Perhaps the currently most popular and discussed objection to physicalism is the zombie conceivability argument, whose most famous proponent is David Chalmers. In a nutshell, the argument goes as follows: zombies are conceivable, if zombies are conceivable then zombies are possible, and if zombies are possible, then physicalism is false; …
Schneider, Susan (unpublished). “The Nature of Symbols in the Language of Thought.” Schneider addresses the important problem of how to individuate LOT symbols. There is no accepted or even fully worked out solution to this problem in the literature. She gives various interesting and original arguments to the effect that …
Today I received my complimentary copy of The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, edited by Sahotra Sarkar and Jessica Pfeifer, Routledge, 2006. I wrote the entry on artificial intelligence. To my astonishment, the entry reads as follows: If Turing’s thesis [i.e., the Church-Turing thesis] is correct, stored-program computers can perform …
Bloomfield, P. (2005). “Let’s Be Realistic About Serious Metaphysics.” Synthese 144: 69-90.He argues that the only sense of possibility relevant to serious metaphysics (i.e., relevant to the metaphysics of the actual world) is how things may be given how the actual world is. (This notion of possibility-given-the-way-the-actual-world-is is supposed to …
Gillett, C. and B. Rives (2005). “The Non-Existence of Determinables: Or, a World of Absolute Determinates as Default Hypothesis.” Nous 39(3): 483-504.They argue that there are no determinables, only determinates, on grounds of ontological parsimony. In their opinion, positing determinables on top of determinates leads to “double counting” of causal …
During a recent conversation with Brit Brogaard, we noticed that some students may benefit from some coaching on out how to properly use faculty to their advantage when working on a paper. The rules must be adjusted for context. If you are writing a term paper, you need to work …
On Wednesday, December 28, 2006, at the Eastern APA in NYC, we held our session on classical computation and hypercomputation. (For some background, see previous posts.) From my point of view, it went roughly as follows.In my presentation, I argued that in discussions of the Physical Church-Turing Thesis (Physical CT), …
