Philosophy Carnival #46
Here. (If you haven’t read Dennett’s piece “Higher Order Truths about Chmess,” I recommend it.)
Are Causal Facts Observable?
I just read John Earman and John Roberts’ interesting papers defending Humean Supervenience about laws of nature, in PPR 2005. They argue that facts about which generalizations are nomic supervene on non-nomic observable facts. Their argument is that without such supervenience, it would be impossible to find empirical justification for …
Brain States Vs. States of the Brain
Examples of downward causation?
I just culled together a bunch of putative examples of downward causation, some from advocates, some from detractors. Particularly interesting and promising is the article by Robert Bishop, Downward causation in fluid convection, and Bechtel/Craver’s article Top-down causation without top-down causes, for which brief quotes will not do justice. (Note …
Animals with episodic memory and foresight?
Today’s NY Times has a nice article on recent evidence that contrary to popular belief (especially among philosophers), some animals have a form of episodic memory and the ability to plan for future events.
Human trichromatic vision may be a lot less common that previously thought
This may be old news to those who are up on the vision neuroscience literature, but I found it interesting and surprising so I thought I would share. It appears that within the human population, individuals vary in the number of red-cone genes (from 1 to 4) and green-cone genes …
Multiple Realization Poll
Philosophers, both at Brains and elsewhere in the philosophical blogosphere, seem to like participating in and reading polls, so how about another one here? Is the property of having dichromatic color vision multiply realized in humans? If so, why? If not, why not I say “yes”. There are three familiar …