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48378.08218
Emotional hardcore and other music genres featuring screamed vocals are puzzling for the appreciator. The typical fan attaches appreciative value to musical screams of emotional pain all the while acknowledging it would be inappropriate to hold similar attitudes towards their sonically similar everyday counterpart: actual human screaming. Call this the screamed vocals problem. To solve the problem, I argue we must attend to the anti-sublimating aims that get expressed in the emotional hardcore vocalist’s choice to scream the lyrics. Screamed vocals help us see the value in rejecting (a) restrictive social norms of emotional expressiveness and (b) restrictive artistic norms about how one ought to express or represent pain in art, namely that if one is going to do so they must ensure the pain has been ‘beautified’. In developing this second point I argue that emotional hardcore is well-suited (though not individually so) for putting pressure on longstanding views in the history of aesthetics about the formal relationship between art and human pain.
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106089.082471
It is a familiar story that, where Kant humbly draws a line beyond which cognition can’t reach, Husserl presses forward to show how we can cognize beyond that limit. Kant supposes that cognition is bound to sensibility and that what we experience in sensibility is mere appearance that does not inform us about the intrinsic nature of things in themselves. By contrast, for Husserl, it makes no sense to say we experience anything other than things in themselves when we enjoy sensory perception. Kant’s conception, then, by doing just that, is nonsensical. I argue that Husserl’s account does not deliver on its promise. Things as they are in themselves are just as cognitively out of reach on Husserl’s understanding of them as they are on Kant’s. Further, the charge of nonsense Husserl raises against Kant’s conception of things in themselves applies—indeed, with greater force—to his own.
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132257.082489
Illusionists and a posteriori physicalists agree entirely on the metaphysical nature of reality—that all concrete entities are composed of fundamental physical entities. Despite this basic agreement on metaphysics, illusionists hold that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, whereas a posteriori physicalists hold that it does. One explanation of this disagreement would be that either the illusionists have too demanding a view about what consciousness requires, or the a posteriori physicalists have too tolerant a view. However, we will argue that this divergence of opinion is merely an upshot of the semantic indeterminacy of the term ‘conscious’ and its cognates. We shall back up this diagnosis by showing how semantic indeterminacy of the kind in question is a pervasive feature of language. By illustrating this pattern with a range of historical examples, we shall show how the dispute between the illusionists and their a posteriori physicalist opponents is one instance of a common kind of terminological imprecision. The disagreement between the illusionists and the a posteriori physicalists is thus not substantial. In effect, the two sides differ only about how to make an indeterminate term precise. The moral is that they should stop looking for arguments designed to settle the dispute in their favour.
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211635.082515
It is one thing to believe something, and it is another to grasp it. For example, everyone knows that life is short, but most of us arguably do not fully grasp this fact. Grasping this fact can have a notable effect on our cognition and behavior, prompting us to reconsider how to best spend our limited time. Similarly, most of us know but seldom grasp that children are starving all around the world and that we could, if we put in a sufficient collective effort, halt much of this suffering. Grasping these facts makes us more inclined to donate to charity—or at least makes us more inclined to feel guilty if we don't. As both of these examples illustrate, grasping seems to be something above and beyond mere belief or knowledge, and it seems to make an important difference to our cognitive and decision-making processes.
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439286.082527
Work in philosophy of mind often engages in descriptive phenomenology, i.e., in attempts to characterize the phenomenal character of our experience. Nagel’s famous discussion of what it’s like to be a bat demonstrates the difficulty of this enterprise (1974). But while Nagel located the difficulty in our absence of an objective vocabulary for describing experience, I argue that the problem runs deeper than that: we also lack an adequate subjective vocabulary for describing phenomenology. We struggle to describe our own phenomenal states in terms we ourselves find adequately expressive. This paper aims to flesh out why our phenomenological vocabulary is so impoverished – what I call the impoverishment problem. As I suggest, this problem has both practical and philosophical import. After fleshing out the problem in more detail, I draw some suggestive morals from the discussion in an effort to point the way forward towards a solution.
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452405.082539
I distinguish five types of discrimination, three of which are personal-level and distinctively visual. I explain their implication relations. Then I argue that the plausibility of the claim that seeing something requires discriminating it, as opposed to simply attributing some properties to it, hinges on the type of discrimination under consideration. A weak form of discrimination trivializes the debate. Stronger notions of discrimination, however, cannot be understood without attribution. Attribution appears to form the fundamental level of personal-level representation.
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519054.082558
I propose a novel (interpretation of) quantum theory, which I will call Environmental Determinacy-based or EnD Quantum Theory (EnDQT). In contrast to the well-known quantum theories, EnDQT has the benefit of not adding hidden variables, and it is not in tension with relativistic causality by providing a local causal explanation of quantum correlations without measurement outcomes varying according to, for example, systems or worlds. It is conservative, and so unlike theories such as spontaneous collapse theories, no modifications of the fundamental equations of quantum theory are required to establish when determinate values arise, and in principle, arbitrary systems can be in a superposition for an arbitrary amount of time. According to EnDQT, at some point, some systems acquired the capacity to have and give rise to other systems having determinate values, and where this capacity propagates via local interactions between systems. When systems are isolated from the systems that belong to these chains of interactions, they can, in principle, evolve unitarily indefinitely. EnDQT provides novel empirical posits that may distinguish it from other quantum theories. Furthermore, via the features of the systems that start the chains of interactions, it may provide payoffs to other areas of physics and their foundations, such as cosmology.
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568069.082572
In Plato’s Philebus, Socrates’ second account of ‘false’ pleasure (41d-42c) outlines a form of illusion: pleasures that appear greater than they are. I argue that these pleasures are perceptual misrepresentations. I then show that they are the grounds for a methodological critique of hedonism. Socrates identifies hedonism as a judgment about the value of pleasure based on a perceptual misrepresentation of size, witnessed paradigmatically in the ‘greatest pleasures’.
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669200.082583
I often talk about how philosophy needs better discovery systems, and try to find ways to clearly communicate my own work (e.g. summarizing My Big Ideas, and my main “myth-busting” updates to our disciplinary conventional wisdom)—while inviting others to do likewise. …
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923028.082595
An increasingly prevalent approach to studying human cognition is to construe the mind as optimally allocating limited cognitive resources among cognitive processes. Under this bounded rationality approach (Icard 2018, Simon 1980), it is common to assume that resource-bounded cognitive agents approximate normative solutions to statistical inference problems, and that much of the bias and variability in human performance can be explained in terms of the approximation strategies we employ. In this paper, we argue that this approach restricts itself to an unnecessarily narrow scope of cognitive models, which limits its ability to explain how humans flexibly adapt their representations to novel environments. We argue that more attention should be paid to how we form our cognitive representations in the first place, and advocate for pluralistic framework which jointly optimizes over both representations and algorithms for manipulating them. We identify several fundamental trade-offs that manifest in this joint optimization, and draw on recent work to motivate a unified formal framework for this analysis. We illustrate a simplified version of this analysis with a case study in social cognition, and outline several new directions for research that this approach suggests.
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1030010.082607
I here defend microphysical manyism. According to microphysical manyism, each composite or higher-level object is a mere plurality of microphysical particles. After clarifying the commitments of the view, I offer two physicalist-friendly arguments in its favour. The first argument appeals to the Canberra Plan. Here I argue that microphysical particles acting in unison play the theoretical roles associated with composite objects - that they do everything that we think of composite objects as doing - and thus that composite objects are to be identified with pluralities of microphysical particles. Along the way I rebut the objections that pluralities of particles don’t display the right emergent, ‘lingering’, or modal properties to be good candidates for identification with higher-level objects. In the second argument I claim that microphysical manyism is uniquely able to capture a compelling and widespread physicalist intuition concerning the intimate nature of the relationship between higher-level, composite objects and the microphysical world.
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1041518.082618
The things we do – our actions – can be contrasted with the things that merely happen to us. The dominant view distinguishes actions from happenings on the grounds that the former are essentially brought about and guided by intentions. Merleau-Ponty offers an alternative account, according to which doings are primarily initiated and guided by the agent's apprehension of her environment. Intentions may still play a role in bringing about action, but they are not essential, and the way they influence behaviour is conceived differently on his view. In this paper, I consider two important factors that contribute to our actions: habit and attention. Surprisingly, these have been largely ignored by proponents of the dominant view, despite their significance for agency. Here, I argue that whilst neither can be satisfactorily accommodated on the dominant model, Merleau-Ponty's framework offers a nice explanation of them. This gives us some reason to prefer a Merleau-Pontyian account to the dominant view. I will begin by outlining the dominant model in more detail.
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1041567.08263
Solipsism is the view that the I – my self – is, in some sense, alone. There are different forms of solipsism, which vary along two dimensions. First, solipsistic views can differ in how alone they take the I to be: one might claim that the I is the only self in a world of objects or non-‐selves. Or one could take the I to be all that there is. Second, there are different views one might take up concerning the nature of these claims. They can be understood as metaphysical claims about what exists; epistemological claims about what can be known; or as phenomenological claims about the character of experience. (These options are not mutually exclusive.) The standard view is that solipsism in all its varieties is at best, a deeply unattractive position, and at worst, absurd. It is surely undeniable that I share the world with other people. Moreover, this fact features in my experience and is knowable by me. Nevertheless, both Merleau-‐Ponty and Wittgenstein – two of the twentieth century's most profound and interesting thinkers – hold that solipsism expresses something important about the human condition. My aim in this paper is to articulate what they take solipsism to express. Much has been written about Wittgenstein's views on solipsism (see, e.g., Anscombe 1959, Hacker 1986, Diamond 1991, Pears 1996). Merleau-‐Ponty's ideas about solipsism and our relations with others have also received a fair amount of attention in the literature (see, e.g., Madison 1981, Carman 2008, Romdenh-‐Romluc 2011, Morris 2012). Thus, one might wonder what more there is to say on the topic. I hope to show here that revisiting these ideas is a fruitful enterprise.
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1087678.082642
We know that Twitter is not what it used to be, but if you were around the Twittersphere in 2019, you may remember a series of long discussions, by very well-known neuroscientists, on the nature of neural representation. Reading from the bleachers, many philosophers like us couldn’t help but notice that some of the themes discussed in these threads were very familiar. Indeed, they were uncannily similar to the way philosophers of mind argued in the 1970s and 1980s about the prospects of naturalizing intentionality. While the recent debates were couched in terms of multivariate analyses, pattern similarity, and repetition suppression, they were ultimately about how to understand misrepresentation, representational content, and even reference to abstract and non-existent entities, albeit in the context of contemporary cognitive neuroscience. The time was then ripe to try to bring together both philosophers and neuroscientists interested in the nature of representation, so they could talk to and learn from each other.
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1090992.082654
Pissing away my life in a haze of doomscrolling, sporadic attempts to “parent” two rebellious kids, and now endless conversations about AI safety, I’m liable to forget for days that I’m still mostly known (such as I am) as a quantum computing theorist, and this blog is still mostly known as a quantum computing blog. …
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1268980.082664
A non-solipsist form of presentness is usually thought to require the non-relative copresentness of space-like separated events, where this requirement further implies the non-relative simultaneity of these events. Since special relativity is thought to rule out any global, non-relative simultaneity, typical non-solipsist forms of presentness are taken to be inconsistent with special relativity. To address this problem, we re-explain the relationship between the non-solipsism of presentness and co-presentness by appealing to metaphysical indeterminacy. We propose presentness indeterminacy, the thesis that where an event, p, is determinately present, any event in space-like relation to p lacks a determinate tense. We argue that for many theories of time, indeterminate co-presentness is all that the non-solipsism of presentness requires. Since there is no determinate co-presentness, the inconsistency between presentness and special relativity in these theories disappears.
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1269007.082676
The dispute about whether there is indeterminacy in the world is long and inconclusive. At first glance, it seems like quantum mechanics ought to provide a quick, empirical resolution to the debate: prima facie, a photon in a superposition of right-polarized and left-polarized states has an indeterminate polarization. But quantum mechanics has not provided any such resolution; the controversy drags on. In this paper, I suggest some reasons for this impasse, and lay out a path forward.
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1385495.082688
Engineering failure investigations seek to reconstruct the actual causes of major engineering failures. The investigators need to establish the existence of certain past events and the actual causal relationships that these events bear to the failures in question. In this paper, I examine one method for reconstructing the actual causes of failure events, which I call “feature dependence”. The basic idea of feature dependence is that some features of an event are informative about the features of its causes; therefore, the investigators can use the features of a known failure event to reconstruct details of its causes. I make explicit the structure of feature dependence and the evidential basis of its key premises, and show how feature dependence works in the investigation of the American Airlines Flight 191 accident.
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1496414.082701
I develop Tetsurō Watsuji’s relational model of the self as “betweenness”. I argue that Watsuji’s view receives support from two case studies: solitary confinement and dementia. Both clarify the constitutive interdependence between the self and the social and material contexts of “betweenness” that define its lifeworld. They do so by providing powerful examples of what happens when the support and regulative grounding of this lifeworld is restricted or taken away. I argue further that Watsuji’s view helps see the other side of this deprivation, how reconstructing aspects of betweenness is, at the same time, a reconstruction of the self. I conclude by briefly indicating further consequences of this view.
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1665375.082712
Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) holds that the senses, imagination, and passions aim at survival and the satisfaction of the body’s needs, rather than truth or the good of the mind. Each of these faculties makes a distinctive and, indeed, an indispensable contribution to the preservation of life. Commentators have largely focused on how the senses keep us alive. By comparison, the imagination and passions have been neglected. In this paper, I reconstruct Malebranche’s account of how the imagination contributes to the preservation of the body by compensating for the limitations of the senses. First, the imagination represents non-actual states of affairs, such as probable or possible future states. Second, the imagination forges new and often helpful associations based on past experiences. Third, the imagination (mis)represents that objects will cause pleasure and pain, thereby imbuing them with emotional significance they would otherwise lack. Together, these features flesh out Malebranche’s view that the imagination is necessary for the preservation of life.
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1716809.082723
In this paper we examine moving spotlight theories of time: theories according to which there are past and future events and an objective present moment. In Section 1, we briefly discuss the origins of the view. In Section 2, we describe the traditional moving spotlight view, which we understand as an ‘enriched’ B-theory of time, and raise some problems for that view. In the next two sections, we describe versions of the moving spotlight view that we think are better and which solve those problems. In Section 3, we describe a version of the view that combines permanentism – the thesis that all things always exist – with propositional temporalism, the thesis that some propositions are sometimes true and sometimes false. In Section 4, we discuss a version of the view that is like an ‘enriched’ presentism. We conclude with some brief thoughts on issues that remain outstanding.
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1729850.08274
‘Own-body perception’ refers to the perception of one’s body as one’s own body. The chapter reviews various disruptions to own-body perception, including what is known about their neural correlates. It argues that it is crucial to distinguish between the sense of ownership for one’s body as an object of perception—the body-as-object—and the sense of ownership for one’s body as that by which and through which one perceives the world —the body-as-subject. Despite the fact that illusory own-body perception provides an excellent case for illustrating this distinction, most discussions to date of own-body perception have failed to make this distinction and apply it to the various clinical and experimental findings. The chapter summarizes one recent model of the body-as-subject, according to which the body-as-subject is based on sensorimotor integration. Finally, it uses this model to clarify the phenomenon of illusory own-body perception, and it suggests directions for future research.
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1729878.082753
Cognitive neuroscience tends to conceptualize mindfulness meditation as inner observation of a private mental realm of thoughts, feelings, and body sensations, and tries to model mindfulness as instantiated in neural networks visible through brain imaging tools such as EEG and fMRI. This approach confuses the biological conditions for mindfulness with mindfulness itself, which, as classically described, consists in the integrated exercise of a whole host of cognitive and bodily skills in situated and ethically directed action. From an enactive perspective, mindfulness depends on internalized social cognition and is a mode of skillful, embodied cognition that depends directly not only on the brain, but also on the rest of the body and the physical, social, and cultural environment.
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1780822.082767
This chapter is a guide to the basics of metaphysical grounding. It offers an accessible overview of its features and uses, comparing this concept with other forms of dependency one can find in the literature. It emphasizes two major theoretical roles grounding is claimed to play in philosophical theorizing: (i) accounting for a distinctive form of non-causal determination and (ii) illuminating the hierarchical structure of reality. The chapter aims at persuading the reader of the usefulness of grounding by discussing how some objections targeting these roles can be mitigated.
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1824016.082778
There are two distinct approaches to Bayesian modelling in cognitive science. Black-box approaches use Bayesian theory to model the relationship between the inputs and outputs of a cognitive system without reference to the mediating causal processes; while mechanistic approaches make claims about the neural mechanisms which generate the outputs from the inputs. This paper concerns the relationship between these two approaches. We argue that the dominant trend in the philosophical literature, which characterizes the relationship between black-box and mechanistic approaches to Bayesian cognitive science in terms of the dichotomy between instrumentalism and realism, is misguided. We propose that the two distinctions are orthogonal: black-box and mechanistic approaches to Bayesian modelling can each be given either an instrumentalist or a realist interpretation. We argue that the current tendency to conflate black-box approaches with instrumentalism and mechanistic approaches with realism stems from unwarranted assumptions about the nature of scientific explanation, the ontological commitments of scientific theories, and the role of abstraction and idealization in scientific models. We challenge each of these assumptions to reframe the debates over Bayesian modelling in cognitive science.
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1824050.082795
Explicit knowledge is consciously accessible to the knower: the person can introspect what it is that they know and ar,culate it in the form of a statement (DummeC 1991, Davies 2015, Thompson 2023). If a person possesses some knowledge which they are unable to ar,culate to themselves or others, this knowledge is said to be implicit rather than explicit. Standard examples of implicit knowledge include a speaker’s knowledge of language, or prac,cal knowledge such as how to ride a bike. The concept of implicit knowledge, however, raises challenging philosophical ques,ons. If aCribu,ons of mental states only make sense against a background assump,on of ra,onal rela,ons between thought and ac,on (see e.g. Davidson 1980), then it seems difficult to aCribute knowledge to a person who is unable to assert what they know. And it is hard to see how there can be non-introspectable knowledge if one thinks that there is a cons,tu,ve connec,on between being in a mental state and having introspec,ve knowledge about that state (see e.g. Shoemaker 1994).
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1838562.082812
This paper advances the development of a phylogeny-based psychology in which cognitive ability types are individuated as characters in the evolutionary biological sense. I explain the character concept and its utility in addressing (or dissolving) conceptual problems arising from discoveries of cognitive abilities across a wide range of species. I use the examples of stereopsis in the praying mantis, internal cell-to-cell signaling in plants, and episodic memory in scrub jays to show how anthropocentric cognitive ability types can be reformulated into cognitive characters, thereby promoting the integration of psychology with other sciences of evolved traits.
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1838620.082823
There is an apparent tension in Shepherd’s accounts of space and time. Firstly, Shepherd explicitly claims that we know that the space and time of the unperceived world exist because they cause our phenomenal experience of them. Secondly, Shepherd emphasizes that empty space and time do not have the power to effect any change in the world. My proposal is that for Shepherd time has exactly one causal power: to provide for the continued existence of self-same or changing objects. Because Shepherd takes causation to be a relation whereby two objects combine to form a third, their effect, whenever we perceive a continually existing object, since time is a proper part of such objects, our perception of time is caused by time itself. Likewise, space’s causal power is to provide for the possibility of the motion or rest of objects, and so when we perceive objects with space as a proper part, we come into causal contact with space.
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1965810.082857
The sense of agency is typically defined as the experience of controlling one’s own actions, and through them, changes in the external environment. It is often assumed that this experience is a single, unified construct that can be experimentally manipulated and measured in a variety of ways. In this article, we challenge this assumption. We argue that we should acknowledge four possible agency-related psychological constructs. Having a clear grasp of the possible constructs is important since experimental procedures are only able to target some but not all the possible constructs. The unacknowledged misalignment of the possible constructs of a sense of agency and the experimental procedures is a major theoretical and methodological obstacle to studying the sense of agency. Only if we recognize the nature of this obstacle will we be able to design the experimental paradigms that would enable us to study the responsible computational mechanisms.
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2020289.082871
We study settings where information in the form of Bayesian signals is acquired by an expert on behalf of a principal. Information acquisition is costly for the expert, and crucially not verifiable by the principal. The expert is compensated by the principal with a menu of state-contingent payments. We provide a full characterization of the set of all menus that implement (resp., strictly implement) each signal. Moreover, we provide a closed-form characterization for the expected cost for the cheapest such menu, which we call proxy cost of the signal. Surprisingly, in general, the proxy cost is neither increasing in the Blackwell order, nor posterior-separable, even when the expert’s cost function is posterior-separable itself.