Naturalizing Qualia

Hill (2014) argues that perceptual qualia, i.e. the ways in which things look from a viewpoint, are physical properties of objects. They are relational in nature, that is, they are functions of objects’ intrinsic properties, viewpoints, and observers. Hill also claims that his kind of representationalism is the only view capable of “naturalizing qualia”. After discussing a worry with Hill’s account, I put forward an alternative, which is just as “naturalization-friendly”. I build upon Chirimuuta’s color adverbialism (2015), and I argue that we would better serve the “naturalizing project” if we abandoned representationalism and preferred a broadly adverbialist view of perceptual qualia

Perceptual Constancy

We perceive objects and events in a way that makes it possible to act, react, think, believe, etc. in reliable and predictable ways. To explain this perceptual stability, as well as its behavioral consequences, theorists invoke a set of capacities known as perceptual constancies. Thanks to constancies, perceivers latch onto what’s unchanging in the world even though sensory stimulation is in continuous flux. In this dissertation, I present and defend a new view of both perceptual constancy and perceptual objectivity, i.e. the capacity of perception to present the world as mind-independent. According to the traditional view, perceptual constancy is the capacity of perceptual systems to recover perceiver-independent properties of distal objects from a largely ambiguous proximal stimulus, ‘discounting’ contextual, perceiver-dependent information. I argue that the traditional view should be rejected because it is, on the one hand, too ‘visuo-centric’, and, on the other hand, unable to fully explain the roles that constancy plays in our lives. These roles include guiding action and enabling the stable conscious experiences that ground our perceptual judgments. The view I favor, which I call “Relational Invariance view”, holds that constancy is the capacity to track invariant relations within the perceptual scene or between some element in the scene and the perceiver. These invariant relations are specified by patterns of variation in the proximal stimulus over time, and perceivers can sometime directly control this variation through movement. This view explains the role that, intuitively, perceptual constancy plays in guiding motor action and in a wide variety of perceptual recognition tasks, where recovering perceiver-independent properties seems unnecessary. The Relational Invariance view is then tied to a new view of perceptual objectivity, whose core insight is that the ‘job’ of perception in enabling the experience of a mind-independent world is not to ‘abstract away’ from any sort of perspectival or contextual influence, but rather to ‘embrace’ these influences as intrinsic to the very idea of what it means to perceive the world for creatures like us

Olympians and Vampires - Talent, practice, and why most of us 'don't get it'

Why do some people become WNBA champions or Olympic gold medalists and others do not? What is ‘special’ about those very few incredibly skilled athletes, and why do they, in particular, get to be special? In this paper, I attempt to make sense of the relationship that there is, in the case of sports champions, between so-called ‘talent’, i.e. natural predisposition for particular physical activities and high-pressure competition, and practice/training. I will articulate what I take to be the ‘mechanism’ that allows certain people to rise to the Olympus of athletic excellence, and what being part of this elite club ‘feels like’. My proposal is based on the idea that so-called talent and practice interact in complex and unsystematic ways. I will also argue that becoming a top athlete involves undergoing a special kind of transformation, which makes such people qualitatively different from any ‘normal’ sport amateur, even when the difference might not be immediately visible to the ‘untrained’ eye

CP violation in D meson decays: would it be a sign of new physics ?

Ascribing the large SU(3) violations in the Cabibbo forbidden decays of neutral D mesons to the final state interactions, one gets large strong phase differences, necessary for substantial direct CP violation. While the absolute value of the CP violating asymmetries depend on the uncertain strength of the penguin contribution, we predict an asymmetry for the decays into charged pions more than twice as large and having opposite sign with respect to that for charged kaons.Comment: 9 pages, added references, minor changes in the text, results unchanged. Accepted for publication in Physical Review

Naturalizing Qualia

Hill (2014) argues that perceptual qualia, i.e. the ways in which things look from a viewpoint, are physical properties of objects. They are relational in nature, that is, they are functions of objects’ intrinsic properties, viewpoints, and observers. Hill also claims that his kind of representationalism is the only view capable of “naturalizing qualia”. After discussing a worry with Hill’s account, I put forward an alternative, which is just as “naturalization-friendly”. I build upon Chirimuuta’s color adverbialism (2015), and I argue that we would better serve the “naturalizing project” if we abandoned representationalism and preferred a broadly adverbialist view of perceptual qualia

Issues On the Nature of Sounds

Màster en Filosofia Analítica (APhil), Facultat Filosofía, Universitat de Barcelona, Curs: 2012-2013, Director/Tutor: Manuel García CarpinteroWhat are sounds? For a philosopher in particular, they are very tricky objects. In this paper I will go through the many theories about the nature of sounds that have been put forward, trying to see whether there's at least one that “sounds” plausible. Then, I will examine some additional issues useful, in my opinion, to support the view I chose

Perceptual science and the nature of perception

Can philosophical theories of perception defer to perceptual science when fixing their ontological commitments regarding the objects of perception? Or in other words, can perceptual science inform us about the nature of perception? Many contemporary mainstream philosophers of perception answer affirmatively. However, in this essay I provide two arguments against this idea. On the one hand, I will argue that perceptual science is not committed to certain assumptions, relevant for determining perceptual ontology, which however are generally relied upon by philosophers when interpreting such science. On the other hand, I will show how perceptual science often relies on another assumption, which I call the ‘Measuring instrument conception’ of sensory systems, which philosophers of perception should clearly reject. Given these two symmetric lines of argument, I will finally suggest that we ought to think differently about the relationship between perceptual science and the philosophy of perception

Music and Emotion: the Dispositional or Arousal theory

<p>One of the ways of analysing the relationship between music and emotions in through musical expressiveness.</p><p>As the theory I discuss in this paper puts it, expressiveness in a particular kind of music's secondary quality or, to use the term which gives the theory its name, a <em>disposition</em> of music to arouse a certain emotional response in listeners.</p><p>The most accurate version of the dispositional theory is provided by Derek Matravers in his book <em>Art and Emotion</em> and in other papers: what I will try to do, then, is to illustrate Matravers theory and claim that it is a good solution to many problems concerning music and its capacity to affect our inner states.</p

Suoni

Sounds are very tricky objects. We think that we know many things about them. We think, for example, that we perceive them, that they're are the only and immediate objects of auditory perception, but we also think that they are the means through which we perceive their sources. We seem to intuitively believe that material objects “have” sounds, and, at the same time, we tend to resist the idea that sounds are actually “just” properties of something else. We seem to agree with the claim that a deaf person cannot experience sounds (they're not part of this person's “perceivable world”), but we nonetheless believe that Beethoven could compose music because he had found an alternative way to perceive sounds. Finally, at school we've been taught that sounds are identical with elastic waves propagating in a medium, that they're, in this sense, physical events, but nevertheless we seem to think that the real essence of sounds must be something more than their “physical substrate”. This contribute has two goals. On the one hand, to introduce the most influential contemporary theories regarding what sounds properly are. On the other hand, to explain the strengths and weaknesses of each one of these theories, so as to highlight the main problems they face.I suoni sono oggetti parecchio "strani". Pensiamo di sapere molto su di loro. Pensiamo ad esempio che li percepiamo, che sono gli unici ed immediati oggetti della nostra percezione uditiva, ma pensiamo anche che essi sono mezzi attraverso cui percepiamo le loro sorgenti. Sembriamo intuitivamente propensi a credere che gli oggetti materiali "possiedono" i suoni e contemporaneamente non accettiamo di buon grado la proposta di vedere i suoni come proprietà di qualcos'altro. Ci sembra di essere d'accordo con l'idea che una persona sorda non può avere esperienza dei suoni (che essi non sono parte del mondo di questa persona) ma allo stesso tempo pensiamo che Beethoven fosse capace di comporre musica perché aveva trovato un modo alternativo di sentire i suoni pur essendo sordo. A scuola, infine, ci hanno insegnato che i suoni sono identici a onde elastiche che si propagano in un medium, che essi sono in questo senso eventi fisici, ma ciononostante sembriamo pensare anche che la "vera essenza" dei suoni dev'essere necessariamente qualcosa in più del loro sostrato fisico. Questo contributo si pone due obiettivi. Da un lato, introdurre le teorie contemporanee più importanti a proposito di che cosa propriamente sono i suoni, e dall'altro spiegare i punti di forza di ciascuna di esse così come evidenziarne i principali problem

2-BODY NONLEPTONIC DECAYS OF D-MESONS

The amplitudes for two-body Cabibbo allowed nonleptonic decays of D mesons are evaluated within the factorization approximation from the effective Hamiltonian including short distance QCD corrections to next-to-leading order. Annihilation and W-exchange contributions as well as final state interaction effects have been included and are in fact crucial to obtain agreement with the experimental data