Matter Thinks
Theories of Knowledge, Mind, Purpose, Agency, and Morality
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Levels of Agency
“Agency” is a philosophically loaded term. Philosophers differ widely on what agents are, what they can and cannot do, and whether any even exist, making it hard to settle on a definition that everyone can accept. For present purposes I will define agency as the taking of actions in pursuit of a goal. Agents do…
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Forking Determinism
If you turned back the clock and had the chance to choose over again, would it come out the same way? Would you choose the same flavor of ice cream? Jump in and save the drowning child again? Pick the same shirt? The same career? This is a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t question for a supporter of…
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Reduction and Intentionality
There are many contemporary views of the relationship between scientific explanations at different levels. In my reading, they gravitate towards two grand ideas: reduction and translation. Reductionists argue that the entities at each level are nothing more than aggregates of lower level entities, and the scientific theories at higher levels are just condensed expressions of…
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Kinds of Information
There is a well developed physical theory of information that equates information with microstates — the position and momentum of all the particles in a system. The amount of information needed to fully describe a system varies. The more ordered the system, the less information is required. The amount of information required turns out to…
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Causal Dualism
Cars stream through an intersection. A traffic light turns red. The cars approaching the intersection stop. Clearly the red traffic light caused the cars to stop. Not directly; red light can’t in and of itself stop a car the way, say, a boulder can. The red light causes the cars to stop by communicating information…
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Nominalism
Spurred by a philosophical discussion on the subject of universals, I recently re-read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Nominalism in Metaphysics. Nominalism is the thesis that there are nothing but particulars — no Platonic entities, no universal properties, no realm of eternal and unchanging essences, nothing but the concrete things — the particulars…
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The Ends of the Universe
In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (the second book of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series), Douglas Adams imagines a restaurant located not only at a specific place but also a specific time — the time at which the universe comes to a spectacular end. Diners come from all over the…
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Determinism and the Direction of Causation
My friend Rick says: In a deterministic world we can predict future events from events in the past or present, and we can derive knowledge of events in the past or present from knowledge of events in the future. This is because in a deterministic world the future depends on the past, and the past…
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The Nature of Knowledge
My goal in this essay is to sketch out a particular path towards naturalizing knowledge. To naturalize knowledge means to see knowledge as something that exists in the natural world, and is best understood and explained scientifically. This is the essence of what Quine proposed in “Epistemology Naturalized”. He was reacting to the lingering traces…
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What Does A Photon Know?
Imagine that you are transported to a completely dark and silent place. You have no idea where you are. A single photon with a wavelength of 7,000 angstroms — a red photon — reaches your eye, and you see it. (Recent research shows that the human eye can in fact see a single photon under the…
Matter Thinks 