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14698.316715
On desire-fulfillment (DF) theories of wellbeing, cases of fulfilled desire are an increment to utility. What about cases of unfulfilled desire? On DF theories, we have a choice point. We could say that unfulfilled desires don’t count at all—it’s just that one doesn’t get the increment from the desire being fulfilled—or that they are a decrement. …
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14946.317183
The main message of Neuroethics is that neuroscience forces us to reconceptualize human agency as marvelously diverse and flexible. Free will can arise from unconscious brain processes. Individuals with mental disorders, including addiction and psychopathy, exhibit more agency than is often recognized. Brain interventions should be embraced with cautious optimism. Our moral intuitions, which arise from entangled reason and emotion, can generally be trusted. Nevertheless, we can and should safely enhance our brain chemistry, partly because motivated reasoning crops up in everyday life and in the practice of neuroscience itself. Despite serious limitations, brain science can be useful in the courtroom and marketplace. Recognizing all this nuance leaves little room for anxious alarmism or overhype and urges an emphasis on neurodiversity. The result is a highly opinionated tour of neuroethics as an exciting field full of implications for philosophy, science, medicine, law, and public policy.
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17674.317212
In the first part I argued that the primary form of Kripkenstein’s skeptical challenge is to explain what it is for an expression to have a particular meaning in a speaker’s idiolect (rather than another) (Kripke 1982: 11, Reiland 2023c). Having presented the challenge, Kripkenstein goes through and criticizes answers in terms of explicit instructions, dispositions to use, simplicity, experiential states, taking the state to be primitive, and Fregean sense, and concludes that it can’t be answered.
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22525.317229
Let “phenomenal dogmatism” be the thesis that some experiences provide some beliefs with immediate justification, and do so purely in virtue of their phenomenal character. A basic question-mark looms over phenomenal dogmatism: Why should the fact that a person is visited by some phenomenal feel suggest the likely truth of a belief? In this paper, I press this challenge, arguing that perceptually justified beliefs are justified not purely by perceptual experiences’ phenomenology, but also because we have justified second-order background beliefs to the effect that the occurrence of certain perceptual experiences is indicative of the likely truth of certain corresponding beliefs. To bring this out, I contrast “perceptual dogmatism” with “moral dogmatism”: the thesis that some emotional experiences provide some moral beliefs with immediate justification, and do so purely in virtue of their phenomenal character. I argue that moral dogmatism is much less antecedently appealing, precisely because the counterpart second-order beliefs here are much less plausible.
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30007.317243
In 2005, I debated my then-colleague Larry Iannaccone on the economics of religion. The turnout — around 300 people at GMU back when it was clearly a commuter school — surprised me and totally shocked Larry. …
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75432.317256
At several key points throughout his Treatise, Hume refers to certain “general rules” which, he claims, we are “mightily addicted to”, and which frequently make us “carry our maxims beyond those reasons, which first induc’d us to establish them” (T 3.2.9.3). As Michael Gill (2006, 221) observes, Hume typically italicizes the term ‘general rules’, thus seemingly referring to “a specific, well-defined piece of his technical apparatus”. Unfortunately, Hume never explains what he means by the term. Nevertheless, he clearly thinks that general rules influence many of our beliefs, passions, and moral judgments. It is therefore important to understand exactly how Hume understands them. This is my aim in this paper.
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75464.317269
Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness (MEC) is a theory of decision-making under moral uncertainty. It says that we ought to handle moral uncertainty in the way that Expected Value Theory (EVT) handles descriptive uncertainty. MEC inherits from EVT the problem of fanaticism. Roughly, a decision theory is fanatical when it requires our decision-making to be dominated by low-probability, high-payo options. Proponents of MEC have o ered two main lines of response. The rst is that MEC should simply import whatever are the best solutions to fanaticism on o er in decision theory. The second is to propose statistical normalization as a novel solution on behalf of MEC. This paper argues that the rst response is open to serious doubt and that the second response fails. As a result, MEC appears signi cantly less plausible when compared to competing accounts of decision-making under moral uncertainty, which are not fanatical.
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77308.317282
If it can be reasonable for a typical innocent human being to save lions from extinction at the expense of the human’s own life, then the life of a typical human being is not of greater value than that of all the lion species. …
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78870.317296
GeneBcally complete yet authorless artworks seem possible, yet it’s hard to understand how they might really be possible. A natural way to try to resolve this puzzle is by construcBng an account of artwork compleBon on the model of accounts of artwork meaning that are compaBble with meaningful yet authorless artworks. I argue, however, that such an account of artwork compleBon is implausible. So, I leave the puzzle unresolved.
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84854.317309
Within the context of general relativity, Leibnizian metaphysics seems to demand that worlds are “maximal” with respect to a variety of space-time properties (Geroch 1970; Earman 1995). Here, we explore maximal worlds with respect to the “Heraclitus” asymmetry property which demands that of no pair of spacetime events have the same structure (Manchak and Barrett 2023). First, we show that Heraclitus-maximal worlds exist and that every Heraclitus world is contained in some Heraclitus-maximal world. This amounts to a type of compatibility between the Leibnizian and Heraclitian demands. Next, we consider the notion of “observationally indistinguishable” worlds (Glymour 1972, 1977; Malament 1977). We know that, modulo modest assumptions, any world is observationally indistinguishable from some other (non-isomorphic) world (Manchak 2009). But here we show a way out of this general epistemic predicament: if attention is restricted to Heraclitus-maximal worlds, then worlds are observationally indistinguishable if and only if they are isomorphic. Finally, we show a sense in which cosmic underdetermination can still arise for individual observers even if the Leibnizian and Heraclitian demands are met.
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84889.317323
This paper presents a novel sense in which theoretical structure has been preserved across the transition from classical to quantum physics. I import mathematical tools from category theory that have been used for structural comparisons in the context of theoretical equivalence and apply these tools to new situations involving theory change. The structural preservation takes the form of a categorical equivalence between categories of models of classical and quantum physics. I situate the significance of this structural preservation in terms of prospects for theory construction in quantum physics.
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84920.317341
It is plausible that the models of our scientific theories correspond to possibilities. But exactly which models of which scientific theories stand in this correspondence? The answers to this question hinted at so far in the literature are too restrictive: they don’t support the idea that the models of many of our best scientific theories correspond to physical possibilities. The paper thus provides a novel proposal for guiding belief about physical possibilities based on physics. The proposal draws on the notion of an effective theory: a theory that applies very well to a particular, restricted domain. We argue that it is the models of effective theories that we should believe correspond, at least in part, to physical possibilities. It is thus effective theories that should guide modal reasoning in science.
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84950.317355
Philosophers and physicists often claim that the ‘privileged coordinates’ of a physical theory provide a window into its structure. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether this is the case. We show that there are general relativistic spacetimes that admit the same privileged coordinates but have different structure, and we infer from this that privileged coordinates do not provide a perfect guide to underlying structure. We conclude by isolating the conditions under which privileged coordinates do perfectly reflect structure.
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84977.317368
Stephen Hawking’s derivation of Hawking radiation relied on one particular spacetime model, that of a star collapsing into a black hole which then remains in existence forever. He then argued that Hawking radiation implies this model should be thrown away in favour of a different model, that of an evaporating black hole. This aspect of Hawking’s argument is an example of an idealization that is pervasive in the literature on black hole thermodynamics, but which has not yet been widely discussed by philosophers. The aim of this paper is to clarify the nature of Hawking’s idealization, and to show a sense in which it leads to a paradox. After identifying this idealization paradox in classic derivations of Hawking radiation, I go on to show how various research programmes in black hole thermodynamics can be viewed as possible resolutions to the paradox. I give an initial analysis of the prospects for success of these various resolutions, and show how they shed light on both the philosophical foundations of both Hawking radiation on the nature of idealizations in physics.
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96948.317383
Last time I presented a class of agent-based models where agents hop around a graph in a stochastic way. Each vertex of the graph is some ‘state’ agents can be in, and each edge is called a ‘transition’. …
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108884.317397
For those who don’t yet know from their other social media: a week ago the cryptographer Yilei Chen posted a preprint, eprint.iacr.org/2024/555, claiming to give a polynomial-time quantum algorithm to solve lattice problems. …
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117020.317409
It would be nice if my papers and lecture notes were available in HTML, I thought. Let's start with my lecture notes on modal logic (PDF) I thought. I'll need to convert them from LaTeX to HTML, but surely there are tools for that. …
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117020.317422
Years ago, I read a clever argument against physician assisted suicide that held that medical procedures need informed consent, and informed consent requires that one be given relevant scientific data on what will happen to one after a procedure. …
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120514.317436
I’ve been thinking how best to define computationalism about the mind, while remaining fairly agnostic about how the brain computes. Here is my best attempt to formulate computationalism:
- If a Turing machine with sufficiently large memory simulates the functioning of a normal adult human being with sufficient accuracy, then given an appropriate mapping of inputs and outputs but without any ontological addition of a nonphysical property or part, (a) the simulated body dispositionally will behave like the simulated one at the level of macroscopic observation, and (b) the simulation will exhibit mental states analogous to those the simulated human would have. …
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120515.31745
If physician assisted suicide is permissible, then it would have been permissible for early Christians facing being tortured to death by the Romans to kill themselves less painfully. It would not have been permissible for early Christians facing being tortured to death by the Romans to kill themselves less painfully. …
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143716.317466
The culture of the Akan people of West Africa dates from before the
13th century. Like other long-established cultures the world over, the
Akan have developed a rich conceptual system complete with
metaphysical, moral, and epistemological aspects. Of particular
interest is the Akan conception of persons, a conception that
informs a variety of social institutions, practices, and judgments
about personal identity, moral responsibility, and the proper
relationship both among individuals and between individuals and
community. This overview presents the Akan conception of persons as seen by two
major contemporary Akan philosophers, Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye.
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181824.317479
To a large extent, the evidential base of claims in the philosophy of science has switched from thought experiments to case studies. We argue that abandoning thought experiments was a wrong turn, since they can effectively complement case studies. We make our argument via an analogy with the relationship between experiments and observations within science. Just as experiments and ‘natural’ observations can together evidence claims in science, each mitigating the downsides of the other, so too can thought experiments and case studies be mutually supporting. After presenting the main argument, we look at potential concerns about thought experiments, suggesting that a judiciously applied mixed-methods approach can overcome them.
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184545.317492
It turns out I’ve blogged rather a lot of philosophy over the years! I like to find ways to categorize and refer back to the more valuable of those old posts, so they aren’t entirely lost to the ages. …
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190900.317506
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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202869.317519
Welcome to our newest PEA Soup Blog Ethics discussion! This discussion focuses on David Estlund‘s recent paper ‘What’s Unjust About Structural Injustice?‘. To begin, we will pass things over to Peter de Marneffe for a critical précis. …
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211056.317535
A typical feature that is singled out in characterizations of the “open society” or the “great society” is its impersonal nature. Karl Popper characterizes the relationships taking place in the open society as “abstract” and “depersonalized”:
“As a consequence of its loss of organic character, an open society may become, by degrees, what I should like to term an ‘abstract society.’ It may, to a considerable extent, lose the character of a concrete or real group of men, or of a system of such real groups. …
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248611.317549
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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257927.317562
The new approach to quantum mechanics (QM) is that the mathematics of QM is the linearization of the mathematics of partitions (or equivalence relations) on a set. This paper develops those ideas using vector spaces over the field Z2 = {0.1} as a pedagogical or toy model of (finite-dimensional, non-relativistic) QM. The 0, 1-vectors are interpreted as sets, so the model is “quantum mechanics over sets” or QM/Sets. The key notions of partitions on a set are the logical-level notions to model distinctions versus indistinctions, definiteness versus indefiniteness, or distinguishability versus indistinguishability. Those pairs of concepts are the key to understanding the non-classical ‘weirdness’ of QM. The key non-classical notion in QM is the notion of superposition, i.e., the notion of a state that is indefinite between two or more definite- or eigen-states. As Richard Feynman emphasized, all the weirdness of QM is illustrated in the double-slit experiment, so the QM/Sets version of that experiment is used to make the key points.
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257953.317575
We propose a distinction between two different concepts of time that play a role in physics: geometric time and creative time. The former is the time of deterministic physics and merely parametrizes a given evolution. The latter is instead characterized by real change, i.e. novel information that gets created when a non-necessary event becomes determined in a fundamentally indeterministic physics. This allows us to give a naturalistic characterization of the present as the moment that separates the potential future from the determined past. We discuss how these two concepts find natural applications in classical and intuitionistic mathematics, respectively, and in classical and multivalued tensed logic, as well as how they relate to the well-known A- and B-theories in the philosophy of time.
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257964.317588
This essay examines the philosophical significance of Ω-logic in Zermelo- Fraenkel set theory with choice (ZFC). The categorical duality between coalgebra and algebra permits Boolean-valued algebraic models of ZFC to be interpreted as coalgebras. The hyperintensional profile of Ω-logical validity can then be countenanced within a coalgebraic logic. I argue that the philosophical significance of the foregoing is two-fold. First, because the epistemic and modal and hyperintensional profiles of Ω-logical validity correspond to those of second-order logical consequence, Ω-logical validity is genuinely logical. Second, the foregoing provides a hyperintensional account of the interpretation of mathematical and metamathematical vocabulary.