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16554
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Activities have place, rate, duration, entities, properties, modes, direction, polarity, energy and range [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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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.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3)
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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.
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15956
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The peripatetics treated forms and real qualities as independent of matter, and non-material [Alexander,P]
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Full Idea:
The peripatetic philosophers, in spite of their disagreements, all treated forms and real qualities as independent of matter and not to be understood in material terms.
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From:
Peter Alexander (Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles [1985], 54)
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A reaction:
This is the simple reason why hylomorphism became totally discredited, in the face of the 'mechanical philosophy'. But there must be a physical version of hylomorphism, and I don't think Aristotle himself would reject it.
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16562
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We understand something by presenting its low-level entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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Full Idea:
The intelligibility of a phenomenon consists in the mechanisms being portrayed in terms of a field's bottom out entities and activities.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7)
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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.
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16555
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Functions are not properties of objects, they are activities contributing to mechanisms [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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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.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3)
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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.
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16528
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Mechanisms are not just push-pull systems [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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Full Idea:
One should not think of mechanisms as exclusively mechanical (push-pull) systems.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1)
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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?
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16553
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Our account of mechanism combines both entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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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.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3)
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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.
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16559
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Descriptions of explanatory mechanisms have a bottom level, where going further is irrelevant [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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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.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 5.1)
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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.
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15975
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Can the qualities of a body be split into two groups, where the smaller explains the larger? [Alexander,P]
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Full Idea:
Is there any way of separating the qualities that bodies appear to have into two groups, one as small as possible and the other as large as possible, such that the smaller group can plausibly be used to explain the larger?
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From:
Peter Alexander (Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles [1985], 5.02)
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A reaction:
Alexander implies that this is a question Locke asked himself. This is pretty close to what I take to be the main question for essentialism, though I am cautious about couching it in terms of groups of qualities. I think this was Aristotle's question.
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16564
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There are four types of bottom-level activities which will explain phenomena [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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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.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7)
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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.
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9316
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How is self-representation possible, does it produce a regress, and is experience like that? [Kriegel/Williford]
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Full Idea:
The difficulties with a self-representational view of consciousness are how self-representation of mental states could be possible, whether it leads to an infinite regress, and whether it can capture the actual phenomenology of experience.
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From:
U Kriegel / K Williford (Intro to 'Self-Representational Consciousness' [2006], §3)
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A reaction:
[compressed] All of these objections strike me as persuasive, especially the first one. I'm not sure I know what self-representation is. Mirrors externally represent, and they can't represent themselves. Two mirrors together achieve something..
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9314
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Unfortunately, higher-order representations could involve error [Kriegel/Williford]
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Full Idea:
A problem for explaining consciousness by higher-order representations is that, like their first-order counterparts, they can misrepresent; there could be a subjective impression of being in a conscious state without actually being in any conscious state.
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From:
U Kriegel / K Williford (Intro to 'Self-Representational Consciousness' [2006], §1)
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A reaction:
It sounds plausible that this is a logical possibility, but how do you assess whether it is an actual or natural possibility? Are we saying that higher-order representations are judgments, which could be true or false? Hm.
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15963
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Science has been partly motivated by the belief that the universe is run by God's laws [Alexander,P]
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Full Idea:
The idea of a designed universe has not been utterly irrelevant to the scientific project; it is one of the beliefs that can give a scientist the faith that there are laws, waiting to be discovered, that govern all phenomena.
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From:
Peter Alexander (Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles [1985], 03.3)
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A reaction:
Of course if you start out looking for the 'laws of God' that is probably what you will discover. Natural selection strikes me as significant, because it shows no sign of being a procedure appropriate to a benevolent god.
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16558
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Laws of nature have very little application in biology [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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Full Idea:
The traditional notion of a law of nature has few, if any, applications in neurobiology or molecular biology.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3.2)
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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.
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