QUOTATIONS #7

Bradley Dowden --: Philosophers of time are deeply divided on the question on what sort of ontological differences there are among the present, past and future. Presentists argue that necessarily only present objects and present experiences are real; and we conscious beings recognize this in the special "vividness" of our present experience. The growing-universe theory is that the past and present are both real, but the future is not yet real. The most popular view is that there are no significant ontological differences among present, past and future. This view is called "eternalism" or "the block universe theory." [Time, IEP]

Max Tegmark --: One might expect the notion of a multiverse to be forever in the domain of metaphysics. Yet the borderline between physics and metaphysics is defined by whether a theory is experimentally testable, not by whether it is weird or involves unobservable entities. The frontiers of physics have gradually expanded to incorporate ever more abstract (and once metaphysical) concepts such as a round Earth, invisible electromagnetic fields, time slowdown at high speeds, quantum superpositions, curved space, and black holes. Over the past several years the concept of a multiverse has joined this list. It is grounded in well-tested theories such as relativity and quantum mechanics, and it fulfills both of the basic criteria of an empirical science: it makes predictions, and it can be falsified. Scientists have discussed as many as four distinct types of parallel universes. The key question is not whether the multiverse exists but rather how many levels it has. [Parallel Universes]

Brian Greene --: In day to day life, physicists view time in the same way that everyone else does. And that makes it all the more surprising when we examine how time appears in our current theoretical frameworks, because nowhere in our theories do we see the intuitive notion of time that we all embrace. Nowhere, for example, can we find the theoretical underpinnings for our sense that time flows from one second to the next. Instead, our theories seem to indicate that time doesn't flow --rather, past, present, and future are all there, always, forever frozen in place. [A Conversation With Brian Greene]

Science Week --: In general, "reductionism" is the idea that macroscopic phenomena can be explained in terms of microscopic entities and/or events, but the specific meaning of the term depends upon context and the conceptual identification within a particular science of levels of understanding. In biology in general, for example, "reductionism" is the term applied to attempts to explain biological phenomena in the language of physics and chemistry. In neurobiology, the term "reductionism" may be applied to attempts to explain human cognitive behavior in terms of the behavior of nerve cells and their connections. In evolutionary biology, the term "reductionism" may be applied to attempts to explain the dynamics of evolution in terms of molecular genetics. In physics and chemistry, the term "reductionism" may be applied to attempts to explain the macroscopic behavior of physical or chemical systems in terms of events at the level of atomic phenomena. Also in physics, the term "reductionism" may be applied to attempts to explain both the macroscopic behavior of a physical system and/or the microscopic atomic behavior of the entities of the system in terms of events at the still more microscopic level of fundamental particles and fundamental forces. [Particle Physics: An Exchange Concerning Relevance]

Paul Davies --: In daily life we divide time into three parts: past, present, and future. The grammatical structure of language revolves around this fundamental distinction. Reality is associated with the present moment. The past we think of having slipped out of existence, whereas the future is even more shadowy, its details still unformed. In this simple picture, the "now" of our conscious awareness glides steadily onward, transforming events that were once in the unformed future into the concrete but fleeting reality of the present, and thence relegating them to the fixed past. [That Mysterious Flow]

Brian Greene --: Einstein greeted the failure of science to confirm the familiar experience of time with "painful but inevitable resignation." The developments since his era have only widened the disparity between common experience and scientific knowledge. Most physicists cope with this disparity by compartmentalizing: there's time as understood scientifically, and then there's time as experienced intuitively. For decades, I've struggled to bring my experience closer to my understanding. In my everyday routines, I delight in what I know is the individual's power, however imperceptible, to affect time's passage. In my mind's eye, I often conjure a kaleidoscopic image of time in which, with every step, I further fracture Newton's pristine and uniform conception. And in moments of loss I've taken comfort from the knowledge that all events exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition into past, present and future being a useful but subjective organization. [The Time We Thought We Knew]

Paul Davies --: Physicists prefer to think of time as laid out in its entirety - a timescape, analogous to a landscape - with all past and future events located there together .... Completely absent from this description of nature is anything that singles out a privileged special moment as the present or any process that would systematically turn future events into the present, then past, events. In short, the time of the physicist does not pass or flow. [That Mysterious Flow]

Christoff Koch --: Well, let's first forget about the really difficult aspects, like subjective feelings, for they may not have a scientific solution. The subjective state of play, of pain, of pleasure, of seeing blue, of smelling a rose - there seems to be a huge jump between the materialistic level, of explaining molecules and neurons, and the subjective level. Let's focus on things that are easier to study - like visual awareness. You're now talking to me, but you're not looking at me, you're looking at the cappuccino, and so you are aware of it. You can say, `It´s a cup and there´s some liquid in it.´ If I give it to you, you´ll move your arm and you´ll take it - you´ll respond in a meaningful manner. That´s what I call awareness." ("What is Consciousness", Discover, November 1992, p. 96.)

Dave Droar --: The Chinese room is obviously a metaphor for a computer. Computers also run solely on syntax and the manipulation of symbols without ever having any concept of meaning (sematics). [Assessing Eliminative Materialism]

Wikipedia --: [Roy Bhaskar's] Transcendental Realism refers to the fact that in order for scientific investigation to take place, the object of that investigation must have real, manipulable, internal mechanisms that can be triggered to produce particular outcomes. This is what we do when we conduct experiments. This stands in contrast to empiricist scientists' claim that all scientists can do is observe the relationship between cause and effect. The implication of this is that science should be understood as an ongoing process in which scientists improve the concepts they use to understand the mechanisms that they study. It should not, in contrast to the claim of empiricists, be about the identification of a coincidence between a postulated 'independent variable' and 'dependent variable'. Positivism/falsification are also rejected due to the observation that it is highly-plausible that a mechanism will exist but either a) go un-activated, b) be activated, but imperceived, c) be activated, but counteracted by other mechanisms, which result in it having unpredictable effects. Thus, non-realisation of a posited mechanism can not (in contrast to the claim of positivists) be taken to signify its non-existence. [Critical Realism]

Dan Lloyd --: In the demon's thrall, we are deluded about everything, and all the time -- a terrible fate, but one whose terrors are only hypothetical, since systematic demonic delusion is without practical consequences. In practice, an uncontradicted delusion is as good as a truth. [Popping The Thought Balloon]

Edward O. Wilson --: The natural sciences are best understood as humanity's way of correctly perceiving the real world, as opposed to the way the human brain perceives that same world unaided by instruments and verifiable fact and theory. The brain, it is becoming increasingly clear, evolved as an instrument of survival. It did not evolve as a device to understand itself, much less the underlying principles of physics, chemistry, and biology. Under the circumstances of physical environment and culture prevailing from one generation to the next during the long haul of prehistory, natural selection built a brain that conferred the highest rates of survival and reproduction. The jury-rigged quality of our perceptual and cognitive apparatus, the legacy of genetic evolution, is part of the reason social scientists have such a hard time grappling with human nature, why so much of the history of philosophy can be fairly said to consist of failed models of the brain, and why people generally understand automobiles better than their own minds. [Resuming The Enlightenment Quest]

Jaegwon Kim --: Does this mean that emergentism has returned -- as an ontological doctrine about how the phenomena of this world are organized into autonomous emergent levels and as a metascientific thesis about the relationship between basic physics and the special sciences? I think the answer is a definite yes. The fading away of reductionism and the enthronement of nonreductive materialism as the new orthodoxy simply amount to the resurgence of emergentism -- not all of its sometimes quaint and quirky ideas but its core ontological and methodological doctrines. The return of emergentism is seldom noticed, and much less openly celebrated; it is clear, however, that the fortunes of reductionism correlate inversely with those of emergentism (modulo the rejection of substantival dualism). It is no undue exaggeration to say that we have been under the reign of emergentism since the early 1970s. [Making Sense of Emergence]

Edward O. Wilson --: Consider the matter of vision. What we intuitively believe to be the "real world" is what we see. But what we see is only an infinitesimal slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, comprising wavelengths of 400 to 700 billionths of a meter. With instrumentation, we are now able to observe the remainder of the spectrum that rains down on our bodies, from gamma waves trillions of times shorter than visible light to radio waves trillions of times longer. Many animals see a part of the spectrum outside our range. Insects, for example, depend heavily on ultraviolet light at wavelengths shorter than the human visible spectrum. Color in the visible spectrum also deceives us. We intuitively think that the rainbow is a natural phenomenon existing apart from the human mind, but it is not. Its palette is a product of the way the visual system and brain break the continuously varying wavelength of sunlight into the seemingly discrete segments we call colors. Such hereditary filtering and self-deception occur in all of the other senses. And some capabilities present in other organisms are totally absent from our uninstrumented minds. We have, for example, no organs to monitor the electric fields that some species of fish use to guide themselves through dark water, or the magnetic field by which migratory birds navigate across clouded night skies. Why are human beings, supposedly the summum bonum of creation, so handicapped? The simplest and most thoroughly verifiable answer has been provided by the natural sciences, and most particularly the borderland disciplines of cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Outside our heads there is freestanding reality. Only lunatics and a sprinkling of constructivist philosophers doubt its existence. Inside our heads is a reconstruction of reality based on sensory input and the self-assembly of symbol-based concepts. Scenarios based on these concepts, rather than an independent executive entity in the brain--the "ghost in the machine," in philosopher Gilbert Ryle's famous derogation--appear to constitute the mind. The scenarios of conscious thought move constantly back and forth through time. As these configurations fly by, driven by stimuli and drawing upon memories of prior scenarios, they are weighted and guided by emotion, which is the modification of neural activity that animates and focuses mental activity. [Resuming The Enlightenment Quest]

Jaegwon Kim --: I have argued elsewhere against nonreductive materialism, urging that this halfway house is an inherently unstable position, and that it threatens to collapse into either reductionism or more serious forms of dualism. But .... [here] I am not primarily concerned with the truth or tenability of emergentism or nonreductive materialism; rather, my main concern is with making sense of the idea of emergence -- the idea that certain properties of complex systems are emergent while others are not. Even if we succeed with the conceptual task of giving a coherent sense to emergence, it is another question whether any particular group of properties is emergent -- for example, whether intentional or qualitative mental properties are emergent relative to neural/biological properties, or whether biological properties are emergent relative to physicochemical properties -- or indeed whether there are any emergent properties at all. [Making Sense of Emergence]

Science Week --: The various sciences are split by scientists (not by nature) into various levels of explanation, with researchers working at the various levels using various techniques and concepts. Ordinarily, in the practice of science, the working scientist does not spend much time cogitating about whether a general reductionist approach is useful or not useful, philosophically valid or not valid, or whatever. The attitude essentially is that here is a house, I choose to study in detail the nature of the bricks, you choose to study in detail the nature of the construction of the house, I enjoy what I'm doing, you enjoy what you're doing, and each of us is making some contribution to a general understanding of the nature of the entity "house". This division of labor has been quite fruitful in science, and there is never much of a problem concerning the existence of various levels of investigation until the person who studies bricks says that what he or she is doing is more important than what the person who studies the construction of the house does, or when the person studying the construction of the house says it is the study of the construction of the house that is more important than the study of bricks. [Particle Physics: An Exchange Concerning Relevance]

Joseph Ledoux --: I believe that animals have feelings and other states of consciousness, but neither I, nor anyone else, has been able to prove it. We can't even prove that other people are conscious, much less other animals. In the case of other people, though, we at least can have a little confidence since all people have brains with the same basic configurations. But as soon as we turn to other species and start asking questions about feelings, and consciousness in general, we are in risky territory because the hardware is different. [World Question Center, 2005]

Michael Shermer --: The universe is ultimately determined, but we have free will. As with the God question, scholars of considerable intellectual power for many millennia have failed to resolve the paradox of feeling free in a determined universe. One provisional solution is to think of the universe as so complex that the number of causes and the complexity of their interactions make the predetermination of human action pragmatically impossible. We can even put a figure on the causal net of the universe to see just how absurd it is to think we can get our minds around it fully. It has been computed that in order for a computer in the far future of the universe to resurrect in a virtual reality every person who ever lived or could have lived, with all causal interactions between themselves and their environment, it would need 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123 bits (a 1 followed by 10^123 zeros) of memory. Suffice it to say that no computer within the conceivable future will achieve this level of power; likewise no human brain even comes close. The enormity of this complexity leads us to feel as if we are acting freely as uncaused causers, even though we are actually causally determined. Since no set of causes we select as the determiners of human action can be complete, the feeling of freedom arises out of this ignorance of causes. To that extent we may act as if we are free. There is much to gain, little to lose, and personal responsibility follows. [World Question Center, 2005]

David Chalmers --: It is often noted that physics characterizes its basic entities only extrinsically, in terms of their relations to other entities, which are themselves characterized extrinsically, and so on. The intrinsic nature of physical entities is left aside. Some argue that no such intrinsic properties exist, but then one is left with a world that is pure causal flux (a pure flow of information) with no properties for the causation to relate. If one allows that intrinsic properties exist, a natural speculation given the above is that the intrinsic properties of the physical - the properties that causation ultimately relates - are themselves phenomenal properties. We might say that phenomenal properties are the internal aspect of information. This could answer a concern about the causal relevance of experience - a natural worry, given a picture on which the physical domain is causally closed, and on which experience is supplementary to the physical. The informational view allows us to understand how experience might have a subtle kind of causal relevance in virtue of its status as the intrinsic nature of the physical. This metaphysical speculation is probably best ignored for the purposes of developing a scientific theory, but in addressing some philosophical issues it is quite suggestive. [Facing Up To The Problem Of Consciousness]

John Gregg --: It is worth noting that, properly speaking, physicalism itself can be seen as a kind of functionalism. This is because at the lowest level, every single thing that physics talks about (electrons, quarks, etc.) is defined in terms of its behavior with regard to other things in physics. If it swims like an electron and quacks like an electron, its an electron. It simply makes no sense in physics to say that something might behave exactly like an electron, but not actually be one. Because physics as a field of inquiry has no place for the idea of qualitative essences, the smallest elements of physics are characterized purely in functional terms, as black boxes in a block diagram. What a photon is, is defined exclusively in terms of what it does, and what it does is (circularly) defined exclusively in terms of the other things in physics (electrons, quarks, etc., various forces, a few constants). Physics is a closed, circularly defined system, whose most basic units are defined functionally. Physics as a science does not care about the intrinsic nature of matter, whatever it is that actually implements the functional characteristics exhibited (and described so perfectly in our laws of physics) by the lowest level elements of matter. Thus physics itself is multiply realizable. [Functionalism: Can't we just say that consciousness depends on the higher-level organization of a given system?]

David Chalmers --: For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience? Given any such process, it is conceptually coherent that it could be instantiated in the absence of experience. It follows that no mere account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises. The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory. [Facing Up To The Problem Of Consciousness]

Dan Lloyd --: New cosmology and new physics gave European intelligentsia a galloping case of what we would now call modern science. In a sense, Descartes' worst fantasies were unfolding: What everyone thought to be the case was turning out to be systematically and pervasively false. The forces and laws that governed the physical world were discovered to be quite different from the folk-inspired and Aristotelian theories that had seemed so obvious. And so it goes on to this day: The world-model in one's mind is at best a radical translation of the distal energies of reality. [Popping the Thought Balloon]

David Chalmers --: Purely physical explanation is well-suited to the explanation of physical structures, explaining macroscopic structures in terms of detailed microstructural constituents; and it provides a satisfying explanation of the performance of functions, accounting for these functions in terms of the physical mechanisms that perform them. This is because a physical account can entail the facts about structures and functions: once the internal details of the physical account are given, the structural and functional properties fall out as an automatic consequence. But the structure and dynamics of physical processes yield only more structure and dynamics, so structures and functions are all we can expect these processes to explain. The facts about experience cannot be an automatic consequence of any physical account, as it is conceptually coherent that any given process could exist without experience. Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical. The moral of all this is that you can't explain conscious experience on the cheap. [Facing Up To The Problem Of Consciousness]

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