Justin Snedegar

Scientific American discusses a new book by Stuart Kauffman in which he discusses anomalies that (current) physics cannot explain. We cannot use the familiar blueprint of finding causes, applying the laws of nature, and predicting effects. Kauffman says that this is not an epistemological issue, but an ontological one: it's not that we aren't advanced enough to go through the necessary computations, it's that there are "different causes at different levels". I'm not sure what this means, but I suspect it means something like this: these phenomena are of a different type than the ones that science generally deals with, and so the standard methods simply cannot be used to make predictions.

Kauffman says that these phenomena cannot be explained by physics, but that they do have causal powers and so are real entities. He suggests that a process of emergence leads to these phenomena, and that we may regard the "creative process of emergence" as (a naturalized version of) God.

I have two problems with this.

(1) An inability of current physics to explain some phenomena should perhaps not lead us so quickly into a view of these phenomena as emergent entities. Physics seems to always be increasing the number of things it is able to explain. Just as relativity is able to make predictions that classical physics cannot regarding big stuff, and quantum mechanics is able to make predictions that classical physics cannot regarding small stuff, maybe a new field of physics will be developed that can make predictions involving this "emergent" stuff. Of course, maybe that's what Kauffman is working on here. I should really read the book, and learn something about physics, and read the article more carefully, before blogging about it, I suppose.

(2) Whatever the processes that lead to these phenomena are, I guess we can choose to call them (collectively) "God". But I don't know what this accomplishes. The processes may indeed be "stunning", "overwhelming", and "worthy of awe". Still, why call it "God"? The word has lots of heavy connotations. Certainly these processes are not what most people think of when they think of God. God is supposed to be a benevolent, intelligent, rational, etc. being. One could say that this conception is simply an anthropomorphic interpretation of these processes, I suppose. But, it seems that a naturalized God is just not God, but more science.

Clearly, Kauffman does not mean to suggest that these processes are actually what is talked about in the Bible. But, my question is, why bring God into it at all? Couldn't he just say "Hey, here's some weird stuff that we can't explain right now. It's pretty amazing." and leave it at that? I don't see how this is "sacred science" or how it is "using faith to explain anomalies".

Lewis Powell

The point of this post is not merely to deride Wikipedia, or applaud the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, though I do start by doing so:

The philosophy articles on Wikipedia are not very good (to put it mildly), and to fix them would be a tedious, unrewarding process that could be completely undone by anyone with a web browser.

On the other hand, the SEP is (a) fantastic, but (b) necessarily slow to expand its content. I say necessarily slow because the SEP expands its content by getting people with a very high level of expertise to write in-depth articles that are edited and revised. That's why the articles are good. So, while the output is excellent, the process by which it gets that output is fairly time/energy/labor intensive, and the only time/energy eligible to be used comes from a relatively small set of people (those with high levels of expertise). To sum up: By taking large amount of time and energy from a very restricted group of people, excellent, detailed articles can be (and in fact, are) produced.

While that process works really well for the goals of the SEP, there are other processes which, while not well-suited to producing the same sort of content as the SEP, are good for producing a different sort of content.

The goal for the site that I am starting is to produce a site that complements existing resources like the SEP. Instead of shooting for articles which cover a given topic in great depth and detail, this site would aim for articles that give broader, shallower summaries. Rather than having a single author for each article, it will allow individuals to make small contributions to articles. Both of these changes will lower the bar for what level of expertise is required to be able to contribute.

Additionally, it won't be limited to just articles on articles on philosophical topics or views. It will also (ideally) present articles on organizations for philosophers, recurring conferences, various philosophy journals, etc. Perhaps even articles on philosophy departments (sticking to bare-bones information like the size of the program, faculty lists, associated conferences, journals, reading groups, etc.) and individual philosophers (again sticking to barebones facts like where they are located, what their active research areas are, etc.).

The great thing is that pretty much any philosophy graduate student or professor of philosophy is in a position to make some valuable contributions to this sort of project, and making such contributions won't necessarily require a substantial commitment of time and energy.

So, if you want to get involved, contact me (lmpowell at usc dot edu). In order to contribute, you will need to register an account. Registration is limited (roughly) to philosophy graduate students or professors (i.e. people actively involved in academic philosophy).

Justin Snedegar

I've been working on this paper on and off for the last year or so, and I think I want to say something about what I'll post here in the paper.

Here's an argument against growing block (the view that the past and present exist, but the future does not):

(1) If growing block is true, then we don't know that we're present.
(2) We do know that we're present.
(3) Therefore, growing block is not true.

Support for (1): According to (the targeted version of) growing block, nothing about a moment changes when the moment goes from being present to being past. It merely gains a relation of precedence to some future slices. (This is C.D. Broad's view, roughly.) So, imagine some past person, like Caesar, at some past moment in his life, t. Imagine that at t, Caesar thought something like "Here I am in the present moment." According to the growing blocker, it is true (now) that [Caesar is thinking "Here I am in the present moment" at t]. When t was the present moment, or on the growing edge of the block, Caesar thought something true. But now t is in the past. So, Caesar thinks something false. Upshot: why should we think we're in any better position? How do we know that 2008 isn't sometime thousands of years in the past? It seems like the growing blocker has to say that we don't. For a more detailed version of this argument, see Merricks, "Good-bye Growing Block", which is in one of the Oxford Studies in Metaphysics volumes.

Here's a reply to that argument given by Peter Forrest:

Forrest denies (1) from the argument above. He claims that life and consciousness can only occur on the growing edge of reality, or the present moment. So, since we know we're alive and conscious, we know we're in the present moment.

I have one argument against this "dead past" hypothesis, but I won't go into it here.

Forrest talks about life and consciousness being "by-products of the causal frisson between being and non-being", so that they can only occur on the growing edge.

If Forrest can make this work, I think it may be a way for him to get out of my argument that I mentioned above. But, I have two problems with it.

A. It sounds spooky, and I don't like it.
B. It seems weird that he can talk about causal frisson between being and non-being. What sorts of causal relationships can things which do not exist enter into?

I know the presentist has something to say about this with regard to past objects (to get out of the cross-time relations objections to presentism).

Finally, the point of this post: does anyone know of any literature that may be good for me to look at with regards to (B)? I suppose the presentist stuff about cross-time relations would be good, but is there anything...better?

Lewis Powell

Because of a paper I am working on regarding Hume's theory of belief in the Treatise, and some connections between the topic of that paper and the interpretation of Hume as a Baconian about probabilistic reasoning, I started looking into formalizations of non-Pascalian probabilities.

My as-yet-unschooled understanding of Baconian probabilities is that they differ from Pascalian probabilities in a couple of important ways. One is that they are ordinal rather than algebraic (meaning that they cannot be summed or multiplied). The other major difference is that the 0 point on the scale does not reflect disproof (as it does for Pascalian probabilities), but maximal uncertainty. In other words, on the Pascalian model, if P(H) = 0 that is equivalent to it being the case that P(~H) = 1. On the Baconian model, this is not so. Since that pretty much exhausts my current knowledge of Baconian probability, I figured that I should find out more about it.

A cursory google search alerted me to a book by L. Jonathan Cohen in which he (allegedly) shows how to use a generalized version of the modal logic S4 to model Baconian probabilities. I say 'allegedly' not because I am particularly doubtful that he does so, but only because I have yet to get my hands on that book. Someone else had it checked out, so I issued a recall (after first making sure that the book was not checked out by one of my professors or by another student in the program), and am now waiting for it to come back in.

Luckily, I do not lack reading material while I wait, though, because, in my search of the library's online catalogue for that Cohen book, I noticed that he had also written something called "An Essay on Belief and Acceptance" which piqued my interest despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it was not particularly related to any of the issues I had been intending to investigate.

So, I've been reading that book, which I am finding very interesting. In fact, any readers who are familiar with it and have (a) thoughts about it or (b) recommendations of other good work on the same topic should post them to the comments.

I don't want to make it sound like this has stalled progress on my original investigation (the original investigation being the Hume paper, in case that wasn't clear). Luckily, I spend enough time working on philosophy that such off-topic excursions don't outright interfere with getting my work done.*

But there is a potential danger with having too many topics under investigation at once, which is what makes it worrisome for me that pursuing legitimate connections to a given topic seems to be the major trigger for launching me on increasingly unrelated investigations.

*In this case, enough time is roughly equivalent to all of it.

Justin Snedegar

For anyone who uses Ubuntu as their OS, check out these sweet desktop wallpapers that Andy Cullison has put together over at Wide Scope.

Also, I've been in touch with people at various schools in Southern California to let them know about this blog. Hopefully, some more people will be interested in contributing soon.