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856067.960184
Reminder: everyone is welcome here, but paid subscriptions are what enable me to devote the necessary time to researching and writing this newsletter, including pieces like this one on Katie Johnson, the woman who alleged Trump sexually assaulted her at the age of thirteen at a party of Jeffrey Epstein’s. …
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925650.960253
It’s widely held that we perceive not only low-level properties, such as colors and shapes, but also high-level properties, such as the property of being a dog or of being a moving train. Debate about which types of property we perceive has recently eclipsed the question of how perceiving itself operates. We focus here on that latter question, proposing an account on which perception of low-level properties occurs by way of mental qualities alone, whereas perception of high-level properties occurs by way of mental qualities together with conceptual content of the type that figures in thinking. It is central to our account that mental qualities have a type of representational character unique to them, so that mental qualities can interact representationally with conceptual content in perceiving. We present a number of advantages of this account, including how it fits with a range of experimental findings, and address several objections to it.
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933072.960266
I have toyed with a pair of theories. The first is what I call gaze-dualism. On gaze-dualism, our sensory conscious experiences are constituted by a non-physical object—the soul—“gazing” at certain brain states. …
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933072.960275
There is a vast and rather radical diversity in the inner conscious lives of human beings. Start with the differences in dreams: some people know immediately whether they are dreaming and others do not; some are in control of their dreams and others are not; some dream in color and others do not. …
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939388.960284
1. Liu’s Theory
The title is a reference to Cixin Liu’s science fiction novel, The Dark Forest, from the Three Body Problem trilogy. (That trilogy, by the way, is among the greatest works of science fiction.) …
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941358.960292
This paper critically analyses the “attention economy” within the framework of cognitive science and techno-political economics, as applied to both human and machine interactions. We explore how current business models, particularly in digital platform capitalism, harness user engagement by strategically shaping attentional patterns. These platforms utilize advanced AI and massive data analytics to enhance user engagement, creating a cycle of attention capture and data extraction. We review contemporary (neuro)cognitive theories of attention and platform engagement design techniques and criticize classical cognitivist and behaviourist theories for their inadequacies in addressing the potential harms of such engagement on user autonomy and wellbeing. 4E approaches to cognitive science, instead, emphasizing the embodied, extended, enactive, and ecological aspects of cognition, offer us an intrinsic normative standpoint and a more integrated understanding of how attentional patterns are actively constituted by adaptive digital environments. By examining the precarious nature of habit formation in digital contexts, we reveal the techno-economic underpinnings that threaten personal autonomy by disaggregating habits away from the individual, into an AI managed collection of behavioural patterns. Our current predicament suggests the necessity of a paradigm shift towards an ecology of attention. This shift aims to foster environments that respect and preserve human cognitive and social capacities, countering the exploitative tendencies of cognitive capitalism.
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942392.9603
A few months into the pandemic, my wife and I adopted a new pastime: we would complete the New York Times crossword puzzle every day. The puzzle gets more difficult as the week goes on, Mondays being easiest, with the qualitative peak on Saturday and the quantitative Sunday, when the crossword is nearly twice as large. …
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1022330.960308
When bad news gets me down, I often get insomnia. I wake up in the middle of the night, start thinking about how we’re all doomed, and can’t easily stop. To break out of these doom loops, I do elaborate visualization exercises. …
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1028866.960316
Wilhelm Keitel was made chief of staff of the Armed Forces in 1938. If that sounds like a vote of confidence, in fact Hitler regarded the man with disdain: Keitel had “the brains of a movie usher.” So why promote him? …
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1099318.960324
In the first lecture, I argued that societies are complex dynamic systems and that in order to promote social change we must attend to material meso-level systems, e.g., heath care systems, education systems, criminal justice systems, and the like, and their patriarchal, White supremacist, and capitalist dynamics. This complex systems approach – together with attention to the social formation of subjects within practices – helps us capture the phenomenon of intersectional oppression and is suited to the strategic thinking needed for social transformation.
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1263426.960332
It is a stark truth that the prison system in the United States is a moral catastrophe. Many of those who go to prison are routinely subject to battery, assault, and rape, or live in constant fear thereof. Incarcerated individuals are forced to align with gangs to protect themselves. They are treated by guards and other prison officials in deeply dehumanizing ways, subjected to psychological torture through solitary confinement and other measures, and sometimes inhabit literally unlivable conditions.
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1289311.96034
Cognitive scientists ascribe inferential processes to (neuro)cognitive systems to explain many of their capacities. Since these ascriptions have different connotations, philosophical accounts of inference could help clarify their assumptions and forestall potential confusion. However, many existing accounts define inference in ways that are out of touch with successful scientific practice – ways that overly intellectualise inference, construe inference in complete opposition to association, and imply that inferential processes prevent minds from being in contact with the outside world. In this chapter, we combine Siegel’s (2017) Response Hypothesis with insights from basal cognition and ecological rationality to sketch a philosophically viable, updated account of inference in (neuro)cognitive systems. According to this view, inference is a kind of rationally evaluable transition from some inputs or current representations to some conclusion or output representation. This notion of inference aligns with and can illuminate scientific practices in disparate fields, while eschewing a commitment to a consciously accessible language-like neural code or a formal system of mental logic, highlighting the continuity between inferential and associative processes, and allowing for a non-indirect mind-world relationship, where minds are genuinely open and responsive to their environment.
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1371596.960353
This paper assesses the prospects for an externalist perspective for somatic medicine—the view that health and disease of the body might sometimes be constitutively dependent on factors external to the organism. After briefly reviewing the grounds for psychiatric externalism, I argue that similar considerations are already implicit in somatic medical practice, particularly in immunology, public/population health, and occupational therapy. I then argue that the interactionist and population-minded externalist approach to biomedicine represents an important practical application of more general trends in biological theory; namely, the growing rejection of individualistic and reductionistic thinking.
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1371617.960361
Machine learning (ML) is a major scientific success. Yet, ML models are notoriously considered black boxes, where this black boxness may refer to details of the ML model itself or details concerning its outcomes. Hence, there is a flourishing field of “eXplainable Artificial Intelligence” (XAI), providing means for rendering several aspects of ML more transparent. However, given their tremendous success, why would we even want to explain black boxed ML models with XAI? I here suggest that, in order to answer this question, we first need to distinguish between proximate and ultimate aims in using XAI: While the proximate aim may be uniformly to provide instruments for explaining aspects of ML to relevant stakeholders, the ultimate aim varies with the context of deployment. Furthermore, I argue that in science, the ultimate aim is the understanding of scientific phenomena. I then sketch three paths along which understanding of phenomena may be gained by means of ML and XAI. In a coda, I address the possibility of gaining understanding from ML directly, without explanations and XAI.
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1371640.960369
Particle physicists have been among the early adopters of Machine Learning (ML) methods, the most notable ML systems being Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Today, ML's use in Particle Physics (PP) ranges from the reconstruction of signals inside the detector to the simulation of events and the determination of statistical ratios in the nal analysis. Most intriguingly, there is some evidence which suggests that DNNs might be able to independently acquire complex physical conceptsconcepts that are relevant for the discovery and understanding of new particles and phenomena. We here argue that these two possibilities, that of discovering novel concepts per se, and that of discovering novel phenomena by means of them, pose epistemic challenges for particle physicists. In turn, we will analyse ways of mitigating these challenges, both actual and at present merely possible.
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1371669.960377
This article examines the phenomenon of electron localization from a conceptual perspective, without going into technical details. In particular, it analyzes two cases in which electrons are confined to a specific region near one or more atoms, but with different characteristics: electron localization in molecules and in crystalline solids. The features and requirements for localization in each case are discussed, along with their specific interpretative challenges and the various proposals put forward to address them.
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1472249.960385
As part of the summer break, I’m publishing old essays that may be of interest for new subscribers. This post has been originally published March 29, 2023. If not already the case, do not hesitate to subscribe to receive free essays on economics, philosophy, and liberal politics in your mailbox! …
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1486973.960393
A general class of presupposition arguments holds that the background knowledge and theory required to design, develop, and interpret a machine learning (ML) system imply a strong upper limit to ML’s impact on science. I consider two proposals for how to assess the scientific impact of ML predictions, and I argue that while these accounts prioritize conceptual change, the presuppositions they take to be disqualifying for strong novelty are too restrictive. I characterize a general form of their arguments I call the Concept-free Design Argument: that strong novelty is curtailed by utilizing prior conceptualizations of target phenomena in model design.
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1486996.960401
Despite its growing appeal for the study of consciousness, the notion of entropy has yet to lead to widely supported new insights about the nature of phenomenal experience. Typically, entropy measures of brain activity are found to correlate with cognitive functions that are assumed to index consciousness. Taking a very different approach, this theoretical framework does not conflate consciousness with any function. It presents a series of premises to argue that consciousness is fundamentally characterized as inactionable perception, i.e. that does not give rise to macrophysical action. This is then fitted in a framework of perception and action as informational changes in a dynamical neural state space. In this model, inactionable perception naturally arises as the prediction-driven increase of concept-related entropy. This entails an increase of (Shannon) information while its efficacy to produce macrophysical effects decreases, which is here referred to as information dissipation, analogously to energy dissipation in thermodynamic systems. It results from inefficient sensorimotor coupling with the environment, which occurs when behavior is not fixed relative to the stimulus. Despite the posited inefficacy of conscious perception, it consists of action-specific information and can therefore be interpreted as potential behavior. Starting from fundamental properties, this framework may provide a new and coherent conceptual basis for a fuller understanding of what consciousness is and how it relates to the physical world. Although many of its implications remain to be explored, it appears consistent with empirical findings, and prompts subtle reinterpretations of some classical results in perception research.
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1518602.960409
Astronomers have found a truly huge black hole! It’s in the massive galaxy in the center here, called the Cosmic Horseshoe. The blue ring is light from a galaxy behind the Cosmic Horseshoe, severely bent by gravity. …
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1569013.960417
How many ways are there to punctuate a sentence? When I wrote about the topic more than two years back, I counted fourteen basic punctuation marks:
apostrophe, brace, bracket, colon, comma, dash, ellipsis, exclamation, hyphen, parenthesis, period, question, quotation, and (last but not least) semicolon. …
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1602238.960425
The family of relevant logics can be faceted by a hierarchy of increasingly fine-grained variable sharing properties—requiring that in valid entailments A → B, some atom must appear in both A and B with some additional condition (e.g., with the same sign or nested within the same number of conditionals). In this paper, we consider an incredibly strong variable sharing property of lericone relevance that takes into account the path of negations and conditionals in which an atom appears in the parse trees of the antecedent and consequent. We show that this property of lericone relevance holds of the relevant logic BM (and that a related property of faithful lericone relevance holds of B) and characterize the largest fragments of classical logic with these properties. Along the way, we consider the consequences for lericone relevance for the theory of subject-matter, for Logan’s notion of hyperformalism, and for the very definition of a relevant logic itself.
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1602289.960433
Perspectival realism claims that scientific knowledge is always situated into a vantage point. We argue that ecological psychology offers a suitable framework to develop perspectival epistemologies. Ecological psychology stresses that perception is focused on affordances, i.e. the possibilities of interactions afforded by reality given the abilities of an organism. We call the integrating view as ecological perspectivism. It claims that science offers knowledge of reality in terms of affordances, which are relational to the instruments and abilities of scientific communities. Cognition is of affordances, and what a domain affords for scientists depends on which skills and technologies they avail. We connect this proposal with the main arguments for perspectivism. First, regarding instrumental detections, ecological perspectivism offers a realist account of perception that treats the use of instruments as tools that scaffold and extend embodied cognition. Second, regarding model pluralism, ecological perspectivism supports an artifactualist account of modelling as embodied cognition extended by tools.
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1602418.960452
Relevance has become a central concept in the discussion of academic knowledge production, used in the strategies and guidelines of various research-oriented institutions. This article analyses some of the key contemporary tenets in this area. Having conducted a systematic literature review of 113 academic articles, I distinguish eight main ways of referring to relevance in the context of knowledge production. Some accounts focus on how existing knowledge institutions do or could provide users with relevant knowledge, whereas others take a more dynamic approach reflecting on how stakeholder needs should influence knowledge production and what types of institutional structures allow them to do so. This difference corresponds with the characterisation of the science-policy interface either as a two-world (linear) relationship or as one-world intertwined. It is also worth considering how social and policy relevance, for example, stand against each other. These nuances should be recognised given that the concept of relevance is widely used in institutional design and in discussions about the future of academic knowledge production.
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1602442.960462
Baroque questions of set-theoretic foundations are widely assumed to be irrelevant to physics. In this article, I challenge this assumption. I argue that even the fundamental physical question of whether a theory is deterministic—whether it fixes a unique future given the present—can depend on one’s choice of set-theoretic axiom candidates over which there is intractable disagreement. Suppose, as is customary (Earman 1986), that a deterministic theory is one whose mathematical formulation yields a unique solution to its governing equations. Then the question of whether a physical theory is deterministic becomes the question of whether there exists a unique solution to its mathematical model—typically a system of differential equations. I argue that competing axiom candidates extending standard mathematics—in particular, the Axiom of Constructibility (V = L) and large cardinal axioms strong enough to prove Projective Determinacy—can diverge on all the core dimensions of physical determinism. First, they may disagree about whether a given physical system is well-posed, and so whether a solution exists.
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1603124.960473
For those of us who love philosophy, philosophical songs—e.g. from the 21st Century Monads or Hannah Hoffman—can be a lot of fun. Since I’m not in a position to compose such works myself, one of my favorite uses of Suno is to play around with having it add musical backing to philosophical lyrics, with results like my Idealism Theme Song (Return to Eden) and The Curse of Deontology.1 While I find these fun, I can’t really imagine them being philosophically persuasive; they’re more just serving as superficial “pointers” to more in-depth arguments that one might consider later looking into. …
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1706744.960481
Generally speaking, it is seriously wrong to do harm to others. It is also often seriously wrong to allow harm to others. Some nonetheless hold that doing and allowing harm are morally inequivalent. They endorse the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA): the view that it is harder to justify doing harm than merely allowing harm, all else being equal. For example, it seems wrong to deflect a lethal threat onto an innocent in order to save oneself, but permissible to allow a lethal threat to reach an innocent in order to save oneself. The DDA naturally accounts for this. But others deny that there is any morally significant difference, arguing that when all else is equalized, doing harm is no worse (nor harder to justify) than allowing harm.
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1706771.96049
The main aim of this paper is to clarify the relation between the divine mind, matter, and finite minds. It has been noted in the secondary literature that Shepherd repeatedly characterizes this relation in emanationist terms (Boyle 2023: 268; LoLordo 2020: 20), such as when she mentions “outgoings” (EPEU: 189, 190, 219) or when she says that “[m] ind and matter; may be considered as having existed eternally, coming forth from him [i.e. God], living in him, and supported by him” (ERCE: 98). However, while LoLordo (2021: 241) thus, correctly I believe, speculates that mind and matter belong to God in some sense, and Boyle (2023: 267) suggests they are some sort of “constant creations,” neither develop these ideas in more detail. In contrast, I spell out this relation by drawing from a distinction by Jennifer McKitrick (2003) to argue that the divine mind is best understood as functioning similarly to a bare or ungrounded disposition, while matter and finite minds are akin to grounded dispositions. In other words, the divine mind, an infinite capacity for consciousness (see §3), is the ultimate causal basis for matter and finite minds and is causally responsible for their existence and persistence. Matter and finite minds, in turn, are both
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1706794.960498
Blame abounds in our everyday lives, perhaps no more so than on social media. With the rise of social networking platforms, we now have access to more information about others’ blameworthy behaviour and larger audiences to whom we can express our blame. But these audiences, while large, are not typically diverse. Just as we tend to gather and share information within online social networks made up of like-minded individuals, much of the moral criticism found on the internet is expressed within groups of agents with similar values and worldviews. Like these epistemic practices, the blaming practices found on social media have also received criticism. Many argue that the blame expressed on the internet is unfitting, excessive, and counterproductive. What accounts for the perniciousness of online blame? And what should be done to address it?
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1706848.960506
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License doi.org/10.3998/phimp.4064 ophy of literature”; those related to philosophical content in literature (e.g., moral motivation in Steinbeck’s novels), usually dubbed “philosophy in literature”; and finally, those centered on literary forms in which philosophical works are written (e.g. Zhuangzi’s non-sequiturs, Plato’s dialogues), usually dubbed “philosophy as literature.” The aim of this article is to expand the way we understand philosophy in literature. Many literary works address philosophical ideas or find their inspirations from philosophical questions. But the problem with focusing on the way philosophy provides the important content in a literary work is the implicit assumption that literature is to be put in service of philosophical ends. Philosophy is prioritized over liter- 1. Defining ‘philosophy’ and ‘literature’ and explaining how they might be distinguished from each other are tasks far beyond the scope of this paper.