On the particularity of each mind

Among all the mysterious and wonderous characteristics of minds, the deepest and most mysterious one, yet also the most overlooked, is their particularity. It is a special and most fundamental kind of particularity: each one of us experiences life through their own, private, unique, and non-duplicable perspective, which is what fundamentally differentiates him/her from the rest of the universe and gives him/her their identity. There is an infinity of possible first-person perspectives, and each mind has a unique one. The particular perspective of each mind is accessible only from within that mind itself and is completely inaccessible to the rest of the universe, to which all minds, considered from a third-person perspective, are exactly similar. The present paper argues that this makes it impossible that a mind is a composite entity, as no combination of constituents could account for that mind’s specific particularity; combining some constituents could never explain why this particular mind had to emerge among an infinity of exactly similar (from the constituents’ perspective) alternatives. Hence there is an aspect of each mind, in fact its most important aspect, that is independent of anything else in the universe, which reveals minds to be non-composite, fundamental substances

Free Will and the Paradox of Predictability

In recent literature there has been increased interest in the so-called “paradox of predictability” (PoP) which purportedly shows that a deterministic universe is fundamentally unpredictable, even if its initial state and governing laws are known perfectly. This ostensible conclusion has been used to support compatibilism, the thesis that determinism is compatible with free will: supposedly, the PoP reveals that the nature of determinism is misunderstood and actually allows freedom, hence also free will. The present paper aims to disprove this conclusion and show that the PoP has absolutely no implication concerning the predictability of deterministic systems and the nature of determinism. Its paradoxy arises from a confusion between mental and physical notions in its formulation (the PoP tacitly premises a mental arbiter with respect to whom notions such as prediction and signification have meaning) and disappears once it is expressed in purely physical language. Ultimately, the PoP demonstrates not that prediction is impossible under determinism, but merely the obvious fact that it is impossible to predict while simultaneously acting so as to disprove one’s own prediction. The related issue of the impossibility of self-prediction is also discussed