51 ideas
| 6548 | Physicalism requires the naturalisation or rejection of set theory [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Eventually set theory will have to be either naturalised or rejected, if a thoroughgoing physicalism is to be maintained. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 8.4) | |
| A reaction: Personally I regard Platonism as a form of naturalism (though a rather bold and dramatic one). The central issue seems to be the ability of the human main/brain to form 'abstract' notions about the physical world in which it lives. |
| 19482 | Current physics says matter and antimatter should have reduced to light at the big bang [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: Our best theories of physics imply we shouldn't be here. The big bang ought to have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter particles, which would have almost immediately annihilated each other, leaving nothing but light. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2015.05.23) | |
| A reaction: This is not, of course, a rejection of physics, but a puzzle about the current standard model of physics. |
| 19483 | CP violation shows a decay imbalance in matter and antimatter, leading to matter's dominance [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: The phenomenon of charge-parity (CP) violation says that under certain circumstances antiparticles decay at different rates from their matter counterpart. ...This might explain matter's dominance in the universe, but the effect is too small. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2015.05.23) | |
| A reaction: Physicists are currently studying CP violations, hoping to explain why there is any matter in the universe. This will not, I presume, explain why matter and antimatter arrived in the first place. |
| 6531 | Institutions are not reducible as types, but they are as tokens [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Institutional types are irreducible, though I assume that institutional tokens are reducible in the sense of strict identity, all the way down to the subatomic level. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: This seems a promising distinction, as the boundaries of 'institutions' disappear when you begin to reduce them to lower levels (cf. Idea 4601), and yet plenty of institutions are self-evidently no more than physics. Plants are invisible as physics. |
| 6532 | Types cannot be reduced, but levels of reduction are varied groupings of the same tokens [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: If types cannot be reduced to more physical levels, this is not an embarrassment, as long as our institutional categories, our physiological categories, and our physical categories are just alternative groupings of the same tokens. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: This is a self-evident truth about a car engine, so I don't see why it wouldn't apply equally to a brain. Lycan's identification of the type as the thing which cannot be reduced seems a promising explanation of much confusion among philosophers. |
| 6534 | One location may contain molecules, a metal strip, a key, an opener of doors, and a human tragedy [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: One space-time slice may be occupied by a collection of molecules, a metal strip, a key, an allower of entry to hotel rooms, a facilitator of adultery, and a destroyer souls. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: Desdemona's handkerchief is a nice example. This sort of remark seems to be felt by some philosophers to be heartless wickedness, and yet it so screamingly self-evident that it is impossible to deny. |
| 6529 | I see the 'role'/'occupant' distinction as fundamental to metaphysics [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: I see the 'role'/'occupant' distinction as fundamental to metaphysics. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.0) | |
| A reaction: A passing remark in a discussion of functionalism about the mind, but I find it appealing. Causation is basic to materialistic metaphysics, and it creates networks of regular causes. It leaves open the essentialist question of WHY it has that role. |
| 6549 | I think greenness is a complex microphysical property of green objects [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Personally I favour direct realism regarding secondary qualities, and identify greenness with some complex microphysical property exemplified by green physical objects. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 8.4) | |
| A reaction: He cites D.M.Armstrong (1981) as his source. Personally I find this a bewildering proposal. Does he think there is greenness in grass AS WELL AS the emission of that wavelength of electro-magnetic radiation? Is greenness zooming through the air? |
| 19737 | A system can infer the structure of the world by making predictions about it [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: If we can train a system for prediction, it can essentially infer the structure of the world it's looking at by doing this prediction. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2015.12.12) | |
| A reaction: [AI expert] This seems to be powerful support for the centrality of mathematical laws of nature in achieving understanding of the world. We may downplay the 'mere' ability to predict, but this idea says that the rewards of prediction are very great. |
| 6543 | Intentionality comes in degrees [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Intentionality comes in degrees. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: I agree. A footprint is 'about' a foot, in the sense of containing concentrated information about it. Can we, though, envisage a higher degree than human thought? Is there a maximum degree? Everything is 'about' everything, in some respect. |
| 6537 | Teleological views allow for false intentional content, unlike causal and nomological theories [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: The teleological view begins to explain intentionality, and in particular allows brain states and events to have false intentional content; causal and nomological theories of intentionality tend to falter on this last task. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: Certainly if you say thought is 'caused' by the world, false thought become puzzling. I'm not sure I understand the rest of this, but it is an intriguing remark about a significant issue… |
| 6546 | Pain is composed of urges, desires, impulses etc, at different levels of abstraction [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Our phenomenal experience of pain has components - it is a complex, consisting (perhaps) of urges, desires, impulses, and beliefs, probably occurring at quite different levels of institutional abstraction. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be true, and offers the reductionist a strategy for making inroads into the supposed irreducable and fundamental nature of qualia. What's it like to be a complex hierarchically structured multi-functional organism? |
| 6547 | The right 'level' for qualia is uncertain, though top (behaviourism) and bottom (particles) are false [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: It is just arbitrary to choose a level of nature a priori as the locus of qualia, even though we can agree that high levels (such as behaviourism) and low-levels (such as the subatomic) can be ruled out as totally improbable. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.6) | |
| A reaction: Very good. People scream 'qualia!' whenever the behaviour level or the atomic level are proposed as the locations of the mind, but the suggestion that they are complex, and are spread across many functional levels in the middle sounds good. |
| 19736 | Neural networks can extract the car-ness of a car, or the chair-ness of a chair [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: Early neural nets were really good at recognising general categories, such as a car or a chair. Those networks are good at extracting the 'chair-ness' or the 'car-ness' of the object. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2015.12.12) | |
| A reaction: [Interview with Yann LeCun, Facebook AI director] Fregean philosophers such as Geach think that extracting features is a ridiculous idea, but if even a machine can do it then I suspect that human beings can (and do) manage it too. |
| 6527 | If energy in the brain disappears into thin air, this breaches physical conservation laws [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: By interacting causally, Cartesian dualism seems to violate the conservation laws of physics (concerning matter and energy). This seems testable, and afferent and efferent pathways disappearing into thin air would suggest energy is not conserved. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: It would seem to be no problem as long as outputs were identical in energy to inputs. If the experiment could actually be done, the result might astonish us. |
| 6528 | In lower animals, psychology is continuous with chemistry, and humans are continuous with animals [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Evolution has proceeded in all other known species by increasingly complex configurations of molecules and organs, which support primitive psychologies; our human psychologies are more advanced, but undeniably continuous with lower animals. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: Personally I find the evolution objection to dualism highly persuasive. I don't see how anyone can take evolution seriously and be a dualist. If there is a dramatic ontological break at some point, a plausible reason would be needed for that. |
| 6554 | Two behaviourists meet. The first says,"You're fine; how am I?" [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Old joke: two Behaviourists meet in the street, and the first says,"You're fine; how am I?" | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], n1.6) | |
| A reaction: This invites the response that introspection is uniquely authoritative about 'how we are', but this has been challenged quite a lot recently, which pushes us to consider whether these stupid behaviourists might actually have a good point. |
| 6545 | If functionalism focuses on folk psychology, it ignores lower levels of function [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: 'Analytical functionalists', who hold that meanings of mental terms are determined by the causal roles associated with them by 'folk psychology', deny themselves appeals to lower levels of functional organisation. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: Presumably folk psychology can fit into the kind of empirical methodology favoured by behaviourists, whereas 'lower levels' are going to become rather speculative and unscientific. |
| 6541 | Functionalism must not be too abstract to allow inverted spectrum, or so structural that it becomes chauvinistic [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: The functionalist must find a level of characterisation of mental states that is not so abstract or behaviouristic as to rule out the possibility of inverted spectrum etc., nor so specific and structural as to fall into chauvinism. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: If too specific then animals and aliens won't be able to implement the necessary functions; if the theory becomes very behaviouristic, then it loses interest in the possibility of an inverted spectrum. He is certainly right to hunt for a middle ground. |
| 6539 | The distinction between software and hardware is not clear in computing [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Even the software/hardware distinction as it is literally applied within computer science is philosophically unclear. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: This is true, and very important for functionalist theories of the mind. Even very volatile software is realised in 'hard' physics, and rewritable discs etc blur the distinction between 'programmable' and 'hardwired'. |
| 6533 | Mental types are a subclass of teleological types at a high level of functional abstraction [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: I am taking mental types to form a small subclass of teleological types occurring for the most part at a high level of functional abstraction. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: He goes on to say that he understand teleology in evolutionary terms. There is always a gap between how you characterise or individuate something, and what it actually is. To say spanners are 'a small subclass of tools' is not enough. |
| 6535 | Teleological characterisations shade off smoothly into brutely physical ones [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Highly teleological characterisations, unlike naïve and explicated mental characterisations, have the virtue of shading off fairly smoothly into (more) brutely physical ones. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: Thus the purpose of a car engine, and a spark plug, and the spark, and the temperature, and the vibration of molecules show a fading away of the overt purpose, disappearing into the pointless activity of electrons and quantum levels. |
| 6544 | Identity theory is functionalism, but located at the lowest level of abstraction [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: 'Neuron' may be understood as a physiological term or a functional term, so even the Identity Theorist is a Functionalist - one who locates mental entities at a very low level of abstraction. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: This is a striking observation, and somewhat inclines me to switch from identity theory to functionalism. If you ask what is the correct level of abstraction, Lycan's teleological-homuncular version refers you to all the levels. |
| 6530 | We reduce the mind through homuncular groups, described abstractly by purpose [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: I am explicating the mental in a reductive way, by reducing mental characterizations to homuncular institutional ones, which are teleological characterizations at various levels of functional abstraction. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: I think this is the germ of a very good physicalist account of the mind. More is needed than a mere assertion about what the mind reduces to at the very lowest level; this offers a decent account of the descending stages of reduction. |
| 6536 | Teleological functionalism helps us to understand psycho-biological laws [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Teleological functionalism helps us to understand the nature of biological and psychological laws, particularly in the face of Davidsonian scepticism about the latter. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: Personally I doubt the existence of psycho-physical laws, but only because of the vast complexity. They would be like the laws of weather. 'Psycho-physical' laws seem to presuppose some sort of dualism. |
| 6542 | A Martian may exhibit human-like behaviour while having very different sensations [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Quite possibly a Martian's humanoid behaviour is prompted by his having sensations somewhat unlike ours, despite his superficial behavioural similarities to us. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: I think this firmly refutes the multiple realisability objection to type-type physicalism. Mental events are individuated by their phenomenal features (known only to the user), and by their causal role (publicly available). These are separate. |
| 16419 | No one has yet devised a rationality test [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: The financial sector has been clamouring for a rationality test for years. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2013.10.29) | |
| A reaction: Many aspects of intelligence tests do actually pick out what I would call rationality (which includes 'rational intuition', a new favourite of mine). But they are mixed in with rather mechanical geeky sort of tests. |
| 16417 | About a third of variation in human intelligence is environmental [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: Possibly a third of the variation in our intelligence is down to the environment in which we grew up - nutrition and education, for example. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2013.10.29) | |
| A reaction: This presumably leaves the other two-thirds to derive from genetics. I am a big believer in environment. Swapping babies between extremes of cultural environment would hugely affect intelligence, say I. |
| 16418 | People can be highly intelligent, yet very stupid [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: You really can be highly intelligent, and at the same time very stupid. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2013.10.29) | |
| A reaction: This is closely related to my observation (from a lifetime of study) that a talent for philosophy has a very limited correlation with standard notions of high intelligence. What matters is how conscious reasoning and intuition relate. Greek 'phronesis'. |
| 19484 | Psychologists measure personality along five dimensions [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: Psychologists have long thought that measuring on a scale of just five personality dimensions - agreeableness, extroversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness and openness to new experiences - can capture all human variations in behaviour and attitude. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2015.06.13) | |
| A reaction: Researchers are considering a sixth - called 'honesty-humility' - which is roughly how devious people are. The five mentioned here seem to be a well entrenched orthodoxy among professional psychologists. Is personality more superficial than character? |
| 2685 | The Greek 'philia' covers all good and fruitful relationships [Cooper,JM] |
| Full Idea: The Greek 'philia' is much wider than our "friendship"; it includes family relationships, and business relationships and membership of institutions. | |
| From: John M. Cooper (Aristotle on Friendship [1977], p.301) |
| 6538 | We need a notion of teleology that comes in degrees [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: We need a notion of teleology that comes in degrees. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: Anyone who says that key concepts, such as those concerning the mind, should come 'in degrees' wins my instant support. A whole car engine requires a very teleological explanation, the spark in the sparkplug far less so. |
| 19950 | Entropy is the only time-asymmetric law, so time may be linked to entropy [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: All our physical laws are time-symmetric, ...so things can run forwards or backwards. But entropy is an exception, saying that disorder increases over time. Many physicists therefore suspect that the flow of time is linked to entropy. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2017.02.04) |
| 19478 | Light moves at a constant space-time speed, but its direction is in neither space nor time [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: A light ray always moves at one unit of space per unit of time - a constant diagonal on the graph. ...But the direction that light rays travel in is neither space nor time, and is called 'null'. It is on the edge between space and time. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2013.06.15) | |
| A reaction: Don't understand this, but it sounds fun. |
| 19474 | Quantum states are measured by external time, of unknown origin [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: When we measure the evolution of a quantum state, it is to the beat of an external timepiece of unknown provenance. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2013.06.15) | |
| A reaction: It is best not to leap to philosophical conclusions when studying modern physics. Evidently time has a very different status in quantum mechanics and in relativity theory. |
| 19473 | The Schrödinger equation describes the evolution of an object's wave function in Hilbert space [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: A quantum object's state is described by a wave function living in Hilbert space, encompassing all of its possible states. We see how the wave function evolves in time, moving from one state to another, using the Schrödinger equation. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2013.06.15) | |
| A reaction: [These idea are basic explanations for non-scientific philosophers - please forgive anything that makes you wince] |
| 6551 | 'Physical' means either figuring in physics descriptions, or just located in space-time [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: An object is specifically physical if it figures in explanations and descriptions of features of ordinary non-living matter, as in current physics; it is more generally physical if it is simply located in space-time. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 8.5) | |
| A reaction: This gives a useful distinction when trying to formulate a 'physicalist' account of the mind, where type-type physicalism says only the 'postulates of physics' can be used, whereas 'naturalism' about the mind uses the more general concept. |
| 19953 | In string theory space-time has a grainy indivisible substructure [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: String theory suggests that space-time has a grainy substructure - you can't keep chopping it indefinitely into smaller and smaller pieces. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2015.11.07) | |
| A reaction: Presumably the proposal is that strings are the true 'atoms'. |
| 19476 | String theory needs at least 10 space-time dimensions [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: String theory needs at least 10 space-time dimensions to be mathematically consistent. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2013.06.15) | |
| A reaction: Apparently because of 'Ads/CFT', it may be possible to swap this situation for a more tractable 4-dimensional version. |
| 19954 | It is impossible for find a model of actuality among the innumerable models in string theory [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: String theory has more than 10-to-the-500th solutions, each describing a different sort of universe, so it is nigh-on impossible to find the one solution that corresponds to our geometrically flat, expanding space-time full of particles. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2015.11.07) |
| 19947 | Hilbert Space is an abstraction representing all possible states of a quantum system [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: The elements of the abstract mathematical entity called Hilbert Space represent all the possible states of a quantum system | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 1017.02.04) |
| 19948 | Einstein's merging of time with space has left us confused about the nature of time [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: Our hunt for the most basic ingredients of reality has left us muddled about the status of time. One culprit for this was Einstein, whose theory of general relativity merged time with space. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2017.02.04) |
| 19955 | Space-time may be a geometrical manifestation of quantum entanglement [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: A promising theory (based on the 'Maldacena duality' - that string equations for gravity are the same as quantum equations for surface area) is that space-time is really just geometrical manifestations of quantum entanglement. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2015.11.07) | |
| A reaction: This is a speculation which might unite the incompatible quantum and general relativity theories. |
| 19475 | Relativity makes time and space jointly basic; quantum theory splits them, and prioritises time [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: Relativity says space and time are on the same footing - together they are the fabric of reality. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, treats time and space differently, with time occasionally seeming more fundamental. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2013.06.15) | |
| A reaction: Interesting. When talking about time, people glibly cite relativistic space-time to tell you that time is just another dimension. Now I can reply 'Aaah, but what about time in quantum mechanics? Eh? Eh?'. Excellent. |
| 19949 | Quantum theory relies on a clock outside the system - but where is it located? [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: After general relativity, quantum mechanics reinstated our familiar notion of time. The buzzing of the quantum world plays out according to the authoritative tick of a clock outside the described system, ...but where is this clock doing its ticking? | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2017.02.04) |
| 19951 | Entropy is puzzling, so we may need to build new laws which include time directionality [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: Smolin observes that if entropy increases, the early universe must have been highly ordered, which we cannot explain. Maybe we need to build time directionality into the laws, instead of making time depend on entropy. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2017.02.04) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] |
| 19477 | General relativity predicts black holes, as former massive stars, and as galaxy centres [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: Black holes are predicted by general relativity, and are thought to exist where massive stars once lived, as well as at the heart of every galaxy. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2013.06.15) | |
| A reaction: Since black holes now seem to be a certainty, that is one hell of an impressive prediction. |
| 19952 | Black holes have entropy, but general relativity says they are unstructured, and lack entropy [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: Black holes have a temperature, and hence entropy. ...But if a black hole are just an extreme scrunching of smooth space-time, it should have no substructure, and thus no entropy. This is probably the most obvious incompleteness of general relativity. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2015.11.07) |
| 16420 | 84.5 percent of the universe is made of dark matter [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: Dark matter makes up 84.5 percent of the universe's matter. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2013.10.29) |
| 17604 | We are halfway to synthesising any molecule we want [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: Ei-ichi Negishi (Nobel chemist of 2010) says 'the ultimate goal is to be able to synthesise any molecule we want. We are probably about halfway there'. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2010.10.16) |
| 17603 | Chemistry just needs the periodic table, and protons, electrons and neutrinos [New Sci.] |
| Full Idea: Ei-ichi Negishi (Nobel chemist of 2010) says 'I work with the periodic table in front of me at all times, and approach all challenges in terms of three particles, positively charged protons, negatively charged electrons, and neutral neutrinos'. | |
| From: New Scientist writers (New Scientist articles [2013], 2010.10.16) |