While completing the requirements for my terminal MA, I imagined the future prospects for a successful junior researcher. Years before, I left a decade-long career to return to school. As a graduate student, I earned money in the service industry, working late into early morning hours to contribute financially to our growing family. Daytime activities […]
In this three part (probably) series, I’m going to look at the notions of invention and discovery as they relate to how we think about mathematics and logic. In this first post, I’m going to set up the distinction between discovery and invention as I see it, and then talk about whether systems of notation for […]
It’s almost Thanksgiving here in Canada, so here’s a thanksgiving themed post about concepts from Frege and Neo-logicism. In his Grundlagen (1884), Frege proposes that the number that belongs to two concepts is the same just in case the objects falling under those concepts can be correlated one-to-one (i.e. they’re equinumerous). The formalization of that claim is […]
I learned philosophy of language in the dogmatic antiquity of a couple of years ago. Many of my colleagues and senior philosophers seem still to cling to these dogmas, like “a sentence is made true by its disquotation.” In the now-times, though, it seems especially important to show where we went wrong in developing our […]
It’s often said that science strives towards generality, looking for laws and principles about reality that admit of no exceptions, or as few as possible. Some even go as far as saying that unity is a standard of scientific success, that an ideal scientific knowledge would be one simple, unifying, and universal theory of everything. […]
Recently I began a postdoctoral research position at the University of Calgary with the project From Biological Practice to Scientific Metaphysics. I (along with Oliver Lean) was asked to present Amanda Bryant’s paper entitled, “Keep the chickens cooped: the epistemic inadequacy of free range metaphysics” (2017) as part of a graduate seminar taught by Ken […]
It is common enough to run across arguments talking about how certain sorts of philosophical positions have corrupted the modern academy, destroying an intellectual commitment to truth in favor of some other set of values. These claims have come up regularly in disputes over "the atheistic worldview," post-modernism, and moral relativism.
How many Lego bricks would it take to build a conscious, rational mind? This may sound like an absurd question. Lego bricks don’t seem like the sort of thing that you could build a mind out of. (At least, I’m assuming that artificial intelligence researchers aren’t currently tinkering away in their state-of-the-art labs with a […]
Facts about Facts Facts, and in particular “alternative facts”, have been in the news a lot this week, and for good reason (I toyed with calling this post “Facts: talking metaphysics to power”). I’ll have something to say about “alternative facts” later in the post, but first I’m going to talk about facts more generally, […]
In his recent book, John Loftus argues that we ought to stop teaching philosophy of religion. This is not an extended review of the book; I might read it in the future and write a more fleshed out review, but rather a response to the excerpt (in the link above) that Hemant Mehta posted recently; it is […]
Originally posted on sibilantfricative:
I teach at a university that was, up until recently, a polytechnical college before it was eaten up by a larger state school. That means on a daily basis, I work primarily with men. In a typical writing or literature class that I teach, there are often only one or two…
While robots were originally conceived of as laborers, advances in AI and emotional modeling have led to “companion robots” like Aldebaran’s Pepper and Intelligent Systems Co.’s Paro. But a companion is fundamentally unlike a standard worker[1]: labor is by its nature fungible, and companions, if we understand companions as something like friends, are, presumably, non-fungible. Workers […]
First let me head off the suspicion that I’ll be discussing some sort of weird idealist/massively subjectivist/etc metaphysics. I’m concerned with ‘world’ and ‘universe’ as they’re used by analytic metaphysicians, logicians, and philosophers of mathematics. In particular I’m concerned about the cardinalities of the domains of discourse assumed by some philosophers when dealing with, in […]
Thanks to Justin Caouette for inviting me to the blog. I’ll start with a bit that draws ideas from a paper I’m working on for a book on Robot Ethics: The standard criteria for personhood are not obviously inherently impossible for AIs to obtain: they could be self-conscious, they could regard others as persons, they could […]
The following is a rather simple (simplistic?) argument against certain forms of physicalism*, specifically, those forms which identify the conscious mind with physical processes of the brain. The argument starts with the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals (thank you, Leibniz), which is usually uncontroversial: If A and B are one and the same thing, […]
For many who’ve taken philosophy courses at the university level (let alone those who teach philosophy), substance dualism appears to be a theory with, dare I say it, no substance. It’s not a “live option.” But, to extend the pun, I think it’s the dismissal, not the theory, that lacks substance. In the introduction to this series of posts, I […]
Originally posted on UP@NIGHT:
Once upon a time I was having dinner at the home of a colleague, a professional philosopher. The conversation took an intriguing turn when my colleague revealed that he had virtually no visual memory. Of course I had known that people remember things and events with varying degrees of…
“Hey, heads up, guys. Here comes Substance Dualism” If contemporary philosophy were a high school and theories were students, Substance Dualism would be the kid who has a reputation for bad breath, horrible fashion sense, a shady family history, and for saying gauche and tactless things on a regular basis. The cool kids wouldn’t be […]
My 6th post is up over at flickers. I have copied and pasted it below for those not interested in clicking again. Mental illness affects how we perceive the actions of others and with good reason. Consider two scenarios. In scenario 1 a person crashes into you because they had a non-epileptic seizure while driving. […]
My 5th post over at Flickers is up, check it out here. I’ve copied and pasted it below for those not interested in clicking (and following comments). Cheers! In the last post I suggested that moral responsibility may not come in degrees and based on the discussion that ensued it seems that we are pretty […]
A Philosopher's Take 
December 9, 2018 by Adam Hayden
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