While an account of the physical basis of mind must explain many things, this appears to be the most difficult. It is impossible to exclude the phenomenological features of experience from a reduction in the sam
Our argument proceeds in three steps: First, we argue that agency is important in biology and the philosophy of biology because the science of living organisms must deal with the locus of change or development. Biological “forces,” such as natural selection have been posited as the source of...
This is a review of the issue of randomness in quantum mechanics, with special emphasis on its ambiguity; for example, randomness has different antipodal relationships to determinism, computability, and compressibility. Following a (Wittgensteinian) philosophical discussion of randomness in general, I ar...
In many ways, the problem of machine learning is a version of thegeneral problem of adaptive evolution, as encounteredfor example in biology. In biology we typically imagine that we want to adaptively optimize some overall “fitness” of a system; in machine learning we typi...
The role of other imaging modalities, such as magnetic resonance imaging, is still undetermined; however, extensive research is underway on this subject. Treatment depends on the age of the patient and the reducibility of the hip joint. At an early age and up to 6 mo, the main treatment ...
form a simpler description of the world, that we can successfully and coherently make use of. And a fundamental discovery of our Physics Project is that the two great pillars of twentieth-century physics—general relativityandquantum mechanics—correspond precisely to two such pockets of ...
In a sense, the seeds of this objection to the reducibility of experience are already detectable in successful cases of reduction: for in discovering sound to be, in reality, a wave phenomenon in air or other media, we leave behind one viewpoint to take up another, and the auditory, ...
Indeed, suppose we equate reducibility of randomness with the existence of a "Laplacian" deterministic hidden variable theory (i.e. use the anti- pode of determinism), and assume, as the Copenhagenists would be pleased to, the conjunction of the following properties: 1. The Born rule and ...
. And so I finally decided to do my long-planned study of the Game of Life. There’s much, much more that can be done. But I think what I’ve done here provides an indication of some of the directions one can go, and some ...