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36525.279934
According to David Chalmers, the virtual entities found in Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) environments instantiate virtual properties of a specific kind. It has recently been objected that such a view (i) can’t extend to all types of properties; (ii) leads to a proliferation of property-types; (iii) implausibly ascribes massive errors to VR and AR users; and (iv) faces an analogue of Jackson’s “many-property problem”. My first objective here is to show that advocates of virtual properties can deal with each of these objections. The other goal of this paper is to examine the consequences of Chalmers’ theory in the particular case of AR. If we countenance virtual properties, AR highlights that non-virtual objects can possess both non-virtual and virtual properties. With AR, it also appears that a same non-virtual object can have different and even incompatible properties across augmented environments. Lastly, considering properties in light of AR highlights the risk of an “augmented solipsism”, and calls forth interesting questions about the persistence conditions of non-virtual objects in AR environments.
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94301.280059
The Border Between Seeing and Thinking is an extraordinary achievement, the result of careful attention (and contribution) to both the science and philosophy of perception. The book offers some bold hypotheses. While the hypotheses themselves are worth the price of entry, Block’s sustained defense of them grants the reader insight into countless fascinating experimental results and philosophical concepts. His unpretentious and accommodating exposition of the science—explaining rather than asserting, digging into specific results in detail rather than making summary judgments and demanding that readers take him at his word—is a model of how philosophers ought to engage with empirical evidence. It is simply not possible to read this book without learning something. It will surely play a foundational role in theoretical work on perception for many years to come.
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94322.280083
This paper explores the relationship between the questioning attitude of wondering and a class of attitudes I call epistemic desires. Broadly, these are desires to improve one’s epistemic position on some question. A common example is the attitude of wanting to know the answer to some question. I argue that one can have any kind of epistemic desire towards any question, Q, without necessarily wondering Q, but not conversely. That is, one cannot wonder Q without having at least some epistemic desire directed towards Q. I defend this latter claim from apparent counterexamples due to Friedman (2013) and Drucker (2022), and finish with a proposal on which epistemic desires, particularly the desire for understanding, play an explanatory role in distinguishing wondering from other forms of question-directed thought.
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94347.280103
An influential objection to the epistemic power of the imagination holds that it is uninformative. You cannot get more out of the imagination than you put into it, and therefore learning from the imagination is impossible. This paper argues, against this view, that the imagination is robustly informative. Moreover, it defends a novel account of how the imagination informs, according to which the imagination is informative in virtue of its analog representational format. The core idea is that analog representations represent relations ‘for free,’ and this explains how the imagination can contain more information than is put into it. This account makes important contributions to both philosophy of mind, by showing how the imagination can generate new content that is not represented by a subject’s antecedent mental states, and epistemology, by showing how the imagination can generate new justification that is not conferred by a subject’s antecedent evidence.
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99637.280113
In recent decades, Bayesian modeling has achieved extraordinary success within perceptual psychology (Knill and Richards, 1996; Rescorla, 2015; Rescorla, 2020a; Rescorla, 2021). Bayesian models posit that the perceptual system assigns subjective probabilities (or credences) to hypotheses regarding distal conditions (e.g. hypotheses regarding possible shapes, sizes, colors, or speeds of perceived objects). The perceptual system deploys its subjective probabilities to estimate distal conditions based upon proximal sensory input (e.g. retinal stimulations). It does so through computations that are fast, automatic, subpersonal, and inaccessible to conscious introspection.
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121030.280132
I favor a "superficialist" approach to belief (see here and here). "Belief" is best conceptualized not in terms of deep cognitive structure (e.g., stored sentences in the language of thought) but rather in terms of how a person would tend to act and react under various hypothetical conditions -- their overall "dispositional profile". …
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209783.280144
We plead for a fluid margin, or mixed/indeterminate buffer zone, between Physical and Non-Physical Causal Closures, and for a Neutrosophic Causal Closure Principle claiming that the chances of all physical effects are determined by their prior partially physical and partially non-physical causes.
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267534.280153
According to First-Person Realism, one's own first-person perspective on the world is metaphysically privileged in some way. After clarifying First-Person Realism by reference to parallel debates in the metaphysics of modality and time, I survey eight different arguments in favor of First-Person Realism.
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267558.280162
There are two ways to characterize symmetric relations. One is intensional: necessarily, Rxy iff Ryx. In some discussions of relations, however, what is important is whether or not a relation gives rise to the same completion of a given type (fact, state of affairs, or proposition) for each of its possible applications to some fixed relata. Kit Fine calls relations that do ‘strictly symmetric’. Is there is a difference between the notions of necessary and strict symmetry that would prevent them from being used interchangeably in such discussions? I show that there is. While the notions coincide assuming an intensional account of relations and their completions, according to which relations/completions are identical if they are necessarily coinstantiated/equivalent, they come apart assuming a hyperintensional account, which individuates relations and completions more finely on the basis of relations’ real definitions. I establish this by identifying two definable relations, each of which is necessarily symmetric but nonetheless results in distinct facts when it applies to the same objects in opposite orders. In each case, I argue that these facts are distinct because they have different grounds.
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566079.280172
In the last ten years there has been an increase in using artificial neural networks to model brain mechanisms, giving rise to a deep learning revolution in neuroscience. This chapter focuses on the ways convolutional deep neural networks (DCNNs) have been used in visual neuroscience. A particular challenge in this developing field is the measurement of similarity between DCNNs and the brain. We survey similarity measures neuroscientists use, and analyse their merit for the goals of causal explanation, prediction and control. In particular, we focus on two recent intervention-based methods of comparing DCNNs and the brain that are based on linear mapping (Bashivan et al., 2019, Sexton and Love, 2022), and analyse whether this is an improvement. While we conclude explanation has not been reached for reasons of underdetermination, progress has been made with regards to prediction and control.
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714397.280186
I learned a lot from the comments on Part 3 and also this related thread on the Category Theory Community Server:
• Coalgebras, operational semantics and the Giry monad. I’d like to thank Matteo Cappucci, David Egolf, Tobias Fritz, Tom Hirschowitz, David Jaz Myers, Mike Shulman, Nathaniel Virgo and many others for help. …
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739144.2802
The neuroscience of consciousness is undergoing a significant empirical acceleration thanks to several adversarial collaborations that intend to test different predictions of rival theories of consciousness. In this context, it is important to pair consciousness science with confirmation theory, the philosophical discipline that explores the interaction between evidence and hypotheses, in order to understand how exactly, and to what extent, specific experiments are challenging or validating theories of consciousness.
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844746.280208
the actual dispositional properties of an entity fully and ultimately determine how that entity could be. Powers are modal properties in two senses. Firstly, powers are modal properties in the sense that they are modally robust: it is metaphysically impossible for fragility to be directed to something other than shattering (Bird 2016). This is because the identity of a power is fixed by what it is for. 3 Secondly, powers are modal properties because they have (nontrivial) modal consequences — they are the source of some modal facts, they can act as truthmakers for certain modal claims (Jacobs 2010; Vetter 2015). The fact that the sugar cube is soluble, together with the fact that solubility is directed at dissolving, fully grounds the fact that the sugar cube could be dissolved. Or, to use our preferred formulation, the modal claim ‘possibly, the sugar cube dissolves’ is made true by the sugar cube’s solubility. 4
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1076172.280215
Experiences of urges, impulses or inclinations are among the most basic elements in the practical life of conscious agents. This paper develops a theory of urges and their epistemology. I motivate a framework that distinguishes urges, conscious experiences of urges and exercises of capacities we have to control our urges. I argue that experiences of urges and exercises of control over urges play coordinate roles in providing one with knowledge of one’s urges.
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1191552.28022
The purpose of this appendix is to show how the conceptual framework – call this CF1 – proposed in the main text relates to Russellian Monism (RM) and can accrue RM’s benefits, while avoiding the combination problem that challenges many forms of RM. For efficiency it will be assumed that readers are familiar with the main text and with CF1.
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1195368.280226
Aesthetic evaluations of human bodies have important implications for moral recognition and for individuals’ access to social and material goods. Unfortunately, there is a widespread aesthetic disregard for non-white bodies. Aesthetic evaluations depend on the aesthetic properties we regard objects as having. And it is widely agreed that aesthetic properties are directly accessed in our experience of aesthetic objects. How, then, might we explain aesthetic evaluations that systematically favour features associated with white identity? Critical race philosophers, like Alia Al-Saji, Mariana Ortega, Paul C. Taylor, and George Yancy, argue that this is because the perception of racialized bodies is affected by the social structures in which they are appreciated. The aim of this paper is to propose how social structures can affect aesthetic perception. I argue that mental imagery acquired through the interaction with aesthetic phenomena structures the perception of non-aesthetic properties of bodies, so that aesthetic properties consistent with racist stereotypes are attributed to individuals.
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1195482.280233
The starting point of this paper is the thought that the phenomenal appearances that accompany mental states are somehow only there, or only real, from the standpoint of the subject of those mental states. The world differs across subjects in terms of which appearances obtain. Not only are subjects standpoints across which the world varies, subjects are standpoints that we can moreover ‘adopt’ in our own theorizing about the world (or stand back from). The picture that is suggested by these claims has an appeal but is at the same time obscure and stands in need of regimentation. This paper explores and motivates a metaphysical account of what it is for subjects to be standpoints, what it is to adopt standpoints in our representations and, most importantly, how these notions might help us better understand the subjective character of conscious mental states. Some well-known observations by Thomas Nagel serve as starting points and the paper concludes by revisiting Nagel’s argument for the inevitable incompleteness of objective accounts of mental states, which will be reframed in terms of the central commitments of the proposed framework.
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1195528.28024
In deciding whether to forgive, we often focus on the wrongdoer, looking for an apology or a change of ways. However, to fully consider whether to forgive, we need to expand our focus from the wrongdoer and their wrongdoing, and we need to consider who we are, what we care about, and what we want to care about. The difference between blame and forgiveness is, at bottom, a difference in priorities. When we blame, we prioritize the wrong, and when we forgive, we shift our priorities away from the wrong. Recognizing this essential role for priorities in forgiveness allows us to address a thorny puzzle in thinking about forgiveness: how is it that forgiveness can be both principled and elective? If there is sufficient reason to forgive, as will sometimes be the case because forgiveness is principled, how can it be reasonable to withhold forgiveness? Recognizing that forgiveness is a shift in our priorities dissolves this apparent tension between forgiveness being principled and forgiveness being elective.
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1195670.280246
According to Bird’s Naïve Dispositional Monism, all properties are powers, and are individuated by their manifestations. Lowe has famously challenged the position with an individuation regress or circularity argument. Bird has then offered a structuralist side-step in the form of Structuralist Dispositional Monism, according to which powers are individuated through the unique position they occupy in an asymmetric power-structure. However, Structuralist Dispositional Monism has been argued to be just as problematic as Naïve Dispositional Monism, if not more so.
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1249317.280252
In this article, I argue that if tacit knowledge of grammar is analyzable in functional-computational terms, then it cannot ground linguistic meaning, structure, or sound. If to know or cognize a grammar is to be in a certain computational state playing a certain functional role, there can be no unique grammar cognized. Satisfying the functional conditions for cognizing a grammar G entails satisfying those for cognizing many grammars disagreeing with G about expressions’ semantic, phonetic, and syntactic values. This threatens the Chomskyan view that expressions have such values for speakers because they cognize grammars assigning them those values. For if this is true, semantics, syntax, and phonology must be indeterminate, thanks to the indeterminacy of grammarcognizing (qua functional-computational state). So, the fact that a speaker cognizes a grammar cannot explain the determinate character of their language.
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1307002.280258
Over the past decade, an inspiring and potent new idea has taken root in philosophy, whose implications for epistemology and for our understanding of the mind we are only just beginning to appreciate. I’m talking about the notion that the mind is not a passive data churner but an active and searching inquirer, driven by curiosity and wonder. The thoughts and views populating this inquiring mind are shaped as much by the questions that give rise to them as by the information that they carry. Information is no longer the sole currency of thought: the mind is abuzz with questions.
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1307030.280264
Experiential acquaintance is an alleged relation between ourselves and our experiences that has sometimes been hypothesized as necessary for knowledge of our experiences. This paper begins with a clarification of ‘acquaintance’ and an explanation of ‘experience’ that focuses attention on a famous, but flawed, argument by G. E. Moore. It goes on to critically examine several recent arguments concerning experiential acquaintance and to show how internalist foundationalism can respond to a famous Sellarsian dilemma without appeal to a relation of acquaintance with our experiences. It concludes that we can dispense with experiential acquaintance.
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1348180.28027
It is widely held that episodic memory is constitutively connected with space and time. In particular, many contend that episodic memory constitutively has spatial and/or temporal content: for instance, necessarily representing a spatial scene, or when a given event occurred, or at the very minimum that it occurred in the past. Here, I critically assess such claims. I begin with some preparatory remarks on the nature of episodic memory. I then ask: How, if at all, is episodic memory constitutively spatial? And, how, if at all, is episodic memory constitutively temporal? In answer, I argue that episodic memory need not have any spatial content, nor (in any substantial sense) need it represent when its events occur, nor even that they occur in the past. Instead, only a relatively modest connection holds between episodic memory and time in virtue of the temporal structure of its objects. Finally, I critically assess whether considerations concerning the organization and encoding of episodic memory in creatures like us provide stronger reason to posit a constitutive link between our episodic memories and space or time.
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1348204.280279
Machine learning is used more and more in scientific contexts, from the recent breakthroughs with AlphaFold2 in protein fold prediction to the use of ML in parametrization for large climate/astronomy models. Yet it is unclear whether we can obtain scientific explanations from such models. I argue that when machine learning is used to conduct causal inference we can give a new positive answer to this question. However, these ML models are purpose-built models and there are technical results showing that standard machine learning models cannot be used for the same type of causal inference. Instead, there is a pathway to causal explanations from predictive ML models through new explainability techniques; specifically, new methods to extract structural equation models from such ML models. The extracted models are likely to suffer from issues though: they will often fail to account for confounders and colliders, as well as deliver simply incorrect causal graphs due to ML models tendency to violate physical laws such as the conservation of energy. In this case, extracted graphs are a starting point for new explanations, but predictive accuracy is no guarantee for good explanations.
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1348207.280287
Embodied Cognition holds that bodily (e.g. sensorimotor) states and processes are directly involved in some higher-level cognitive functions (e.g. reasoning). This challenges traditional views of cognition according to which bodily states and processes are, at most, indirectly involved in higher-level cognition. Although some elements of Embodied Cognition have been integrated into mainstream cognitive science, others still face adamant resistance. In this paper, rather than straightforwardly defend Embodied Cognition against specific objections I will do the following. First, I will present a concise account of embodied conceptual processing and highlight some of its advantages over non-embodied accounts, specifically focusing on the role of metaphors. Second, I will detail the influence of computational metaphors on theories of cognition and evaluation of these theories. Third, I will argue that embodied cognitive mechanisms, specifically those operating through computational metaphors, may drive some of the resistance to Embodied Cognition - and that Embodied Cognition is able to offer a uniquely compelling account of this. Ultimately, this will contribute to an improved understanding of Embodied Cognition, its explanatory power, and how it ought to be evaluated. Additionally, it will shed light on the role of metaphors in shaping philosophical thought and highlight the importance of these influences.
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1407303.280293
In recent years many people have raised the idea that the supposed reality we are experiencing might in fact be a simulation, running on a computer that exists in the true (or “base”) reality. There are many arguments for this, some more serious than others, but all such arguments make an assumption that I reject, namely that it is at least possible to create conscious, rational beings within a computer program. Note that the simulation hypothesis is quite different from the plot of the Matrix in this respect, since most of the people in the Matrix are flesh-and-blood human organisms, existing in the base reality, who merely get their sense experiences from the program. The simulation hypothesis, on the other hand, says that we humans are just “Sims”, i.e. entities that are part of the simulation, created by the computer code, like non-player characters in a video game.
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1540351.280299
Grief is, and has always been, technologically supported. From memorials and shrines to photos and saved voicemail messages, we engage with the dead through the technologies available to us. As our technologies evolve, so does how we grieve. In this paper, we consider the role chatbots might play in our grieving practices. Influenced by recent phenomenological work, we begin by thinking about the character of grief. Next, we consider work on developing ‘continuing bonds’ with the dead. We argue that, for some, chatbots may play an important role in establishing these continuing bonds by helping us develop what we term ‘habits of intimacy’. We then turn to the ‘ick factor’ some may feel about this prospect, focusing especially on ethical concerns raised by Patrick Stokes and Adam Buben about the risk of replacing our dead with chatbots. We argue that replacement worries are not as pressing as Stokes and Buben suggest. We resist these replacement worries by appealing to the ‘thin reciprocity’, as we refer to it, that such bots offer, as well as the fictionalist stance
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1540369.280305
The space of possible worlds is vast. Some of these possible worlds are materialist worlds, some may be worlds bottoming out in 0s and 1s, or other strange things we cannot even dream of… and some are idealist worlds. From among all of the worlds subjectively indistinguishable from our own, the idealist ones have uniquely compelling virtues. Idealism gives us a world that is just as it appears; a world that’s fit to literally enter our minds when we perceive it. If the world is an idealist world, we live in a perceptual Eden. We did not fall from Eden. Rather, we deluded ourselves into believing that we couldn’t possibly live in Eden when we committed to materialism. Reflecting on these big-picture issues gives us reason to question this commitment and embrace a radically new account of reality and our relation to it.
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1540427.280311
This article defends the existence of borderline consciousness. In borderline consciousness, conscious experience is neither determinately present nor determinately absent, but rather somewhere between. The argument in brief is this. In considering what types of systems are conscious, we face a quadrilemma. Either nothing is conscious, or everything is conscious, or there’s a sharp boundary across the apparent continuum between conscious systems and nonconscious ones, or consciousness is a vague property admitting indeterminate cases. Assuming mainstream naturalism about consciousness, we ought to reject the first three options, which forces us to the fourth, indeterminacy. Standard objections to the existence of borderline consciousness turn on the inconceivability of borderline cases. However, borderline cases are only inconceivable by an inappropriately demanding standard of conceiv-ability. I conclude with some plausible cases and applications.
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1540457.280318
Critical psychiatry has recently echoed Szasz’s longstanding concerns about medical understandings of mental distress. According to Szaszianism, the analogy between mental and somatic disorders is illegitimate because the former presuppose psychosocial and ethical norms, whereas the latter merely involve deviations from natural ones. So-called “having-it-both-ways” views have contested that social norms and values play a role in both mental and somatic healthcare, thus rejecting that the influence of socio-normative considerations in mental healthcare compromises the analogy between mental and somatic disorders. This paper has two goals. Firstly, I argue that having-it-both-ways views fail to provide a compelling answer to Szasz’s challenge. The reason is that what is essential to Szasz’s argument is not that mental disorder attributions involve value judgements, but that mental attributions in general do. Mental disorders are thus doubly value-laden and, qua mental, only metaphorically possible. To illustrate this, I construe Szasz’s view and Fulford’s having-it-both-ways approach as endorsing two different kinds of expressivism about mental disorders, pointing out their different implications for the analysis of delusions. Secondly, I argue, against Szaszianism, that Szasz’s rejection of the analogy is relatively irrelevant for discussions about the appropriateness of medicalizing mental distress. Specifically, I draw from socio-normative approaches to the psychopathology/social deviance distinction and mad and neurodiversity literature to argue that a) it is still possible to distinguish social deviance from psychopathology once we reject the analogy; and b) that both medicalizing and normalizing attitudes to mental distress can harmfully wrong people from relevant collectives.