Cartesian Minds

According to a basic dualistic conception that originated in Descartes, minds are immaterial, non-spatial and simple thinking particulars that are independent of anything material. Call this view the Cartesian conception, and minds thus conceived, Cartesian minds. In what follows I propose a new version of an argument against the Cartesian conception that can be traced back to Descartes" days (Garber and Ayers 1998, 232). The inspiration behind my version is an argument suggested by Strawson"s seminal discussion of the concept of a person (1959, Chaps. 3-4). However, in both form and substance my argument takes its own course

Self-Knowledge, Theoretical Knowledge and Scien

As part of his celebrated attack on the "Myth of the\ud Given� Wilfrid Sellars argues for a radical alternative to the\ud orthodox, neo-Cartesian conception of our knowledge of\ud our own minds – self-knowledge, for short (Sellars 1997;\ud unless otherwise indicated all references are to this work).\ud The orthodox conception finds a particularly elaborate\ud expression in traditional empiricism. On this conception, it\ud is with our own mental states that we hold the most\ud intimate and direct epistemic relation. Therefore, selfknowledge\ud is a paradigm, indeed the paradigm, of noninferential\ud and non-theoretical knowledge. In contrast,\ud Sellars claims that self-knowledge is akin to theoretical\ud knowledge in science. Indeed, in his view self-knowledge\ud illustrates the continuity of science with ordinary thinking\ud (97). At the same time he takes self-knowledge to illustrate\ud the fact that the distinction between the theoretical and the\ud non-theoretical is merely methodological (84). These\ud general points are made fairly clearly by Sellars. However,\ud the argument that he offers on their behalf is rather\ud obscure. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a\ud clear reconstruction of Sellars' argument. But I shall also\ud provide a brief diagnosis of a crucial weakness in the\ud argument due to which it is, ultimately, unsuccessful

Quantum to Classical Transitions via Weak Measurements and Post-Selection

This work will incorporate a few related tools for addressing the conceptual difficulties arising from sewing together classical and quantum mechanics: deterministic operators, weak measurements and post-selection. Weak Measurement, based on a very weak von Neumann coupling, is a unique kind of quantum measurement with numerous theoretical and practical applications. In contrast to other measurement techniques, it allows to gather a small amount of information regarding the quantum system, with only a negligible probability of collapsing it. A single weak measurement yields an almost random outcome, but when performed repeatedly over a large ensemble, the averaged outcome becomes increasingly robust and accurate. Importantly, a long sequence of weak measurements can be thought of as a single projective measurement. I claim in this work that classical variables appearing in the macro-world, such as centre of mass, moment of inertia, pressure and average forces, result from a multitude of quantum weak measurements performed in the micro-world. Here again, the quantum outcomes are highly uncertain, but the law of large numbers obliges their convergence to the definite quantities we know from our everyday lives. By augmenting this description with a final boundary condition and employing the notion of "classical robustness under time-reversal" I will draw a quantitative borderline between the classical and quantum regimes. I will conclude by analyzing the role of macroscopic systems in amplifying and recording quantum outcomes.Comment: To be published as a book chapter in "Quantum Structural Studies: Classical Emergence from the Quantum Level", R.E. Kastner, J. Jeknic-Dugic, G. Jaroszkiewicz (Eds.), World Scientific Publishing Co. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1406.638