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35535.41854
Conglomerability says that if you have an event E and a partition {Ri : i ∈ I} of the probability space, then if P(E∣Ri) ≥ λ for all i, we likewise have P(E) ≥ λ. Absence of conglomerability leads to a variety of paradoxes, but in various infinitary contexts, it is necessary to abandon conglomerability. …
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38828.418722
Are there ways in which it would be better if axiology were different? Here’s a suggestion that comes to mind:
- It would be better if cowardice, sloth, dishonesty, ignorance, suffering and all the other things that are actually intrinsic evils were instead great intrinsic goods. …
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39940.418744
This paper demonstrates a synergy between the Inner Speech model of free will and the Modular-with-Feedback Theory. The first section examines determinism and causation to argue that free will requires the ability of an agent to make a non-deterministic choice, which could have been decided otherwise. This in spite of physical, hereditary and environmental ad hoc factors which inevitably influence choice. Section two introduces the Modular-with-Feedback Theory which proposes free will to be compatible, not with determinism, but with chance. It provides a model of how free will emerges from oscillating neuronal activity in neural modules.
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42226.418759
In Part 1, I explained how statistical mechanics is connected to a rig whose operations depend on a real parameter and approach the ‘tropical rig’, with operations and as I explained my hope that if we take equations from classical statistical mechanics, expressed in terms of this -dependent rig, and let we get equations in thermodynamics. …
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45803.418774
When Democritus said that the atoms are in contact with each other, he did not mean contact, strictly speaking, which occurs when the surfaces of the things in contact fit on [epharmazousōn] one another, but the condition in which the atoms are near one another and not far apart is what he called contact. …
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46762.418788
Let’s say you like ? more than ?, ? more than ?, and ? more than ?. Then your likes form a loop. But is it wise to have such a loop of likes? An old way to show that it is not wise is to show that, if you have a loop of likes, then you are prey to a wealth pump — that is, a scheme where you pay for what you know you could keep for free. The old wealth pump goes like this: Let’s say you start with?. Then a man asks you if you want to trade ? for ?. Since you like ? more than ?, you make this trade. Then the man asks if you want to trade? for ?. Since you like ? more than?, you make this trade too. And then the man asks if you want to pay a small sum to trade ? for ?. Since you like ? more than ?, you pay the small sum and make the trade from ? to ?. Now, you are back to ?, but you have less wealth: You paid for what you knew you could have kept for free, which does not seem wise.
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49060.418807
Colocationists about human beings think that in my chair are two colocated entities: a human person and a human animal. Both of them are made of the same stuff, both of them exhibit the same physical movements, etc. …
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54486.41883
Is the ideal of value neutrality in science (a) achievable, (b) desirable, and, (c) not detrimental? Alex van den Berg and Tay Jeong (2022) passionately defend the ideal of value neutrality. In this reply, I would like to fine-tune some of their arguments as well as refute others. While there seems to be a broad consensus among philosophers of science that value neutrality is not achievable, one could still defend it as an ideal to aspire to for the sciences (including social sciences). However, I argue that the ideal of value neutrality advanced by van den Berg and Jeong is detrimental, therefore not desirable. We should rather adjust our view of science towards scientific pluralism and perspectivism in combination with strategies to productively deal with values in science. The latter approach is, pace van den Berg and Jeong, more conducive to democracy and egalitarianism than the ideal of value neutrality.
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54508.418863
An influential theorem by Satosi Watanabe convinced many that there can be no physical probabilistic theory with both non-trivial forward and backward transition probabilities. We show that this conclusion does not follow from the theorem. We point out the flaw in the argument, and we showcase examples of theories with well-defined backward and forward transition probabilities.
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121431.418889
In my previous post, I gave an initial defense of a theory of qualitative haecceities in terms of qualitative origins: qualitative haecceities encapsulate complete qualitative descriptions of an entity’s initial state and causal history. …
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121432.418916
Between roughly 2001 and 2018, I’ve happy to have done some nice things in quantum computing theory, from the quantum lower bound for the collision problem to the invention of shadow tomography. I hope that’s not the end of it. …
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133140.418938
A haecceity H of x is a property of an entity such that necessarily x exists if and only if x instantiates H.
Haecceities are normally thought of as non-qualitative properties. But one could also have qualitative haecceities. …
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167292.418953
Participatory and collaborative approaches in sustainability science and public health research contribute to co-producing evidence that can support interventions by involving diverse societal actors that range from individual citizens to entire communities. However, existing philosophical accounts of evidence are not adequate to deal with the kind of evidence generated and used in such approaches.
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167356.418966
With the recent renewed interest in AI, the field has made substantial advancements, particularly in generative systems. Increased computational power and the availability of very large datasets has enabled systems such as ChatGPT to effectively replicate aspects of human social interactions, such as verbal communication, thus bringing about profound changes in society. In this paper, we explain that the arrival of generative AI systems marks a shift from ‘interacting through’ to ‘interacting with’ technologies and calls for a reconceptualization of socio-technical systems as we currently understand them. We dub this new generation of socio-technical systems synthetic to signal the increased interactions between human and artificial agents, and, in the footsteps of philosophers of information, we cash out agency in terms of ‘poiêsis’. We close the paper with a discussion of the potential policy implications of synthetic socio-technical system.
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169711.418979
There is a profound lack of respect, tolerance, and empathy in contemporary politics. Within the past few decades, political opponents have steadily grown to dislike, distrust, fear, and loathe each other; moreover, members of polarized groups perceive one another as closed minded, arrogant, and immoral.1 However, new empirical research suggests that intellectual humility may be useful in bridging political divisions.2 For this reason, a growing number of psychologists and philosophers maintain that intellectual humility is an antidote to some of democracy’s ills.
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192262.418992
Sign languages (in the plural: there are many) arise naturally as soon
as groups of deaf people have to communicate with each other. Sign
languages became institutionally established starting in the late
eighteenth century, when schools using sign languages were founded in
France, and spread across different countries, gradually leading to a
golden age of Deaf culture (we capitalize Deaf when talking
about members of a cultural group, and use deaf for the
audiological status). This came to a partial halt in 1880, when the
Milan Congress declared that oral education was superior to sign
language education (Lane 1984)—a view that is amply refuted by
research (Napoli et al.
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225385.419005
America’s school choice advocates have been making great arguments for decades. Only recently, though, have they started to actually win arguments. What changed? In The Parent Revolution, Corey DeAngelis argues that the key variable was a change in strategy. …
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343945.419018
Q: Jonathan Rauch’s Kindly Inquisitors is against cancel culture, and against punishing hate speech—sounds interesting. Tell me about it. A: It’s more broadly a defense of what Rauch calls “liberal science.” Liberal science “uses intellectual resources efficiently, it settles differences of opinion peacefully, and it inherently blocks the political manipulation of knowledge.” The alternatives don’t, or don’t do those things as well. …
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354890.419041
I’m trying to work out how classical statistical mechanics can reduce to thermodynamics in a certain limit. I sketched out the game plan in Part 1 but there are a lot of details to hammer out. While I’m doing this, let me stall for time by explaining more precisely what I mean by ‘thermodynamics’. …
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400251.419048
This paper proves normalisation theorems for intuitionist and classical negative free logic, without and with the operator for definite descriptions. Rules specific to free logic give rise to new kinds of maximal formulas additional to those familiar from standard intuitionist and classical logic. When is added it must be ensured that reduction procedures involving replacements of parameters by terms do not introduce new maximal formulas of higher degree than the ones removed. The problem is solved by a rule that permits restricting these terms in the rules for @, D and to parameters or constants. A restricted subformula property for deductions in systems without is considered. It is improved upon by an alternative formalisation of free logic building on an idea of Ja´skowski’s. In the classical system the rules for require treatment known from normalisation for classical logic with _ or D. The philosophical significance of the results is also indicated.
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400490.419054
As was recently shown, non-relativistic quantum theory can be derived by means of a projection method from a continuum of classical solutions for (massive) particles. In this paper, we show that Maxwell’s equations in empty space can be derived using the same method. In this case, the starting point is a continuum of solutions of equations of motion for massless particles describing the structure of Galilean space-time. As a result of the projection, the space-time structure itself is changed by the appearance of a new fundamental constant c with the dimension of a velocity. This maximum velocity c, derived here for massless particles, is analogous to the accuracy limit h¯ derived earlier for massive particles. The projection method can thus be interpreted as a generalized quantization. We suspect that all fundamental fields can be traced back to continuous sets of particle trajectories, and that in this sense, the particle concept is more fundamental than the field concept.
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400510.419061
In 2015 the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (‘LIGO’), comprising observatories in Hanford, WA and Livingston, LA, detected gravitational waves for the first time. In the “discovery” paper the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration describe this event, “GW150914”, as the first “direct detection” of gravitational waves and the first “direct observation” of a binary black hole merger (Abbott et al. 2016, 061102–1). Prima facie, these are somewhat puzzling claims. First, there is something counter-intuitive about describing such a sophisticated experiment as a “direct” detection, insofar as this suggests that the procedure was simple or straightforward. Even strong gravitational waves produce only a tiny change in the length of the 4km interferometer arms.
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400531.419067
Most proposals on the problem of mental causation or the exclusion problem emerge from two metaphysical camps: physicalism and dualism. However, a recent theory called “Russellian Panpsychism” (PRM) offers a distinct perspective on the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. PRM posits that phenomenal consciousness is fundamental and pervasive. It suggests that consciousness and physical properties are not entirely separate but rather intertwined. Phenomenal consciousness serves as a foundational ground for the dispositional nature of physical properties. By doing so, PRM proposes a novel solution to the exclusion problem, combining elements from both physicalism and dualism while addressing their inherent difficulties. Nonetheless, the success of PRM faces challenges, as argued by Howell (2015). In this paper, I argue that if PRM is formulated as a version of dual-aspect monism, it can offer a distinctive approach to tackling the exclusion problem.
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400554.419073
We take supersymmetry in the Seiberg-Witten theory as a case study of the uses of (super)symmetry arguments in studying the ontology of four-dimensional interacting quantum field theories. Together with a double expansion, supersymmetry is a via media that helps to bridge the gap between the ontologies of an exact quantum field theory and its semi-classical limit. We discuss a class of states that exist at any value of the coupling, and whose properties such as mass, electric and magnetic charges, and spin quantum numbers can be precisely characterised at low energies. The low-energy theory is best presented as a one-dimensional complex manifold, equipped with metric and other structures: namely, the space of low-energy vacua, covered by three open regions that are interpreted as macroscopic phases. We discuss two cases of emergence: the emergence of the low-energy regime and the emergence between models at low energies, thereby highlighting the significance of the topology of the space of vacua for such cases of emergence.
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437286.419081
Much work in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience has argued for continuism about remembering and imagining (see, e.g., Addis J R Soc N Z 48(2–3):64–88, 2018). This view claims that episodic remembering is just a form of imagining, such that memory does not have a privileged status over other forms of episodic simulation (esp. imagination). Large parts of contemporary philosophy of memory support continuism. This even holds for work in semantics and the philosophy of language, which has pointed out substantial similarities in the distribution of the verbs remember and imagine. Our paper argues against the continuist claim, by focusing on a previously neglected source of evidence for discontinuism: the semantics of episodic memory and imagination reports. We argue that, in contrast to imagination reports, episodic memory reports are essentially diachronic, in the sense that their truth requires a foregoing reference-fixing experience. In this respect, they differ from reports of experiential imagination, which is paradigmatically synchronic. To defend our claim about this difference in diachronicity, we study the truth-conditions of episodic memory and imagination reports. We develop a semantics for episodic uses of remember and imagine that captures this difference.
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457541.419087
Suppose there are no objective moral facts. It's tempting to think that this calls for a special semantics for moral language. Perhaps moral statements somehow express moral attitudes rather than describe the world. …
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458196.419093
The function of chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT is based on detecting probabilistic patterns in the training data. This makes them vulnerable to generating factual mistakes in their outputs. Recently, it has become commonplace in philosophical, scientific, and popular discourses to capture such mistakes by metaphors that draw on discourses about the human mind. The three most popular metaphors at present are hallucinating, confabulating, and bullshitting. In this paper, we review, discuss, and criticise these mental metaphors. By applying conceptual metaphor theory, we provide numerous reasons why none of the metaphors succeed in providing us with a better understanding of factual chatbot mistakes. We conclude by calling for justifications of the epistemic feasibility and fruitfulness of the metaphors at issue. Furthermore, we raise the question what would be lost if we stopped trying to capture factual chatbot mistakes by mental metaphors.
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466092.419101
Start with these plausible claims:
If x causes y, the causal relation between x and y is not posterior to the existence of y. A relation between two entities is never prior to the existence of either entity. …
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466092.419108
I found myself yesterday scurrying to pick up my daughter early from her first day at a new school. My mission? To apply carefully selected, attractive, expensive Etsy nametags, emblazoned with her formerly favorite non-animal—unicorns—to the spare clothing in the almost-regulation-size wooden box in her cubby. …
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538601.419114
Buddhism was introduced to the Korean Peninsula from China during the
Korean Three Kingdoms period. It first arrived in Koguryŏ, a
kingdom on the northern end of the peninsula, in 372 CE and then in
Paekche, a kingdom on the southwest of the peninsula, in 384 CE. It
arrived in Shilla, a kingdom on the southeast of the peninsula, in 521
CE by way of Koguryŏ. The influence of Chinese Buddhism on Korean
Buddhism cannot be treated lightly because Korea imported mostly
sinologized Buddhism, not Indian Buddhism. However, Korea added its
own color and historical and social context. Throughout history, Buddhism has significantly influenced the
worldview of the Korean people, instilling concepts such as karma and
the interconnectedness of all things.