nucleation

mereology

Graph View

107 items with this tag.

Nov 01, 2026
CLAIM-528: That a mechanism realizes a capacity can mean that the capacity is produced through it over time or that the capacity consists in it at a time, and interventions show only the first: a pathway whose disabling changes the capacity after a delay is a cause, can be intervened on surgically, and can be located relative to a declared boundary, whereas every intervention on a capacity that consists in its parts also changes some part along another path, so that relation is underdetermined by intervention data and is inferred by abduction or from simultaneity and settled parthood; and which of the two a given dependence is depends on the time resolution at which a description treats the parts' response as instantaneous
Nov 01, 2026
CLAIM-530: Where maintenance is realized is a question of constitutive relevance only through its parthood condition: an internal producer and an outside controller supplying the same production law as state feedback meet mutual manipulability's two manipulability conditions identically, since disabling or stimulating either changes the maintained capacities and intervening on the capacities changes the activity of either, so what puts one inside and the other outside is parthood, a boundary the experiments presuppose and do not find
Nov 01, 2026
LIT-1924: Horizontal Surgicality and Mechanistic Constitution
Nov 01, 2026
LIT-1925: Saving the mutual manipulability account of constitutive relevance
Nov 01, 2026
LIT-1928: Top-down causation without top-down causes
Nov 01, 2026
LIT-1929: Three Problems for the Mutual Manipulability Account of Constitutive Relevance in Mechanisms
Nov 01, 2026
LIT-1930: Constitutive Explanatory Relevance
Nov 01, 2026
LIT-1931: Constitutive relevance & mutual manipulability revisited
Nov 01, 2026
LIT-1934: Constitutive Relevance, Mutual Manipulability, and Fat-Handedness
Nov 01, 2026
LIT-1939: An Abductive Theory of Constitution
Nov 01, 2026
THEORY-1287: The experiments mechanists use to find a mechanism's components (correlation, lesion, stimulation, and intervening on the whole while recording the parts) run in both directions between part and whole and, by Craver and Bechtel's own account, show only prima facie that an item is a component, because an item not interactively integrated into the system could be a background condition; they give no test of integration, so the experiments do not by themselves fix where a mechanism ends
Nov 01, 2026
THEORY-1288: If a mechanism's behaviour supervenes on its constituents' behaviours and constitution is not causal, every cause of that behaviour is also a cause of some constituent along another path, so no intervention can change the whole without separately changing a part; mutual manipulability by ideal interventions is then unsatisfiable, and once interventions are relaxed to admit these common causes, every model with constitutive dependence has a model without it that implies the same correlations under every manipulation, even in ideal experimental conditions
Nov 01, 2026
THEORY-1291: Within levels of mechanisms, apparent top-down and bottom-up causes can be read as mechanistically mediated effects, intralevel causation among components together with the constitution of the whole by them, so that the relation between levels is constitution and not causation; Craver and Bechtel show the translation for six cases, on the assumption, not argued, that every higher-level cause has a mechanistic explanation
Nov 01, 2026
THEORY-1293: Given that every change in a phenomenon is simultaneously realized by some constituent on every lower level, that simultaneous changes are not causally related, that co-occurrence is transitive, and that the parts and their levels are already known, a single intervention that changes a part and the phenomenon simultaneously while directly changing at most one behaviour on each lower level shows that the part is a constituent; the condition presupposes the boundary and the level hierarchy it is applied to and cannot supply them
Nov 01, 2026
THEORY-1294: Constitution is best inferred, and only abductively, from the failure to break a coupling: a set of parts constitutes a phenomenon when every cause of the phenomenon is also a cause of some member of the set, no smaller set does as much, and no expansion of the variables studied turns up a cause of the phenomenon that spares them all, so constitutive relevance is fixed by the set a part belongs to and no finite series of experiments settles it
Oct 21, 2026
CLAIM-405: An individuation is well defined only once its criterion is fixed (the target it serves, the transformations its unity must survive, the scale), and that dependence does not make it arbitrary: once the criterion is fixed a verdict can be false, and differently fixed criteria can pick out units of one system whose boundaries cross rather than nest, none of them less real for it
Oct 21, 2026
LIT-1360: Real patterns, the predictive mind, and the cognitive construction of the manifest image
Oct 19, 2026
QUESTION-197: Is there a variant of the Döring–Isham rules, or of the context category, under which tensor-product composites of quantum systems satisfy the translation condition?
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-443: Being a biological individual is not being an organism: evolutionary (Darwinian) individuality and physiological individuality come apart, and each is found among parts of organisms and groups of organisms as well as among organisms, so a part or a group can be an individual of one kind and not the other
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-448: On a substance ontology, a gestated foster that is part of the pregnant organism either is no substance, so that mammals begin at birth and the foster is not the later baby, or is part and substance at once, which leaves no consistent count; a process ontology keeps both parthood and foster–neonate identity, at the price of a count between one and two that it does not define
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-452: A thing with many equally good candidate boundaries can be counted as one in two ways that cover each other's failures: supervaluation makes 'there is one cat' true on every precisification though no candidate is definitely the cat, and counting by almost-identity, meaning extensive mereological overlap, makes it true enough where the candidates overlap almost completely
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-476: If continuant persons are maximal aggregates of person-stages interrelated by the psychological relation R, then the relation of belonging to one person is R itself, so Parfit's premises do not show that identity is not what matters; the price is that persons overlap in fission and are counted by a relation weaker than identity
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-493: From core mereology, classical extensional mereology (GEM) is reached by exactly three pairings of a decomposition principle with an unrestricted-sum principle: Supplementation with Sum2, Strong Supplementation with Sum3, and Complementation with Sum1; Supplementation with Sum3, the pairing given by Simons (1987), does not yield it, because which definition of 'sum' is used decides which decomposition axiom is needed
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-507: Any system with the same fine-grained functional organisation as a conscious system has qualitatively the same experiences, with natural though not metaphysical necessity, because otherwise a neuron-by-neuron replacement would yield either a rational subject systematically wrong about its fading experience or experience that flips with a switch nobody could notice; the principle covers only isomorphs, so it says nothing about systems merely similar in kind to a conscious one
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-512: The extended-mind thesis worth disputing is that external entities partly constitute a subject's mental states in virtue of the subject's sensorimotor interaction with them; so stated it can reach standing belief but not consciousness, if consciousness needs information directly available for global control, since perception makes availability indirect
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-514: Self-maintenance through closure of constraints does not single out organisms, since colonies, holobionts, symbioses and ecosystems meet it too, so a persister criterion applied at whatever level meets it turns organisms into parts; what is proposed to mark organisms is that they can also induce, control and come through phases of destabilised organisation and reach a new closure regime, though that only organisms can do so is asserted
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-528: The cases offered for extended cognition are explained at least as well by embedded cognition, on which the organism leans heavily on external props, and memory research finds that external stores lack the interference, generation effect and power-law learning and forgetting of internal memory, so a kind spanning both does no explanatory work and conservatism favours the embedded account
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-540: For moral purposes the body is bounded below by depth: objects whose real definitions are too microphysically committal are not body parts though they are parts in the ordinary sense, and bodily rights and interests concern only events that change the body's high-level properties, so a brain-computer interface user's implemented software can be a body part while the third-party server running it is not
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-549: A structured group is not identical to its members: two groups of one kind can have the same members at every time and still be two, which theories that identify a group with a plurality, fusion, aggregate or set of its members cannot allow, and a view of groups as realizations of structures with functionally defined nodes can
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-582: Causal coupling between a process and something outside it does not by itself make that thing part of the process, so an argument from coupling to extended cognition needs a further premise saying what makes a process cognitive
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-583: An agent is the set of parts that pursue a goal together, bounded by the farthest events it can sense and try to regulate; cells joined by bioelectric coupling share measurements and so form larger agents with larger goals without ceasing to be agents, so a living system is many nested agents, not one, and cancer is the larger agent shrinking back to the cell
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-585: In the Döring–Isham scheme for realising collections of systems in topoi, disjoint sums of quantum systems compose exactly; along a tensor product of finite-dimensional systems, the pull-back of a constituent's quantity agrees with the composite's own quantity at a context exactly when every projection in it with proper support on the first factor has the form P⊗1, so it fails for every non-scalar quantity and no operator on the composite realises the pull-back
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-589: No principle of mereology is merely a fixing of what 'part' means: even reflexivity, transitivity and antisymmetry face counterexamples that do not rest on equivocation, and every principle beyond them is contested, so classical mereology is one substantive theory among several and not a neutral default
- mereology
- metaphysics
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-591: Cognition has two necessary marks, involving non-derived content and a distinctive kind of causal processing, and as a contingent fact only processes in the brain have both, so notebooks, screens and tools coupled to a thinker are not parts of cognition, and human-plus-tool systems will support no science of their own
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-622: Spatial boundaries are bona fide where a spatial discontinuity or a heterogeneity of material is present and fiat where they exist only by demarcation; the two obey different topologies, distinct bodies are never in bona fide contact, so any whole of separate bodies is a fiat object, and real properties of the material still enable and constrain where fiat boundaries can be drawn
Oct 16, 2026
THEORY-644: Panpsychism escapes dualism's problem of mental causation only in its constitutive Russellian form, where micro-experiences constitute macro-experience; that form meets three combination problems, of subjects, qualities and structure, and every response that avoids combining (emergent, autonomous or identity panpsychism) gives back the advantage in mental causation or revised physics, while the combinatorial responses remain unworked
Oct 14, 2026
THEORY-232: A whole can be compared in agency with its parts, relative to a chosen decomposition and the parts' goals: it is more agential when its organization lets the parts resolve more of their mutual constraints than they do at the equilibrium of their former organization, which shows as delayed gratification
Oct 13, 2026
LIT-1015: Many, but almost one
Oct 13, 2026
LIT-1016: Material Beings
Oct 13, 2026
LIT-1020: The Problem of the Many
Oct 13, 2026
LIT-1022: Parts and Places: The Structures of Spatial Representation
Oct 13, 2026
LIT-1024: Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries
Oct 12, 2026
LIT-990: Agency, Goal-Directed Behavior, and Part-Whole Relationships in Biological Systems
Oct 12, 2026
QUESTION-046: What criterion, applied the same way to a modular mind and to an organized group, would say whether an organized whole is a subject of experience and not only an agent?
Oct 11, 2026
LIT-905: The Architecture of Complexity
Oct 11, 2026
LIT-908: The Ghost in the Machine
- mereology
- complex-systems
Oct 04, 2026
LIT-705: Group Agency and Supervenience
Oct 04, 2026
LIT-707: Aggregativity: Reductive Heuristics for Finding Emergence
Oct 04, 2026
LIT-709: Conceptualization of the Holobiont Paradigm as It Pertains to Corals
Oct 03, 2026
LIT-582: Biological organisation as closure of constraints
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-391: Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-392: Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-393: Artificial Intelligence as Philosophy and as Psychology
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-395: The Combination Problem for Panpsychism
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-396: Psychological Predicates
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-400: Minds, brains, and programs
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-401: What is it like to be a group agent?
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-404: Does a rock implement every finite-state automaton?
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-405: Where Am I?
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-407: Troubles with Functionalism
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-409: How a materialist can deny that the United States is probably conscious – response to Schwitzgebel
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-412: Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-413: The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-415: Extended Cognition and Extended Consciousness
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-419: Form, Function, and Feel
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-421: Foreword
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-422: Challenges to the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-426: Macrocognition: A Theory of Distributed Minds and Collective Intentionality
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-436: Intelligence without representation
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-438: The bounds of cognition
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-439: The Computational Boundary of a "Self": Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-442: The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-445: From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-446: Survival and Identity
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-451: Of Personal Identity
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-454: Personal Identity
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-455: Defending the Bounds of Cognition
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-459: Is the United States Phenomenally Conscious? Reply to Kammerer
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-464: Of Identity and Diversity
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-478: The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-479: What are groups?
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-486: Social Structures and the Ontology of Social Groups
Oct 02, 2026
LIT-487: Social Ontology
Oct 02, 2026
THEORY-043: A mind of mindless agents and a mind of minded agents are one functionalist move run in two directions, and what separates them is an anti-nesting principle or an architectural criterion, neither yet principled
Oct 01, 2026
LIT-378: 'What is a Thing?': Topos Theory in the Foundations of Physics
Oct 01, 2026
LIT-399: Plain Talk About Neurodevelopmental Epistemology
Oct 01, 2026
LIT-402: K-Lines: A Theory of Memory
Oct 01, 2026
LIT-418: Society of mind: A response to four reviews
Oct 01, 2026
LIT-429: The Society of Mind
Oct 01, 2026
LIT-432: The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind
Oct 01, 2026
LIT-444: Examining the Society of Mind
Sep 29, 2026
LIT-310: A topos foundation for theories of physics: IV. Categories of systems
Sep 27, 2026
THEORY-017: In a Hilbert-space model only unitarily invariant structure is intrinsic; a basis or tensor factorisation, and so any parts or features, is extra data supplied from outside the space, and the record's Hilbert-space works differ in where they get it
Sep 26, 2026
LIT-097: The Extended Mind
Sep 26, 2026
LIT-123: Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space
Sep 26, 2026
LIT-124: Mereology
Sep 26, 2026
LIT-138: The Depth of the Body
Sep 26, 2026
LIT-142: One or two? A Process View of pregnancy
Sep 26, 2026
LIT-157: Reproducees, reproducers, and Darwinian individuals
Sep 26, 2026
LIT-159: If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious
Sep 26, 2026
LIT-167: The Organism
Sep 26, 2026
LIT-168: Biological Individuals
Sep 26, 2026
LIT-188: Scaffolding individuality: coordination, cooperation, collaboration and community
Sep 25, 2026
LIT-005: Adding causality to the information-theoretic perspective on individuality
Sep 25, 2026
LIT-025: Greater than the parts: a review of the information decomposition approach to causal emergence
Sep 25, 2026
LIT-027: Emergence as the conversion of information: a unifying theory
Sep 25, 2026
LIT-049: A coarse-graining account of individuality: how the emergence of individuals represents a summary of lower-level evolutionary processes

Created with Quartz v5.0.0 © 2026

Repository
Quartz