The modeling of the human mind based on quantum effects has been gaining considerable interest due to the intriguing possibility of applying non-local interactions in the studies of consciousness. Inasmuch as the majority of the pertinent studies are restricted to the exclusive analysis of mental phenomena, the quantum model of mind proposed by Roger Penrose constitutes a part of a much larger scheme of the ultimate unification of physics. Penrose's efforts to find the 'missing science of consciousness' presuppose the non-algorithmic (...) character of human thinking inferred from Gödel's incompleteness theorem. This is supposed to combine with the anticipated non-algorithmic character of the future quantum gravity theory involving the objective reduction of a quantum mechanical state vector. By surveying contemporary achievements of cognitive sciences as well as the development of Penrose's conjectures, presented in his recent work The Road to Reality, we wish to show that his non-algorithmic quantum model of human mind is contingent upon the fundamental philosophical assumption of the mathematicity of the Universe. (shrink)

The mathematical theory of communication.

1. A substance is a being that is capable of action. It is either •simple, meaning that it has no parts, or •composite, meaning that it is a collection of simple substances or monads. (Monas is a Greek word meaning ‘unity’ or ‘oneness’.) Any composite thing—any body—is a multiplicity, ·a many, but simple substances are unities, ·or ones·. There must be simple substances everywhere, because without simples there would be no composites—·without ones there could not be manies·. And simple substances (...) are lives, souls, minds—·where there is a simple substance there is life·—and the world’s being full of such substances means that the whole of nature is full of life. (shrink)

Luciano Floridi presents a book that will set the agenda for the philosophy of information. PI is the philosophical field concerned with the critical investigation of the conceptual nature and basic principles of information, including its dynamics, utilisation, and sciences, and the elaboration and application of information-theoretic and computational methodologies to philosophical problems. This book lays down, for the first time, the conceptual foundations for this new area of research. It does so systematically, by pursuing three goals. Its metatheoretical goal (...) is to describe what the philosophy of information is, its problems, approaches, and methods. Its introductory goal is to help the reader to gain a better grasp of the complex and multifarious nature of the various concepts and phenomena related to information. Its analytic goal is to answer several key theoretical questions of great philosophical interest, arising from the investigation of semantic information. (shrink)

This book offers a unique synthesis of past and current work on the structure, meaning, and use of negation and negative expressions, a topic that has engaged thinkers from Aristotle and the Buddha to Freud and Chomsky. Horn's masterful study melds a review of scholarship in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics with original research, providing a full picture of negation in natural language and thought; this new edition adds a comprehensive preface and bibliography, surveying research since the book's original publication.

In book Zeta of the Metaphysics and elsewhere Aristotle appears to commit himself to the following propositions: (1) No universal can be substance; (2) Form is a universal; and (3) Form is that which is most truly substance. These propositions appear to constitute an inconsistent triad lying at the heart of Aristotle’s ontology. A number of attempts have been made to rescue Aristotle from the charge of inconsistency. Some have claimed that Aristotle did not subscribe to (1), but only to (...) the proposition that nothing predicated universally can be substance. Others hold that, contrary to (2), form is not a universal but peculiar to each individual. Still others argue that the sense of ‘substance’ in which the species form is a substance is not the sense in which no universal is substance. I argue that none of these attempts to rescue Aristotle from the charge of inconsistency is ultimately defensible. (shrink)

The philosophy of information (PI) is a new area of research with its own field of investigation and methodology. This article, based on the Herbert A. Simon Lecture of Computing and Philosophy I gave at Carnegie Mellon University in 2001, analyses the eighteen principal open problems in PI. Section 1 introduces the analysis by outlining Herbert Simon's approach to PI. Section 2 discusses some methodological considerations about what counts as a good philosophical problem. The discussion centers on Hilbert's famous analysis (...) of the central problems in mathematics. The rest of the article is devoted to the eighteen problems. These are organized into five sections: problems in the analysis of the concept of information, in semantics, in the study of intelligence, in the relation between information and nature, and in the investigation of values. (shrink)

This book dares to challenge natural selection--not in the name of religion but in the name of good science. Most scientists are so terrified of religious attacks on the theory of evolution that it is never examined critically. There are significant scientific and philosophical problems with the theory of natural selection. Darwin claimed the factors that determine the course of evolution are very largely environmental. Empirical results in biology are increasingly calling this thesis into question. The authors show that Darwinism (...) is committed to inferring, from the premise that a kind of creature with a certain trait was selected, the conclusion that that kind of creature was selected for having that trait. Though such inferences are fallacious, they are nevertheless unavoidable within the Darwinist framework. Ultimately, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini level a devastating critique against Darwinist orthodoxy and suggest new ways of thinking about evolution.--From publisher description. (shrink)

Determinism is a perennial topic of philosophical discussion. Very little acquaintance with the philosophical literature is needed to reveal the Tower of ...

The no-miracles argument for realism and the pessimistic meta-induction for anti-realism pull in opposite directions. Structural Realism---the position that the mathematical structure of mature science reflects reality---relieves this tension.

Various fault modes of determinism in classical physics are outlined. It is shown how quantum mechanics can cure some forms of classical indeterminism. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of HPS, University of Pittsburgh, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA 15260; e‐mail: [email protected].

This classic, provocative introduction to classical metaphysical questions focuses on appreciating the problems, rather than attempting to proffer answers.

Comprehensive account of constructive theory of first-order predicate calculus. Covers formal methods including algorithms and epi-theory, brief treatment of Markov’s approach to algorithms, elementary facts about lattices and similar algebraic systems, more. Philosophical and reflective as well as mathematical. Graduate-level course. 1963 ed. Exercises.

Metaphysics: Contemporary Readings is a comprehensive anthology that draws together leading philosophers writing on the major themes in Metaphysics. Chapters appear under the headings: Universals Particulars Modality and Possible Worlds Causation Time Persistence Realism and Anti-Realism Each section is prefaced by an introductory essay by the editor which guides students gently into each topic. Articles by the following leading philosophers are included: Allaire, Anscombe, Armstrong, Black, Broad, Casullo, Dummett, Ewing, Heller, Hume, Kripke, Lewis, Mackie, McTaggart, Mellor, Merricks , Parfit, Plantinga, (...) Price, Prior, Putnam, Quine, Russell, Smart, Swinburne, Taylor , Van Cleve, van Inwagen, Williams Featuring a new section on causation, this new edition is highly accessible and provides a broad-ranging exploration of the subject. Ideal for any philosophy student, this reader will prove essential reading for any metaphysics course. The sections and selections of readings have been updated to complement Michael Loux's textbook Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction , third edition. (shrink)

The objects we encounter in ordinary life and scientific practice - cars, trees, people, houses, molecules, galaxies, and the like - have long been a fruitful source of perplexity for metaphysicians. The Structure of Objects gives an original analysis of those material objects to which we take ourselves to be committed in our ordinary, scientifically informed discourse. Koslicki focuses on material objects in particular, or, as metaphysicians like to call them "concrete particulars", i.e., objects which occupy a single region of (...) space-time at each time at which they exist and which have a certain range of properties that go along with space-occupancy, such as weight, shape, color, texture, and temperature. The Structure of Objects focuses in particular on the question of how the parts of such objects, assuming that they have parts, are related to the wholes which they compose. (shrink)

A modest proposal concerning laws, counterfactuals, and explanations - - Why be Humean? -- Suggestions from physics for deep metaphysics -- On the passing of time -- Causation, counterfactuals, and the third factor -- The whole ball of wax -- Epilogue : a remark on the method of metaphysics.

Presents general information about meteorology, weather, and climate and includes more than thirty activities to help study these topics, including making a ...

Book 1. Volume I, Greece and Rome ; Volume II, Augustine to Scotus ; Volume III, Ockham to Suarez.

Suppose all of the particles in the universe should happen to come to rest at the same time, in positions so arranged that all of the forces on every particle balance to zero at that time. What would happen next? Or rather, what does Newtonian mechanics say will happen next? Preface Inertia and Stasis 2.1 Stating the Law of Inertia more precisely 2.2 The stasis scenario Indeterministic Examples 3.1 Abstract example 3.2 Second example Non-Lipschitz Forces and Determinism Beyond the Stasis (...) Scenario CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The paper is a contribution to formal ontology. It seeks to use topological means in order to derive ontological laws pertaining to the boundaries and interiors of wholes, to relations of contact and connectedness, to the concepts of surface, point, neighbourhood, and so on. The basis of the theory is mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, a theory which is shown to have a number of advantages, for ontological purposes, over standard treatments of topology in set-theoretic terms. One (...) central goal of the paper is to provide a rigorous formulation of Brentano's thesis to the effect that a boundary can exist as a matter of necessity only as part of a whole of higher dimension which it is the boundary of. It concludes with a brief survey of current applications of mereotopology in areas such as natural-language analysis, geographic information systems, machine vision, naive physics, and database and knowledge engineering. (shrink)

Roman Ingarden (1893 -- 1970) was a Polish phenomenologist, ontologist and aesthetician. A student of Edmund Husserl's from the Göttingen period, Ingarden was a realist phenomenologist who spent much of his career working against what he took to be Husserl's turn to transcendental idealism. As preparatory work for narrowing down possible solutions to the realism/idealism problem, Ingarden developed ontological studies unmatched in scope and detail, distinguishing different kinds of dependence and different modes of being. He is best known, however, for (...) his work in aesthetics, particularly on the ontology of the work of art and the status of aesthetic values, and is credited with being the founder of phenomenological aesthetics. His work.. (shrink)

I deny that the world is fundamentally causal, deriving the skepticism on non-Humean grounds from our enduring failures to find a contingent, universal principle of causality that holds true of our science. I explain the prevalence and fertility of causal notions in science by arguing that a causal character for many sciences can be recovered, when they are restricted to appropriately hospitable domains. There they conform to a loose collection of causal notions that form a folk science of causation. This (...) recovery of causation exploits the same generative power of reduction relations that allows us to recover gravity as a force from Einstein's general relativity and heat as a conserved fluid, the caloric, from modern thermal physics, when each theory is restricted to appropriate domains. Causes are real in science to the same degree as caloric and gravitational forces. (shrink)

Newton’s equations of motion tell us that a mass at rest at the apex of a dome with the shape specified here can spontaneously move. It has been suggested that this indeterminism should be discounted since it draws on an incomplete rendering of Newtonian physics, or it is “unphysical,” or it employs illicit idealizations. I analyze and reject each of these reasons. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA (...) 15260; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

I deny that the world is fundamentally causal, deriving the skepticism on non-Humean grounds from our enduring failures to find a contingent, universal principle of causality that holds true of our science. I explain the prevalence and fertility of causal notions in science by arguing that a causal character for many sciences can be recovered, when they are restricted to appropriately hospitable domains. There they conform to loose and varying collections of causal notions that form folk sciences of causation. This (...) recovery of causation exploits the same generative power of reduction relations that allows us to recover gravity as a force from Einstein's general relativity and heat as a conserved fluid, the caloric, from modern thermal physics, when each theory is restricted to appropriate domains. Causes are real in science to the same degree as caloric and gravitational forces. (shrink)

In this paper a model in particle dynamics of a well-known supertask is constructed. As a consequence, a new and simple result about the failure of determinism of classical particle dynamics can be proved which is related to the non-existence of boundary conditions at spatial infinity. This result is much more accessible to the non-technical reader than similar ones in the scientific literature.

The recent philosophy of physics is confronted with the new ontology, as it emerges after philosophy proper has fully articulated the linguistic turn. The classical ontologists asserted or denied, controversially, that certain entities "existed." Rather than adding to these controversies, the new ontology uncovers their dialectics. The ontologically problematic entities of physics are of two kinds, represented by forces and particles, respectively. The dialectics has been dominated by eight patterns. Two of these, independence and realism, belong to philosophy proper. The (...) latter is here considered in order to relieve the philosophy of physics of a burden only philosophy proper can bear. That leaves six patterns: concreteness (including the orbit feature), acquaintance, simplicity, significance, process, and model. The paper sketches how each of these may be used and probably has been used, either explicitly or implicitly, in the recent controversies. (shrink)

This book is a fascinating and accessible summary of Roger Penrose's current thinking on those areas of physics in which he feels there are major...

The properties of negation, in combination with those of other logical operations and structural features of the deductibility relation, serve as gateways among logical systems. Negation therefore plays an important role in selecting logical systems for particular applications. This volume provides a thorough treatment of this concept, based on contributions written by authors from various branches of logic. The resulting 14 research papers address a variety of topics including negation in relevant logics; a defense of dialetheic theory of negation; stable (...) negation in logic programming; antirealism and falsity; and negation, denial, and language change in philosophical logic. Suited to scholars and graduate students in the fields of philosophy, logic mathematics, computer science, and linguistics. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

I love information upon all subjects that come in my way, and especially upon those that are most important. Thus boldly declares Euphranor, one of the defenders of Christian faith in Berkley’s Alciphron (Berkeley, (1732), Dialogue 1, Section 5, Paragraph 6/10). Evidently, information has been an object of philosophical desire for some time, well before the computer revolution, Internet or the dotcompandemonium (see for example Dunn (2001) and Adams (2003)). Yet what does Euphranor love, exactly? What is information? The question (...) has received many answers in different fields. Unsurprisingly, several surveys do not even converge on a single, unified definition of information (see for example Braman 1989, Losee (1997), Machlup and Mansfield (1983), Debons and Cameron (1975), Larson and Debons (1983)). (shrink)

This is the first critical edition of Diogenes Laertius'History of Greek Philosophybased on full evidence. The Greek text is radically emended from Diogenes' sources. This edition provides an ample double apparatus. In apparatus criticus allvariae lectionesof codices BPF and Phi are reported. Vol. II comprises the first edition ofMagnum excerptumfrom Diogenes Laertius preserved in the Vatican codex Phi,Ps.-Hesychii de viris illustribusfrom the same codex, and all the excerpts from Diogenes Laertius in theSuda.

© 2015, American College of Rheumatology. Objective More than 1 in 4 Medicare beneficiaries with rheumatoid arthritis use high-cost biologic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs, and spending for these drugs has risen sharply for Medicare Part D. Our aim was to conduct the first systematic, national investigation of how Part D plans cover biologic DMARDs and to determine patients' financial burden under current cost-sharing structures. Methods We performed a cross-sectional analysis of Part D plan formularies in 50 states and Washington, DC using (...) the January 2013 Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Prescription Drug Plan Formulary and Pharmacy Network Files. We calculated the percentage of plans covering each DMARD as well as the percentage requiring prior authorization and/or coinsurance. We also compared biologic drug coverage in Medicare Advantage prescription drug plans to that in Medicare Part D stand-alone plans. Results All plans covered at least 1 biologic DMARD, but the vast majority required prior authorizations. Nearly all plans required patients to pay a coinsurance percentage rather than a fixed dollar copayment. This translated into mean out-of-pocket costs of $2,712-$2,774 before reaching the catastrophic phase of coverage, during which beneficiaries pay 5% of drug costs. Medicare Advantage prescription drug plans covered more individual biologic DMARDs than did Medicare Part D stand-alone plans, but Medicare Advantage prescription drug plans required higher average coinsurance. In contrast, 6 of 9 nonbiologic DMARDs were covered by nearly all plans without prior authorizations at fixed copayments averaging $5-$10/month. Conclusion Nationally, nearly all Part D plans cover at least 1 biologic DMARD, but the vast majority require cost sharing sufficiently high to risk significant financial burden to patients. (shrink)

This is a self-contained introduction to the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. It is the introductory chapter of Many Worlds? Everett, quantum theory, and reality, S. Saunders, J. Barrett, A. Kent, and D. Wallace, Oxford University Press.

_Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction_ is for students who have already completed an introductory philosophy course and need a fresh look at the central topics in the core subject of metaphysics. It is essential reading for any student of the subject. This Fourth Edition is revised and updated and includes two new chapters on Parts and Wholes, and Metaphysical Indeterminacy or vagueness. This new edition also keeps the user-friendly format, the chapter overviews summarizing the main topics, concrete examples to clarify difficult (...) concepts, annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, endnotes, and a full bibliography. Topics addressed include: the problem of universals the nature of abstract entities the problem of individuation the nature of modality identity through time the nature of time the nature of parts and wholes the problem of metaphysical indeterminacy the Realism/anti-Realism debate. Wherever possible, Michael J. Loux and Thomas M. Crisp relate contemporary views to their classical sources in the history of philosophy. As experienced teachers of philosophy and important contributors to recent debates, Loux and Crisp are uniquely qualified to write this book. (shrink)