The role of probability is one of the most contested issues in the interpretation of contemporary physics. In this paper, I’ll be reevaluating some widely held assumptions about where and how probabilities arise. Larry Sklar voices the conventional wisdom about probability in classical physics in a piece in the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy, when he writes that “Statistical mechanics was the first foundational physical theory in which probabilistic concepts and probabilistic explanation played a fundamental role.” And the conventional wisdom (...) about quantum probabilities is that they are basic, not reducible to the types of probabilities we see in statistical mechanics. In the first section of this paper, I’ll argue that in fact classical physics was steeped in probability long before statistical mechanics came on the scene, specifically, that an objective measure over phase space is an indispensable component of any informative physical theory. In the next section, I’ll argue that this objective measure is the fundamental form of physical probability and that quantum probabilities can be defined in terms of it. In the last, I’ll raise some questions about the metaphysical status of the fundamental measure. (shrink)

The intuitive difference between a system that choreographs the motion of its parts in the service of goals of its own formulation and a system composed of a collection of parts doing their own thing without coordination has been shaken by now familiar examples of self-organization. There is a broad and growing presumption in parts of philosophy and across the sciences that the appearance of centralized information-processing and control in the service of system-wide goals is mere appearance, i.e., an explanatory (...) heuristic we have evolved to predict behavior, but one that will eventually get swept away in the advancing tide of self-organization. I argue that there is a distinction of central importance here, and that no adequate science of complex systems can dispense with it. (shrink)

This chapter argues that some non-Fregean form of reference-determination has to be recognized. It presents the Argument from Confinement, which was inspired by Lewis's version of Putnam's Model-Theoretic Argument. It then discusses semantic and architectural links, and examines how the argument from Confinement brings the need for architectural links into relief and exposes the impotence of intellectual activity to forge them.

This chapter discusses “conceptual evolution” and the role of the environment in maintaining an invariant link between thought and the world. It shows how coordination breaks down when one moves into unaccustomed circumstances, and describes a general technique for decoupling thought from context by developing an increasingly articulated representation of the causal fabric in which phenomenal states are embedded. It then recommends a generalization of Perry's vocabulary of unarticulated constituents. Finally, the chapter brings the discussion back around and incorporates this (...) into the general story of how the mind turns the fragile, fleeting links provided by experience into reliable, continuing connections that reach far into the spatial landscape and deeply into the circle of causes. (shrink)

This chapter suggests that what is special about being human—i.e., about being a self in the sense of a possessor of a first-personal deliberative standpoint—is that you have a self-consciously creative role in the production of your life and an unavoidably creative role in the production of your self. The sense in which you create your life is that your life is partly made up of your choices. And the sense in which you create your self is that you are (...) the author of your choices. This vindicates the perfectly familiar and perfectly mundane fact that by making choices, you partly make your life what it is. The discussion draws on Koorsgaard’s work on self-constitution, work in moral psychology on human autonomy, and the large body of literature on the construction of a first-personal narrative. (shrink)

This chapter examines a grammatical illusion generated by the formal interaction between reflexive devices and the nonreflexive apparatus of a medium that lies behind another influential batch of arguments for dualism. The illusion receives its purest expression in a famous argument presented in 1908 by John McTaggart that was actually targeted at the reality of time. This argument is used to introduce this illusion and then show it at work in the arguments for dualism.

The most powerful argument for the incompatibility of freedom and determinism was given its simplest expression, and dubbed the Consequence Argument, by Peter van Inwagen. The Consequence Argument aims to show that if the natural laws are deterministic, and if neither the initial conditions of the universe nor the laws of nature are under our control, then our actions cannot be under our control. This chapter examines the kind of control that a self-governing system has over its behavior. It includes (...) brief discussions of two related arguments: Derk Pereboom’s Manipulation Argument, which assimilates determination by law to covert manipulation, and Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument. (shrink)

The worry that our actions are not free because they are compelled by their causal antecedents is addressed. The everyday notion of cause is a mix of different elements, and it has taken science a long time to develop a mature concept that separates out the objective content, providing us with a clean, precise, formalizable notion freed of the subjective and phenomological components. This chapter is about the historical developments that led to that notion, culminating in the interventionist conception of (...) causation, accompanied by complementary developments in our understanding of the function of causal thinking. It is argued causation appears in mature science not as necessary connections written into the fabric of nature, but robust pathways that can be utilized as strategic routes to bringing about ends. Causal relations, in this form, function not as challenges to freedom, but handmaids to decision. (shrink)

This introductory chapter begins with a brief description of the primary goal of the book and the three parts that constitute the book. It then discusses the context in which thought about the self arises with a myth of origin, and the notions of coordination and representational media.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the objection Anscombe lodged against Descartes, to illustrate the gap between the momentary subject of the reflexive thought and the temporally extended subject to which we attribute thought and experience. It defends a familiar view about identity over time, underscoring how some of the most puzzling features of thought about ourselves can be resolved by focusing on the architectural underbelly of thought. It argues that identification of oneself in thought in a manner that (...) supports reidentification is just indexical identification, characterized by the very special feature that identification is made without any conceptualization. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the Problem of Inverted Spectra, which has been used as fuel against a number of different philosophical positions, for example, in attempts to analyze phenomenal properties in functional or behavioral terms, and recently by David Chalmers as another argument for dualism. It argues that by recognizing the ineliminable relationality of thought about the experience of others, we can acknowledge the epistemic and cognitive gaps brought out by the Knowledge Argument and the possibility of inverted spectra, while restricting (...) them to purely epistemic ones. (shrink)

This chapter examines Frank Jackson's argument for dualism. It argues that transitions between media involve information-preserving transformations of vehicles of content that convert the output of one medium into something that can interact computationally with the states of another. Just as the contents of observations have to be expressed symbolically before they can be fed into the computational apparatus of a physical theory, and English sentences have to be rendered in French before they can be combined in inferences with French (...) expressions, phenomenal states have to be converted into an inferentially articulated form before they can interact with the machinery of thought. So conceived, the transition from experience into thought involves little more than a simple transformation of vehicle. (shrink)

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts. It addresses the problem of how to bring the view from within, on which I am the frame of the world, the unrepresented representer who contains the whole of it, together with the view from without, on which the world is the frame, and I am somewhere inside the picture, an undistinguished thing among things. It argues that the pressures that lead us to view the self, or the individual consciousness, as something outside of (...) the natural order are many and deep, but a surprising number hinge in one way or another, on misunderstandings about reflexivity. (shrink)

This chapter suggests that what is special about being human—that is, about being a self in the sense of a possessor of a first-person deliberative standpoint—is that you have a self-consciously creative role in the production of your life and an unavoidably creative role in the production of your self. The sense in which you create your life is that your life is partly made up of your choices. And the sense in which you create your self is that you (...) are the author of your choices. This vindicates the perfectly familiar and perfectly mundane fact that by making choices, you partly make your life what it is. The discussion draws on Koorsgaard’s work on self-constitution, work in moral psychology on human autonomy, and the large body of literature on the construction of a first-person narrative. (shrink)

This chapter introduces the descriptive analogue of self-location. It argues that if a language contains predicates that apply to the properties it exemplifies, and it contains reflexive expressions that identify those properties, we have the makings of self-describing sentences that do for its descriptive vocabulary what self-locating acts do for spatial vocabulary.

This chapter argues that the formal requirements on self-describing media shed light on two elusive questions in the philosophy of mind. The first is a question that Dretske raised in Naturalizing the Mind: why do we have conscious access to the intrinsic properties of experience? In his terms, the question is: what is experience for? The second is a question that has hounded philosophy of mind since Brentano: in what sense, if any, is thought intrinsically intentional? What is the property (...) that some states have of pointing, or purporting to point, beyond themselves? The chapter also addresses the question of why we self-represent, and what advantage self-representation gives us in the fight for survival. (shrink)

This chapter introduces some central notions. It treats the conscious mind as part of a larger dynamical system and focuses on the interfaces with other parts of the system; that is, experience, on the incoming end, and action or volition, on the outgoing end. The fundamental point of contrast with traditional representational approaches is that whereas representational approaches treat intentional relations expressed by model-theoretic mappings as fundamental mind-world relations, the dynamical approach takes relations of covariation relative to specified ranges of (...) contexts as basic and recognizes no mind-world relations that cannot be understood in these terms. (shrink)

This chapter is about the physics that underwrites asymmetries in our practical relationship to the past and future. It discusses the physical reasons that our actions make a difference to the future but not to the past. This asymmetry is one of two temporal asymmetries that shape our experience of the world. The other is an epistemic asymmetry in the information we have about the past and future. This chapter starts with a brief description of the asymmetries, relay the progress (...) that has been made in the last three centuries understanding the physics that underwrites them, and then discuss the sense in which the future is open to a decision-making agent. (shrink)

Suppose someone who claims to have full knowledge of the scientific laws and the initial conditions of the universe predicts some voluntary action of yours, and that the prediction is made known to you before you act. Now make it your policy to act counterpredictively. Can you do this? And if you can make it your policy to decide contrary to whatever prediction is made, is there anything keeping you from carrying it out? Most of us would answer yes to (...) the first question and no to the second. An argument adapted from Michael Scrivens’s Paradox of Predictability is presented in this chapter to show that this kind of freedom is compatible with the existence of deterministic laws and it is suggested that the ability to act contrary to what anyone tells us they think we are going to do provides a concrete, practical sense in which our actions are free. (shrink)

This chapter begins with a discussion of Frege's model of thought. It then discusses Burge's views about de re beliefs and Perry's thought without representation.

This chapter looks at the emergence of selves in nature. Different kinds of complex system—simple groups, dynamical systems, self-organizing systems, and self-governing systems—are discussed from a dynamical perspective. The self-governing system is introduced as a model for the human being. Self-governing systems are systems in which at least some organized activity is the result of a centralized process that involves the integration of information, and the formation of an overall plan that coordinates joint activity. In creating an internal point of (...) view on the world, self-governance opens up the psychological space for the growth of a self. (shrink)

Three types of unity that self-governing systems possess are discussed. The first is the synthetic unity attained when information drawn from incommensurate sources is mapped into a common frame of reference. The second is the unity of voice—or “univocity”—attained when a set of separate, potentially conflicting informational streams is united into a single collective voice. The third is the dynamical unity achieved when the parts of a system operate under the command of a single voice. Peeling back the curtain and (...) looking at how the personal point of view arises, and how the unities that are given introspectively are generated by work that the brain does dispels the mystery that is at least partly behind the imaginative pictures of self as mental substance or soul-stuff. (shrink)

This chapter begins with a discussion of Dennett's view of self-representation. It introduces the so-called “Joycean Machine”, special narrative module in the brain charged with production of an autobiography. It is argued that the synchronic unity of the thinking subject is the unity of voice and agency wrought by the unifying activity of the Joycean Machine. In dynamical terms, the collective voice can have a causal role. Turned outward, it can mediate the communication between systems, allowing them to act as (...) unified agents in interaction with one another. Turned inward, it can govern the activity of the components. (shrink)

Dennett’s story “Where am I?” is used to set up the difficulty of locating the self in the natural world. The story is told from a first-person point of view in which the narrator maintains his identity across exchanges of brain and body, but there is no physical thing in the story that can act as bearer of his identity. The story seems to present a dilemma between Cartesian dualism and Dennett’s a “no-self” view. This chapter argues for a third (...) option. Prepersonal processes in the brain stabilize separable conceptions of self and world out of patterns in sensory information. The conception of self starts out as a mere sensorimotor point of view but gradually develops into something richer. Seeing how the first-person point of view arises is seeing how the self arises, because the self is nothing but the proper subject of a first-person point of view. (shrink)