76 research outputs found
The Ontological Basis of Strong Artificial Life
This article concerns the claim that it is possible to create living organisms, not merely models that represent organisms, simply by programming computers ("virtual" strong alife). I ask what sort of things these computer-generated organisms are supposed to be (where are they, and what are they made of?). I consider four possible answers to this question: (a) The organisms are abstract complexes of pure information; (b) they are material objects made of bits of computer hardware; (c) they are physical processes going on inside the computer; and (d) they are denizens of an entire artificial world, different from our own, that the programmer creates. I argue that (a) could not be right, that (c) collapses into (b), and that (d) would make strong alife either absurd or uninteresting. Thus, "virtual" strong alife amounts to the claim that, by programming a computer, one can literally bring bits of its hardware to life
Composition and Coincidence
[First Paragraph] Suppose we take a pound of gold and mold it into the shape of Hermes. Then, it would
seem, we shall have a golden statue of Hermes, beautiful to behold. We shall also have a lump
of gold. And we have the makings of a well-known philosophical puzzle. Many people find it
obvious that if we crushed the statue or melted it down, we should destroy the statue but not the
lump of gold. The lump can be deformed and still continue to exist, but the statue cannot; that
is the nature of lumps and statues. So the lump can outlive the statue. Since nothing can
outlive itself, it is natural to conclude that the one-pound gold statue and the one-pound lump of
gold in our example are numerically different. And as statues are to lumps, they say, so are
brick houses to heaps of bricks, living organisms to masses of matter, and people to their
bodies. More generally, certain atoms (or elementary particles or what have you) often
compose two numerically different material objects at once. To put it another way, two
different material objects may have all the same proper parts (the same parts except themselves)
at once. Because of its many defenders and its intuitive attraction, I will call this the Popular
View about lumps and statues and other familiar material objects
Was Jekyll Hyde?
Many philosophers say that two or more people or thinking beings could share a single human being in a split-personality case, if only the personalities were sufficiently independent and individually well integrated. I argue that this view is incompatible with our being material things, and conclude that there could never be two or more people in a split-personality case. This refutes the view, almost universally held, that facts about mental unity and disunity determine how many people there are. I suggest that the number of human people is simply the number of appropriately endowed human animals
There is No Problem of the Self
Because there is no agreed use of the term ‘self’, or characteristic features or even paradigm cases of selves, there is no idea of ‘the self’ to figure in philosophical problems. The term leads to troubles otherwise avoidable; and because legitimate discussions under the heading of ‘self’ are really about other things, it is gratuitous. I propose that we stop speaking of selves
Personal identity and the radiation argument
Sydney Shoemaker has argued that, because we can imagine a
people who take themselves to survive a 'brain-state-transfer' procedure,
cerebrum transplant, or the like, we ought to conclude that we could survive
such a thing. I claim that the argument faces two objections, and can be
defended only by depriving it any real interest
The Ontology of Material Objects
[First paragraph] For a long time philosophers thought material objects were unproblematic. Or nearly so. There
may have been a problem about what a material object is: a substance, a bundle of tropes, a
compound of substratum and universals, a collection of sense-data, or what have you. But once
that was settled there were supposed to be no further metaphysical problems about material
objects. This illusion has now largely been dispelled. No one can get a Ph.D. in philosophy
nowadays without encountering the puzzles of the ship of Theseus, the statue and the lump, the
cat and its tail complement', amoebic fission, and others. These problems are especially pressing
on the assumption that we ourselves are material objects
An Argument for Animalism
The view that we are human animals, "animalism", is deeply unpopular. This
paper explains what that claim says and why it is so contentious. It then
argues that those who deny it face an awkward choice. They must either
deny that there are any human animals, deny that human animals can think,
or deny that we are the thinking things located where we are
Why I have no hands
[FIRST PARAGRAPH] Consider the following argument for the claim that there are no hands--or feet
or ears or any other arbitrary parts of human beings.
Premise One: I am the only rational, conscious being--for short, the only person--
now sitting in this chair.
Trust me: my chair isn't big enough for two. You may doubt that every rational,
conscious being is a person; perhaps there are beings that mistakenly believe
themselves to be people. If so, read ‘rational, conscious being’ or the like for
'person'.
Premise Two: Anything that would be rational and conscious in one environment
could not fail to be rational or conscious in another environment
without differing internally in some way.
Nothing can fail to be rational or conscious merely by having the wrong relational
properties. All philosophers of mind except perhaps dualists and eliminative
materialists make this assumption. The content of someone's intentional states
might be sensitive to her surroundings: on Twin Earth there may be someone
whose mind is just like yours except that your thoughts about water correspond in
him or her to thoughts about something else, if the colourless, potable liquid called
'water' on Twin Earth is not H2O but a substance with a different chemical
composition. But unless mental features are not caused by physical ones, that being
could hardly fail to be rational or conscious at all, if you are rational and conscious.
Premise Three: If there is such a thing as my hand, there is also such a thing as my
"hand-complement": an object made up or composed of just
those parts of me that don't share a part with my hand. [1]
If my hand exists, then "the rest of me but for my hand" exists as well. (I assume
that I am a material object, and that my hand, if it existed, would be a part of me.)
2
This is just to say that there is nothing ontologically special about hands: saying that
there are hands but no hand-complements would be as arbitrary as saying that
there are hands but no feet. Any reasonable ontology of material objects that gives
us hands gives us hand-complements as well. This might sound less than obvious
because 'hand' is a familiar, compact word of ordinary English, while 'handcomplement'
is philosophical jargon. But that is an accidental feature of our
language, and presumably reflects our interest in hands and our lack of interest in
hand-complements. There is no reason to suppose that it has any ontological
significance. Consider that 'cheir' in ancient Greek and 'manus' in Latin, the words
that dictionaries translate as 'hand', actually meant something that included eight or
ten inches of forearm. Strictly speaking, the ancient Greeks and Romans had no
word for what we call hands. But that does not imply that they disagreed with us
about what material objects there are
Animalism and the Corpse Problem
The apparent fact that each of us coincides with a thinking animal
looks like a strong argument for our being animals (animalism). Some critics,
however, claim that this sort of reasoning actually undermines animalism.
According to them, the apparent fact that each human animal coincides with
a thinking body that is not an animal is an equally strong argument for our
not being animals. I argue that the critics' case fails for reasons that do not
affect the case for animalism
The paradox of increase
[FIRST PARAGRAPHS]
It seems evident that things sometimes get bigger by acquiring new parts. But there is an ancient
argument purporting to show that this is impossible: the paradox of increase or growing argument.
Here is a sketch of the paradox. Suppose we have an object, A, and we want to make it bigger by
adding a part, B. That is, we want to bring it about that A first lacks and then has B as a part.
Imagine, then, that we conjoin B to A in some appropriate way. Never mind what A and B are, or
what this conjoining amounts to: let A be anything that can gain a part if anything can gain a part,
and let B be the sort of thing that can become a part of A, and suppose we do whatever it would take
to make B come to be a part of A if this is possible at all. Have we thereby made B a part of A
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