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9085.414573
David Wallace’s ‘Dennett’s Criterion’ plays a key part in establishing realist claims about the existence of a multiverse emerging from the mathematical formalism of quantum physics, even after decoherence is fully appreciated. Although the philosophical preconditions of this criterion are not neutral, they are rarely explicitly addressed conceptually. I tease apart three: (I) a rejection of conceptual bridge laws even in cases of inhomogeneous reduction; (II) a reliance on the pragmatic notion of usefulness to highlight quasi-classical patterns, as seen in a decoherence basis, over others; and (III) a structural realist or ‘functional realist’ point of view that leads to individuating those patterns as real macroscopic objects at the coarse-grained level, as they are seen from the Classical Stance (analogous to Dennett’s Intentional Stance). I conclude that the justification of Dennett’s Criterion will be intimately tied up with the fate of strong forms of naturalism, and in particular that Wallacian quantum mechanics is a key case study for concretely evaluating his ‘math-first’ structural realism (Wallace 2022).
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74254.414803
Assume naturalism and suppose that digital electronic systems can be significantly conscious. Suppose Alice is a deterministic significantly conscious digital electronic system. Imagine we duplicated Alice to make another such system, Bob, and fed them both the same inputs. …
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123264.414816
In the course of presenting his own solution to the insolubles (logical paradoxes such as the Liar), Marsilius of Inghen criticises four earlier theories, which appear to be those of Albert of Saxony, (the early) Buridan, Roger Swyneshed and a modification of William Heytesbury’s solution which we find in many textbooks and anonymous treatises known as presentations of the Logica Oxoniensis. Marsilius’s solution bears interesting resemblances to all four, but has its own distinctive features. The core idea of his solution is that all propositions have a two-fold signification, a material signification and a formal one. The material signification, also called the primary or direct signification, is what most would call the proposition’s usual signification; e.g., the material signification of ‘This proposition is false’ is that that proposition is false. Its formal, aka indirect or reflexive, signification is, in the case of affirmative propositions, that the subject and predicate supposit for the same thing, and in the case of negative propositions, that they do not. This reflexive signification derives from the meaning of the (affirmative resp. negative) copula. Thus the reflexive signification of ‘This proposition is false’ is that ‘this proposition’ and ‘false’ supposit for the same thing, that is, that it is false that that proposition is false. Presenting Marsilius’s formal signification in such cases as stating of that proposition’s being false, for example (which is the material signification of ‘This proposition is false’), that it is false (that is, falls under the supposition of ‘false’) suggested to Paul Spade that Marsilius’s solution was a development of Gregory of Rimini’s account. I will argue that any resemblance here is, in the absence of any external evidence, superficial and coincidental, and that Marsilius’s view is much closer to the Oxford solutions and Albert’s—Albert and Marsilius being, after all, members of the English Nation at Paris. Marsilius’s arguments in favour of his theory, and his application of the solution to a range of insolubles, are well worth looking at in detail, which I will do, though not at the length which Marsilius devotes to it.
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239746.414854
According to a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, the causal role of human consciousness in the measuring process is called upon to solve a foundational problem called the “measurement problem.” Traditionally, this interpretation is tied up with the metaphysics of substance dualism. As such, this interpretation of quantum mechanics inherits the dualist’s mind-body problem. Our working hypothesis is that a process-based approach to the consciousness causes collapse interpretation (CCCI) —leaning on Whitehead’s solution to the mind-body problem— offers a better metaphysical understanding of consciousness and its role in interpreting quantum mechanics. This article is the kickoff for such a research program in the metaphysics of science.
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239769.414862
This chapter examines the history of philosophy of psychology and philosophy of psychiatry as subfields of philosophy of science that emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The chapter also surveys related literatures that developed in psychology and psychiatry. Philosophy of psychology (or philosophy of cognitive science) has been a well-established subfield of philosophy of mind since the 1990s and 2000s. This field of philosophy of psychology is narrowly focused on issues in cognitive psychology and cognitive science. Compared to the thriving subfield of philosophy of cognitive science, there has been a lack of corresponding interest among philosophers of science in broader methodological questions about different paradigms and fields of study in psychology. These broader methodological questions about psychology have been addressed in the field of theoretical psychology, which is a subfield of psychology that materialized in the 1980s and 1990s. Philosophy of psychiatry emerged as a subfield of philosophy of science in the mid-2000s. Compared to philosophy of psychology, the philosophy of psychiatry literature in philosophy of science engaged with issues examined in an older and more interdisciplinary tradition of philosophy of psychiatry that developed after the 1960s. The participation of philosophers of science in the literature on theoretical psychology, by contrast, has been limited.
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395875.414869
Among the various proposals for quantum ontology, both wavefunction realists and the primitive ontologists have argued that their approach is to be preferred because it relies on intuitive notions: locality, separability and spatiotemporality. As such, these proposals should be seen as normative frameworks asserting that one should choose the fundamental ontology which preserves these intuitions, even if they disagree about their relative importance: wavefunction realists favor preserving locality and separability, while primitive ontologists advocate for spatiotemporality. In this paper, first I clarify the main tenets of wavefunction realism and the primitive ontology approach, arguing that seeing the latter as favoring constructive explanation makes sense of their requirement of a spatiotemporal ontology. Then I show how the aforementioned intuitive notions cannot all be kept in the quantum domain. Consequently, wavefunction realists rank locality and separability higher than spatiotemporality, while primitive ontologists do the opposite. I conclude that however, the choice of which notions to favor is not as arbitrary as it might seem. In fact, they are not independent: requiring locality and separability can soundly be justified by requiring spatiotemporality, and not the other way around. If so, the primitive ontology approach has a better justification of its intuitions than its rival wavefunction realist framework.
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466312.414876
from our empathy for the dead. Much needs to be done to give a satisfying defense of this proposal — beginning with a defense of the suggestion that empathy can extend, beyond the living, to those who experience nothing. But the very suggestion that empathy plays even some role in grief may itself come as a surprise. In fact, the suggestion goes against the grain of much recent theorizing in philosophical discussions of grief. One of the major divides in this literature is between “agent-centered” views of grief, which claim that the loss to be grieved is a loss from the perspective of the bereaved person’s life, and “object-centered” views, which claim that the loss to be grieved is an objective loss of life, not, primarily, a loss to the griever. Empathy disappears from view in this setting because it straddles the divide between self (the grieving agent) and other (the objective loss); in empathizing, it is said that one feels for another.
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466365.414887
Thoughts are like Pancakes, and the Brain is the Pan wherein they are tossed and turned by the several Objects, as several Hands.
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528588.414893
Philosophers of science commonly connect ontology and science, stating that these disciplines maintain a two-way relationship: on the one hand, we can extract ontology from scientific theories; on the other hand, ontology provides the realistic content of our scientific theories. In this article, we will critically examine the process of naturalizing ontology, i.e., confining the work of ontologists merely to the task of pointing out which entities certain theories commit themselves to. We will use non-relativistic quantum mechanics as a case study. We begin by distinguishing two roles for ontology: the first would be characterized by cataloging existing entities according to quantum mechanics; the second would be characterized by establishing more general ontological categories in which existing entities must be classified. We argue that only the first step is available for a naturalistic approach; the second step not being open for determination or anchoring in science. Finally, we also argue that metaphysics is still a step beyond ontology, not contained in either of the two tasks of ontology, being thus even farther from science. Keywords: ontology, ontological naturalism, quantum mechanics, metaontology.
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701623.414903
This paper integrates type functionalism with the Kairetic account to develop context-specific models for explaining mental states, particularly pain, across different species and systems. By employing context-dependent mapping fc, we ensure cohesive causal explanations while accommodating multiple realizations of mental states. The framework identifies context subsets Ci and maps them to similarity subspaces Si, capturing the unique physiological, biochemical, and computational mechanisms underlying pain in different entities such as humans, octopi, and AI systems. This approach highlights the importance of causal relations in defining mental states and preserves their functional roles across diverse contexts. Furthermore, the paper incorporates elements of token functionalism by recognizing species-specific realizations of mental states. By acknowledging the unique representations of mental states within different species and systems, the framework provides a nuanced understanding of how similar functional roles can be fulfilled by diverse physical substrates. This synthesis of type and token functionalism enhances our explanatory power and coherence in addressing the complex nature of mental states. The resulting framework offers a robust tool for analyzing and understanding mental phenomena, with significant implications for cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence. By maintaining the functional roles of mental states while accommodating their multiple realizations, this approach not only advances theoretical understanding but also opens new avenues for practical applications in cross-species empathy, AI ethics, and the development of context-aware cognitive models.
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701794.414909
Existing metaphysical accounts of mechanisms commit to the existence of objects or entities posited in scientific theories, and thus fall within the category of maximal metaphysics. In this paper, I demonstrate the incompatibility of object-based metaphysics of mechanisms with the prevailing trend in the philosophy of physics by discussing the so-called bottoming-out problem. In response, I propose and flesh out a structuralist metaphysics of mechanisms based on Ontic Structural Realism (OSR), which is a kind of minimal metaphysics. I argue that the metaphysical underpinnings of mechanisms are structures, whose metaphysical nature is elaborated through comparison with existing metaphysical theories of mechanisms. After that, I address the concern of whether objects in mechanisms can be accommodated in my account by invoking existing metaphysical theories of objects in special science by structuralists, such as Ladyman and Ross (2007)’s real pattern account and suggesting a potential alignment between OSR and processual ontology. Finally, I demonstrate how my view can naturally serve as the metaphysics for Mechanism 2.0 and be applied to systems biology.
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932571.414918
Recent advances in stem cell-derived human brain organoids and microelectrode array (MEA) technology raise profound questions about the potential for these systems to give rise to sentience. Brain organoids are 3D tissue constructs that recapitulate key aspects of brain development and function, while MEAs enable bidirectional communication with neuronal cultures. As brain organoids become more sophisticated and integrated with MEAs, the question arises: Could such a system support not only intelligent computation, but subjective experience? This paper explores the philosophical implications of this thought experiment, considering scenarios in which brain organoids exhibit signs of sensory awareness, distress, preference, and other hallmarks of sentience. It examines the ethical quandaries that would arise if compelling evidence of sentience were found in brain organoids, such as the moral status of these entities and the permissibility of different types of research. The paper also explores how the phenomenon of organoid sentience might shed light on the nature of consciousness and the plausibility of artificial sentience. While acknowledging the speculative nature of these reflections, the paper argues that the possibility of sentient brain organoids deserves serious consideration given the rapid pace of advances in this field. Grappling with these questions proactively could help set important ethical boundaries for future research and highlight critical avenues of scientific and philosophical inquiry. The thought experiment of sentient brain organoids thus serves as a valuable lens for examining deep issues at the intersection of neuroscience, ethics, and the philosophy of mind.
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1221377.414927
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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1221408.414935
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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1798429.414941
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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1886301.414948
Under what conditions are material objects, such as particles, parts of a whole object? This is the composition question and is a longstanding open question in philosophy. Existing attempts to specify a non-trivial restriction on composition tend to be vague and face serious counterexamples. Consequently, two extreme answers have become mainstream: composition (the forming of a whole by its parts) happens under no or all conditions. In this paper, we provide a self-contained introduction to the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness. We show that IIT specifies a non-trivial restriction on composition: composition happens when integrated information is maximized. We compare the IIT restriction to existing proposals and argue that the IIT restriction has significant advantages, especially in response to the problems of vagueness and counterexamples. An appendix provides an introduction to calculating parts and wholes with a simple system.
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2230253.414955
Wilhelm (Forthcom Synth 199:6357–6369, 2021) has recently defended a criterion for comparing structure of mathematical objects, which he calls Subgroup. He argues that Subgroup is better than SYM , another widely adopted criterion. We argue that this is mistaken; Subgroup is strictly worse than SYM . We then formulate a new criterion that improves on both SYM and Subgroup, answering Wilhelm’s criticisms of SYM along the way. We conclude by arguing that no criterion that looks only to the automorphisms of mathematical objects to compare their structure can be fully satisfactory.
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2341698.414961
The big bang is the cause of every event in our universe, and hence it explains all subsequent cosmic history. But can we explain the big bang itself? This chapter explores a number of different styles of explanation that might be offered. These include causal explanations of the big bang, either by a physical or a nonphysical cause: here I focus especially on Roger Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology. They also include non-causal explanations of the big bang in terms of an underlying physical or non-physical fundamental basis for the universe, or in terms of fundamental physical laws.
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2490923.414966
In this paper, I argue that no theory of consciousness can simultaneously respect four initially plausible metaphysical claims – namely, ‘first-person realism’, ‘non-solipsism’, ‘non-fragmentation’, and ‘one world’ – but that any three of the four claims are mutually consistent. So, theories of consciousness face a ‘quadrilemma’. Since it will be hard to achieve a consensus on which of the four claims to retain and which to give up, we arrive at a landscape of competing theories, all of which have pros and cons. I will briefly indicate which kinds of theories correspond to the four horns of the quadrilemma.
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2606344.414972
This book is the second of two volumes on belief and counterfactuals. It consists of five of a total of eleven chapters. ... ... Finally, while merely a change in terminology, I should perhaps note that, throughout the second volume, I follow my own suggestion from the first volume of referring to subjective probabilities not anymore as what they are not, viz., degrees of belief, but as what they are: degrees of certainty.
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2708296.414978
Why is copper red? Why is it so soft compared to, say, nickel—the element right next to it in the periodic table? Why is it such a good conductor of electricity? All of this stems from a violation of Hund’s rules. …
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2721760.414985
Downward causation plays a central role in the debate around levels of mechanism. Both levels’ enthusiasts and skeptics reject it, arguing that it is incoherent to conceive of wholes causing the parts which constitute them. In this paper, I advance an argument from causal constraints against claims of the unintelligibility of constitutive downward causation, arguing that constitution relations neither exhaust the totality of relations that a proper whole is subject to, nor do they preclude another type of relation that a proper whole can have with respect to another proper whole.
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2721992.414992
The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns in English and many other languages. Tree, chair, person, group, and portion are count nouns, which come with the plural and accept numerals such as one and first; water, rice, furniture, silverware, and law enforcement are mass nouns, which lack the plural and do not accept numerals. The morpho-syntactic distinction is generally taken to have semantic content or reflect a semantic mass-count distinction. At the center of the semantic mass-count distinction is, in some way or another, a notion of being one or being a single entity, the basis of countability. There is little unanimity, however, of how the notion of being a single entity is to be understood and thus what the semantic mass-count distinction consists in.
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3301020.414999
The Goldblatt-Thomason theorem is a classic result of modal definability of Kripke frames. Its topological analogue for the closure semantics has been proved by ten Cate et al. (2009). In this paper we prove a version of the Goldblatt-Thomason theorem for topological semantics via the Cantor derivative. We work with derivative spaces which provide a natural generalisation of topological spaces on the one hand and of weakly transitive frames on the other.
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3352727.415005
tences—‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white—Quine writes: “To ascribe truth to the sentence is to ascribe whiteness to snow; such is the correspondence, in this example. Ascription of truth just cancels the quotation marks. Truth is disquotation” (PT: 80).
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3476748.415011
In this article, I try to shed new light on Frege’s envisaged definitional introduction of real and complex numbers in Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884) and the status of cross-sortal identity claims with side glances at Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (vol. I 1893, vol. II 1903). As far as I can see, this topic has not yet been discussed in the context of Grundlagen. I show why Frege’s strategy in the case of the projected definitions of real and complex numbers in Grundlagen is modelled on his definitional introduction of cardinal numbers in two steps, tentatively via a contextual definition and finally and definitively via an explicit definition. I argue that the strategy leaves a few important questions open, in particular one relating to the status of the envisioned abstraction principles for the real and complex numbers and another concerning the proper handling of cross-sortal identity claims.
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3818324.415017
This article distinguishes between two different kinds of biological normativity. One is the ‘objective ’ biological normativity of biological units discussed in anglophone philosophy of biology on the naturalization of such notions as function and pathology. The other is a ‘subjective’ biological normativity of the biological subject discussed in the continental tradition of Canguilhem and Goldstein. The existence of these two distinct kinds of biological normativity calls for a closer philosophical examination of their relationship. The aim of this paper is to address this omission in the literature and to initiate the construction of conceptual bridges that span the gaps between continental, analytic, and naturalist philosophy on biological normativity.
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3990904.415027
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License <www.philosophersimprint.org/000000/> This can be pronounced as the claim that necessarily everything necessarily exists, if it is kept in mind that ‘exists’ is understood in terms of quantification and identity. The position is called first-order necessitism because the quantification in question is first-order, i.e. quantification into the syntactic position of singular terms. First-order contingentism is the view that it is a contingent matter what individuals there are. Thus, first-order contingentists assert the negation of (Nec), which amounts to the claim that possibly something could have failed to exist. Of course, most first-order contingentists also believe the stronger claim that in fact (not merely possibly) many (not just some) individuals could have failed to exist.
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4049502.415033
It is impossible to deduce the properties of a strongly emergent whole from a complete knowledge of the properties of its constituents, according to C. D. Broad, when those constituents are isolated from the whole or when they are constituents of other wholes. Elanor Taylor proposes the Collapse Problem. Macro-level property p supposedly emerges when its micro-level components combine in relation r. However, each component has the property that it can combine with the others in r to produce p. Broad’s nondeducibility criterion is not met. This article argues that the amount of information required for r is physically impossible. Strong Emergence does not collapse. But the Collapse Problem does. Belief in Strong Emergence is strongly warranted. Strong Emergence occurs whenever it is physically impossible to deduce how components, in a specific relation, would combine to produce a whole with p. Almost always, that is impossible. Strong Emergence is ubiquitous.
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4079279.41504
Faced with an intractable problem, some philosophers employ a singular strategy: their idea is to dismiss or dissolve the problem in some way, as opposed to meeting it head on with a proposed solution. Multiversism in many of its varieties has recently emerged as a popular application of this approach to the continuum problem: CH is true in some worlds, false in others; the effort to settle it one way or the other is misguided, a pseudo-problem. My goal here is to examine a few actual and possible implementations of this strategy, but first, in the interest of transparency, I should acknowledge a tendency toward the opposing view of CH. At least for now, I believe that one of the most pressing questions in the contemporary foundations of set theory is how to extend ZFC (or ZFC+LCs) in mathematically defensible ways so as to settle CH (and other independent questions) and to produce a more fruitful theory. It seems best to begin by sketching in my own peculiar take on this opposing view. Then, with this as backdrop, I’ll turn to multiversism.