It's all about molecules, atoms, proteins and electrons, but it's not just about those things. As proper parts of living organism, those constituents ...
Neat! I'll start with watching this and then perusing her Dynamics in Action. I'm always interested in looking into detailed accounts of downward-caus...
That's interesting. I didn't know Juarrero. I'll look her up. In general, I view essentially relational metaphysical and phenomenological stances as c...
Yes, one might say this, appealing to the pragmatic context of the theoretician, observer or experimentalist who is dealing with high-level phenomena....
This definition would be more precise if we would substitute "is deducible from" or "is grounded in" for "is a function of". That's because, as I've s...
I view the objects and phenomena of pretty much all the special sciences (e.g. biology, ecology, psychology, economics, etc.) to be strongly emergent ...
I agree but here it's the idea of "derivability" that does the heavy lifting guaranteeing weak emergence. But, in his OP, @"MoK", derived the conclusi...
The condition that the macro-property, or holistic property, be a function of the properties of the parts of a system (including, presumably, relation...
Reading your exchange with @"Philosophim" I was tempted to jump in and mention precisely this book and argument by Bennett and Hacker. But you did. Ha...
I don't quite agree with this, or with the position claimed by Goddu, Noë and Thompson in the passage quoted by @"Joshs" (although I'm sympathetic wit...
In discussions about LLMs, machine learning, and artificial neural networks, the phrase "inner state" is hardly ever used. However, when the phrase is...
I was thinking that the "I think" marks oneself as being able to make moves in the game of giving and asking for reasons, with everything such an abil...
So would I but the individualistic reading of Kant is tricky. This an issue that is only tangentially related to the topic regarding the aim of the ac...
I haven't yet read Rödl's Self-Consciousness and Objectivity (2018). So, my understanding derives from my reading of his earlier book Self-Consciousne...
Interestingly enough, while beginners are encouraged to play safe moves, ensuring the security of their groups, stronger players and professionals und...
I like Gould very much. I read some of his collected essays in the French translation as a teen (The Panda's Thumb, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, The ...
Again, this is a bit off topic since the OP inquires about the validity of teleological explanations in the case where the laws of evolution of a syst...
This is all very nicely put and I find it quite serendipitous that you would make to connection to the case of Norton's dome since, following our disc...
Possibly! Asa Grey was an American botanist who wrote in an article in Nature: " let us recognize Darwin's great service to Natural Science in bringin...
Yes, I agree. The dependency seems rather indirect since the telos being appealed to in the subordinate causal account (i.e. the organism's seeking to...
Indeed. We could also say that natural selection occurs at the level where various tendencies (and the material enabling conditions if those tendencie...
The OP is inquiring what happens to teleology if the universe is probabilistic. As for evidence that the laws of physics are probabilistic, this appea...
That's an interesting way to characterise an attempted reduction of holistic (or organismic) teleological explanations of organisms and of their funct...
That is a good point. But the idea applies when the events under consideration are taken to be "caused" or determined by "events" in the past or futur...
Sure, you don't have to discuss it if you think it's trivial and not worth your while. But the very notion of function was precisely what some early c...
Yes, you can make this distinction, but both (1) the functional explanations of the behaviors of artifacts and (2) the purposive explanations of inten...
If I may jump in... Individual things in the world, like plants, animals, persons and thermostats, can have goals and functions without there there be...
Proponents of naturalized teleology have something less contentious in mind. See for instance the two SEP entries about teleological notions in biolog...
The rejection of materialistic (or physicalistic) reductionism need not entail the reduction(sic) rejection!] of materialism broadly construed: the id...
When A causes B, and B causes C, where the kind of causation at issue is nomological, then there need not be a teleological explanation of the occurre...
I don't think the Apple paper (The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Compl...
I also am inclined to think it's quite wrong since it seems to misattributes the source of the limitations of LLMs, but there may be a grain of truth....
I agree with the comments @"Banno" and @"Srap Tasmaner" made on the issue of intent regarding the way for one's own expressions (or thoughts) to refer...
I don't think is can be made coherent either while hanging on to the notion that they are essentially private mental states, which is their ordinary c...
I can't quite agree with this. Arguably, a philosophical zombie isn't a "subject" in the relevant sense since, ex hypothesi, they lack subjective stat...
You are quite right, and your comments are on point. I would suggest, thought, that the issue of the third-person accessibility of qualia (and the so ...
Sabine often spouts loads of nonsense whenever she strays outside of her own narrow domain of expertise, which is theoretical physics. In this case, i...
Saying that they're essential "to the object talking about" is ambiguous. It admits of two readings. You may mean to say (de re) of the object you are...
I'm not sure I would agree with that, assuming I understand what you mean. What is a matter of the speaker's intentions, according to Kripke, isn't wh...
In keeping with my view that remembering things just is the manifestation of our persisting in knowing them (that I owe to P. M. S. Hacker) I understa...
Reward hacking and reactive attitudes A short discussion with Claude 4 Sonnet about the concerning phenomenon of reward hacking in AI system training,...
Excellent OP by @"tom111"! I'll reply directly to them later on. Thanks for the Deacon reference. I had read The Symbolic Species circa year 2000 just...
Yes, we are making similar arguments. I've read your excellent contributions and I apologise for not having replied to you yet due to time constraints...
I am happy to grant you that we have a privileged access to the contents and intentional purports of our own cognitive states, and this includes memor...
You are remembering your childhood bedroom to be this or that size, to have this or that location in the house, to be furnished thus and so, etc. All ...
I'm approaching this problem from a direct realist stance that coheres with disjunctivism in epistemology and in the philosophy of perception. On that...
What initially struck me while perusing this thread is that participants generally seemed to assume, at least tacitly, a representationalist/indirect-...
Newcomb's Problem and Kavka's Toxin Puzzle—Part 2 This is a "reboot" of the conversation I had had with the new Claude 4 Opus above. This time, I am t...
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