Category: philosophy
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Mathematicians are machines that are unable to recognize the fact that they are machines
I am reading a Russian book about the “no computer thesis” based on the Gödel theorem. In the book there was a nice quote – see below – that somewhat close to what Bruno says. “And if such is the case, then we (qua mathematicians) are machines that are unable to recognize the fact that…
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Can a Robot Have Free Will?
Keith Douglas Farnsworth. Can a Robot Have Free Will? Entropy 19, no. 5 (2017): 237. http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/19/5/237 “Using insights from cybernetics and an information-based understanding of biological systems, a precise, scientifically inspired, definition of free-will is offered and the essential requirements for an agent to possess it in principle are set out.” “The only systems known…
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Bad Theory as a Bad Tragedy
A quote from Bas C Van Fraassen, Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective: p. 266 ‘Aristotle himself seems to see the parallelism very well. When in the Physics he comes to what he considers a bad theory (the theory of evolution by natural selection and chance variation, as it happens!) he make fun of it. It…
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Making Mind Matter More
The last paragraph from the paper: Jerry A. Fodor, Making Mind Matter More Philosophical Topics, Vol. 17, No. 1, Philosophy of Mind, 1989, pp. 59-79 http://www.jstor.org/stable/43154039 “So, then, perhaps there’s a route to physicalism from stuff about mental causation that doesn’t require the claim that ceteris paribus laws can’t ground mental cases. If so, then…
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Understanding ‘Understanding’
Quotes from Addy Pross, What is Life? How Chemistry becomes Biology Chapter Understanding ‘Understanding’ “In the scientific world we strive to achieve understanding of phenomena in the world around us through application of the scientific method.” “At the very heart of the scientific method is the process of induction, a way of reasoning whose roots…
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When I told my aunt that I wanted to study philosophy …
From preface Clément Vidal, The Beginning and the End: The Meaning of Life in a Cosmological Perspective, 2012. “Deciding what to do after high school is difficult and pivotal. When I told my aunt that I wanted to study philosophy at the university, she looked at me very empathically and told me: “have you considered…
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Wittgenstein on Science and Philosophy
Quotes from Hans Sluga, Wittgenstein Chapter 1. The situated thinker. The Alienated Thinker “For one thing, Wittgenstein appears to assume in them a sharp division between philosophy and science. Thus he rejects any conception of philosophy that would make it into a quasi-scientific enterprise. He writes accordingly, in the Blue Book: ‘Philosophers constantly see the…
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Nominalism and Psychologism
A quote from Frederik Stjernfelt, Natural Propositions: The Actuality of Peirce’s Doctrine of Dicisigns p. 107 “If no universals refer to real structure, then all universals are but labels invented by the human mind. If propositions do not exist in reality they, as well, must be creations of the human mind. … The implication is…