Extended Anatomy It is customary to distinguish between an organism’s body and its environment. The environment is what exists outside the body. There is a definite boundary between the two. But how solid is this distinction? And does it matter to theoretical biology? Might there be a better way to carve things […]
Explanations of Life Suppose we encounter life forms on another planet unrelated to ours and possibly quite unlike ours. Still, there is evident adaptive complexity, so that the laws of physics and chance cannot explain what we observe. What possible explanation might be given for this complexity? How might it […]
Essentially Negative Concepts Negation is a basic and ubiquitous element of our conceptual scheme, though it is hard to say anything illuminating about it. Beyond noting that it is a unary truth function we find little to report about the nature of negation. We feel vaguely that it consists in a […]
Epistemology Personalized What is it that is justified? Not propositions: they are true or false, but it would be strange to say that a proposition is justified independently of anyone believing it to be true (or probable). Was the heliocentric theory justified before anyone had any beliefs about it? It was […]
Divine Supervenience I wish to broach an extremely speculative theological question: Is God supervenient on the universe. More precisely, are the properties of God uniquely determined by the properties of the universe? Does any universe qualitatively identical to our universe in all its non-divine attributes contain a god that is qualitatively identical […]
There is something surprising about the Cogito: it is not merely trivially true like, “I think, therefore I have states of mind” or “I think, therefore there is a non-empty set of my thoughts”. What is it that is surprising? Not the claim that I have thoughts, and not the claim that I […]
Descartes without Dualism There is something right about Descartes’ metaphysics of mind and body and something wrong. He is right in supposing there is a kind of symmetrical duality with respect to mind and body, but wrong in supposing there is a corresponding dualism of substances. A body is an extended […]
Degrees of Determinism People usually talk about determinism and indeterminism as if it were a binary affair. But there are different strengths of determinism and indeterminism, with some more plausible than others. Let me first define the strongest possible kind of determinism: if a cause from the actual world is […]
It is helpful to distinguish between what I shall call deep common sense (DCS) and local common sense (LCS). DCS is the kind of common sense that all humans share and which has existed for hundreds and thousands of years (and may well have been present in earlier hominids). It is a human […]
Dark Mind Dark matter pre-dates its detection by billions of years: hence its name. It is dark precisely in the sense that it does not emit or reflect light—it doesn’t interact with electromagnetic radiation at all. It is detectable only by means of remote gravitational effects. It is nowhere to […]