The growing prominence of computers in contemporary life, often seemingly with minds of their own, invites rethinking the question of moral responsibility. If the moral responsibility for an act lies with the subject that carried it out, it follows that different concepts of the subject generate different views of moral responsibility. Some recent theorists have argued that actions are produced by composite, fluid subjects understood as extended agencies (cyborgs, actor networks). This view of the subject contrasts with methodological individualism: the (...) idea that actions are produced only by human individuals. This essay compares two views of responsibility: moral individualism (the ethical twin of methodological individualism), and joint responsibility (associated with extended agency theory). It develops a view of what joint responsibility might look like, and considers the advantages it might bring relative to moral individualism as well as the objections that are sure to be raised against it. (shrink)

To classify is to organize the particulars in a body of information according to some meaningful scheme. Difficulty recognizing metaphor, synonyms and homonyms, and levels of generalization renders those applications of artificial intelligence that are currently in widespread use at a loss to deal effectively with classification. Indexing conveys nothing about relationships; it pinpoints information on particular topics without reference to anything else. Keyword searching is a form of indexing, and here artificial intelligence excels. Growing reliance on automated means of (...) accessing information brings an increase in indexing and a corresponding decrease in classification. This brings about a shift from the modernist view of the world as permanently and hierarchically structured to the indeterminacy and contingency associated with postmodernism. (shrink)

Recent social theory has departed from methodological individualism’s explanation of action according to the motives and dispositions of human individuals in favor of explanation in terms of broader agencies consisting of both human and nonhuman elements described as cyborgs, actor-networks, extended agencies, or distributed cognition. This paper proposes that moral responsibility for action also be vested in extended agencies. It advances a consequentialist view of responsibility that takes moral responsibility to be a species of causal responsibility, and it answers objections (...) that might be raised on the basis of intentions and deserts. (shrink)

Hanson claims that moral responsibility should be distributed among both the humans and artifacts comprising complex wholes that produce morally relevant outcomes in the world. I argue that this claim is not sufficiently supported. In particular, adopting a consequentialist understanding of morality does not by itself support the view that the existence of a causally necessary object in such a complex whole is sufficient for assigning moral responsibility to that object. Moreover, there are good reasons, both evolutionary and contemporary, (...) for not adopting this stance. (shrink)

Arrow’s impossibility result stems chiefly from a combination of two requirements: independence and fixity. Independence says that the social choice is independent of individual preferences involving unavailable alternatives. Fixity says that the social choice is fixed by a social preference relation that is independent of what is available. Arrow found that requiring, further, that this relation be transitive yields impossibility. Here it is shown that allowing intransitive social indifference still permits only a vastly unsatisfactory system, a liberum veto oligarchy. Arrow’s (...) argument for independence, though, undermines any rationale for fixity. (shrink)

An overview of Bradley's metaphysics and epistemology, which had much of the basic structure of quantum mechanics, but was all but ignored in the years following the formal quantum theories discovered by Heisenberg and Schrödinger. Bradley's version of absolute idealism was infected with the mentalism that was generally associated with idealism in the late nineteenth century. I develop his ideas from a standpoint somewhat more friendly to modern formal methods, although this is not much of a stretch, as Bradley had (...) already taken absolute idealism strongly in that direction, if not all the way. (shrink)

Rawls' Difference Principle asserts that a basic economic structure is just if it makes the worst off people as well off as is feasible. How well off someone is is to be measured by an ‘index’ of ‘primary social goods’. It is this index that gives content to the principle, and Rawls gives no adequate directions for constructing it. In this essay a version of the difference principle is proposed that fits much of what Rawls says, but that makes use (...) of no index. Instead of invoking an index of primary social goods, the principle formulated here invokes a partial ordering of prospects for opportunities. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's philosophies, from both the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, are explained and developed. Wittgenstein uses a primitive version of recursion theory to develop his attempt at a purely logical metaphysics in the Tractatus. However, due to his implicit materialist assumptions, he could not make the system completely logical, and built in a mystical division of possible worlds into the true and the false. This incoherence eventually lead him to reject logic as a method for doing metaphysics, and indeed to (...) reject metaphysics entirely. I argue that his move from the Tractatus to the Investigations was valid, but only given his materialist assumptions. If he had been willing to drop this unnecessary baggage, recursion would have played a very different role in his system, since he would then have had no need to separate static objects from processes, which he saw as purely mental. F.H. Bradley developed such a nonmaterialist metaphysics in the nineteenth century, but was crippled by a mentalism that Wittgenstein was free of. The anti-mentalism and anti-materialism that Wittgenstein considered as given were not so obvious to his predecessor, Russell, who revolted against Bradley's idealism in much the same way Wittgenstein ended up revolting against Russell's logical atomism. In my view, none of these positions was the right approach, which would require nonmentalism and nonmaterialism. But for some reason, these things (which seem to go together quite naturally to me) have been widely considered to be incompatible. Bradley was appropriately a non-materialist, but suffered from mentalism. Russell and the early Wittgenstein were appropriately nonmentalists, but suffered from materialism. The later Wittgenstein was, I would argue, still an ardent materialist and anti-mentalist, in spite of the fact that he had long since realized the contradictions to which materialism leads; he just had not recognized that it was his materialist assumptions that had lead him there, since these assumptions were so firmly engrained in his thinking as to be invisible.. (shrink)

A survey of Kant's views on space, time, geometry and the synthetic nature of mathematics. I concentrate mostly on geometry, but comment briefly on the syntheticity of logic and arithmetic as well. I believe the view of many that Kant's system denied the possibility of non-Euclidean geometries is clearly mistaken, as Kant himself used a non-Euclidean geometry (spherical geometry, used in his day for navigational purposes) in order to explain his idea, which amounts to an anticipation of the later discovery (...) of the general concept of non- Euclidean geometries. Kant's view of geometry and arithmetic as synthetic was, I believe, essentially correct, in that geometry and arithmetic are both synthetic a priori if considered as branches of mathematics independent of the rest of mathematics. However, the view that somehow logic is analytic, while mathematics is synthetic for Kantian reasons, is mistaken. All three disciplines—logic, arithmetic and geometry—are synthetic as disciplines independent from one another. However, they have a common basis, recursion theory, which I prefer to identify with mathematics as a whole. As a result, I do not say, as is often considered to be the Kantian view, that mathematics is synthetic while logic is analytic. Rather, I prefer to say that mathematics is analytic, while logic is synthetic. This is perfectly consistent with Kant's system, since it was arithmetic and geometry individually that he argued were synthetic. What Kant called the analytic is recursion theory, which could be considered as a basic formulation of mathematics or logic—or better, both mathematics and logic could be recognized as essentially the same discipline. However, if "logic" is taken to mean "predicate logic", as is often the case in modern times, then it is mathematics that is closer to Kant's analytic, not logic. Such ambiguities, of course, can be avoided by simply associating Kant's analytic with recursion theory, and avoiding the controversies as to what counts as mathematics or logic.. (shrink)

While the essays on this web site, taken together, explain most of the essentials of my metaphysical system, some material is not covered, and the different essays take quite different approaches. The essays were mostly written for undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy at the University of Toronto and York University. Thus, each essay is slanted to the issues that were addressed in whatever course it was written for. However, I hope soon to pull all this material together into a (...) cohesive, single work that will explain my system more fully and with more focus, which will serve as my Ph.D. dissertation. In the meantime this brief overview gives the broad picture of what my philosophical system is, and how the various essays on these pages are inter-related. For those who do not wish to read through this entire page, the Quantum Phenomenology essay is probably the one you should read if you only have time to read one, as it is the closest to being comprehensive. (shrink)

Plato's theory of forms is developed and compared to the modern theory of recursion. I show how Plato's theory, as it applies to mathematical objects, is essentially a primitve version of modern recursion theory, which has all the essential elements of the ancient theory. However, Plato himself thought there was more than mathematics to his forms. He believed that form had a noncomposite, unanalyzable component. So, while recursion theory provides an adequate formalization of Plato's theory, it cannot be considered identical (...) to it. I argue--drawing from material in the "Meno," "Phaedo," and "Republic"--that Plato's arguments for noncomposite form are largely fallacious. Plato would, I believe, have taken the computational version developed here seriously, since mathematics was his primary source for clear examples of forms (one could argue that it was his only source short of dipping into mysticism). In fact, there is a long-standing oral tradition that Plato developed a more formal version of his theory in lecture notes for courses he taught at the Academy (the university he founded in Athens). Any such notes, if they existed at all, have been lost. But if such a formal version did exist, it is tantalizing to wonder to what extent Plato may have anticipated modern theoretical computer science and metamathematics. (shrink)

The many worlds anthropic principle is explored here from the a priori perspective of rationalist metaphysics, within the framework of modal logic. It is shown how the apparent contradictions of quantum superposition can be thought of in terms of different levels of world models. The framework of modal logic is used, but given the rationalist assumption that all possible worlds exist. There is thus no absolute distinction between possibility and necessity. To take the point of view of a conscious being (...) in a world, however, is to adopt some such distinction--something we must do in order to do physics. This paper is intended to lay the groundwork for future attempts to develop theories of what is necessarily true in a world with conscious entities. It also contains some tentative speculations on the difficult issue of death and quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Starting with the Descartes' cogito, "I think, therefore I am"--and taking an uncompromisingly rational, rigorously phenomenological approach--I attempt to derive the basic principles of recursion theory (the backbone of all mathematics and logic), and from that the principles of feedback control theory (the backbone of all biology), leading to the basic ideas of quantum mechanics (the backbone of all physics). What is derived is not the full quantum theory, but a basic framework--derived from a priori principles along with common everyday (...) experience--of how the universe of everyday experience should work if it operates according to rational principles. We find, to our surprise, that the resulting system has all the most puzzling features of quantum physics that make physicists scratch their heads. Far from being "bizarre" and "weird", as is usually thought, the strangest paradoxes of quantum theory turn out to be just what one ought to expect of a rational universe. It is the classical, pre-quantum universe of the nineteenth century that has irrational, mystical components. The quantum-mechanics-like theory that is developed is, furthermore, most compatible with the strictest, most uncompromisingly rationalist of the standard interpretations of quantum mechanics, those which add no ad hoc elements to the theory, and which generally trace their history to the relative state formulation of Everett (also called the "many worlds" interpretation). These interpretations take the universe to be quite literally describable as a quantum wavefunction. As with any project this far-reaching in scope, I confess I have had to make some working assumptions along the way. I have attempted to isolate these, and clearly label them as points of possible future revision--they are marked in the text with an asterisk (*). (shrink)

Those who interpret quantum mechanics literally are forced to follow some variant of Everett's relative state formulation (or "many worlds" interpretation). It is generally assumed that this is a rather bizarre result that many physicists (especially cosmologists) have been forced into because of the evidence. I look at the history of philosophy, however, reveals that rationalism has always flirted with this very idea, from Parmenides to Leibniz to modern times. I will survey some of the philosophical history, and show how (...) the so-called paradox of quantum superposition can be considered a consequence of basic rationalist assumptions such as the principle of sufficient reason and the identity of indiscernibles. (shrink)

Sleep researchers in different disciplines disagree about how fully dreaming can be explained in terms of brain physiology. Debate has focused on whether REM sleep dreaming is qualitatively different from nonREM (NREM) sleep and waking. A review of psychophysiological studies shows clear quantitative differences between REM and NREM mentation and between REM and waking mentation. Recent neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies also differentiate REM, NREM, and waking in features with phenomenological implications. Both evidence and theory suggest that there are isomorphisms between (...) the phenomenology and the physiology of dreams. We present a three-dimensional model with specific examples from normally and abnormally changing conscious states. Key Words: consciousness; dreaming; neuroimaging; neuromodulation; NREM; phenomenology; qualia; REM; sleep. (shrink)

Sleep researchers in different disciplines disagree about how fully dreaming can be explained in terms of brain physiology. Debate has focused on whether REM sleep dreaming is qualitatively different from nonREM (NREM) sleep and waking. A review of psychophysiological studies shows clear quantitative differences between REM and NREM mentation and between REM and waking mentation. Recent neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies also differentiate REM, NREM, and waking in features with phenomenological implications. Both evidence and theory suggest that there are isomorphisms between (...) the phenomenology and the physiology of dreams. We present a three-dimensional model with specific examples from normally and abnormally changing conscious states. Key Words: consciousness; dreaming; neuroimaging; neuromodulation; NREM; phenomenology; qualia; REM; sleep. (shrink)

The Latin religious text known in the Middle Ages as the Stimulus Amoris must be considered a key text of late-medieval Franciscan spirituality, and one of the texts from the Franciscan milieu that was most widely copied and disseminated throughout the Middle Ages among monastic as well as lay readerships.1 In a recent study, Falk Eisermann has demonstrated that the Stimulus Amoris was subject to a particularly productive reception with multiple adaptations through centuries, and that the text to a large (...) extent was without one clearly discernible, normative form. The Stimulus Amoris, in other words, appears to have been regarded as an open text that could be, and in fact was altered, excerpted, shortened and... (shrink)