Barry Stroud; XV*—The Physical World, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 87, Issue 1, 1 June 1987, Pages 263–277, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotel.

Consciousness in the Physical World collects historical selections, recent classics, and new pieces on Russellian monism, a unique alternative to the physicalist and dualist approaches to the problem of consciousness.

In his masterly article, “Sir Arthur Eddington and the Physical World,” which appeared in the January 1934 issue of Philosophy, Dr. Stace has brought out a number of interesting points on which I should like to comment. However, as the main issues between Professor Stace and Professor Eddington are with regard to the physical world and reality, these will form the main topics of my remarks.

Originally published in Italian in 1976, this book describes the methods scientists use to investigate the physical world. It is ideal for students and teachers of science and the philosophy of science. It is both a high-level popularization and a critical appraisal of these methods, describing important advances in physics and analyzing the historical development, value, reliability and philosophical implications of the way physicists approach the problems confronting them. The introductory chapter on the meaning of physical theories (...) and the mathematical tools used to develop them is followed by a general discussion on the foundations of physics under four major headings: the physics of the reversible, the physics of the irreversible, microphysics, and cosmology. Throughout, the subject matter of physical theories is linked to discussion of the attendant philosophical and epistemological implications, such as the validity of the theories, inductive inference, causal explanation, probability, the role of observation and the reality of physical objects. (shrink)

Originally published in Italian in 1976, this book describes the methods scientists use to investigate the physical world. It is ideal for students and teachers of science and the philosophy of science. It is both a high-level popularization and a critical appraisal of these methods, describing important advances in physics and analyzing the historical development, value, reliability and philosophical implications of the way physicists approach the problems confronting them. The introductory chapter on the meaning of physical theories (...) and the mathematical tools used to develop them is followed by a general discussion on the foundations of physics under four major headings: the physics of the reversible, the physics of the irreversible, microphysics, and cosmology. Throughout, the subject matter of physical theories is linked to discussion of the attendant philosophical and epistemological implications, such as the validity of the theories, inductive inference, causal explanation, probability, the role of observation and the reality of physical objects. (shrink)

Consciousness in the Physical World collects historical selections, recent classics, and new pieces on Russellian monism, a unique alternative to the physicalist and dualist approaches to the problem of consciousness.

The role of dispositions in the physical world is considered. It is shown that not only can classical physics be reasonably construed as the discovery of real dispositions, but also quantum physics. This approach moreover allows a realistic understanding of quantum processes.

Simplicius, writing in the sixth century, distinguishes physical science from astronomy on the ground that, whereas it is the function of the physicist to “inquire into the nature of the heavens and the stars, into their potentialities, their quality, their becoming and passing away,” astronomy has no competence in questions of this primary character. Its function is “to determine the order of the heavenly bodies, their figures, magnitudes, distances from the earth, sun and moon, their eclipses, conjunctions, the quantitative (...) and qualitative properties of their motions,” etc. For this purpose it requires arithmetic and geometry, but cares not how the heavenly motions be described, whether in terms of excentrics or epicycles, so long as the appearances can thus be accounted for. (shrink)

Dualist and Reductionist theories of mind disagree about whether or not consciousness can be reduced to a state of or function of the brain. They assume, however, that the contents of consciousness are separate from the external physical world as-perceived. According to the present paper this assumption has no foundation either in everyday experience or in science. Drawing on evidence for perceptual projection in both interoceptive and exteroceptive sense modalities, the case is made that the physical (...) class='Hi'>world as-perceived is a construct of perceptual processing and, therefore, part of the contents of consciousness. A finding which requires a Reflexive rather than a Dualist or Reductionist model of how consciousness relates to the brain and the physical world. The physical world as-perceived may, in turn be thought of as a biologically useful model of the world as described by physics. Redrawing the boundaries of consciousness to include the physical world as-perceived undermines the conventional separation of the 'mental' from the physical', and with it the very foundation of the Dualist-Reductionist debate. The alternative Reflexive model departs radically from current conventions, with consequences for many aspects of consciousness theory and research. Some of the consequences which bear on the internal consistency and intuitive plausibility of the model are explored, e.g. the causal sequence in perception, representationalism, a suggested resolution of the Realism versus Idealism debate, and the way manifest differences between physical events as-perceived and other conscious events are to be construed. In the present paper I wish to challenge some of our most deeply-rooted assumptions about what consciousness is, by re-examining how consciousness, the human brain, and the surrounding physical world relate to each other. (shrink)

In my review of Steven French's The structure of the world. Metaphysics & Representation. OUP, Oxford, 2014 I argue that the author is forced to navigate between the Scilla of Tegmark’s Pitagoreanism (2008) and the Carybdis of “blobobjectivism” (Horgan and Potrč 2008), namely the claim that the whole physical universe is a single concrete structurally complex but partless cosmos (a “blob”).

Simplicius, writing in the sixth century, distinguishes physical science from astronomy on the ground that, whereas it is the function of the physicist to “inquire into the nature of the heavens and the stars, into their potentialities, their quality, their becoming and passing away,” astronomy has no competence in questions of this primary character. Its function is “to determine the order of the heavenly bodies, their figures, magnitudes, distances from the earth, sun and moon, their eclipses, conjunctions, the quantitative (...) and qualitative properties of their motions,” etc. For this purpose it requires arithmetic and geometry, but cares not how the heavenly motions be described, whether in terms of excentrics or epicycles, so long as the appearances can thus be accounted for. (shrink)

Sambursky describes the development of scientific conceptions and theories in the centuries following Aristotle until the close of antiquity in the sixth century A.D. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase (...) access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Barry Stroud; XV*—The Physical World, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 87, Issue 1, 1 June 1987, Pages 263–277, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotel.

This book, based on Jaegwon Kim's 1996 Townsend Lectures, presents the philosopher's current views on a variety of issues in the metaphysics of the mind...

Making room for agency in a physical world is no easy task. Can it be done at all? In this article, I consider and reject an argument in the negative.

1. Of what use is the concept of causation? Bertrand Russell [1912-13] argued that it is not useful: it is “a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.” His argument for this was that the kind of physical theories that we have come to regard as fundamental leave no place for the notion of causation: not only does the word ‘cause’ not appear in the advanced sciences, but (...) the laws that these sciences state are incompatible with causation as we normally understand it. But Nancy Cartwright has argued [1979] that abandoning the concept of causation would cripple science; her conclusion was based not on fundamental physics, but on more ordinary science such as the search for the causes of cancer. She argues that Russell was right that the fundamental theories of modern physics say nothing, even implicitly, about causation, and concludes on this basis that such theories are incomplete. It is with this cluster of issues that I will begin my discussion. (shrink)

1929. The course of Gifford Lectures that Eddington delivered in the University of Edinburgh in January to March 1927.

I would like to start with a historical question or, more precisely, a question pertaining to the history of science itself. It is a widely accepted idea that Aristotelism has been an obstacle to the emergence of modern physical science, and this was for at least two reasons. The first one is the cognitive role Aristotle is supposed to have attributed to perception. Instead of considering perception as an origin of error, Aristotle thinks that our senses provide us with (...) a reliable image of the external world. The perceptive knowledge is a kind of knowledge in its own right, and the theoretical knowledge is, in fact, the continuation of the perceptive knowledge in some way. The second reason is the presumed inability of the Aristotelian philosophers to apply mathematics to the physical world. This was a formidable obstacle because modern physics came to be but as a mathematical physics. Aristotelianism had therefore to be, so to speak, superseded by the Platonic movement that originated in Florence around Ficino in order to give modern physics the conditions of its appearance. Galileo had to say that “Nature is written with mathematical letters” and Descartes that “our senses do not teach us what things are, but to what extent they are useful or harmful to us”. Alexandre Koyré is right to consider Galilean physics to be basically Platonic. The theoretical justification Aristotle offers for the impossibility of a convergence between mathematics and physics seems to be based on some fundamental features of his philosophy, i.e. he rejects the Platonic conception of a unique science, encompassing all things, and replaces it with the doctrine of the incommunicability of genera, whose corollary is that there is but one science for each genus. (shrink)

Mental causation, idea that it is us – via our minds – who cause bodily actions is as commonsensical as it is indispensable for our understanding of ourselves as rational agents. Somewhat less uncontroversial, but nonetheless widespread (at least among ordinary people) is the idea that the mind is non-physical, following the intuition that what is physical can neither act nor think nor judge morally. Taken together, and cast into a metaphysical thesis, the two intuitions yield interactive dualism: (...) the view that human persons and their minds are non-physical but can nonetheless interact with their bodies, most notably through their brains. This thesis has two main objectives: first, to defend interactive dualism against objections, and second, to show how it can blend in with a physical world in which laws of nature hold. The first part (chapter 1) consists in a brief motivation of interactive dualism as opposed to non-interactive dualism. I argue that non-interactive, epiphenomenalist dualism sacrifices so many crucial aspects of our human existence that interactive dualism is highly to be preferred to it, barring even stronger counterarguments against the latter. It is those putative counterarguments I address in parts II and III. Part II takes on the philosophical objections from the causal closure of the physical and from causal heterogeneity. The former takes the success of physics and physiology as basis for the doctrine of the causal closure of the physical (CCP). I argue against this that there is not only no convincing argument for CCP, but also that any science-based belief in CCP cannot be epistemically justified. As regards the causal heterogeneity objection, it is ‘weighed and found wanting’, because it relies on unwarranted assumptions about causation. In part III, I examine the objection from energy conservation. It roughly says that if interactive dualism were true, then energy would not be conserved, which physics taught us cannot be the case. My reply is that the underlying conception of energy (and momentum) conservation is wrong-headed and not the one that actual physicists use. Instead of being categorical and global, conservation laws are conditional and local, thereby making natural room for mental interaction. Some dualists, however, have sought to make interactive dualism conservation-friendly, notably by invoking quantum physics; I show that these attempts are unnecessary and create more problems than they solve. Finally, in chapter 9, I turn the tables on non-interactionists by investigating current neurophysiological literature on volitional actions, which, though not addressing the question directly, still encourages the interactive dualist picture more than a non-interactionist one. Part IV is about the interplay between interactive dualism and the laws of nature. The ultimate goal is, if possible, to come up with a theory of the laws of nature that explains the lawlike behavior of nature and at the same time makes room for interaction. I begin by pointing out that the laws of nature are or at least should be what physicalists worry about (chapter 10). I then proceed with a historical survey on the development of the notion of laws of nature (chapter 11) that sheds light on its theistic origin. This is followed by an inquiry into the question how a law of nature could possibly be broken (chapter 12) and a survey of the extant metaphysical theories of the laws of nature with special regard to their receptivity to interaction (chapter 13). Finally, in chapter 14 I develop a theory of the laws of nature both faithful to their divine origin and the possibility of mental interaction: dispositionalist divine decretalism, a synthesis of dispositionalism and Jeffrey Koperski’s divine decretalism. (shrink)

Physicalists commonly argue that conscious experiences are nothing more than states of the brain, and that conscious qualia are observer-independent, physical properties of the external world. Although this assumes the ‘mantle of science,’ it routinely ignores the findings of science, for example in sensory physiology, perception, psychophysics, neuropsychology and comparative psychology. Consequently, although physicalism aims to ‘naturalise’ consciousness, it gives an unnatural account of it. It is possible, however, to develop a natural, nonreductive, reflexive model of how consciousness (...) relates to the brain and the physical world. This paper introduces such a model and how it construes the nature of conscious experience. Within this model the physical world as perceived (the phenomenal world) is viewed as part of conscious experience not apart from it. While in everyday life we treat this phenomenal world as if it is the “physical world”, it is really just one biologically useful representation of what the world is like that may differ in many respects from the world described by physics. How the world as perceived relates to the world as described by physics can be investigated by normal science (e.g. through the study of sensory physiology, psychophysics and so on). This model of consciousness appears to be consistent with both third-person evidence of how the brain works and with first-person evidence of what it is like to have a given experience. It also views consciousness as an integral part and natural expression of the world—in a manner true to the spirit (if not to the detail) of Whitehead’s philosophy. -/- . (shrink)

The book explores philosophical issues such as idealism and free will and speculates on the relationship of consciousness to quantum mechanics.

Some metaphysics are provided showing that what is commonly called ‘the physical world’ can be deconstructed into three ‘levels’: a single, unified ‘noumenal world’ on which everything supervenes; a ‘phenomenal world’ that we each privately experience through direct perception of phenomena; and a ‘collective world’ that people in any given ‘language using group’ experience through learning, using and adapting that group’s language. This deconstruction is shown to enable a clear account of qualia and of how (...) people can hold some things to be physically real even when it is clear no one can ever directly experience those things as phenomena. It is further shown to enable a single, internally consistent, largely empirically supported conceptual framework – a ‘metacosmology’ – able to encompass not only the physical world as people conceive of it for everyday purposes, and as scientists conceive of it for scientific purposes, but also people’s first person phenomenal experience of a physical world and, prospectively, the mechanisms by which such first person, conscious experiences can be generated. (shrink)

This is Appendix A to the note: Deconstructing the Physical World (DPW). It shows how the conceptual framework developed in DPW relates to Russellian Monism (RM) and that it can accrue RM’s benefits while defeating the combination problem that challenges many RMs.

The term coherence is used in many connections. We often speak of coherent reasoning, coherent activities, coherent bodies, and coherent phenomena. In science this term is often used to indicate continuity of a structure in space and time. If many individuals can simultaneously observe similar sets of coherent phenomena, we infer with some justification, first, that the phenomena observed have some kind of correspondence with activities in an external world, that is, a world independent of the existence of (...) the individual observers, and second, that the coherence itself is an attribute of the external world. In a recently published article, to which I shall make several references in this paper, I have called attention to the fact that the science of physics is based on the form and the changes in form of an immediately observed phenomenological world, called the physical world, which can be completely characterized as a structure in space and time. In his analysis of the foundations of the science of physics Eddington has clearly shown that theoretical physics deals exclusively with structures of the type described in the mathematical theory of groups, and that our knowledge of the physical world could have been reached by our sense of vision alone. Coherence in the physical world is that characteristic of the structure which describes the more or less permanent relationship between phenomena in different parts of space at approximately the same time, or a regular sequence in the changing phenomena at approximately the same region of space. (shrink)

This volume is in the nature of a perspective on these and related Indian thoughts. Wherever necessary and possible, a brief overview of the concerned ideas in the other culture-areas has been given to facilitate a comparative understanding, besides a chapter on Modern Perspective on the Physical World. Relevant original passages in Sanskrit under References, an extensive bibliography of both primary and secondary sources, and a glossary of technical words have been included in this volume. It is hoped (...) that these will stimulate interested readers towards further intensive studies. Contents include: Preface, General Introduction, An Overview, Unitary Conceptions, Five Elements, Substance, Qualities and Motion, Atomism, Epistemology: Its Ultimate Aim, Space and Time, Heat, Light and Sound, Weights and Measures, Modern Perspective on the Physical World, Appendices, Abbreviations, Glossary, General Bibliography. (shrink)

In various philosophical, religious and mystical traditions, beauty is often related to intellectual upliftment and spiritual ascent, which suggests that besides its common aesthetic value it may also acquire an epistemic, metaphysical and spiritual meaning or value. I will examine in detail three accounts in which beauty, at times inseparable from desire and love, mediates between physical, intellectual and spiritual levels of existence. Since beauty, in all three accounts, takes on a mediatory role or function,1 I will name these (...) mediations as follows: ancient Greek Eros-mediation or Beauty-mediation (Plato: ca. 429-347 BCE), late medieval Italian Beauty and Love-mediation (Dante Alighieri: 1265-1321) and pre-modern Indian Beauty and Love-mediation (Rūpa Gosvāmi: 1470/90-1564 CE).2 In the first section, I will analyse the stages of Eros or Beauty mediation in Plato; in the second section, I will turn to Dante’s Beauty and Love-mediation and compare it with Plato’s account. In the third section, I will analyse Rūpa’s account of Beauty and Love-mediation in comparison with both Plato and Dante. I will argue that there are certain patterns of mediation mutually shared if not between all three accounts, then at least between two of them. While Plato’s account clearly influenced Dante and was well integrated into Dante’s account, there is no mention or evidence of a pre-modern Bengali theologian influenced by ancient Greek and medieval Italian philosophy and mysticism. However, a strong convergence of elements of Beauty-mediations in Plato and Dante, as well as Beauty and Love-mediations in Dante and Rūpa Gosvāmi, confirms the universality of certain features of Beauty and Love-mediation and speaks in support of an all-inclusive account of them.3 -/- 1 By Beauty-mediation I mean an aesthetic, intellectual or spiritual reconciliation between opposites, such as human and divine, mortal and immortal, particular and universal, sexual and sacred and so on. 2 Rūpa Gosvāmi was an Indian theologian. More information about him is provided in section 3. 3 I am here applying transitivity: if Plato’s account (A) shares elements with Dante’s account (B) and if Dante’s account (B) shares those same elements with Rūpa’s account (C), then Plato’s (A) and Rūpa’s (C) accounts share some elements as well. Obviously, all accounts have some different elements not mutually shared, but I will not deal with them here. (shrink)

In his recent book Physicalism, Daniel Stoljar argues that there is no version of physicalism that is both true and deserving of the name. His argument employs a variation of Hilary Putnam’s famous twin-earth story, which Stoljar calls “the twin-physics world.” In this paper, I challenge Stoljar’s use of the twin-physics world. The upshot of that challenge, I argue, is that Stoljar fails to show, concerning the versions of physicalism for which he grants the possibility of being true, (...) that none of them is deserving of the name. (shrink)

<b> </b>Abstract: It is generally accepted that the most serious threat to the possibility of mental causation is posed by the causal self-sufficiency of physical causal processes. I argue, however, that this feature of the world, which I articulate in principle I call Completeness, in fact poses no genuine threat to mental causation. Some find Completeness threatening to mental causation because they confuse it with a stronger principle, which I call Closure. Others do not simply conflate Completeness and (...) Closure, but hold that Completeness, together with certain plausible assumptions, _entails_ Closure. I refute the most fully worked-out version of such an argument. Finally, some find Completeness all by itself threatening to mental causation. I argue that one will only find Completeness threatening if one operates with a philosophically distorted conception of mental causation. I thereby defend what I call naïve realism about mental causation. (shrink)

Our experience of the physical world around us, and of the social environments in which we function, is increasingly mediated by information and communication technology, which is itself evolving ever more rapidly and pervasively. This book presents a coherent and detailed account of why we experience feelings of being present in the physical world and in computer-mediated environments, why we often don't, and why it matters - for design, psychotherapy, tool use and social creativity amongst other (...) practical applications. Since the extent to which presence is experienced in a technology-mediated interactive context can be manipulated by design, and in almost unlimited ways, we can use explorations with mediated presence to provide new insights into the psychology of presence in both the physical and technology-mediated worlds. (shrink)

Most ethical work is done at a low level of formality. This makes practical moral questions inaccessible to formal and natural sciences and can lead to misunderstandings in ethical discussion. In this paper, we use Bayesian inference to introduce a formalization of preference utilitarianism in physical world models, specifically cellular automata. Even though our formalization is not immediately applicable, it is a first step in providing ethics and ultimately the question of how to “make the world better” (...) with a formal basis. (shrink)

Regardless of whatever else physicalism requires, nearly all philosophers agree that physicalism cannot be true in a world which contains fundamental mentality. I challenge this widely held attitude, and describe a world which is plausibly all-physical, yet which may contain fundamental mentality. This is a world in which priority monism is true—which is the view that the whole of the cosmos is fundamental, with dependence relations directed from the whole to the parts—and which contains only a (...) single mental system, like a brain or computer. Because some properties of the whole are fundamental under priority monism, it follows that that the mental properties of a cosmos-encompassing brain or computer system may be fundamental in a priority monist world. Yet such a world need not contain anything physically unacceptable: the mental properties of the cosmos-encompassing brain or computer can be characterized in a physicalism-friendly functionalist or identity-theoretic way. Thus, as I see it, physicalism need not be false in such a world. This constitutes a challenge to those who hold the view that physicalism is inconsistent with the existence of fundamental mentality. (shrink)