The New Mechanical Philosophy

The New Mechanical Philosophy argues for a new image of nature and of science--one that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, and that casts the work of science as an effort to discover and understand those mechanisms. Drawing on an expanding literature on mechanisms in physical, life, and social sciences, Stuart Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them. A key quality of mechanisms is that they are particulars - located at different places and times, with no one just like another. The crux of the scientist\u27s challenge is to balance the complexity and particularity of mechanisms with our need for representations of them that are abstract and general.This volume weaves together metaphysical and methodological questions about mechanisms. Metaphysically, it explores the implications of the mechanistic framework for our understanding of classical philosophical questions about the nature of objects, properties, processes, events, causal relations, natural kinds and laws of nature. Methodologically, the book explores how scientists build models to represent and understand phenomena and the mechanisms responsible for them. Using this account of representation, Glennan offers a scheme for characterizing the enormous diversity of things that scientists call mechanisms, and explores the scope and limits of mechanistic explanation

Narrative Realities and Optimal Entropy

This talk will focus on cognitive processes between conscious and subconscious awareness in order to present a slightly different definition of narrative. Rather than simply accepting that narrative is a conscious selection of stories subject to bias, I will argue that biases are the primary structure of narrative and that their success is explained in painfully simple terms

What am I? Virtual Machines and the Mind/Body Problem

When your word processor or email program is running on your computer, this creates a "virtual machine” that manipulates windows, files, text, etc. What is this virtual machine, and what are the virtual objects it manipulates? Many standard arguments in the philosophy of mind have exact analogues for virtual machines and virtual objects, but we do not want to draw the wild metaphysical conclusions that have sometimes tempted philosophers in the philosophy of mind. A computer file is not made of epiphenomenal ectoplasm. I argue instead that virtual objects are "supervenient objects". The stereotypical example of supervenient objects is the statue and the lump of clay. To this end I propose a theory of supervenient objects. Then I turn to persons and mental states. I argue that my mental states are virtual states of a cognitive virtual machine implemented on my body, and a person is a supervenient object supervening on his cognitive virtual machine

Knowledge-based economy

The European Union is resorting to long-term multi-annual political and economical plans. The current set of plans, “Horizons 2020”, also involves restructuring the educational system, as in the Bologna system. The idea behind it is that education should help industry to win the competitive battle with other major economical blocks. The idea is best described by the adage of the European Union of developing a so-called “knowledge-based economy”. It implies that education is a form of investment. We should educate people – the society should spend effort on educating people – in order for society to make profit on it. Contrasting this is the idea of education as a consumption good. In the latter, people study to become knowledgeable, since knowledge makes a person happy. We discuss here the dissident view why an educational system that is for investment-only will at the end not bear fruit and will destroy science, creativity and eventually any form of competitiveness in the economy. It will lead to moral as well as financial bankruptcy.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio