Physics and Five Problems in the Philosophy of Mind

by sarosh • 16 years ago

7 10 16 years ago

samd4• 16 years ago

I think there's more jargon in that paper than participles. My experience with scientists trying to do philosophy is that they are either saying total bullshit, or saying something that's already been said dressed up with fancy science jargon.

_delirium2• 16 years ago

Yeah, this is particularly true in the rather terrible physics-meets-free-will literature. It seems every few months a physicist "scientifically discovers" some viewpoint on free will that has been widely known for centuries, or even worse claims something absurd like that they've disproven free will, for some totally naive definition of "free will".

In particular, almost nobody seems to bother dealing with compatibilist arguments, of the sort made by Daniel Dennett and many others, which make the physicists' research mostly irrelevant for free will, unless compatibilism can be refuted: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

samd4• 16 years ago

I'm not a fan of compatibilism mostly because their strategy seems to be to just redefine free will to be something very weak. Of course, most debates about free will are merely debates about what free will means.

mhartl• 16 years ago

The author, Stuart Kauffman, is known not to be a crank, but when paging through the paper I find a disturbing lack of mathematics.

sarosh• 16 years ago

The reason I posted it was because it was Kauffman and it was (relatively) approachable. But yeah, the lack of math is a bit...surprising.

Physics and Five Problems in the Philosophy of Mind

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