So let’s circle back to the combination problem for panpsychism, that got me on this topic in the first place. Despite reading and writing a lot about it, I’m still never quite sure what counts as ‘solving’ the combination problem. Often I read papers that say ‘here’s the combination problem’ …
Combining Minds aims to persuade you that minds can indeed combine. But first, we need to work out what that claim even means and why you might think they can’t. So here’s a little bit of intellectual autobiography on that topic. In the last few decades, philosophers interested in the …
It’s my pleasure to introduce our next Ergo symposium, featuring Christoph Hoerl’s “Experience and Time: Transparency and Presence” with commentaries by Elliot Carter (University of Toronto) Geoffrey Lee (University of California, Berkeley), Louise Richardson (University of York). I’d like to thank each of the participants for their great work!
Does responsibility require the possibility to have done otherwise? Does knowledge require safety? Can causation be reduced to some form of counterfactual dependency? Could a material duplicate fail to be a psychological duplicate? To answer these and similar questions, one must gain knowledge about metaphysical possibilities and necessities. One must …
Understanding the nature of “vertical” relations whether in science, nature, mathematics, logic, or anywhere else, is a hot topic in philosophy. What is unfortunate is that, as yet, too little attention is paid to focused issues about what frameworks work best for the “vertical” relations in particular areas. However, it …
Part I of the book clears space for later work and supplies a key theoretical platform. To get us started, I briefly sketch the outlines of the scientific views to highlight how they differ from philosophical accounts of reduction /emergence; and to broach a diagnosis of how the dislocation between …
One theme of this week’s posts has been the claim that dynamic entities are among the most metaphysically basic of the things in the mental domain. I’ve made only the vaguest gestures towards saying what I mean by this (in response to Gualtiero’s earlier comment). By dynamic entities, I mean …
