mereology.
58 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-010 v5 | Greater than the parts | A review, with no new theorem, of the ΦID theory of causal emergence. A supervenient feature V_t is k-th-order causally emergent iff Un⁽ᵏ⁾(V_t; X_t′ | X_t) > 0. A system hosts such features iff Syn⁽ᵏ⁾(X_t; X_t′) > 0 (cited as Rosas et al. 2020, Theorem 1), and Syn⁽ᵏ⁾ = D⁽ᵏ⁾ + G⁽ᵏ⁾ (downward causation plus causal decoupling). The review’s own additions are interpretive: the formalism is neutral between Granger and Pearl, coordinate dependence is defended as a feature, and it rebuts the charge that the theory makes no macro-versus-micro comparison. | Read |
| NOTE-020 v4 | Emergence as the conversion of information | Varley and Hoel apply a PID, with the Williams–Beer I_min redundancy, to past→future mutual information and summarise it with a new layer-weighted “synergy bias” B_syn ∈ [0,1]. Coarse-graining can raise B_syn at the macroscale. A macroscale XOR reaches 0.833, against 0.52 for its NAND/AND/OR implementation. In 200 random 3-node “Gaussian” TPMs expanded into equivalence-class micro/mesoscales with identical MI, every macroscale had higher B_syn, by ≈ 0.01–0.07 (r = 0.819 against macroscale B_syn). In 185 near-deterministic systems the change was mostly negative, down to ≈ −0.1. | Read |
| NOTE-027 | Adding causality to individuality | Of Krakauer et al.’s (2020) three mutual-information “individuality” terms (A* = I(S_{t+1}; S_t), A = I(S_{t+1}; S_t | E_t), nC = I(S_{t+1}; E_t | S_t)), Bourrat argues that nC and A* are not individuality measures. He then proposes the interventional  = I(S_{t+1}; Ŝ_t) (Eq. 6) and two ETI criteria: C1, a normalised Â_{S2}/H(Ŝ2) ≥ Â_{S1}/H(Ŝ1)|θ₀, and C2, low Var(Â_{S2} | Ê2 = ê2k). None of these is computed on any system. The paper’s claim that  ≡ I(S_{t+1}; S_t | E_t) = A in Krakauer’s model is false in general. | Read |
| NOTE-064 v2 | Bourrat 2023, a coarse-graining account of individuality | Bourrat proposes that a partition of particles into collectives defines individuals when the “projected” prediction (coarse-grain at t1, then evolve the coarse-grained state) differs from the “truthful” one (evolve at the fine grain, then coarse-grain at t2) by δC = C_T − C_P < θ, across many traits (Eqs. 1–2). He argues that, because measurement and computation are finite, coarse-graining can be the only way to predict at all: in his example, 100 operations predict 10 entities for 10 timesteps or 2 collectives for 50. That indispensability is his whole case for the “quasi-ontological” status of collectives at Godfrey-Smith and Kerr’s fifth stage. Nothing is computed on any model. | Read |
| NOTE-100 v2 | Bourrat — Reproducees, reproducers, Darwinian individuals | Bourrat builds a nested vocabulary. A reproducee is a B that comes after A, is caused by A, and is of A’s relevant class. A reproducer is a reproducee with reproductive autonomy, meaning it can reproduce across a range of backgrounds. A Darwinian individual is a reproducer with high reproductive causal control, meaning heredity survives as the parent’s description is made finer. On that vocabulary, genes of multicellular organisms are, like hearts, mere reproducees, but with high control. Material overlap is necessary for reproducers, which are whole life cycles, and unnecessary for reproducees, so Griesemer and Godfrey-Smith partly talk past each other. Both quantities get an information-theoretic recipe (conditional MI after Bertschinger et al. 2008 for autonomy; interventional MI across grains, Griffiths et al.’s INF, for control), and neither is computed. | Read |
| NOTE-114 v2 | SEP — Biological individuals | A survey that maps biological individuals by crossing two axes: organism / some parts of organisms / some groups of organisms, against living agent (physiological) / Darwinian (evolutionary) individual. The result is nine regions, each given one example (fruit fly, gene, eusocial colony, lysosome, clade, heart, coral reef, virus, squid+Vibrio). “Part” is never defined, and the entry gives no criterion for which parts or groups count: the placements are the authors’ tentative judgements, “moving from less contentious to more contentious examples” (§7). | Read |
| NOTE-115 v2 | Meincke — A process view of pregnancy | Meincke argues that substance ontology forces a binary count of individuals. The Containment View fails empirically, following Kingma. Kingma’s Parthood View either loses foster–neonate identity (“Parts-of-Substances”) or cannot count consistently (“Substances-as-Parts”). If organisms are autopoietic processes, a pregnant individual is instead an asymmetrically bifurcating “hypercomplex” process. The foster is “something in between zero and one” and the whole is “something in between one and two”, and the bifurcation runs on past birth through lactation (“postnatal pregnancy”). | Read |
| NOTE-131 v3 | Schwitzgebel — If materialism is true, the US is conscious | A conditional, informal argument. Any materialist criterion liberal enough to credit rabbits (and rabbit-level distributed aliens, the “squidbits”) and behaviourally human-like but oddly built aliens (Sirian supersquids, Antarean antheads) with consciousness also credits the United States. On this argument the US meets the usual materialist marks of consciousness: sophisticated information processing (roughly 10^14 person-to-person visual “connections”, comparable to the brain’s about 10^14 synapses), goal-directed environmental responsiveness, self-representation and historical embedding. The only exits are eliminativism, extreme sparseness or neurochauvinism, each costlier than the conclusion. The paper argues for no universal criterion. It ends undecided between three readings: US consciousness, a challenge to materialists, or grounds to distrust universal metaphysics of mind. | Read |
| NOTE-134 v3 | Carroll — Reality as a vector in Hilbert space | A programmatic essay, not a result paper. Carroll argues that a quantum theory is fixed, up to unitary equivalence, by the Hamiltonian’s eigenvalue list {E_n} on a finite-dimensional factor (he assumes a non-degenerate spectrum), and that parts are not given. Subsystems (tensor factorisations H = H_S ⊗ H_E or ⨂_α H_α), classicality and space are to be selected afterwards as rare structure that suits the dynamics. The only uniqueness he reports is for local factorisations, and it rests on a cited theorem (Cotler et al. 2019). The system/environment criterion rests on “simple numerical examples” in a companion paper, the metric and Einstein’s equation on “optimistic assumptions”, and emergent fields on a hope. | Read |
| NOTE-148 v2 | Baedke — The Organism (Cambridge Element) | Baedke treats “organism” as a nexus concept with an organizational dimension and a relational dimension, joined by the various kinds of biological individuality. He argues that the standard “persister” (self-maintenance, closure) criterion cannot single organisms out, because colonies, holobionts and ecosystems meet it too, and that organisms are also “overcomers”, able to destabilize and reorganize their own closure. Organisms are then individuated relationally by tracing diachronic causal paths in the unrolled O/E model of Baedke et al. 2021 (LIT-110). The overcomer claim rests on three illustrative cases, anglerfish, sea slug and jumping ant, and is asserted, not shown, to hold of organisms only (p. 40). | Read |
| NOTE-151 v2 | Register — The Depth of the Body | Register argues that body parthood “for moral purposes” is bounded below by depth. Depth is the microphysical commitment of an object’s real definition, and objects that are “too deep” (a water molecule, the parcel of matter now composing the heart, a particular cloud server) are not body parts, though they are parts in the ordinary sense. His two principles (“bodily interests/rights are high-level”) say that events which are high-level neutral do not bear on bodily rights or interests. So a BCI user’s implemented software can be a body part owned by the user while the third-party server that runs it is not. | Read |
| NOTE-163 v2 | SEP — Mereology | The entry argues that no mereological principle, not even the partial-order core M (Reflexivity, Transitivity, Antisymmetry), is merely a fixing of the meaning of “part”. It lays out the ladder M ⊂ MM (+Supplementation) ⊂ EM (+Strong Supplementation) ⊂ GEM (+Unrestricted Sum). GEM is “virtually” a complete Boolean algebra with zero removed, and it is reached from M by exactly three adequate pairings: Supplementation + Unrestricted Sum2, Strong Supplementation + Unrestricted Sum3, and Complementation + Unrestricted Sum1. The influential Simons (1987) pairing, Supplementation + Unrestricted Sum3, which the entry’s own 2003 edition also used, does not yield GEM. | Read |
| NOTE-173 v3 | Griesemer & Shavit — Scaffolding individuality (3Cs) | The paper sets out an idealized three-stage sequence of interaction types, which it calls a “first and rough sketch” (§1). Stage 1 is coordination in collections (pairwise, “aggregative” interactions of co-located individuals). Stage 2 is cooperation in conexuses (a connected web of binary interactions whose benefits can still be counted per member). Stage 3 is collaboration in communities: heterogeneous multi-way interactions around a shared goal, in which generatively entrenched “core” interactions give organizational closure. Table 1 puts the transition to a new level of individuality between stages 2 and 3 only. The paper asserts, rather than argues, that this describes evolutionary transitions non-circularly and that individuality is a special case of collectivity. Its one argued conclusion is hedged: community-level inheritance “seem[s] likely to evolve in tandem” with community-level individuality (§3). | Read |
| NOTE-180 v4 | Clark & Chalmers — The Extended Mind | The paper argues from a functionalist parity claim that a process or standing state which would count as cognitive if it happened in the head counts as cognitive when an external resource carries it, provided the resource is actively coupled to the organism here and now. Otto’s notebook entry is its example of such a standing belief. From this it infers, in one paragraph, that the self extends too. The four “criteria” for a coupled resource (constancy, direct availability, automatic endorsement, and the admittedly “arguable” past conscious endorsement) are offered as the features that make the paradigm case clear. The paper explicitly says they are not necessary and sufficient conditions. | Read |
| NOTE-285 | A topos foundation for theories of physics: IV. Categories of systems | Proposes axioms for a category Sys of physical systems, symmetric-monoidal under composite ⋄ and under disjoint sum ⊔, whose arrows are translations of local languages. Each arrow j : S₁ → S is realised by a left-exact functor τ(j) between the systems’ topoi, together with arrows φ(j) : Σ_{S₁} → τ(j)Σ_S and β(j) : τ(j)R_S → R_{S₁}. Classical physics satisfies the scheme exactly. In quantum theory the disjoint sum H₁⊕H₂ satisfies it (the pulled-back arrow of Â₁⊕Â₂ is δ̆(A₁)), but the composite H₁⊗H₂ does not: the natural pull-back of δ̆(A₁) differs from δ̆(A₁⊗1̂) off the image of V(H₁), which the authors attribute to “operator entanglement”. | Read |
| NOTE-326 | ’What is a Thing?’: Topos Theory in the Foundations of Physics | The Döring–Isham programme in one volume. A theory of a system is a representation of a typed language L(S) in a topos. In quantum theory, presheaves over the abelian von Neumann subalgebras V(H), daseinisation sends projectors injectively to clopen sub-objects of the spectral presheaf Σ, preserving ∨ but not ∧. A pure state gives sieve-valued truth values. Every bounded self-adjoint  becomes an arrow Σ → ℝ^↔ whose value at a point is a pair of monotone functions, an interval that widens as contexts coarsen. Most of it reprints papers I–IV. New are the inverse-image corollary linking PL(S) and L(S), values in a pseudo-state, and the algebra of the quantity-value candidates. The Heyting structure on Sub_cl(Σ) is still only sketched. | Read |
| NOTE-335 | Putnam — Psychological Predicates | Pain is hypothesised to be a functional state of a whole organism, a probabilistic automaton’s state fixed by its machine table, rather than a physical-chemical brain state, because a functional organisation common to all pain-feelers is a likelier invariant than a physical one. The hypothesis carries the anti-nesting condition (3): no pain-feeler has a decomposition into parts that separately possess the pain-capable kind of Description. Its only stated motive is to exclude swarms of bees. Its clause (1) is empty, since everything is a probabilistic automaton under some Description. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-338 | Where Am I? | A first-person story with an argument inside. With his brain in a vat in Houston radio-linked to his body under Tulsa, the narrator tests three answers to “where am I?”: where the body is, where the brain is, where the point of view is. He favours the third and finds it unclear. A computer duplicate of his brain can take over his body with no detectable difference, and when duplicate and brain drift out of step there are two persons in one body. Intuition pumps, no thesis defended to the end. | Read |
| NOTE-339 v2 | Examining the Society of Mind | An exposition, read in full. Singh dates the Society of Mind to Minsky and Papert’s early-1970s robot work, finds its agent in the procedure-bearing frame of 1974, and quotes the unpublished 1976 book drafts. He sorts the 1986 book’s mechanisms into agents, simplest agents, agency construction, problem solving, communication and growth. Agents need no shared code: K-lines, randomly wired buses and paranomes stand in for messages. He finds near-relatives in Bayes nets, case-based reasoning, blackboards, Cyc and Soar, and concludes that the theory has never been implemented. Its claims of lineage are asserted, not shown. | Read |
| NOTE-340 | List — What is it like to be a group agent? | A short, conditional argument. Group agents are real by a thin functionalist definition and a naturalistic indispensability argument, and they have consciousness as awareness. Phenomenal consciousness turns on a bridge principle. Agency-, biology- and information-based principles are surveyed, and IIT is adopted. Three structural reasons (functional decomposability, robustness of steering bodies to partial randomisation, processing done mainly inside members) are said to make a group’s Φ low. The exclusion postulate is a second route. Nothing is computed. The result is used to ground a normative asymmetry: group agents have only derivative rights. | Read |
| NOTE-341 | The Computational Boundary of a “Self” | A hypothesis essay. A Self is the set of parts that pursue goals together, and its boundary is the farthest region of space and time it can measure and act on, its “cognitive light cone”. Selves grow from homeostatic loops by adding memory, anticipation and networks, and cells form larger Selves by sharing bioelectric state through gap junctions. Every level that has its own goal is a Self, so living systems hold many nested Selves at once; the paper says this against IIT in one bracket. It has no model, no measurement of the light cone and no new data, and it confines claims about experience to a closing speculation. | Read |
| NOTE-342 | Chalmers — Does a rock implement every finite-state automaton? | Implementation needs strong, counterfactual-supporting conditionals for every transition in the table, not one run, so Putnam’s rock does not implement every FSA. Repaired, the triviality result survives for weak formalisms. A clock plus a dial implements every inputless FSA. The right input–output dependencies plus an input memory and a dial implement every FSA with those dependencies. Combinatorial-state automata, with independently varying components in distinct physical regions, demand fine-grained causal structure, and a blind implementation must grow exponentially. Logically possible false implementations and an overstrict independence condition are left open. Minds attach to (system, CSA) pairs, so the Chinese room holds two. | Read |
| NOTE-343 | Rupert — Challenges to the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition | Rupert separates extended cognition (HEC) from embedded cognition (HEMC) and from content externalism, then argues that HEC loses to HEMC on conservatism. LIT-097’s criteria give a dilemma: without past endorsement they overgenerate beliefs; with it the organism is privileged. Memory research (conversation, negative transfer, the generation effect, power laws) shows external stores are a different kind, and a generic kind spanning both does no explanatory work. | Read |
| NOTE-344 | Plain Talk About Neurodevelopmental Epistemology | The first worked mechanism of the society-of-agents view, then “The Society of Minds”. Agents too simple for language exchange no messages: each argument sits at a fixed location on shared channels (c-lines), and the agents themselves are short-term memory. A specificity gradient makes low-level communities local, persistence-memory and a case-shift handle interruptions without a stack, and the infant’s internal “cognitive cases” are conjectured to precede and shape linguistic cases. Speculation throughout; the author says so. | Read |
| NOTE-347 | Chalmers — Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia | Organizational invariance, that fine-grained functional isomorphs of a conscious system have the same experiences, is defended by reductio over gradual neuron replacement. Absent qualia would imply a rational being systematically wrong about its own fading experience. Inverted or absent qualia would imply experience that flips with a switch and cannot be noticed. Both are judged implausible, not impossible. The paper extends the argument to a population of homunculi and to a single record-keeping homunculus. The conclusion is natural, not metaphysical, supervenience of experience on organisation, and it says nothing about systems that are not isomorphs. | Read |
| NOTE-348 | The Emotion Machine | Read in the 2005 draft. Emotions are Ways to Think: each emotional state is a selection of mental resources turned on and off, made by Selectors that Critics trigger when they recognise a type of problem, and ordinary thinking uses the same switching. On this design sit six levels of mental activity, panalogies that link descriptions across realms, and a Self that is a network of partial models. It is argued by example and analogy, with no experiment and few neural claims. Against Damasio, the body is a resource the brain exploits, not what an emotion is made of; on Elliot it proposes, without evidence, the reverse causal direction. | Read |
| NOTE-349 | Searle — Minds, brains, and programs | A man who follows English rules for manipulating Chinese symbols can answer Chinese questions like a native speaker without understanding Chinese, so no program is by itself sufficient for understanding. Six replies are answered; the systems reply by having the man internalise the room. Searle grants that machines could think, if they had the brain’s causal powers. The argument concerns intentionality, and its answer to the systems reply rests on treating the internalised system as a part of the man, which is the point in dispute. | Read |
| NOTE-351 | Intelligence without representation | A methodological manifesto with working robots behind it. Brooks argues that AI should build complete autonomous Creatures incrementally and test them in the real world, and that intelligence should be decomposed into parallel activity-producing layers, each running from sensing to action, not into perception, central reasoning and action. His robots have no central representation or control, and their coherence exists “in the eye of an observer”, as in Minsky’s account of human behaviour. The evidence is three layers on one robot, described, not measured, and the broad hypothesis about representation is flagged as a hypothesis. | Read |
| NOTE-352 | K-Lines: A Theory of Memory | Memory as reinstatement: a K-line, attached on a memorable event to the agents then active, later re-imposes that partial mental state. The level-band principle limits it to an intermediate band of levels, so the present is seen as an instance of the past without re-imposing the old answer. K-lines build on earlier K-lines into a K-pyramid against the perceptual P-pyramid; cross-exclusion makes conflicting details cancel into abstraction; learning needs a third, goal-holding net. A programme statement: no simulation, and the P→K link is left unspecified. | Read |
| NOTE-356 | Chalmers — Extended Cognition and Extended Consciousness | Chalmers restates the 1998 extended-mind thesis as a claim about constitution through sensorimotor interaction, because the original statement is satisfied by wired-in “extended circuits” that the critics accept. He keeps the perception-action boundary as the strongest objection, and argues that consciousness does not extend because it needs information directly available for global control, and perception makes availability indirect. Both moves are proposed and defended against a few cases, not demonstrated. | Read |
| NOTE-358 | Chalmers — The combination problem for panpsychism | A taxonomy, not a solution. The combination problem is three problems (subject, quality, structure) plus four smaller ones (unity, boundary, awareness, grain). Each yields an argument against constitutive panpsychism, and subject-summing and structural mismatch are the strongest. Responses fall into emergent, autonomous, identity and combinatorial panpsychism. The non-combinatorial ones pay in mental causation or revised physics. Phenomenal bonding, quantum holism, small palettes and informational composition are judged most promising, but none is shown to work. James’s argument at its origin is an argument against group minds, and a footnote objects to IIT’s exclusion postulate that it makes consciousness extrinsic. | Read |
| NOTE-362 v2 | Kammerer — How a materialist can deny that the US is probably conscious | The Sophisticated Anti-Nesting Principle. A whole W with a functional property P that would normally suffice for conscious state S lacks S if some part of W plays a role that (A) requires the part to have conscious states representing W and (B) is needed for W to have P (or any other property sufficient for S). The SAP leaves the antheads and Block’s tiny-people brain conscious, permits some group consciousness, and denies the US conscious states because its citizens represent it and could not be replaced by parts that do not. Its defence is an Occam-style rule against ascribing consciousness where other subjects’ states explain the behaviour, plus a tu quoque on residual arbitrariness. | Read |
| NOTE-364 | The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity | A self is an abstractum like a centre of gravity, posited by interpretation, and like a fictional character it is indeterminate beyond what its story fixes. A mindless novel-writing robot can author a self whose story is true of the robot. Brains are bundles of partly autonomous systems that make themselves cohere into one autobiography, and when the story coheres around two points there are two selves. The essay argues by analogy and thought experiment. Its evolutionary account of self-talk is speculation, and its evidence is cited. | Read |
| NOTE-365 | Integrated Information Theory 3.0 | The 2014 restatement of IIT. Five axioms of experience become five postulates about mechanisms in a state, and an experience is identified with the maximally irreducible conceptual structure of a complex. Exclusion is the anti-nesting rule: of all overlapping sets of elements, only the one with locally maximal Φ is conscious, so no subset or superset of a complex is. It is postulated from the axiom that experience has definite borders; Occam’s razor is invoked only for exclusion within a mechanism. Logic-gate examples give minor complexes, a conscious inactive network, a minimally conscious photodiode and a feed-forward zombie. Nothing larger than about a dozen elements is computable. | Read |
| NOTE-366 | Block — Troubles with Functionalism | Functionalism fixes mental states only by their relations to inputs and outputs, so a body run by a billion radio-linked people, each executing one line of your machine table, is functionally equivalent to you. There is prima facie doubt that it has qualia, and Block argues the doubt has a rational basis: it is unlike us in psychology and neurophysiology, and it was built to mimic us. The doubt does not depend on the parts having minds. Putnam’s anti-nesting stipulation is an ad hoc patch that fails in every version Block tries. Psychofunctionalism secures beliefs but perhaps not qualia, and no account of inputs and outputs avoids both liberalism and chauvinism. | Read |
| NOTE-368 | Adams & Aizawa — The bounds of cognition | Adams and Aizawa grant LIT-097’s parity sentence but deny that any actual case meets it. Cognition, they assume, needs non-derived content and a distinctive kind of causal process. Otto’s inscriptions have only derived content, Otto’s retrieval uses vision and motor control that Inga’s does not, and coupling a process to its surroundings does not extend it. So cognition is brain-bound as a contingent fact, and human-plus-tool systems are too motley for a science. | Read |
| NOTE-369 | Chalmers — Foreword to Supersizing the Mind | Ten years after LIT-097, its co-author says the iPhone has made the thesis vivid, that the only principled objection is the perception-action boundary, and that the right reply is to let belief-ascription follow explanatory purpose, so that Otto’s belief is extended for some explanations and not others. Consciousness probably stays internal, because no twin case for it can be built. The thesis needs only a weak parity-style functionalism. | Read |
| NOTE-373 | Survival and Identity | What matters in survival is the R-relation (mental continuity and connectedness among person-stages), and it is also identity, because persons are maximal R-interrelated aggregates of stages and so the relation of being stages of one person is the R-relation. Fission and fusion become persons sharing stages, counted by tensed identity; the long-lived Methuselah is a continuum of overlapping persons; degrees come from supervaluation over cut-offs. Against Perry’s lifetimes, two persons, not three, take part in a fission. | Read |
| NOTE-374 | Personal Identity | A survey of the persistence debate with an animalist’s emphasis. It separates seven questions, argues that the persistence question concerns numerical identity and must not presuppose person essentialism, and sets out psychological-continuity, brute-physical and anticriterialist answers. Fission and the too-many-thinkers objection are the two arguments that do the work. It avoids the word “self”. One in-text citation (Olson and Witt 2020) has no matching bibliography entry. | Read |
| NOTE-380 | Adams & Aizawa — Defending the Bounds of Cognition | A reply to a manuscript of Clark’s “Memento’s Revenge”. It names the coupling-constitution fallacy, coupled is not part of, and restates the 2001 marks of the cognitive. Against Clark’s Euler-circle case it separates how a diagram gets its meaning from how a mental image of it does. Against a “brain-tool science” it argues that tools are an open-ended motley. The fallacy is shown by one analogy, and the processing differences are asserted, not measured. | Read |
| NOTE-381 | Schwitzgebel — Is the United States Phenomenally Conscious? Reply to Kammerer | Three concerns about Kammerer’s Sophisticated Anti-Nesting Principle. It may not exclude actual groups, even the US, because citizens may not consciously represent the concrete entity at issue. Condition A’s “required” makes group consciousness depend on members’ motives: read loosely it gives flickering consciousness with no group-level change, read strictly it can never be met. The Occam-style justification either generalises into causal exclusion or is ad hoc, and group-level explanation is often simpler. Kammerer’s is still the best anti-nesting principle the author has met. | Read |
| NOTE-385 | Of Identity and Diversity | Identity is relative to the idea the name stands for: same mass, same life (oak, horse, man), same consciousness (person). A person is a thinking being that “can consider itself as itself”, and personal identity reaches as far back as consciousness can be extended, independent of substance. Man and person come apart (prince and cobbler; day-man and night-man), and “person” is “a forensic term” grounding reward and punishment. Argued from cases and intuitions; “the same consciousness” is never defined. | Read |
| NOTE-386 | Of Personal Identity | No impression of a self is constant, so there is no idea of one; introspection finds only perceptions, and the mind is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”. Its ascribed identity is a fiction of the imagination, like that of ships, churches and plants, produced by resemblance and causation, with memory discovering rather than producing it; hard cases are “grammatical”. The Appendix confesses that two principles, the distinctness of perceptions and the imperceptibility of real connexions, leave the unity of the mind unexplained. | Read |
| NOTE-389 | Ritchie — Social Structures and the Ontology of Social Groups | A structuralist framework for social groups. A social structure is a network of relations constitutively dependent on social factors; it can be overt or covert, intentionally or unintentionally created and instantiated, internal or external to what realizes it. Organized social groups are structured wholes whose internal social structures people occupy; feature social groups are social kinds, nodes in external social structures, which can be intersectional. A restriction to structures that intuitively exist or figure in explanations keeps arbitrary collections out. Motivated, not proved; nothing on agency or minds. | Read |
| NOTE-390 | Ritchie — What are groups? | Six criteria for any theory of groups (members vary across times and worlds; groups are temporary, contingent and located; coincident groups of one kind can be distinct) rule out groups as non-singular pluralities, fusions, Burge aggregates and Effingham’s sets. Proposed: a group is a realization of a structure whose nodes are defined by functional relations; it exists while every node is occupied, members are the occupiers, and two groups are identical at a time only with the same members in the same relations. A sketch of a view, silent on agency. | Read |
| NOTE-393 | Epstein — Social Ontology (SEP) | A survey organised by its author’s own distinction: what grounds a social fact versus what anchors the category it falls under. It reports that ontological individualism is widely assumed and now contested; that grounding has displaced supervenience; that convention, collective acceptance, patterns, practices and language are rival theories of anchoring; and that whether anchoring is a distinct relation is disputed. It covers groups, group agency, institutions, race and gender, artifacts, money, law and language. Survey claims are reported, not argued; one citation (Epstein 2016) is missing from the bibliography, and Schwitzgebel 2015 is listed with critics of group phenomenal states. | Read |
| NOTE-468 | Biological organisation as closure of constraints | A constraint acts on a process while being conserved at that process’s time scale; closure is a set of constraints, each directly dependent on and generative for another, that cannot be split. This separates closure from cycles of processes, grounds functions, and gives a boundary criterion, refined by a preliminary count-based tendency to closure for symbionts and by nested separated closures for levels. Applied only to schematic examples; closure is not claimed to define organisms. | Read |
| NOTE-550 | List & Pettit — Group Agency and Supervenience | Four conditions of agency (§2). A group’s judgments supervene on members’ contributions under a constitution (§3). With a universal domain, robust group rationality is inconsistent with majoritarian, uniform proposition-wise and proposition-wise supervenience (Propositions 1–3), and consistent with set-wise supervenience, as the premise-based and distributed premise-based procedures show (Propositions 4–5; Table 4). The group’s judgment on a conclusion can be fixed by members’ judgments on premises alone. Emergent agency without members’ conception of the group is judged unintelligible (§6). | Read |
| NOTE-555 | Conceptualization of the Holobiont Paradigm as It Pertains to Corals | A mini-review arguing that corals must be studied as holobionts. The holobiont is defined by location (coral plus microbiota in body, mucus and skeleton), and its membership can change. Traits belong to host–symbiont combinations: a novel anemone–alga pairing out-performed both natural ones in oxygen flux at 32–34 °C, and two octocorals lost symbionts by different routes, one per host cell and one with host cells. It asks, without answering, whether the holobiont is the unit of selection. | Read |
| NOTE-704 | Simon — The Architecture of Complexity | Complexity usually takes the form of hierarchy, defined by intensity of interaction rather than subordination. Hierarchies evolve fast because stable intermediate forms survive interruption, and they are nearly decomposable: fast, nearly independent dynamics inside subsystems; slow, aggregate dynamics between them. The theorem is cited, not shown; the evolutionary numbers are illustrative; the social claims are asserted. | Read |
| NOTE-721 | Smith & Varzi — Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries | Spatial boundaries are bona fide where there is a physical discontinuity or qualitative heterogeneity, and fiat where there is not and the boundary owes its existence to demarcation by cognition, language, law or mathematics. Bona fide boundaries get ordinary (Bolzanian) topology, in which a boundary belongs to one side only; fiat boundaries get a Brentanian theory, in which each side has its own and the two coincide. The distinction is about whether a discontinuity is there, not about who made it, so it does not map onto CLAIM-194’s produced/imposed. | Read |
| NOTE-722 | Lewis — Many, but almost one | Lewis gives two solutions to Unger’s problem of the many and combines them. Supervaluation: “cat” is undecided among the candidates, each precisification picks one, so “there is one cat” is super-true. Almost identity: the candidates are cats, but they overlap almost completely, and counting by that overlap gives one, true enough in most contexts. Almost-identity is overlap, not similarity. It is not transitive, its threshold is left undecided, and it fails when the candidates differ substantially. Supervaluation then does the work. | Read |
| NOTE-747 | Watson — Agency, Goal-Directed Behavior, and Part-Whole Relationships | A comparative, scale-relative notion of agency. Given a decomposition into parts with goals of their own, a whole is more agential than its parts when its organization lets them resolve more of their mutual constraints than they would at the equilibrium of the old organization. It shows this as delayed gratification. The essay argues this, and shows in cited models that unsupervised, bottom-up learning can produce such organization. It gives no threshold for an additional agent and no formula beyond comparing total frustration. | Read |
| NOTE-1056 | Gładziejewski — Real patterns, the predictive mind, and the manifest image | A philosophy paper with no data. It traces Dennett’s compression criterion for real patterns through minimum description length and Bayesian inference to variational free energy, so that learning a generative model is extracting real patterns from sensory data. It concludes that the manifest image is a structural description of sensory data, veridical even in a matched vat. The self-model compresses self-generated regularities by positing one common cause, so selves are real as patterns and unreal as substances, and which verdict to give is a dispute over criteria, not facts. It says nothing about consciousness or illusion. | Read |
| NOTE-1490 | Baumgartner & Casini — abductive theory of constitution | Mutual manipulability fails in every case, not some: the surgical interventions it needs cannot exist, and relaxed ones are all fat-handed, so every constitutive model has a pure common-cause model with the same correlations under all manipulations. Unlike causal underdetermination, this survives ideal experimental conditions, because the manipulation itself confounds; there is no crucial experiment for constitution. Their alternative defines constitution by the impossibility of decoupling: a redundancy-free set of parts such that every cause of the phenomenon is a common cause of it and some member, and no expansion of the variable set breaks this. The inference is abductive and only inductively corroborated. | Read |
| NOTE-1491 | Craver & Bechtel — top-down causation without top-down causes | Within levels of mechanisms, talk of top-down and bottom-up causation can be translated into mechanistically mediated effects: intralevel causal chains plus the constitutive relation between a whole and its components. On this account the relation between levels is constitution, not causation. The paper also concedes that the experiments used to find components are symmetrical, share a form with Mill’s methods, and show only prima facie that something is a component rather than a background condition. So they do not by themselves say where a mechanism’s boundary lies. | Read |
| NOTE-1493 | Baumgartner & Gebharter — fat-handedness | If a mechanism’s macro behaviour supervenes on its constituents’ behaviours and constitution is non-causal, every cause of the macro behaviour is a common cause of it and of some constituent’s. Under Woodward 2003 no top-down intervention can then change a constituent, so mutual manipulability entails that nothing constitutes anything; under Woodward’s relaxed interventions it makes whole and part causally related; with a temporal clause it is consistent but its mutual manipulations are all fat-handed and fit a model with no constitution equally well. Constitution is supported only by the second-order fact that no surgical cause of the whole turns up as the variable set grows. | Read |
| NOTE-1494 | Baumgartner, Casini & Krickel — horizontal surgicality | Upper and lower levels of a mechanism can only be manipulated via common causes, so an interventionist analysis of constitution needs a restricted kind of fat-handed intervention. Counting every common cause whose effects stand in supervenience begs the question; counting every common cause cannot tell constituents from sterile effects or detached parts. An intervention that directly changes at most one behaviour on each lower level, and changes its target and the phenomenon simultaneously, is horizontally surgical. Given that every change in a phenomenon is simultaneously realized on every lower level, that simultaneous changes are not causally related, and that co-occurrence is transitive, one such intervention suffices for constitution. The proof presupposes settled parthood and levels. | Read |