38 ideas
22886 | The modern idea of 'limit' allows infinite quantities to have a finite sum [Bardon] |
Full Idea: The concept of a 'limit' allows for an infinite number of finite quantities to add up to a finite sum. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 1 'Aristotle's') | |
A reaction: This is only if the terms 'converge' on some end point. Limits are convenient fictions. |
22914 | An equally good question would be why there was nothing instead of something [Bardon] |
Full Idea: If there were nothing, then wouldn't it be just as good a question to ask why there is nothing rather than something? There are many ways for there to be something, but only one way for there to be nothing. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 8 'Confronting') | |
A reaction: [He credits Nozick with the question] I'm not sure whether there being nothing counts as a 'way' of being. If something exists it seems to need a cause, but no cause seems required for the absence of things. Nice, though. |
16554 | Activities have place, rate, duration, entities, properties, modes, direction, polarity, energy and range [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: Activities can be identified spatiotemporally, and individuated by rate, duration, and types of entity and property that engage in them. They also have modes of operation, directionality, polarity, energy requirements and a range. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3) | |
A reaction: This is their attempt at making 'activity' one of the two central concepts of ontology, along with 'entity'. A helpful analysis. It just seems to be one way of slicing the cake. |
16556 | Penicillin causes nothing; the cause is what penicillin does [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: It is not the penicillin that causes the pneumonia to disappear, but what the penicillin does. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3.1) | |
A reaction: This is a very neat example for illustrating how we slip into 'entity' talk, when the reality we are addressing actually concerns processes. Without the 'what it does', penicillin can't participate in causation at all. |
16562 | We understand something by presenting its low-level entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: The intelligibility of a phenomenon consists in the mechanisms being portrayed in terms of a field's bottom out entities and activities. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7) | |
A reaction: In other words, we understand complex things by reducing them to things we do understand. It would, though, be illuminating to see a nest of interconnected activities, even if we understood none of them. |
16563 | The explanation is not the regularity, but the activity sustaining it [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: It is not regularities that explain but the activities that sustain the regularities. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7) | |
A reaction: Good, but we had better not characterise the 'activities' in terms of regularities. |
16555 | Functions are not properties of objects, they are activities contributing to mechanisms [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: It is common to speak of functions as properties 'had by' entities, …but they should rather be understood in terms of the activities by virtue of which entities contribute to the workings of a mechanism. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3) | |
A reaction: I'm certainly quite passionately in favour of cutting down on describing the world almost entirely in terms of entities which have properties. An 'activity', though, is a bit of an elusive concept. |
16528 | Mechanisms are not just push-pull systems [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: One should not think of mechanisms as exclusively mechanical (push-pull) systems. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1) | |
A reaction: The difficulty seems to be that you could broaden the concept of 'mechanism' indefinitely, so that it covered history, mathematics, populations, cultural change, and even mathematics. Where to stop? |
16529 | Mechanisms are systems organised to produce regular change [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: Mechanisms are entities and activities organized such that they are productive of regular change from start or set-up to finish or termination conditions. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1) | |
A reaction: This is their initial formal definition of a mechanism. Note that a mere 'activity' can be included. Presumably the mechanism might have an outcome that was not the intended outcome. Does a random element disqualify it? Are hands mechanisms? |
16530 | A mechanism explains a phenomenon by showing how it was produced [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: To give a description of a mechanism for a phenomenon is to explain that phenomenon, i.e. to explain how it was produced. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1) | |
A reaction: To 'show how' something happens needs a bit of precisification. It is probably analytic that 'showing how' means 'revealing the mechanism', though 'mechanism' then becomes the tricky concept. |
16553 | Our account of mechanism combines both entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: We emphasise the activities in mechanisms. This is explicitly dualist. Substantivalists speak of entities with dispositions to act. Process ontologists reify activities and try to reduce entities to processes. We try to capture both intuitions. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3) | |
A reaction: [A quotation of selected fragments] The problem here seems to be the raising of an 'activity' to a central role in ontology, when it doesn't seem to be primitive, and will typically be analysed in a variety of ways. |
16559 | Descriptions of explanatory mechanisms have a bottom level, where going further is irrelevant [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: Nested hierachical descriptions of mechanisms typically bottom out in lowest level mechanisms. …Bottoming out is relative …the explanation comes to an end, and description of lower-level mechanisms would be irrelevant. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 5.1) | |
A reaction: This seems to me exactly the right story about mechanism, and it is a story I am associating with essentialism. The relevance is ties to understanding. The lower level is either fully understood, or totally baffling. |
16564 | There are four types of bottom-level activities which will explain phenomena [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: There are four bottom-out kinds of activities: geometrico-mechanical, electro-chemical, electro-magnetic and energetic. These are abstract means of production that can be fruitfully applied in particular cases to explain phenomena. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7) | |
A reaction: I like that. It gives a nice core for a metaphysics for physicalists. I suspect that 'mechanical' can be reduced to something else, and that 'energetic' will disappear in the final story. |
16561 | We can abstract by taking an exemplary case and ignoring the detail [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: Abstractions may be constructed by taking an exemplary case or instance and removing detail. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 5.3) | |
A reaction: I love 'removing detail'. That's it. Simple. I think this process is the basis of our whole capacity to formulate abstract concepts. Forget Frege - he's just describing the results of the process. How do we decide what is 'detail'? Essentialism! |
22237 | The Greeks had a single word meaning both 'beautiful' and 'good' [Pormann] |
Full Idea: The later Greeks coined the term 'kalokagathia' for the fact of being both beautiful [kalos] and good [agathos], thus linking moral and physical health. | |
From: Peter E. Pormann (Medical Conceptions of Health pre-Renaissance [2019], p.44) | |
A reaction: In their literature good people are often handsome, and bad people ugly. Socrates was famous for being an exception. |
22902 | Why does an effect require a prior event if the prior event isn't a cause? [Bardon] |
Full Idea: To say that a reaction requires the earlier presence of an action just raises anew the question of why it is 'required' if it isn't bring about the reaction. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 4 'Pervasive') | |
A reaction: This is another example of my demand that empiricists don't just describe and report conjunctions and patterns, but make some effort to explain them. |
16558 | Laws of nature have very little application in biology [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: The traditional notion of a law of nature has few, if any, applications in neurobiology or molecular biology. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3.2) | |
A reaction: This is a simple and self-evident fact, and bad news for anyone who want to build their entire ontology around laws of nature. I take such a notion to be fairly empty, except as a convenient heuristic device. |
22905 | Becoming disordered is much easier for a system than becoming ordered [Bardon] |
Full Idea: Systems move to a higher state of entropy …because there are very many more ways for a system to be disordered than for it to be ordered. …We can also say that they tend to move from a non-equilibrium state to an equilibrium state. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 5 'Thermodynamic') | |
A reaction: Is it actually about order, or is it just that energy radiates, and thus disperses? |
22913 | The universe expands, so space-time is enlarging [Bardon] |
Full Idea: More and more space-time is literally being created from nothing all the time as the universe expands. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 8 'Realism') | |
A reaction: [He cites Paul Davies for this] Is the universe acquiring more space, or is the given space being stretched? Acquiring more time makes no sense, so what is more space-time? |
22889 | We should treat time as adverbial, so we don't experience time, we experience things temporally [Bardon, by Bardon] |
Full Idea: Kant says that instead of focusing on the nouns 'time' and 'space', it would be more on target to focus on the adverbial applications of the concepts - that we don't experience things in time and space so much as experience them temporally and spatially. | |
From: report of Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013]) by Adrian Bardon - Brief History of the Philosophy of Time 2 'Kantian' | |
A reaction: Put like that, Kant's approach has some plausibility, given that we don't actually experience space and time as entities. To jump from that to idealism seems daft. Does every adverb imply idealism about what it specifies? |
22900 | How can we question the passage of time, if the question takes time to ask? [Bardon] |
Full Idea: Even questioning the passage of time may be self-defeating: can any question be meaningfully asked or understood without presuming the passage of time from the inception of the question to its conclusion? | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 4 'Pervasive') | |
A reaction: [He cites P.J. Zwart for this] We can at least, in B-series style, specify the starting and finishing times of the question, without talk of its passage. Nice point, though. |
22898 | What is time's passage relative to, and how fast does it pass? [Bardon] |
Full Idea: If time is passing, then relative to what? How could time pass with respect to itself? Further, if time passes, at what rate does it pass? | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 4 'Pervasive') | |
A reaction: I remember some writer grasping the nettle, and saying that time passes at one second per second. Compare travelling at one metre per metre. |
22897 | The A-series says a past event is becoming more past, but how can it do that? [Bardon] |
Full Idea: In the dynamic theory of time the Battle of Waterloo is become more past. If we insist on the A-series properties, this seems inevitable. But how can a past event be changing now? | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 4 'Reasons') | |
A reaction: [He cites Ulrich Meyer for this] We don't worry about an object changing its position when it is swept down a river. The location of the Battle of Waterloo relative to 'now' is not a property of the battle. That is a 'Cambridge' property. |
22901 | The B-series needs a revised view of causes, laws and explanations [Bardon] |
Full Idea: If we accept the static (B-series) view, we have to reevaluate how we think about causation, natural laws, and scientific explanation. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 4 'Pervasive') | |
A reaction: Any scientific account which refers to events seems to imply a dynamic view of time. Lots of scientists and philosophers endorse the static view of time, but then fail to pursue its implications. |
22896 | The B-series is realist about time, but idealist about its passage [Bardon] |
Full Idea: The B-series theorist is a realist about time but an idealist about the passage of time. This is the Static Theory of time. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 4 'Reasons') | |
A reaction: Note the both A and B are realists about time, and thus deny both the relationist and the idealist view. |
22903 | The B-series adds directionality when it accepts 'earlier' and 'later' [Bardon] |
Full Idea: The static (B-series) theory, by embracing the relational temporal properties 'earlier' and 'later', adds a directional ordering to the block of events. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 5 'Time's') | |
A reaction: I'm not clear whether this addition to the B-series picture is optional or obligatory. It is important that it seems to be a bolt-on feature, not immediately implied by the timeless series. What would Einstein say? |
22910 | To define time's arrow by causation, we need a timeless definition of causation [Bardon] |
Full Idea: The problem for the causal analysis of temporal asymmetry is to come up with a definition of causation that does not itself rely on the concept of temporal asymmetry. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 5 'Causal') | |
A reaction: This is the point at which my soul cries out 'time is a primitive concept!' Leibniz want to use dependency to define time's arrow, but how do you specify dependency if you don't know which one came first? |
22909 | We judge memories to be of the past because the events cause the memories [Bardon] |
Full Idea: On the causal view of time's arrow, memories pertain to the 'past' just because they are caused by the events of which they are memories. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 5 'Causal') | |
A reaction: How am I able to distinguish imagining the future from remembering the past? How do I tell which mental events have external causes, and which are generated by me? |
22904 | The psychological arrow of time is the direction from our memories to our anticipations [Bardon] |
Full Idea: The psychological arrow of time refers to the familiar fact that that we remember (and never anticipate) the past, and anticipate (but never remember) the future. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 5 'Psychological') | |
A reaction: Bardon rejects this on the grounds that the psychology is obviously the result of the actual order of events. Otherwise time's arrow would just result from the luck of how we individually experience things. |
22906 | The direction of entropy is probabilistic, not necessary, so cannot be identical to time's arrow [Bardon] |
Full Idea: The coincidence of thermodynamic direction and the direction of time is striking, but they can't be one and the same because the thermodynamic law is merely probabilistic. Orderliness could increase, but it is highly improbable | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 5 'Thermodynamic') | |
A reaction: This seems to be persuasive grounds for rejecting thermodynamics as the explanation of time's arrow. |
22907 | It is arbitrary to reverse time in a more orderly universe, but not in a sub-system of it [Bardon] |
Full Idea: It would seem arbitrary to say that the direction of time is reversed if the whole universe becomes more orderly, but it isn't reversed for any particular sub-system that becomes more orderly. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 5 'Thermodynamic') | |
A reaction: The thought is that if time's arrow depends on entropy, then the arrow must reverse if entropy were to reverse (however unlikely). |
22883 | It seems hard to understand change without understanding time first [Bardon] |
Full Idea: It is very tough to see how we could understand what change is without understanding what time is. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], Intro) | |
A reaction: This thought is aimed at those who are hoping to define time in terms of change. My working assumption is that time must be a primitive concept in any metaphysics. |
22890 | We experience static states (while walking round a house) and observe change (ship leaving dock) [Bardon] |
Full Idea: We make a fundamental distinction between perceptions of static states and dynamic processes, …such as walking around a house, and watching a ship leave dock. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 2 'Kantian') | |
A reaction: This seems to be a fundamental aspect of our mind, rather than of the raw experience (slightly supporting Kant). In both cases we experience a changing sequence, but we have two different interpretations of them. |
22884 | The motion of a thing should be a fact in the present moment [Bardon] |
Full Idea: Whether or not something is in motion should be a fact about that thing now, not a fact about the thing in its past or in its future. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 1 'Arrow') | |
A reaction: This is one of the present moment, in which nothing can occur if its magnitude is infinitely small. I have no solution to this problem. |
22892 | Experiences of motion may be overlapping, thus stretching out the experience [Bardon] |
Full Idea: Experience itself may be constituted by overlapping, very brief, but temporally extended, acts of awareness, each of which encompassesa temporally extended streeeeetch of perceived events. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 2 'Realism') | |
A reaction: [cites Barry Dainton 2000] I think this sounds better than Russell's suggestion, though along the same lines. I take all brain events to be a sort of memory, briefly retaining their experience. Very fast events blur because of overload. |
22911 | At least eternal time gives time travellers a possible destination [Bardon] |
Full Idea: If all past, present and future events timelessly coexist, then at least there is a potential destination for the time traveller. …The Presentist treats past and future events as nonexistent, so there is no place for the time traveller to go. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 6 'Fictional') | |
A reaction: Not a good reason to believe in the eternal block of time, of course. The growing block has a past which can be visited, but no future. |
22912 | Time travel is not a paradox if we include it in the eternal continuum of events [Bardon] |
Full Idea: As long as we understand any time travel events to be timelessly included in the history of the world, and thus as part of the fixed continuum of events, time travel need not give rise to paradox. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], 6 'Time travel') | |
A reaction: This would presumably block going back and killing your own grandparent. |
22882 | We use calendars for the order of events, and clocks for their passing [Bardon] |
Full Idea: Roughly speaking, we use calendars to track the order of events in time, and clocks to track changes and the passing of events. | |
From: Adrian Bardon (Brief History of the Philosophy of Time [2013], Intro) | |
A reaction: So calendars cover the B-Series and clocks the A-Series, showing that this distinction is deeply embedded, and wasn't invented by McTaggart. |