metaphysics.
141 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-007 v2 | From the origin of life to pandemics | An editorial review with no new result. Its one formal item (§4, Eq. 4.1: x(t+1) = f[x(t)], x(0) = x₀) sorts phenomena three ways. Non-emergent: local rules plus initial conditions let you deduce the “expected” high-level pattern. Weakly emergent: they let you deduce an “unexpected” one by computation. Strongly emergent: no deduction is possible even in principle. “Unexpected” is never defined. The rest is a cross-domain survey (§3), a 16-paper map of the theme issue (§5), and an outlook (§6). | Read |
| 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-030 v2 | Pusey, Barrett & Rudolph, reality of the quantum state (PBR) | Take pure states |ψ0⟩, |ψ1⟩ with |⟨ψ0|ψ1⟩| = cos θ. Assume (a) a model assigns each preparation a distribution µ_i(λ) over physical states, (b) n independent preparations yield the product distribution µ_{x1}(λ1)⋯µ_{xn}(λn), and (c) outcome probabilities depend only on (λ1, …, λn). If the model’s predictions are within ε of quantum theory, then D(µ0, µ1) ≥ 1 − 2ε^{1/n} for any n with 2^{1/n} − 1 ≤ tan(θ/2) (Eq. 7, App. B). At ε = 0 the distributions for distinct pure states cannot overlap on a set of non-zero measure, so Harrigan–Spekkens ψ-epistemic models are ruled out. | Read |
| NOTE-038 v2 | Structural Realism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) | The entry presents structural realism (Worrall 1989) as the attempt to keep both the no-miracles argument and the lesson of theory change. What is retained, and what we are entitled to believe, is structure, understood by ontic structuralists as modal structure. It sorts the view into an epistemic form, which falls to the Newman/Demopoulos–Friedman triviality result when stated as a Ramsey sentence (§3.2), and an ontic form with seven distinguishable theses, from eliminativism about individuals to “objects are constructs” (§4). The ontic form is motivated by quantum non-individuality and entanglement, gauge symmetry and the hole argument. The entry closes with seven objections, each answered in the author’s own voice (§5). | Read |
| NOTE-072 v2 | Hance et al., wavefunctions as knowledge and reality | The paper argues, informally and without formal results, that Harrigan–Spekkens’ ψ-ontic/ψ-epistemic are contradictories only by stipulation. On the informal senses, “represents reality” and “represents knowledge”, a wavefunction can be both. It offers a weaker sufficient condition for “epistemic” (Eq. 6: for some ψ, A, S, the response function A(S|λ) is not equal to the Born probability p^ψ_A(S) throughout Λψ), which non-overlapping models can meet. It concludes that PBR “shows that wavefunctions cannot overlap on state space, but it says nothing about whether they are epistemic in the broader sense”, so it “does not rule out all epistemic models” (§V). | Read |
| NOTE-077 v2 | Cuffaro & Hartmann, The Open Systems View | The paper argues philosophically, not formally, that the quantum theory of open systems “GT” is more fundamental than standard closed-system quantum theory “ST”. GT treats states as density operators that evolve, in general, non-unitarily, and it admits not-completely-positive maps. The ontic and epistemic cases each win only on a second, interpretation- or practice-laden criterion: OntFund-2 and EpFund-2. On the first, formal criteria (OntFund-1, EpFund-1) the two frameworks tie, and the authors say so because Stinespring dilation and dropping the Lindblad terms translate in both directions (§4.1, §4.2.1). Explanatory fundamentality is granted only deflationarily (ExFund-1), and the authors recommend dropping the notion (§4.2.2). The step from there to “the open systems view is fundamental tout court” (§4.3) rests on the special sciences and on “there are no other options”. | Read |
| NOTE-089 | Nagel: what is it like to be a bat | An organism is conscious if and only if there is something it is like to be it. That subjective character is tied to a type of point of view. Every functional, intentional or causal-role analysis leaves it out, since each is compatible with its absence. Psychophysical reduction therefore cannot follow the usual pattern of dropping a point of view in favour of a more objective description of the same thing: for experience, that leads away from the phenomenon. Physicalism is left not refuted but not yet understandable. The closing proposal is an “objective phenomenology” of the structure of experience. | Read |
| NOTE-091 v2 | Pernu — Mental causation via neuroprosthetics? | The interventionist/difference-making case for nonreductive mental causation from BCIs (List & Menzies 2009; Menzies 2015; Woodward 2008a,b, 2017) misplaces multiple realisation. What the ensemble recordings show is that one cortical-level variable N (the ensemble’s average firing) is realised by many single-neuron patterns N1, N2. Each intention M corresponds to one value of N. So the counterfactual contrast “∼M □→ ∼B true, ∼N □→ ∼B false” fails, and neuroprosthetics supports mental causation only by identifying M with N, not nonreductive physicalism. | Read |
| NOTE-094 v4 | Nahas & Sachs — What’s at stake in naturalizing teleology | The paper argues that “naturalizing teleology” serves at least two relatively autonomous projects with different success criteria. One is scientific: whether an organism-centred account improves biology, which requires operationalisable models that may trade truth for usefulness. The other is philosophical: whether organismal teleology reshapes the liberal-versus-scientific naturalism debate about mind in nature, which requires truth but no operationalisation. It applies the distinction to one recurring dispute, the demarcation of teleological systems from dissipative structures. In the scientific context, models “cannot and need not” demarcate (§4.1: Cusimano & Sterner; McShea & Babcock). In the philosophical context, preferences between accounts turn on unstated commitments (§4.2: García-Valdecasas’s Aristotelian case for Deacon over the Organizational Approach). | Read |
| NOTE-095 v2 | Morganti — From OSR to metaphysical coherentism | Morganti argues from a survey rather than proving anything. Strong, moderate and contextualist OSR each fail as metaphysics: particle kinds have intrinsic features no group-theoretic analysis reduces, and the argument from permutation invariance is inconclusive. What OSR gets right about symmetry, entanglement and particle kinds is better captured by “metaphysical coherentism”: object-like entities (in one domain) stand in symmetric partial ontological dependence on one another. Cycles of such dependence can be kept irreflexive, and so explanatorily non-trivial, by relaxing transitivity (quasi-transitivity) or by making only partial dependence symmetric. | Read |
| NOTE-096 v2 | Karpenko — Defending informational structural realism | Karpenko argues against V.E. Terekhovich’s non-eliminative OSR, which holds that entities and structures exist but “objects do not exist”. He extends Floridi’s informational structural realism with one thesis: empirically equivalent but structurally different models (wave/particle/field descriptions, superstring dualities, AdS/CFT holography, equivalent programs in digital physics) have equal ontological standing. Since nothing stands “behind” them with a privileged configuration, the descriptions, i.e. information, are themselves fundamental, and theoretical objects exist as ontological primitives. There is no formal argument, and the physics is presented by assertion, with several errors. | Read |
| NOTE-099 v2 | Floridi — A defence of informational structural realism | Floridi argues informally in four steps. (1) ESR and (non-eliminativist) OSR are compatible once indexed to levels of abstraction. ESR’s minimal commitment to knowable relations holds at a first-order LoA. At a reflective (“transcendental”) second-order LoA, a second Ockham principle licenses taking the relata to be structural objects. (2) The relata-need-relations regress is blocked by Eddington’s “package hypothesis”: not all relata are logically prior to relations. (3) Structural objects are informational objects, clusters of data understood as concrete “differentiae de re”, made scalable by the object-oriented-programming model. (4) Together these give “informational structural realism”, on which “the ultimate nature of reality is informational” (p. 32). | Read |
| NOTE-103 v2 | SEP — Philosophy of statistical mechanics | The entry argues that statistical mechanics has no canonical formalism but three umbrellas — Boltzmannian SM, the Boltzmann Equation and Gibbsian SM — and that every live account of the approach to equilibrium (ergodic, typicality, Mentaculus, long-run residence time, coarse-graining, interventionist, epistemic) survives Loschmidt’s and Zermelo’s objections only by giving up strict irreversibility or adding something outside the isolated dynamics; it closes on the unresolved “schism” that physicists compute in GSM while philosophers explain in BSM. | Read |
| NOTE-105 v2 | Dorato — Events and the Ontology of Quantum Mechanics | Dorato argues, without formal results, that events are the metaphysical category best suited to quantum mechanics. An event reading fits GRW flashes, GRW matter density and Bohmian worldlines, and also the antirealist views of ψ held by Bohr, Rovelli, Haag and Pashby. Because it is the same across interpretations, he calls it “interpretation-independent” (p. 12). Where ψ needs a realist reading, it should be read as intrinsic dispositions of events. Esfeld et al.’s view has the opposite structure: bare matter points plus a single holistic power of the universal configuration. Dorato argues that view is unintelligible, and that it must change its ontology when it passes from the universal wave function to the effective one (pp. 13–15). | Read |
| NOTE-107 v2 | Religion and Science (SEP) | A survey, not an argument. It reports that the scholarly field rejects the conflict model the public holds, and it finds Barbour’s four-way taxonomy (conflict, independence, dialogue, integration) influential but neither exhaustive nor exclusive. Its survey of five traditions shows the relation varies with creed and colonial history, and it describes the field fragmenting into claim-by-claim “science engaged theology”. Its metaphysical content is concentrated in §1.2 (methodological vs ontological naturalism) and §3.1 (divine action under deterministic, chaotic and quantum physics; primary vs secondary causation; chance and providence). | Read |
| NOTE-109 v2 | Bender et al. — What Lives? (definitions of life) | Three LLMs (Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4o, Llama 3.3 70B), each run 3 times on both orderings of every pair, rated 68 hand-solicited definitions of life on a −1 to 1 “correlation” rubric. The averaged matrix, cut by complete-linkage clustering at an elbow, gives 8 clusters, 45/68 of them (66%) in “Cognitive Autonomy” (n=24) and “Dissipative Self-Organizing Systems” (n=21). The clusters are weak: the repo’s own saved statistics give an overall silhouette of 0.079, and cross-model agreement is an unadjusted Rand index of 71–79% against a chance level of about 62–74%. The headline that life is “a continuous semantic landscape” is not tested against any alternative. | Read |
| NOTE-110 v2 | Belot — Quantum states for primitive ontologists | Inside primitive-ontology Bohmian mechanics, Belot compares four readings of the quantum state: a field on configuration space, a multi-field on 3-space, a law, and a history of velocity dispositions of the particle system. Every reading except the multi-field carries a hard open question: why the world looks 3-dimensional, whether laws can be time-indexed, and whether dispositions lose content. The last is shown by the particle in a box, where every energy eigenstate φn = sin(πnx) induces the same at-rest disposition. The orthodox should prefer the multi-field reading; Belot, on van Fraassen’s view of interpretation, prefers to keep the others alive. | Read |
| NOTE-112 v3 | Poltorak — Wave-function realism and causal closure | A closure principle has two tacit parameters, its domain and its completeness relation (causal, dynamical or explanatory). Wave-function realism falsifies spatiotemporal-domain closure (STC) but is compatible with fundamental-physical closure (FPC), so there is no “trans-domain causal breach”. The physicalist is left with a dilemma: STC is too narrow, and FPC needs an independent criterion of physicality plus a dynamical-to-causal bridge. The paper tests this across primitive-ontology, spacetime-state, multi-field, Everettian, nomological and dispositional readings. | 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-117 v2 | Drayson — What motivates mental fictionalism? | Drayson argues that Toon’s two motivations for mental fictionalism both fail. The negative argument needs “committed to internal, intentional, causal states ⇒ committed to the representational theory of mind” (her Premise 2), which is false because non-representational functionalism (Lewis, Putnam, Loar) supplies such states. And Toon’s positive argument, that pretence lets us genuinely assert that a person is in an overall state S that causes their behaviour, gives him a reason to identify S with the belief and so to be a realist rather than a fictionalist. | Read |
| NOTE-118 v2 | Belot — Time and change in mechanics | For theories with ideal existence, uniqueness and a dynamical time-translation group, time is three intertwined ℝ-actions (on spacetime, on the symplectic space of solutions, and on the isomorphic space of initial data), and change is a slicing-indexed family of functions on those spaces. Singular dynamics, gauge freedom and time-dependence each damage this picture in a repairable way. Spatially compact vacuum GR breaks it, because the reduced Hamiltonian vanishes (h ≡ 0) and there is only one canonical isomorphism between the reduced spaces. That is the problem of time. It is not an artefact of the 3+1 split, it does not show change to be illusory, and it is absent from asymptotically flat GR and from artificially generally covariant theories. A parameterized “geometric time”, such as CMC, restores change and, in the CMC case, a time-dependent Hamiltonian flow. | Read |
| NOTE-122 v2 | Barrett et al. — IIT: good, bad and misunderstood | A position paper with no new formal result. It argues four things. IIT’s algorithm is undefined whenever any spatial, temporal or state graining of a system is non-Markovian (Barrett & Mediano 2019), and so gives no output for brains; it cannot handle unbounded continuous state variables; and it has never been computed on any real system. PCI and other “approximations” of Φ are proxies, capturing at most two of the six axioms. The theory would need recasting in continuous fields (the EM field) to fit the standard model. Against critics, the authors hold that IIT can be read with a multi-dimensional measure of global state (mean Φ, variance of cause-effect-structure quantities, structural complexity), on which Aaronson’s inactive expander grid is only minimally conscious, and that IIT’s implied “tiling” panpsychism is no worse than any rival metaphysics. | Read |
| NOTE-124 v3 | McKenzie — Emergence from physics to computer science | Sole-authored survey by a condensed-matter physicist. It takes novelty (a property the parts lack) as the defining mark of emergence and sets it against twelve other characteristics in §2. The six “objective” ones are discontinuities, order, modification of parts, universality, diversity and mesoscale modularity. The six “subjective” ones are self-organisation, unpredictability, irreducibility, contextuality/downward causation, complexity and intra-stratum closure. Case studies from the Ising model to Schelling segregation and LLMs show that each can come apart from novelty: novelty without discontinuity (Kondo, Fermi liquids, spin ice), without unpredictability (BKT, spin ice), and with reduction (Butterfield). §22 sides with weak emergence and argues that strong-emergence claims from molecular structure are weak. | Read |
| NOTE-125 v2 | Dispositions without conditionals | Proposes, and explicitly does not claim to have shown superior, a “possibility conception” of dispositions — a disposition is individuated by its manifestation alone (“a disposition to M, full stop”) and its modality is possibility, graded for terms like ‘fragile’ as manifestation in a sufficient proportion of maximally varied cases (centred worlds), and plain possibility for terms like ‘breakable’; the defence rests on the semantics of ‘-able’ adjectives and a COCA survey (226 relevant uses of ‘disposed to’, none ascribing a philosophers’ disposition to an inanimate object). | Read |
| NOTE-127 v2 | Holik et al. — Quasi-set theory for a quantum ontology | The paper argues, with no new theorem, that the Lombardi–da Costa ontology of properties for quantum mechanics can be stated in Krause’s quasi-set theory Q. On that ontology a system is a bundle of I-type-properties (instances of universal type-properties, represented by the algebra of observables) with no principle of individuality. For each property instance, the indiscernible instances form a qset U([Π]). An atomic bundle is any qset x with qc(x ∩ U) = 1 for each U; the Axiom of Choice in Q guarantees one exists. The bundle’s kind is Q(B) = {x ∈ P(Q) | R(x)}, whose members are all indiscernible. N particles are a subqset N(B) ⊂ Q(B) with qc = N, a definite number with no labels (§6, pp. 19–22). | Read |
| NOTE-129 v2 | Effective ontic structural realism | Ladyman and Lorenzetti argue that three recent “effective realisms” lack a metaphysics that makes them realist rather than constructive-empiricist, and that the Ladyman–Ross OSR package supplies one: realism about modal structure, “to be is to be a real pattern”, and scale-relative ontology. The three are Fraser & Vickers (and Egg) on non-relativistic QM, Williams and Fraser on QFT, and Robertson & Wilson on “theoretical relicts”. Scale relativity also dissolves Saatsi’s inconsistency objection, so Newtonian gravitational forces and GR gravitation “both exist at different scales”. Egg’s 2019 anthropocentrism objection is answered by grounding measurement in decoherence. | Read |
| NOTE-130 v2 | Floridi — The Informational Nature of Personal Identity | Floridi deflates the diachronic question of personal identity, holding that sameness is always relative to a purpose-fixed level of abstraction and that metaphysical versions of the question “do not deserve to be taken seriously” (p. 554). He puts the synchronic question first: what binds a self’s information into a unity. His answer is an admittedly “figurative” 3C model in which the self is the last of three successive encapsulations, corporeal (bonded by chemical bonds), cognitive (bonded by mutual information) and conscious (bonded by semantics, and so dependent on a community). He then reads ICTs as “egopoietic” technologies because they act on all three membranes. | 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-133 v2 | Leitgeb & Ladyman — Criteria of identity and structuralism | Graph theory counts unlabelled graphs whose nodes, or whose isomorphic connected components, cannot be told apart even by an irreflexive relation. Examples are the edgeless two-node graph G′ and any graph with two or more isolated nodes (11 of the 156 unlabelled 6-node graphs). Mathematicians treat these as determinately distinct objects, so the authors conclude that the identity or difference of places in a structure is given by the structure itself, with identity counted among its relations, and not by any criterion of identity. The argument appeals to mathematical practice; it is not a proof. | 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-137 v2 | Hazelwood — Emerging dilemma for reciprocal causation | Hazelwood defines RC as “the process of natural selection is both a cause and effect of processes such as niche construction” and EC as “natural selection is an emergent causal process”. He argues they are incompatible. Emergence here is Wilson’s synchronic dependence plus autonomy, cashed out as Pence’s composition. If EC holds, niche construction partly composes selection, so the two fail Woodward’s independent-fixability condition and cannot stand in a causal relation. If EC fails, selection is either non-causal (statisticalism) or individual-level, which is incoherent because relative fitness needs a population (Millstein, Sober). EES proponents should drop RC but can keep niche construction as a genuine cause of the evolutionary product. | Read |
| NOTE-140 v2 | Gao — The Meaning of the Wave Function | Gao argues first that ψ is real. His case uses protective measurements, which yield ⟨A⟩ on a single system with certainty, in three versions (ch. 4): one in the ontological-models framework using preparation non-contextuality, two he says need no auxiliary assumption, and one that uses a new criterion of reality. He then argues that ψ describes random discontinuous motion (RDM) of N point particles in 3-space: |ψ|² is the density with which each particle is present at each instant, and ψ is a single-case propensity. The main support is that the charge density |ψ|²Q, which protective measurement shows to exist, has no self-interaction (chs. 6–7). If the Born probabilities come from RDM, collapse is real. Gao proposes an energy-conserving, Planck-time-discrete collapse model: Pᵢ(t+t_P) = Pᵢ(t) + (ΔE/E_P)[δ_{EsEi} − Pᵢ(t)], giving τ_c ≈ ħE_P/(ΔE)² (ch. 8). Combined with relativity, it requires a detectable preferred Lorentz frame (ch. 9). | Read |
| NOTE-142 v2 | Wallace — Stating Structural Realism | Wallace argues that reading a physical theory “math-first”, as mathematical models plus representation rather than as sentences aiming at truth, already makes scientific realism structural. Math-first theoretical equivalence and reduction (as instantiation) are coarse-grained enough to dissolve the standard underdetermination and theory-change objections. On this footing epistemic and ontic structural realism differ only in whether metaphysics itself is language-first or math-first. On math-first OSR, objects are whatever the best “predicate precisification” of a theory quantifies over, real patterns are defined through instantiation plus best precisification, and ontology is scale-relative. At every non-fundamental level the two versions coincide. The paper is explicitly a statement of the position, not a defence of it. | Read |
| NOTE-143 v2 | Frankish — Closing the Cartesian Bureau de Change | An illusionist’s commentary on Veit’s A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness. Frankish places Veit’s function-first, evolutionary programme in a “post-Cartesian” (qualia-eliminativist) paradigm. He then argues that two things drag it back towards Cartesianism: Veit keeps the words “qualia” and “phenomenal”, and he writes as if hedonic valence motivates action “in virtue of its feel”. The second implies “a tiny one-dimensional Cartesian bureau de change” that leaves the hard problem “as hard as ever”. Because the two paradigms are “incommensurable” (p. 20), Frankish urges Veit to commit to a thoroughly functionalist account. | Read |
| NOTE-149 v2 | Chakravartty — Ontological Priority and non-eliminative OSR | Non-eliminative OSR needs relations to be prior to their relata in the determination of their identity. Chakravartty argues that every available account of objects (substance, bundle theory, bundles of dispositionally individuated properties) leaves identity-fixing intrinsic features, and that stripping all of them away is just eliminativism. So OSR faces an exclusive disjunction: eliminativism, or a role for the intrinsic in identity. The graph-theory analogy and the physics cases (entanglement, spacetime points) do not escape the dilemma. The argument is conceptual throughout, and it explicitly leaves eliminative OSR untouched. | 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-152 v2 | Le Bihan & Read — Duality and ontology | A survey that sorts realist responses to dualities along two axes. The first is which of the naively interpreted dual worlds count as candidates for actuality: all of them (underdetermination), one (discrimination) or none (nihilism), each with or without the common-core world. That gives options (1)–(6), with the common-core approach being (1), (3) and (5). The second axis is what replaces the common core: an overarching theory, or “pluralism”, on which all dual structures are co-instantiated as parts of one world. Its verdicts are conditional: no option breaks the underdetermination without a further metaphysical principle, such as the PII, for which the authors see no independent support. | Read |
| NOTE-153 v2 | Rizi — What is emergence, after all? | A perspective, not an argument with results. Rizi proposes that emergence is present when a many-to-one coarse-graining F (Eq. 1, N′ < N) keeps the macro description predictive after most micro detail is discarded. He says the onset of emergence is located by order parameters, diverging susceptibility and correlation length, and RG fixed points, and that dualities show macro behaviour is not dictated by micro “stuff”. Herd immunity on networks (percolation, the S–R interface density ρ_SR) is offered as a social case. The paper then asserts that science needs only weak emergence, and that invoking strong emergence “steps outside the scope of scientific method”. | Read |
| NOTE-154 v2 | Allori — Wave-functionalism | Allori proposes that the wave function be defined by three roles — empirical, nomological and explanatory. On this view it is an ingredient that “partially realizes” the law, not a law and not a material field. So its time-dependence and non-uniqueness (a phase shift, a density matrix) are harmless, it counts as non-epistemic and ontic, and it can take part in constructive explanation. Each of these is argued informally, and the escape from PBR is by relabelling the ontic/epistemic distinction, not by engaging the theorem. | Read |
| NOTE-162 v2 | French — Unitary inequivalence and structural realism | French answers Howard’s objection that QFT’s unitarily inequivalent representations leave the structural realist with non-isomorphic, competing structures. He offers two routes. The first is to adopt cut-off “conventional” QFT with Wallace, on which the inequivalence is an artefact or harmless. The second is to follow Ruetsche’s Swiss Army Knife and treat the algebra as a modal structure spanning all representations. On that reading spontaneous symmetry breaking preserves the symmetry across the degenerate vacua, and the DHR analysis derives quantum statistics from the algebra. Adding Baker’s criterion, on which a symmetry mapping between representations suffices for intertranslatability, removes the assumption behind the objection, and French ends with a third option that combines the two routes. Every step is an informal argument layered on others’ technical results; the paper proves nothing itself. | 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-166 v2 | Personal Identity and Ethics (SEP) | A survey, arguing no thesis of its own, of how three contested questions bear on ethics: which account of persistence is true (unique psychological continuity, Shoemaker and Parfit; or biological continuity and animalism, Olson and DeGrazia), whether identity or the psychological relations (continuity and/or connectedness) is what matters (Parfit’s fission case), and whether metaphysics constrains ethics or the reverse. It traces these through prudential concern, responsibility, abortion (Marquis), death and brain-death criteria, dementia and advance directives (Dworkin vs Jaworska on Margo), and the separateness of persons (Rawls, Parfit, Nozick, Taurek, Sidgwick, Brink). Its main recurring finding is that the relation that fixes persistence and the relation that matters ethically keep coming apart. It concludes that all three questions remain open. | Read |
| NOTE-172 v2 | Watson — On the philosophy of unsupervised learning | Watson argues that clustering, abstraction and generative modelling each come with an epistemic thesis (EC, EA, EG — we identify natural kinds, essential properties and unrealized possibilities via such algorithms or something like them), which he accepts. Each also comes with an ontological thesis (OC, OA, OG — these just are what the algorithms ought to find under ideal conditions), which he rejects because nothing guarantees they are effectively computable. He adds a pragmatic, context-relative view of natural kinds, and closes with the claim that unsupervised outputs are neither “objective” nor vacuous. They should be validated by error-statistical means: resampling stability, generalization of clusters to held-out data, out-of-sample likelihood, and train-on-synthetic scores. | Read |
| NOTE-174 v2 | Rovelli — The relational interpretation (RQM) | Rovelli restates RQM as an ontology of sparse relative facts, which arise in interactions and are labelled by the interacting systems. Its one technical rule is that an amplitude W(b,a) gives the probability P = |W|² only when a and b are relative to the same system. That rule removes the clash between P_collapse = Σᵢ|W(c,bᵢ)|²|W(bᵢ,a)|² and P_unitary = |ΣᵢW(c,bᵢ)W(bᵢ,a)|² (eqs. 2–4). Decoherence makes some facts approximately label-independent (“stable”). ψ is a relative-state bookkeeping device, like a Hamilton–Jacobi function S. The price, which Rovelli states, is giving up “strong realism”: values are not held at all times, may be held at different times for different systems, and there is no coherent global view and no quantum state of the universe. | Read |
| NOTE-175 v2 | Chen — Realism about the Wave Function | A survey that sorts realist readings of the non-relativistic universal wave function into four ontological readings (a field on 3N-dimensional space, a multi-field on 3-space, properties of systems as in spacetime state realism, a Hilbert-space vector), two nomological ones (strong: time-independent and simple like the classical Hamiltonian; weak: a Humean best-system variable) and Maudlin’s sui generis option. It tabulates their compatibility with BM, GRW0/m/f and S0/Sm and with high- versus low-dimensional fundamental space (Table 1, 10 of 56 cells ”?”), and declares no winner. | Read |
| NOTE-178 v2 | De Haro & Butterfield — Philosophy and Physics of Duality | The book gives a formal Schema: a duality is an isomorphism between the “model roots” (state space, quantities, dynamics) of two models of a common-core bare theory, with values and dynamics matching. It pairs this with an interpretative condition: duals are physically equivalent iff (A) they are duals and (B) i1 = i2∘d. On that basis it argues four things. First, there are no genuine cases of in-principle underdetermination in the examples, and a cautious realist can commit to the common core. Second, dualities do not favour structural realism. Third, duality is formally incompatible with ontological emergence, except “beside” it (AdS/CFT’s RG direction), via effective dualities, or epistemically. Fourth, quasi-dualities motivate a “geometric view” on which models are charts on a successor theory’s moduli space. | 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-182 v2 | Arsiwalla et al. — Pregeometry and formal language | A programmatic essay with no construction, theorem or model of its own. It argues that inferential justification in a materialist ontology regresses without end (§3), that a “coherentist” constructivism escapes the regress, and that Wheeler’s pregeometry is therefore best read as “structureless structure”: the types and compositional rules of a computational language such as homotopy type theory (§§4, 6). Every construction of space from such rules that it points to is in the authors’ own earlier papers ([13, 17, 18]) or is promised as “a forthcoming publication” (fn. 1, p. 3). | Read |
| NOTE-187 | On the Evolution, Science, and Metaphysics of Consciousness | Veit’s reply to five commentaries on A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness (2023). Its main new content is the metaphysics the book left to one paragraph. He says hedonic “feel” is identical with a valence system: “a common currency of sharing evaluative information across multiple control systems”. The currency metaphor, he says, is “not Cartesian but cybernetic” (p. 10). He keeps the word “qualia”, arguing that Cartesians have no “definitional rights” (p. 9), and he insists the pathological complexity thesis (PCT) is compatible with any metaphysics, dualism and panpsychism included (p. 9). Against his other critics, he defends a bottom-up evolutionary method that uses human data (de Weerd); a naturalism that is neither autopoietic nor biopsychist (Sachs); evaluation-first over prediction-first, consciousness as an adaptation, and graded, partial unity (Suzuki); and the link to welfare science (Chincarini). | Read |
| NOTE-188 v2 | The Weirdness of the World | The book’s thesis is that every viable theory of how consciousness fits into the cosmos, and of the cosmos’s basic structure, is both “bizarre” (contrary to common sense) and “dubious” (not rationally compelling). So “something that seems almost too crazy to believe must be true” (p. 4), and credence should be spread across the bizarre options. Examples of those options are that the United States is conscious (if materialism is true), that we are sims or Boltzmann brains (a 0.1–1% credence), that space is transcendentally ideal, that almost every act causes almost every future event, and that there is no fact about snail consciousness. Its only positive empirical results are three self-experiments against solipsism (for example, 17 of 19 decisive chess games lost, p < .001). Everything else is informal argument. | Read |
| NOTE-189 | Ontic Structural Realism and Economics | Ross argues that OSR, usually motivated only by fundamental physics, is also the right ontology for a mature special science, economics. The progress of economic theory from Jevons through Hicks–Allen (1934), Samuelson (1947), Debreu (1959) and Arrow (1965) consists in steadily removing psychological, individual-level hypotheses. Its basic objects are optimisation problems, above all games, which are “mathematical structures … whose relata are distinguished as such by the mathematical representations … just like quarks and bosons” (§3). So OSR, joined with an assumption that science is unified, gets consilient support from outside physics. Individuals, in physics and in economics, are “book-keeping devices”. | Read |
| NOTE-190 | Real Patterns | A pattern is real in some data “if there is a description of the data that is more efficient than the bit map, whether or not anyone can concoct it” (p. 34). This is Chaitin’s incompressibility definition of randomness turned around (p. 32). Dennett uses the criterion, with the Game of Life’s gliders and eaters as the stepping stone (pp. 37–42), to defend “mild realism” about beliefs. Folk psychology tracks a real, noisy pattern of enormous predictive leverage. Two rival interpretations can be “different, but equally real, patterns” with no deeper fact to settle between them (p. 49). | Read |
| NOTE-191 | Patterns All the Way Up | Ladyman restates the Ladyman–Ross metaphysics as fifteen theses drawn from scientific practice. The existence criterion is “to be is to be a real pattern”, a pattern that “indispensibly figures in projectible generalisations” (p. 2). Realism is realism about natural modal structure, which is “absolute” in formal mode but “domain and scale-dependent” in material mode (thesis 4). There is no single hierarchy of levels and no assumed fundamental level (theses 10–11, fn. 9). Ontology is effective and scale-relative (thesis 12). Scientific real patterns are lossy compressions, unlike the Game of Life’s; the ideal gas laws use 3 degrees of freedom for ~10²³ (thesis 14). He quotes ETMG’s Principle of Naturalistic Closure verbatim and calls it “problematic” because it refers to fundamental physics (p. 8). | Read |
| NOTE-192 | Science, Metaphysics and Structural Realism | Ladyman argues that structural realism should be metaphysically, not epistemically, revisionary. He gives three grounds. Quantum statistics leaves the individuality of particles underdetermined: permutation invariance gives 3 two-particle states, not 4, so probabilities are 1/3 rather than 1/4 (p. 62). Entangled states give non-supervenient relations that refute Humean supervenience (pp. 71–73). The hole argument blocks point-based substantivalism (pp. 68–69). He proposes that science describes “the modal structure of the phenomena” (p. 73), with modal realism supplying the no-miracles intuition. The paper ends non-eliminatively: “the phenomena have structure but they are not structure” (p. 74). | Read |
| NOTE-193 | Category-theoretic structure and radical ontic structural realism | Bain argues that the “relations without relata” objection to radical OSR depends on defining structure set-theoretically, where a relation is a subset of X × X. If a structure is instead “an object in a category”, its elements (arrows 1 → A) are “not essential”, because category-theoretic objects need not be structured sets. His examples are sheaves of Einstein algebras for GR with asymptotic boundary conditions, which may lack global sections (§3), and nCob and Hilb (§4). He concludes that ROSR “avoids the charge that it rests on an incoherent claim” (p. 1634). The paper never mentions the Yoneda lemma, representable functors or universal properties by name. | Read |
| NOTE-194 | No categorial support for radical ontic structural realism | Lam and Wüthrich argue that category theory gives radical OSR no support. Identifying objects with identity arrows is relabelling (§3). Generalized elements X → A exist in every category, so elements are not eliminated (§4). Categories without products also lose set-style relations, “throwing out the relations with the relata” (§4). Morphisms relate C-objects, not the elements that stand for physical relata, and they “only distinguish isomorphism classes of structures” (§5). Bain’s GR and TQFT cases eliminate at most spacetime points, not relata tout court (§§6–7). They conclude that category theory “offers little if any comfort to ROSR” (abstract) and favour “balanced” OSR. The Yoneda lemma is not named, although §§4–5 state two of its consequences. | Read |
| NOTE-217 v2 | Natural Kinds (SEP) | Whether scientific kinds are natural breaks into four questions (are the classifications natural, are they into kinds, what the kinds are, and do they have essences). The entry maps the positions from conventionalism to essentialist strong realism, notes a recent turn toward pluralist and epistemology-first views and even eliminativism, and questions whether Kripke–Putnam semantics can deliver essences. | Superseded — by NOTE-769 |
| NOTE-264 | I. Taking Ourselves Seriously; II. Getting It Right | Frankfurt grounds practical reason and normativity in the will rather than in reason. Reflexive self-division makes higher-order attitudes possible (pp. 170–171). Identification, a largely default “willing acceptance” (p. 173), turns a desire from “a problem” into a reason (p. 175). Free will is “volitional unanimity” between the governing desire and higher-order volitions (p. 177), and caring is wanting to go on wanting (p. 180). Final ends and their normative authority come from love, “strictly volitional” (p. 196): its involuntary, wholehearted “volitional necessities” are “irresistible, but … not coercive” (p. 197) and are “the only legitimate authority” for our normative convictions (p. 201). The 1971 wanton/person taxonomy is gestured at in a single phrase and its apparatus is not restated. | Read |
| NOTE-265 | What Happens When Someone Acts? | Velleman argues that the “standard story” of action (desire + belief cause an intention, which causes movement) leaves the agent out. It fails even when every causal link is normal: his example is an intention to end a friendship, formed and executed without him (p. 104). Frankfurt’s hierarchical remedy cannot fix it either. Any mental item picked out without presupposing the agent’s participation (a second-order desire, a Watsonian value, a “decisive commitment”) is one the agent can be alienated from. Any item defined so as to guarantee participation begs the question of agent-causation (pp. 112–116). His alternative is to look for what is functionally identical to the agent, not what the agent identifies with. That can only be a motive always behind and never merely in front of critical reflection: the desire to act in accordance with reasons. Its reinforcing force is the agent’s contribution (pp. 117–122). | Read |
| NOTE-267 | Personal Autonomy | The entry sorts accounts of self-government into four families: “coherentist” (hierarchical desires, Frankfurt; evaluative judgments, Watson; plans, Bratman; caring; character), reasons-responsive, responsiveness-to-reasoning (Christman, Mele) and incompatibilist, with relational conditions as a compatible add-on. It then argues (§3) that none of them, alone or combined, gives the minimal conditions of autonomy. Coherence is not sufficient, because the endorsement itself can be manipulated. It is not necessary either: a weak-willed agent, or someone acting against her plans, still governs herself. And any attempt to ground identification in some attitude restarts the regress. The only attitude no agent can be alienated from, the desire to be self-governing, cannot be the criterion, because it is present even in failures. The 1971 hierarchy gets one sentence, and Frankfurt’s later replies (decisive commitment, then “satisfaction”) get one footnote. | Read |
| NOTE-269 | Moral Responsibility and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities | PAP (“a person is morally responsible for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise”) has no decisive positive argument: it is not self-evident, and the moral arguments from fairness, OIC and the W-defense cover blame at most. Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs) are the strongest attack, because the factor that makes the act inevitable plays no role in producing it. The entry lays out three defences of PAP: - general-ability readings (PAP-general); - “flickers of freedom”, which Fischer answers with the robustness requirement; - the Kane/Widerker/Ginet dilemma, answered by Fischer’s causal-irrelevance reply on the first horn and by Pereboom’s buffer case, Hunt’s blockage and Mele & Robb 1998 on the second. Robb reports “not much consensus” (§5). He treats the fall of PAP as re-energising compatibilism, with Frankfurt’s 1971 identification view and Fischer & Ravizza’s guidance control as the two replacement accounts. | Read |
| NOTE-270 | Compatibilism | The entry sorts compatibilism by which incompatibilist premise it denies: that free will requires the ability to do otherwise, that determinism precludes it, or that free will requires ultimate sourcehood. It argues that every “mesh” compatibilism has the same weak point: its sufficient conditions (hierarchies, reasons-responsive mechanisms, values) can be installed by manipulation, so each must either show what is wrong with manipulation cases or accept them. Its §4.2.1 is the fullest statement of Frankfurt 1971 in this batch. It covers first- and second-order desires, the will as the “effective first-order desire” that moves one “all the way to action” (1971, p. 84, Watson-1982 reprint pagination), the therapist’s mere second-order desire versus a second-order volition (pp. 84–5), the unwilling and willing addicts, and “One acts of her own free will if and only if her action issues from the will she wants.” The current revision has dropped the wanton/person distinction. The 2004–2015 revisions had it (“passive bystanders to their wills”, 1971, p. 89) and have to be read for it. | Read |
| NOTE-297 | Structural Realism: The Best of Both Worlds? | Worrall argues that the only position that honours both the no-miracles argument and the historical fact of radical theoretical change is Poincaré’s “structural or syntactic realism”. What survives theory change and explains predictive success is mathematical structure: equations carried over unchanged (Fresnel’s reflection/refraction amplitude ratios, reinterpreted as electric-vector amplitudes in Maxwell’s theory) or recovered as limiting cases under the correspondence principle (Newton from Einstein). The underlying ontology (elastic ether versus electromagnetic field) is not what survives. The support is one worked case and a general appeal to the correspondence principle. There are no formal definitions, and the paper says itself that “much clarificatory work needs to be done”, above all on what it is for one theory’s structure to approximate another’s (p. 121). | 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-336 | Chalmers — Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness | The easy problems of consciousness are problems of explaining functions, which a mechanism explains; the hard problem is that “why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?” survives the explanation of every function. The argument is conceptual: the easy phenomena are functionally definable and experience is not. The positive part takes experience as fundamental and proposes structural coherence and organizational invariance as nonbasic psychophysical principles, with a double-aspect theory of information as a speculative basic one. Nothing is measured; the invariance argument is a one-page sketch. | Read |
| 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-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-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-346 | Dennett — Facing Backwards on the Problem of Consciousness | A three-page reply to Chalmers’s “Facing Up”. The easy/hard split misdirects research: a vitalist could pose the same hard problem of life, and a hard problem of perception set aside from its “easy” parts would be an artifact. Chalmers’s reason why experience differs restates the claim. Subtracting every function from one’s own consciousness leaves nothing but a conviction. Adding experience to physics’ fundamentals would need independent evidence, which is absent. Argument by analogy, with one introspective premise. | 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-353 | True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works | Belief is objective but visible only through a strategy: a true believer is any system “reliably and voluminously predictable” by treating it as a rational agent with the beliefs and desires it ought to have. Adopting the stance is free; its success is a fact, and Laplacean Martians who skipped it would miss real patterns. Thermostats and people differ in degree, by how tightly their states are tied to one interpretation. Evolution explains easily why the strategy works; how the machinery does it is open, and the language of thought is a bet, not a necessity. | Read |
| NOTE-354 | Chalmers — The Meta-Problem of Consciousness | The meta-problem, why we judge that consciousness poses a hard problem, is an easy problem to be solved in topic-neutral terms. The paper surveys thirteen mechanisms and favours introspective models that attribute primitive relations of acquaintance to primitive qualities. It then poses a meta-problem challenge: a theory’s basis of consciousness should explain our judgments about consciousness, which IIT and biological theories struggle to meet. It blocks debunking arguments for illusionism, but concedes a residual coincidence. It argues that only strong illusionism dissolves the hard problem, and rejects it by a Moorean argument. Nothing is measured; the solution offered is an explanandum sketch. | 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-357 | Dennett — Quining Qualia | Qualia are supposed to be ineffable, intrinsic, private and directly apprehensible properties of experience. Fifteen intuition pumps argue that the pretheoretical concept is confused and that nothing has all four marks. The core move: an inversion in early processing and an inversion in memory-linked reactions are introspectively indistinguishable, so a subject has no privileged access to which happened. In place of qualia the paper offers practically ineffable, idiosyncratically detected public properties. It is argument by example throughout, and the author says so. | 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-367 | Dennett & Kinsbourne — Time and the Observer | The Cartesian Theater is the tacit assumption that some place or moment in the brain makes contents conscious, so that arrival order there fixes experienced order. The Multiple Drafts model replaces it: discriminations are made once, locally, and revised in parallel; temporal order is represented by content, not by the timing of vehicles. Four timing “anomalies” then need no backward projection. At sub-second scales the difference between pre- and post-experiential revision is said to be only verbal. It is a conceptual argument over published data; no experiment is run. | Read |
| NOTE-371 | Dennett — Reply to Professor Stich | Dennett accepts Stich’s summary of Brainstorms and answers his three charges. The evolutionary grounding of rationality is deliberately minimal. Full rationality is an idealisation, irrationality has no stable description, and so personhood rests on a concept “we only imperfectly achieve”. On pain, eliminativism and the reality of suffering are reconciled by policy: biting the bullet, reform and common sense each have uses, and Dennett stays with “there are no such things as pains, although of course people do feel pain”. | 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-376 | Shanahan — Palatable Conceptions of Disembodied Being | An avowedly “poetic” attempt to fit consciousness and selfhood to a disembodied 2024 chat agent. Its time would be discrete and discontinuous. Its “I” can be the model or a conversation-bound self that flickers into being each turn; we may slip between them. Such selves can be copied, edited and merged, and spread over branching simulacra. No candidate site survives scrutiny, which is read as Buddhist emptiness and applied back to human selves. Examples are invented usages, not data. | Read |
| NOTE-378 | Personal Identity | Wiggins’s division case shows that what matters in survival need not be one-one, so it is not identity; fusion and imagined beings that divide show it comes in degrees. Q-memory and q-intention describe the relations without presupposing identity. Continuity (transitive) is distinguished from connectedness (degree), and successive selves are proposed in place of one underlying person. The principle of self-interest then has no independent force. §I is argued; the priority of connectedness is asserted; §VI is a sketch. | Read |
| NOTE-379 | Taylor — Consciousness interpreted | A charitable reconstruction, not a defence. Consciousness is a real pattern (Dennett 1991b) in the brain’s content-bearing states, and a user-illusion, a pattern so coarse that describing the brain through it is unwitting metaphor. This makes six claims consistent: multiple drafts, global workspace, qualia eliminativism, user-illusion, fallibility and dictatorial authority. The Orwell/Stalin indeterminacy is rebuilt without verificationism: the two readings compress and predict equally, so neither better describes the pattern. | 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-384 | Frankish — Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness | Illusionism named and defended as a research programme. Phenomenal properties are not instantiated; the task is the illusion problem, to explain why experiences seem to have them. “Quasi-phenomenal” properties, the physical properties introspection misrepresents as phenomenal, separate strong illusionism from a weak illusionism that is argued to be unstable. The case is conservatism, the threat of epiphenomenalism, covert illusionism in reductive theories, a debunking argument and an abductive one from anomalousness. Objections are answered by agreeing to weakened versions of their intuitions. | 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-387 | The Self and the Future | A body-exchange experiment told twice. Third-personally, with selfish choices before and reactions after, it supports “changing bodies”. First-personally, as torture preceded by amnesia, character change and implanted memories, fear remains rational at every step, and the step that completes the exchange alters only what happens to someone else. Conceptual undecidability and conventional decision leave the subject unable to expect anything. A “rather shaky” lean toward the bodily answer, as a risk. | Read |
| NOTE-388 | Social ontology: Some basic principles | Searle restates the 1995 theory in twenty pages. Social facts are facts involving collective intentionality. Institutional facts are the subclass in which collective acceptance imposes a status function, “X counts as Y in C”, carrying deontic powers that give desire-independent reasons for action. Language is constitutive, since such facts exist only as represented. He revises the book in two places: status indicators matter in their own right, and some Y terms are free-standing, with no X, as with corporations and money without currency. “We accept (S has power (S does A))”, a formula from later in the book, is now ranked as the more general form. Collective intentionality is assumed, not argued for. | 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-391 | Durkheim — Qu’est-ce qu’un fait social ? | Defines the social fact by exteriority to individual consciousness and external constraint, shown by sanction or by resistance, with diffusion plus independent existence as an equivalent test. Social facts are neither organic nor individual-psychic, so their substrate is society; they are general because collective, and “in each part because in the whole”. Statistics isolates collective currents from individual cases. Ways of being are consolidated ways of doing. All of it is definition and illustration; the elimination that yields “a new species” is assumed exhaustive. | 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-394 | Haslanger — Gender and Race: (What) Are They? | An explicitly ameliorative (“analytical”) account. Gender and race are defined as hierarchical social positions: a woman is someone regularly observed or imagined to have bodily features presumed to indicate a female’s reproductive role, marked by that within the dominant ideology for subordinate positions, and subordinated in part because of it. Racialized groups are defined in parallel from features presumed to show ancestral links to a region. Gender in general and ethnicity are the non-hierarchical genus. The commonality and normativity objections are met by appeal to the project’s values. Stipulative, with no evidence. | Read |
| NOTE-424 v2 | Time, Structure and Fluctuations | Prigogine’s Nobel statement. Near equilibrium δ²S < 0 with ½∂δ²S/∂t = P > 0 makes δ²S a Lyapounov function, and in the strictly linear regime (constant L_ρρ′) the steady state minimizes entropy production. Far from equilibrium ½∂δ²S/∂t = ΣδJ_ρδX_ρ has no fixed sign, and ΣδJδX ≥ 0 is offered only as a sufficient stability condition. The Brusselator goes unstable at B > 1 + A². Dissipative structures are instabilities of the thermodynamic branch, triggered by fluctuations and sustained by exchange with the outside. The microscopic §§6–7 is a programme, linked to macroscopic thermodynamics only “in the linear region”. | Read |
| NOTE-432 | Explanatory Models for Psychiatric Illness | Psychiatric etiology is multilevel, non-aggregative and full of causal loops, so law-based explanation fails and so do both hard reduction and hard emergence. Mechanistic explanation proceeds by local decomposition and difficult reassembly. Following Marr, biology implements the functions psychology describes and does not replace them. The argument is philosophical, illustrated by an alcohol-dependence sketch and cited findings; it reports no data of its own. | Read |
| NOTE-441 | Self-Regulation and the Problem of Human Autonomy: Does Psychology Need Choice, Self-Determination, and Will? | SDT’s autonomy is “regulation by the self”: acting with reflective endorsement, graded along the internalization continuum, compatible with external influence, dependence and a single option. Ryan and Deci align it with phenomenological and hierarchical (Frankfurt, Dworkin) accounts and use that definition to answer behaviourist, social-cognitive, reductionist, nonconscious-priming, choice-overload and cultural critiques. Autonomy lies not in being an uncaused cause but in the capacity to “reflectively endorse or reject prompted actions” (p. 1573). | Read |
| NOTE-447 | The Emperor’s New Markov Blankets | Pearl blankets (conditional-independence shields in a Bayesian network) and Friston blankets (agent–environment boundaries in the world) are different constructs conflated in the free-energy literature. The four-way partition needs a chosen internal node, sensorimotor labels and steady state; in Friston’s soup it also needs electrochemical-only coupling and a fixed cluster size. Realist use needs metaphysical premises; instrumental use is innocent but settles nothing about boundaries. | Read |
| NOTE-455 | The Normative Constitution of Agency | Korsgaard asks whether agency is natural (a movement caused by the right mental state) or normatively constituted (a movement backed by an agent whose unity is achieved by following norms). Ordinary attribution of action implies activity and identity. Self-constitution explains both: the categorical and hypothetical imperatives give action the form of self-determined efficacy, and the maxims chosen under them constitute practical identity. Reflective self-consciousness breaks given unity and sets the task of rebuilding it, so unity of agency is “an achievement, not a given”. | Read |
| NOTE-460 | Précis: Being No One | Metzinger’s own sketch of the self-model theory. Six constraints (globality, presentationality, transparency, convolved holism, dynamicity, perspectivalness) build up consciousness; a transparent self-model yields phenomenal selfhood, so “no such things as selves exist in the world”; transparency is graded, inversely proportional to the attentional availability of earlier processing stages. Phenomenal unity is one global functional cluster. The first-person perspective is a model of the intentionality relation, whose iteration gives introspective and social intelligence. A theory statement: no new evidence. | 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-490 | Block — The Mind as the Software of the Brain | An introductory chapter that says what the computer model of the mind claims and defends it. Intelligence is explained by functional decomposition into primitive processors; meaning-respecting processing by an isomorphism between syntactic and semantic functions that must hold counterfactually; intentionality by a language of thought whose symbols get meaning from functional role. The Turing test, Stich’s syntactic theory and Searle’s Chinese room are criticised. Block grants the model for intelligence and intentionality and doubts it for phenomenal consciousness. | Read |
| NOTE-491 | Block & Fodor — What Psychological States are Not | Block and Fodor argue that behaviourism and type physicalism fail on empirical grounds, and that machine-state functionalism (FSIT) fails because psychological states cannot be one-to-one with the machine-table states of a probabilistic automaton. Dispositions, simultaneity, productivity and structure all break the correspondence, and machine-table identity is too fine-grained. Inverted and absent qualia are a prima facie objection to any functional definition. What survives is that psychological states may be computational states of an automaton, typed by the laws they fall under. | Read |
| NOTE-501 | The Harder Problem of Consciousness | An argument for a conditional. If naturalism (physicalism is the default), phenomenal realism and anti-scepticism hold, then whether a superficial functional isomorph with a different physical basis is conscious is meta-inaccessible. Physicalism is then the default yet inaccessible, and it is the subjective default that the isomorph is not conscious while the question stays open. Disjunctive and superficial-role identities are metaphysically possible but could never be accepted by inference to the best explanation. | Read |
| NOTE-504 | Block — Inverted Earth | Block gives the converse of the inverted spectrum: on Inverted Earth a subject or twin with identical brain, identical qualitative content and no internal disturbance comes, through his embedding in the environment and language, to have inverted intentional content and an inverted long-arm functional role. So qualitative content is not a functional state, and public colour talk expresses intentional content. The argument is stronger than the inverted spectrum on testimony and supervenience. A short-arm functional theory of qualia would escape it, and Block can only ask what that theory is. | Read |
| NOTE-505 | Comparing the Major Theories of Consciousness | Compares higher-order thought, global workspace and biological theories by whether they can recognise the explanatory gap. HOT and the workspace replace it with puzzles of their own making; only the biological theory fully acknowledges it, and concept dualism (Nagel, Loar) keeps it from implying dualism. Ambitious HOT also suffers ad hoc stipulation, the mismatch problem and implausibility for infants. Goldberg et al.’s data suggest self-related activity is inhibited in intense perception. The biological theory is the least friendly to machine consciousness. | Read |
| NOTE-506 | Block — Psychologism and Behaviorism | A machine that stores every sensible conversation of a given length and looks up its next reply has the capacity to respond sensibly to anything said to it, so it meets the strongest behaviourist conception of intelligence, but its intelligence is its programmers’. So psychologism is true: whether behaviour is intelligent depends partly on how it is produced. The standard objections to behaviourism only ever refuted necessary conditions; this refutes the sufficient one. Psychologism does not require our kind of processing, only processing that is not of the most elementary sort. | Read |
| NOTE-511 | Block — Mental Paint | Block defends phenomenism, the view that phenomenal character outruns representational content, against both forms of representationism. Internalist representationism has only functional resources, and a child raised among ever-changing colours has colour experiences without abiding functional differences. Externalist representationism fails on swampman, on the difference between attention and awareness, on bodily sensations, on Inverted Earth with intact long-term memory, and on an empirical shifted-spectrum argument from normal variation in colour vision. What stays the same across representational change is mental paint. | Read |
| NOTE-545 | Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person | Persons differ from other creatures in the structure of the will: they have second-order volitions, desires that a given desire be the one that moves them to act, and wantons do not. Forming one is identifying with a desire. Freedom of the will is having the will one wants, and a decisive identification ends the series of higher orders “without cutting it off arbitrarily” (p. 16). Responsibility needs neither a free will nor alternatives: the willing addict acts of his own free will. The view is neutral on determinism, and on how the will came to be (n. 10). | Read |
| NOTE-546 | Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility | Frankfurt argues that PAP is false because circumstances can make an action unavoidable without bringing it about: Black stands ready to make Jones4 act and never needs to, so Jones4 is as responsible, for blame or praise, as he would be without Black (§IV). A fact that explains nothing about the action cannot excuse it (§V). The replacement principle excuses only an agent who acted “only because he could not have done otherwise”, and Frankfurt says it is compatible with determinism. | 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-554 | List — Three kinds of collective attitudes | Aggregate attitudes: a rule or market summarises members’ attitudes; proposition-wise supervenience; no direct role; rationality contingent (majority beliefs on p, q, p∧q can be inconsistent, Table 1). Common attitudes: all hold, with common awareness; enriched proposition-wise supervenience; coordination; consistent by unanimity. Corporate attitudes: a group agent’s; holistic supervenience, like non-reductive physicalism; action-guiding; rationality presupposed. Three lessons of near-independence; Table 2 summarises. | Read |
| NOTE-560 | Nonreductive Physicalism and the Limits of the Exclusion Principle | With causes as proportional difference-makers, Kim’s exclusion principle fails. A revised principle (a property and its realizer never both cause an effect) is true of some systems and false of others. A higher-level property excludes its realizer as cause exactly when the effect is realization-insensitive, surviving nearby changes of realizer. That is plausibly the norm in the special sciences, which makes higher-level causes autonomous. | Read |
| NOTE-585 | Causation and Manipulability | A survey of manipulability theories that states Woodward’s own. X causes Y iff some intervention on X with respect to Y would change Y, where an intervention is a surgical, exogenous cause of X meeting conditions M1–M4. The account is non-reductive but not viciously circular, needs no human agent, and defines total, direct and contributing causes by combinations of interventions. Invariance and higher-level causation are not discussed. | Read |
| NOTE-695 | Esfeld & Lam — Moderate structural realism about space-time | Moderate structural realism keeps the first premise of the “master argument” for intrinsic properties, that relations require relata. It denies the second, that relata must have intrinsic properties over and above their relations. Objects and relations are mutually dependent, and relations supply identity conditions wherever intrinsic properties would. Where neither can, as with entangled quantum systems of one kind and space-time points in symmetric space-times, the paper takes numerical distinctness as primitive. It insists this is not a primitive thisness, and that this is why objects and relations stand on the same footing (pp. 33–34). In GR the relata are space-time points, not bare manifold points. The metric, or in the fibre-bundle formulation a section of the orthonormal frame bundle, gives them a “structural identity”. The hole argument tells against epistemic structural realism, and the question “what does a space-time relation relate?” tells against the radical form. The case is interpretive. It shows fit, not entailment, and the one concrete construction of structural identity it cites works only for space-times without symmetries. | Read |
| NOTE-700 | Floridi — The Method of Levels of Abstraction | Floridi drops ontological levelism and defends an epistemological one, the method of levels of abstraction. Observables are interpreted typed variables; an LoA is a finite non-empty set of them; a moderated LoA adds a behaviour predicate; a GoA relates moderated LoAs by mutually inverse relations Rᵢ,ⱼ with pⱼ ⇒ P_Rᵢ,ⱼ(pᵢ), and is disjoint or nested. An LoA fixes which questions are answerable and commits a theory to types (the LoA) and tokens (the model). Applied to Kant’s antinomies and contrasted with Marr, Pylyshyn, Dennett and Davidson. It is a method stated in definitions, not a result. Its one formal claim (disjoint and nested GoAs interconvert) fails under its own definition of nestedness, and its “pluralism without relativism” ranks LoAs only once a purpose is fixed. | 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-769 | Bird & Tobin — Natural Kinds (SEP) | A survey that maps positions rather than arguing for one. Its firmest conclusions are negative: shared natural properties, support for induction and a role in laws are each necessary but not sufficient for a natural kind, and the Kripke–Putnam semantics yields only partial essences, or essences only on assumptions it does not argue. It reports a turn to pluralist, cluster and epistemology-first accounts, against which a purely epistemic criterion is said not to separate natural from conventional kinds. | Read |
| NOTE-996 | Nichols & Bruno — Intuitions about personal identity | Survey studies of Arizona undergraduates on Williams’s personal-identity cases. A transplant case makes memory look necessary for being “still Jim”; a stripped-down Pain case has about 70% say “you will feel the pain” after distinctive mental states are wiped; neither depends on first- or third-person telling, so Williams’s explanation by person fails here. Abstract questions and a forced choice favour psychology (over 80%; 64%, p = 0.053). The authors weigh intuitions by robustness and conclude for a psychological criterion conditionally. The results describe a concept under framing; they do not show what persistence is, and the Pain item may test bare sentience, not identity. | Read |
| NOTE-1012 | Consciousness and the Collapse of the Wave Function | Chalmers and McQueen make consciousness-collapse precise as a super-resistance model (IIT’s Q-shape resisting superposition, with a continuous-collapse dynamics), find simple versions refuted by the quantum Zeno effect, and argue that collapse is the gap in causal closure that interactionist property dualism needs. Skimmed: the introduction, the objections and §8 were read, the formal §§2-7 were not. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1054 v2 | Negro — Three arguments against metaphysical structuralism | Separates methodological, epistemological and metaphysical structuralism about consciousness, and three senses of “consciousness is structural”: having an internal structure, being in a structure, and being the structure. Against the third, which metaphysical structuralism needs, it gives three arguments: Relational Mary, the novel experience argument and the lonely experience argument. Each is valid and rests on an intuition or a conceivability premise. It concludes that methodological and epistemological structuralism need only the first two senses and survive. | Read |
| NOTE-1055 | Aldé — Two geometrical arguments against similarity structuralism | Defines similarity structuralism (phenomenal character is fully fixed by similarity relations, so by the geometry of a similarity space) and argues it cannot account for two accepted facts about colour experience: that exactly four hues are experienced as unmixed and all others as mixtures of two of them, and that the black–white axis is a single gradient while the axes through grey are opposing pairs. Neither fact, it argues, corresponds to any adequate geometric feature of CIELAB or its refinements. It answers the replies from incomplete colour spaces and from unreliable introspection, and concludes structuralism should be rejected for colour. | 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-1220 | Faye & Jaksland — Barad, Bohr, and quantum mechanics | Barad’s reading of Bohr is not Bohr’s. For Bohr a phenomenon is the observed effect under a given experimental arrangement, epistemic and derivative, with atomic object and instrument presupposed real; Bohr was an entity realist, his relational holism epistemic, and the subject–object, knower–known and word–world dualisms are presupposed by his account, not dissolved. Nor does quantum mechanics entail agential realism: Bohmian mechanics reproduces its predictions with an ontology of individual particles, and Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics, though close, keeps systems prior to their interactions. And because Barad denies that measurement disentangles apparatus and object, she cannot borrow Rovelli’s answer to the measurement problem, so even agential realism’s consistency with quantum mechanics is unshown. Its merits as social theory, “if any”, do not stem from quantum mechanics. | Read |
| NOTE-1227 | Rovelli — Relational quantum mechanics | Rovelli proposes that the incorrect notion behind the measurement problem is the observer-independent state of a system, as absolute simultaneity was behind the unease with the Lorentz transformations. Two descriptions of one measurement, by the measuring system O and by an external P who treats S+O unitarily, are both correct, so “q = 1” is elliptic for “q = 1 relative to O”, any physical system can be the observer, and the theory, taken as complete, is about the information (correlation) systems have about one another. The relation between two observers’ views is itself a quantum fact relative to a third, so no view can be deduced from another and there is no description in toto. Values are relational; systems are not: the world is assumed decomposed into systems, each characterized by its set of yes/no questions W(S) and an information capacity N. Two information postulates give an orthomodular lattice, and a third (superposition) postulate is needed for the Hilbert-space formalism; the reconstruction is, in the author’s words, “not fully successful”. | Read |
| NOTE-1230 | Jaksland — Naturalized, fundamental, and feminist metaphysics all at once | A methodological paper, not an assessment of agential realism as quantum mechanics, which it assumes. Barad holds agential realism to be naturalized metaphysics, justified by quantum mechanics and applied once, to the one reality, whose scope then extends to the lifeworld; she rejects reading it as analogy or as a template that other domains instantiate. That extension is threatened by Newtonian mechanics being a good approximation in the macroscopic domain. It survives only if some ontological features (the subject–object and word–world dualisms, representationalism) are all-or-nothing and admit no metaphysical approximation. Jaksland leaves open whether any do, finds individualism “immediately more agreeable” as something that can obtain by approximation, and argues that even without such features the independence of social theorizing from fundamental metaphysics is contingent (on the size of Planck’s constant), not principled. | Read |
| NOTE-1257 | Surviving Death, Again | Johnston withdraws Surviving Death’s account of survival. There, he recalls, the resurrection hope failed and the substitute was living on “in the onward rush of humankind”, on the view that we are higher-order things whose deepest future-directed attitudes fix which embodiments are ours. Now he holds that every reductionist account of personal identity breeds “fellow travelers” with moral status and conflicting interests: personites, R-variants, overlapping “Theons” and modal variants. To avoid them, he holds, we must be essentially embodied wills whose present bodies are not essential, so re-embodiment after death is possible. He argues that emergent substance dualism is a “fig leaf” for divine creation, and gives non-reductive relations of subserving, implementing and interdependence between mental and neural events. | Read |
| NOTE-1437 | Moreno & Mossio — Biological Autonomy, the Introduction | The Introduction alone. Moreno and Mossio state their programme: the organism, not natural selection, is biology’s central idea; its core is a closure of constraints, which they say fundamentally differs from the process loops and self-organisation of dissipative structures, and which grounds teleology, normativity and function. With regulation and agency, closure makes an autonomous system, an organism; ecosystems meet only closure. The arguments are announced for chapters 1–7, which this reading does not cover. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1457 | Fischer — The Frankfurt Cases: The Moral of the Stories | Fischer’s reply to the Dilemma Defense. If indeterminism holds, buffer cases remove every robust alternative; if determinism holds, a case can assume it without assuming it removes alternatives, so that determinism and Black’s device together, and neither alone, remove them. The moral is conditional: if determinism rules out responsibility, it is not by eliminating alternatives. Fischer allows that determinism may still rule it out another way, such as by removing sourcehood, and rejects Widerker’s demand that a Frankfurt case satisfy IRR. | Read |
| NOTE-1458 | Barad — Nature’s Queer Performativity | Barad argues that what classical ontology treats as separate things with fixed properties are phenomena, relations without prior relata, and that an intra-action within a phenomenon enacts an agential cut: “a ‘local’ resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy”, giving agential separability, not absolute separation. The case is made by reading lightning, stingray receptor cells, Pfiesteria and the quantum-eraser experiment as failures of classical identity and causality. It is an essay; the physics is cited and interpreted, not argued from, and the term “apparatus” is used only of the two-slit set-up. | Read |
| NOTE-1459 | Timpe — Source Incompatibilism and Its Alternatives | Against the received split between leeway and source incompatibilism. Mere alternatives cannot meet a control condition, so any acceptable incompatibilism rests on ultimacy; and ultimacy needs indeterminism, which leaves more than one open future, so it entails an alternative-possibilities condition, though perhaps only for non-robust, involuntary alternatives that do no explanatory work. The best source incompatibilism is therefore “wide”, and the taxonomy should go. Timpe counts Pereboom among those who keep an alternatives condition while making the source condition more fundamental. | Read |
| NOTE-1485 | Iliadis — Informational ontology | An exegesis of Simondon as a philosopher of information who extends cybernetics. Information is the resolution of a disparity between two domains of a metastable system, not a signal in a channel; transduction produces “a new informational structure, one that resolves a disparity between fields”. Its evidence is quotation from L’individuation psychique et collective; it proposes, and does not test, an “individuative methodology” for communication research. | Read |
| NOTE-1486 | Massumi — The Principle of Unrest | Interviews and an essay in activist philosophy. Movement is qualitative relational transformation, and capitalism an ontopower feeding on “bare activity”. Micropolitics aims at “a maximally inclusive co-patterning of contrasting tendencies” (p. 64), an aesthetic ideal that affirms discord rather than resolving it. The parent paper’s quotation is exact; it turns the ideal into a description of organizational becoming. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1488 | Massumi and McKim — Of Microperception and Micropolitics | An interview, not an argument with evidence. Affect is the felt transition of a body’s power to affect and be affected toward a diminished or augmented capacitation, offered as a proposition to be regenerated in each use, not a definition to apply. Microshocks prime bodies differentially; affect is reactivated in each event, not transmitted between them; micropolitics modulates collectively felt, unacted-out potential toward a “symbiosis” of contrasting tendencies. | Read |
| NOTE-1489 | Tsoukas & Chia — On organizational becoming | A conceptual paper. It reverses the priority of organization and change. Change is the reweaving of actors’ webs of beliefs and habits as they accommodate new experience. It is driven by the radial structure of categories, whose nonprototypical applications extend them, and by human reflexivity. Organization is both the attempt to stem that change and the pattern that emerges from it. Its illustrations are other researchers’ ethnographies. Its becoming is carried by human agents. | Read |
| NOTE-1508 | Jennings — Attention as the Source of a Free Will | A hybrid account of attention: prioritization by a subject that is a collection of fixed, formed and fluid interests, distinguished from filtering by feedback from dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The subject’s power over its interests is said to be contextually emergent, made possible by a boundary from its context, and visible in phase-amplitude coupling. Attention breaks stalemates between equally weighted interests and forms new ones, which the paper offers as the source of a free will without Kane’s indeterminism. The metaphysics is argued from an analogy with Bénard cells, and the neural evidence does not separate it from the weakly emergent models it rejects. | Read |