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 and Christian Tradition
A quote from Hans Sluga, Wittgenstein Chapter 1. The situated thinker A Man at the Crossroads “If we are to classify him [Wittgenstein] at all, we would certainly have to call Wittgenstein a religious thinker within the Christian tradition. But that characterization is not easy to reconcile with the content of Wittgenstein’s actual philosophical work,…
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On Surveyability
Quotes from Hans Sluga, Wittgenstein Chapter 6. Our Unsurveyable Grammar Essential Complexity “The physical universe, for instance, is very large but we may still be able to construct a surveyable representation of certain of its properties. That is why we can formulate general laws of physics that have both an explanatory and a predictive power.…