Metaphysical musings
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The face at the bottom of the well
The most important thing is this: what you experience, what you think, what you believe has no deep connection to what is real. Kant had this single truth exactly right: everything we think we know about the world is mostly a reflection of ourselves—psychologically, culturally, socially. As Leszek Kołakowski wrote, “In all the universe man Continue reading
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Mad-Dog Everettianism, probability, and a little bit of Hume
One of the great upsides of the generally miserable or horrific pandemic is that more recordings of fascinating intellectual discussions are being made available to wider audiences. Recently I watched a set of talks hosted by an outfit called the “Harvard Foundations of Physics Workshop Series”, grouped together under the name “Mini-Workshop on the Many Continue reading
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What we know when we know particulars
Some reflections on the early sections of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: If we try to think about what is most obvious in our experience, and what the most basic elements of knowledge are, we turn to sense perception. For it seems like the more our minds and our concepts are mixed up with what we Continue reading
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Unvatting the Brains: Putnam, Bostrom, and thinking the unthinkable
The worry is familiar. All of my experience comes to me via my central nervous system, which is a biochemical electrical network. It can be hacked. The data coming from my eyes and ears and so on are converted to electrical signals, and so if those electrical signals were stimulated artificially (i.e., not from eyes Continue reading
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Minds as predictive engines
(Reading Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty (Oxford UP 2015)) I’m no longer sure I know what an “ordinary” theory of mind would look like, but I’m guessing that it would resemble an organized camp of explorers. The explorers, or our senses, venture out into the world and report what they see, hear, and encounter. Back at headquarters, Continue reading
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The Hope of Concepts (or, some sorely needed arch support)
(Loosely reflecting while re-reading Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life…) As in Spheres, PS’s aim is to create (or at least open up a space for) a new life-support system for humans, a post-religious quasi-religion grounded in practice and values that can support us and remain believable even when we realize that we have Continue reading
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The mind, as under construction
The human mind is a moving target. We might trick ourselves into believing it is a thing, with a definite nature and a set of properties to call its own, but in fact the mind is always under construction. At an early age, we begin to learn what to say about our minds – I Continue reading
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Mars teleporter essay on Aeon
I am stranded on Mars. The fuel tanks on my return vessel ruptured, and no rescue team can possibly reach me before I run out of food. (And, unlike Matt Damon, I have no potatoes.) Luckily, my ship features a teleporter. It is an advanced bit of gadgetry, to be sure, but the underlying idea Continue reading
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Robots and responsibility
[Another excerpt from Reality (a primer)] What worries many people about being told that the mind isn’t distinct from the body is what that might mean for human freedom and responsibility. If I create a robot that comes over and stomps through your garden, no one holds the robot responsible. It is just doing what Continue reading
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Maybe the universe doesn’t exist
It is not clear to me that the universe exists. I’m not saying, of course, that there aren’t a lot of things in existence – my dog, this laptop, Saturn’s rings, and so on. And with any actual list of existent things, we can talk about the collection of those things, and give that collection Continue reading
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The flux of it all
[An excerpt from Reality: a primer] Heraclitus was one of the earliest known philosophers. He lived in what we now recognize as western Turkey, in the late 6th century BCE. We know hardly anything about him, and his philosophy is conveyed to us in fragments quoted by other people. The single most famous indirect quote Continue reading
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Best argument for dualism?
The best argument for dualism I know is the argument from subjectivity. The first premise is that experience requires a subject – an entity who is having the experience. Now it may be that this entity isn’t what it thinks it is; it may be a bundle of impressions, or a conscious field that exists Continue reading
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Brains and typewriters
Aristotle was not aware of any mind/body problem. He understood that all (well, almost all) of the things we do with our minds are capacities of the human body. “Thinking is something a human does” – what is especially problematic about that claim? It only became problematic when Descartes stripped matter of any capacities that Continue reading
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Reality of ideas, again: the navel-gazing perspective
What is an idea? On the one hand, it is tempting to say that there can be no explanation without appeal to a special intensional dimension, a protected pocket of our existence that holds meanings. After all, we think ideas; we cannot see them, weigh them, or bat them over the fence. Ideas are intrinsically Continue reading
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Under the right conditions, ideas matter; but far less than we commonly suppose
In the big picture, ideas don’t matter as much as people like me try to pretend. Obviously, in some broad sense, some ideas matter very much to some people, sometimes. But even in those cases where ideas matter in big ways, the practical, material circumstances have to be just right, and it is what’s done Continue reading
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Brandom’s inferentialism
In many works over many years, Robert Brandom has advocated a view called “inferentialism.” It’s a view about linguistic meaning, and it asserts specifically that the meaning of a claim is fixed by what role it plays in the economy of giving reasons and asking for them. So the meaning of “The earth goes around Continue reading
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Philosophical zombies and 1984
(from today’s “Zombie Zymposium”) I’d like to discuss two things. First, I’ll discuss the quasi-technical use of “zombies” in recent discussions of the philosophy of consciousness. I’ll call these entities “philosophical zombies” since, as we’ll see, they are not much like the zombies more commonly featured in movies and TV shows. Secondly, I’d like to Continue reading
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Idealism and contingency
(Reading Terry Pinkard’s marvelous German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism) It may be that the tenability of idealism comes down to the question of history. A resolute idealist discovers that the most fundamental framework of existence is expressed as dynamic relations among concepts: the I, the not-I, the striving of the I to take Continue reading
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Reality is down the hall
“It is therefore worth noting,” Schopenhauer writes, “and indeed wonderful to see, how man, besides his life in the concrete, always lives a second life in the abstract.” I suppose you might say that some of us (especially college professors) tend to live more in the abstract than not. But in fact we all have Continue reading
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Learning from strangers on planes
R. G. Collingwood’s principles of history: “All history is history of thought.” “Historical knowledge is the re-enactment in the historian’s mind of the thought whose history he is studying.” “Historical knowledge is the re-enactment of a past thought incapsulated in a context of present thoughts which, by contradicting it, confine it to a plane different Continue reading
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The obstaclean theory of matter
Denying the existence of the material world never goes down well. No matter how clever and compelling the arguments, most of us want to insist that matter exists – and as our insistence becomes more vehement, we start pounding tables, as if that will impress our interlocutors. Read more… Continue reading
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On Thinking Schelling’s Absolute
Reading Schelling, or even only about Schelling, helps us understand Hegel’s frustration when he called the philosophy of the Absolute “the night in which all cows are black.” The Absolute covers everything under the sky, and rather than illuminating anything, it portrays everything as the same and allows no difference. You can say what you Continue reading
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Fichte’s ostensible incomprehensibility
Arthur Schopenhauer did not have much use for Fichte. He thought Fichte’s mistakes arose from the fact that Fichte did away with Kant’s realm of things in themselves, leaving human consciousness free to just spin in any direction without any friction from anything external to it. And, to make matters worse, he did so without Continue reading
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Does the universe know its right hand from its left?
Or, in other words: is there really any difference between the universe and its mirror image? I remember once reading one of Richard Feynman’s lectures in physics in which he took on this problem. True to form, Feynman found a funny, imaginative, and perfectly clear way of spelling it out: Imagine that we were talking Continue reading
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Illness, enlightenment, salvation: on al-Ghazali and Deutsch
Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) was a Persian mystic philosopher, and wrote the Deliverance from Error as a kind of intellectual autobiography, while at the same time an argument for sufism. (A student gave me the book after sitting through my epistemology class, probably thinking (a) I’d like it, and (b) I could use the help.) Its similarities Continue reading
Huenemanniac 