects of well-being. …
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2750751.988617
Teleosemantics explains meaning by appealing to the biological norms that make error possible, but most work in the field still anchors those norms in evolutionary “selected‐effect” functions. We develop an organismic alternative grounded in the self-maintenance of autonomous systems. Building on sensorimotor theory and enactivism, we reconceptualise goals as second-order constraints—transient attractors in a dynamic sensorimotor field—and show how they are nested into a heterarchy of means–end relations connecting global self‑maintenance of the sensorimotor organization and identity of a system with the most basic sensorimotor coordinations. Drawing on this framework, we identify the minimal necessary requirements for genuine teleological behaviour: 1. Initiation that individuates an action in relation to a goal, 2. Modulatory execution that adaptively compensates perturbations or deploys alternative strategies in relation to the goal, and 3.
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2750776.988631
We often marvel at the beautiful randomness in quantum mechanics, but what if it is simply entropy fulfilling its role as dictated by causality? This paper explores the idea that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle may not represent an intrinsic limitation, but rather a thermodynamic outcome a cost we pay for achieving precision. We examine Gaussian wavefunctions, investigate entropic uncertainty, and demonstrate that increased knowledge of one variable (such as position) leads to a corresponding increase in entropy in its complementary variable (such as momentum). Nature does not conceal the truth; rather, the process of acquiring knowledge alters the equilibrium. By associating entropy with quantum uncertainty, we are not simply reinterpreting mathematics; we are redefining the implications of quantum indeterminacy. Perhaps the universe is not inherently uncertain; it is simply economical with certainty. We propose that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle can be interpreted through the concept of entropy, framing it as an emergent characteristic of the system’s overall information content rather than merely a constraint imposed by quantum mechanics. Investigating this relationship may yield profound insights into the essence of quantum systems and their relationship with the macroscopic realm governed by thermodynamics. This paper offers both a philosophical and mathematical framework that unifies the ideas of entropy and uncertainty, providing a novel viewpoint on one of the most essential principles of quantum mechanics. By analyzing the influence of entropy on quantum uncertainty, this study contests traditional interpretations and encourages a renewed dialogue regarding the foundational principles of physics. It posits that uncertainty transcends mere measurement concerns and may be embedded in the very structure of the universe, prompting a reevaluation of how quantum mechanics integrates into the wider context of physical laws.
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2750814.988643
This paper presents a new account of pragmatic understanding based on the idea that such understanding requires skills rather than abilities. Specifically, one has pragmatic understanding of an affordance space when one has, and is responsible for having, skills that facilitate the achievement of some aims using that affordance space. In science, having skills counts as having pragmatic understanding when the development of those skills is praiseworthy. Skills are different from abilities at least in the sense that they are task-specific, can be learned, and we have some cognitive control over their deployment. This paper considers how the use of AI in science facilitates or frustrates the achievement of this kind of understanding. I argue that we cannot properly ascribe this kind of understanding to any current or near-future algorithm itself. But there are ways that we can use AI algorithms to increase pragmatic understanding, namely, when we take advantage of their abilities to increase our own skills (as individuals or communities). This can happen when AI features in human-performed science as either a tool or a collaborator.
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2805614.988656
The notion of malfunction is critical to biological explanation. It provides a test bed for the normative character of functional attribution. Theories of biological functioning must permit traits to operate but, at the same time, be judged as malfunctioning (in some naturalized, nonarbitrary sense). Whereas malfunctioning has attracted the most attention and discussion in evolutionary etiological approaches, in systemic and organizational theories it has been less discussed.
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2808464.988667
This paper critically examines the central thesis of Kieran Fox’s I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein—namely, that Einstein’s intellectual development constitutes a coherent spiritual path culminating in a form of pantheistic mysticism shaped by both Western and Eastern traditions. Fox presents Einstein as the modern heir to a long-suppressed lineage of rational spirituality, extending from Pythagoras and Spinoza to Vedanta and Buddhism, unified by wonder, reverence for nature, and a vision of cosmic unity. While Fox’s account is imaginatively rich and philosophically syncretic, it risks conflating distinct conceptual registers—scientific, metaphysical, and spiritual—and thereby oversimplifying Einstein’s intellectual complexity. Drawing on Einstein’s scientific writings and personal reflections, this study reconstructs a historically grounded portrait of his thought, emphasizing its tensions, ambiguities, and resistance to spiritual closure. The paper argues that Fox’s interpretation, though rhetorically compelling, substitutes a harmonizing spiritual mythology for the conceptual rigor and epistemic humility that defined Einstein’s actual worldview.
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2808568.988678
In this critical response to John Doris's book "Character Trouble: Undisciplined Essays on Moral Agency and Personality," I analyze his updated take on character skepticism—the view that character traits have surprisingly limited influence on behavior across diverse situations—from a philosophy of science perspective. While I find his updated view compelling, I challenge his reliance on Cohen's conventional effect size benchmarks, arguing that qualitative labels for effect sizes obscure rather than clarify the practical significance of results. I propose that Doris's strongest argument lies in what I call the "disproportion thesis"—the view that personality variables exert less influence, and situational variables more influence, on behavior than our intuitive expectations would predict, creating a disconcerting gap. However, I argue that this thesis requires a more explicit quantification of those prior expectations. I conclude that character skepticism would benefit from formulations of its insights in a way that directly addresses character theorists' empirical commitments, avoiding vague benchmarks and contextualizing effects.