scholarly journals What Simulations Teach Us About Ordinary Objects

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 614-628
Author(s):  
Arthur C. Schwaninger
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Computational Neuroscience ◽  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Neural System ◽  
Ordinary Objects ◽  
The World ◽  
Manifest Image ◽  
Fundamental Physical

AbstractUnder the label of scientific metaphysics, many naturalist metaphysicians are moving away from a priori conceptual analysis and instead seek scientific explanations that will help bring forward a unified understanding of the world. This paper first reviews how our classical assumptions about ordinary objects fail to be true in light of quantum mechanics. The paper then explores how our experiences of ordinary objects arise by reflecting on how our neural system operates algorithmically. Contemporary models and simulations in computational neuroscience are shown to provide a theoretical framework that does not conflict with existing fundamental physical theories, and nonetheless helps us make sense of the manifest image. It is argued that we must largely explain how the manifest image arises in algorithmic terms, so that we can pursue a metaphysics about ordinary objects that is scientifically well founded.

Quantum mechanics, interpretation of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Stairs
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Microscopic Level ◽  
Quantum States ◽  
Quantum Mechanical ◽  
Quantum Superposition ◽  
Ordinary Objects ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Interpretations Of Quantum Mechanics ◽  
The World

Quantum mechanics developed in the early part of the twentieth century in response to the discovery that energy is quantized, that is, comes in discrete units. At the microscopic level this leads to odd phenomena: light displays particle-like characteristics and particles such as electrons produce wave-like interference patterns. At the level of ordinary objects such effects are usually not evident, but this generalization is subject to striking exceptions and puzzling ambiguities. The fundamental quantum mechanical puzzle is ’superposition of states’. Quantum states can be added together in a manner that recalls the superposition of waves, but the effects of quantum superposition show up only probabilistically in the statistics of many measurements. The details suggest that the world is indefinite in odd ways; for example, that things may not always have well-defined positions or momenta or energies. However, if we accept this conclusion, we have difficulty making sense of such straightforward facts as that measurements have definite results. Interpretations of quantum mechanics are, in one way or another, attempts to understand the superposition of quantum states. The range of interpretations stretches from the metaphysically daring to the seemingly innocuous. But, so far, no single interpretation has commanded anything like universal agreement.

The Clash of the Images - Why the Manifest Image and the Scientific Image Are Incompatible

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adem Mulamustafić
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Causal Relationships ◽  
Ordinary Objects ◽  
Scientific Image ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
Scientific Results ◽  
Manifest Image ◽  
The Way

In everyday life, we take there to be ordinary objects such as persons, tables, and stones bearing certain properties such as color and shape and standing in various causal relationships to each other. Basic convictions such as these form our everyday picture of the world: the manifest image. The scientific image, on the other hand, is a system of beliefs that is only based on scientific results. It contains many beliefs that are not contained in the manifest image. At first glance, this may not seem to be a problem. But Mulamustafić shows convincingly that this is a mistake: The world as it is in itself cannot be both the way the manifest image depicts it and the way the scientific image describes it to be.

The Event Universe

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leemon B. McHenry
Keyword(s):  
Electromagnetic Field ◽  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Physical Theory ◽  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Physics ◽  
Linguistic Methods

What kinds of things are events? Battles, explosions, accidents, crashes, rock concerts would be typical examples of events and these would be reinforced in the way we speak about the world. Events or actions function linguistically as verbs and adverbs. Philosophers following Aristotle have claimed that events are dependent on substances such as physical objects and persons. But with the advances of modern physics, some philosophers and physicists have argued that events are the basic entities of reality and what we perceive as physical bodies are just very long events spread out in space-time. In other words, everything turns out to be events. This view, no doubt, radically revises our ordinary common sense view of reality, but as our event theorists argue common sense is out of touch with advancing science. In The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, Leemon McHenry argues that Whitehead's metaphysics provides a more adequate basis for achieving a unification of physical theory than a traditional substance metaphysics. He investigates the influence of Maxwell's electromagnetic field, Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics on the development of the ontology of events and compares Whitehead’s theory to his contemporaries, C. D. Broad and Bertrand Russell, as well as another key proponent of this theory, W. V. Quine. In this manner, McHenry defends the naturalized and speculative approach to metaphysics as opposed to analytical and linguistic methods that arose in the 20th century.

1968: On Social, Epistemic, and Historiographic(?) Revolutions

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto D. Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Young Students ◽  
Historic Significance ◽  
Agent Of Change

This article addresses the meaning and significance of the “world revolution of 1968,” as well as the historiography of 1968. I critically interrogate how the production of a narrative about 1968 and the creation of ethnic studies, despite its world-historic significance, has tended to perpetuate a limiting, essentialized and static notion of “the student” as the primary actor and an inherent agent of change. Although students did play an enormous role in the events leading up to, through, and after 1968 in various parts of the world—and I in no way wish to diminish this fact—this article nonetheless argues that the now hegemonic narrative of a student-led revolt has also had a number of negative consequences, two of which will be the focus here. One problem is that the generation-driven models that situate 1968 as a revolt of the young students versus a presumably older generation, embodied by both their parents and the dominant institutions of the time, are in effect a sociosymbolic reproduction of modernity/coloniality’s logic or driving impulse and obsession with newness. Hence an a priori valuation is assigned to the new, embodied in this case by the student, at the expense of the presumably outmoded old. Secondly, this apparent essentializing of “the student” has entrapped ethnic studies scholars, and many of the period’s activists (some of whom had been students themselves), into said logic, thereby risking the foreclosure of a politics beyond (re)enchantment or even obsession with newness yet again.

The Facticity of Things – Reframing Slotawa's Practice with Meillassoux and Harman

2015 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-79
Author(s):  
Robert Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Ordinary Objects ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
The World ◽  
The Given

Robert Jackson examines the work of the German artist Florian Slotawa. Beginning with his first works, “Hotelarbeiten”, Slotawa recomposes and reconfigures the order of ordinary objects – in this case, the furniture of hotel rooms. In reconstructing these rooms in another order without altering these objects in any way, photographing them, and then subsequently restoring them to their previous configuration, the artist reveals the ordinary function of the objects and by withdrawing from their function shows their material and factual character. To elucidate the specificity of Slotawa’s intervention, Jackson critiques Heidegger’s conception of facticity in its exclusive account of Dasein and its being-in-the world, in contrast to the factuality of “things-within-the world.” Drawing on Harman’s extension of finitude beyond Dasein to all things, he encourages us to see Slotawa as engaged in “facticity of things” that is characterized by dispossession, lack of reason, and radical contingency. As Jackson argues, Slotawa is trying to find a way to dwell in a world that has no room or possibility for the given coordinates of dwelling; a world that is a fact without reason. In concluding he explores a reading of Slotawa that explores the intersecting yet radically different approaches to thinking about a speculative realism in the work of Harman and Meillassoux, and their differing attitudes to the finite and the infinite, facticity and factiality, contingency and necessity, without presuming to assume that either of these accounts cover the speculative facticity of things revealed in Slotawa’s work.

Getting Real?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Goodhart
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Norms

Chapter 3 engages with realist political theory throughcritical dialogues with leading realist theorists. It argues that realist political theories are much more susceptible to conservatism, distortion, and idealization than their proponents typically acknowledge. Realism is often not very realistic either in its descriptions of the world or in its political analysis. While realism enables the critical analysis of political norms (the analysis of power and unmasking of ideology), it cannot support substantive normative critique of existing social relations or enable prescriptive theorizing. These two types of critique must be integrated into a single theoretical framework to facilitate emancipatory social transformation.

Race, Criminal Justice, and Migration Control

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Its Analysis ◽  
The World ◽  
Migration Control ◽  
Key Sites ◽  
And Migration ◽  
The Way

In an era of mass mobility, those who are permitted to migrate and those who are criminalized, controlled, and prohibited from migrating are heavily patterned by race. By placing race at the centre of its analysis, this volume brings together fourteen essays that examine, question, and explain the growing intersection between criminal justice and migration control. Through the lens of race, we see how criminal justice and migration enmesh in order to exclude, stop, and excise racialized citizens and non-citizens from societies across the world within, beyond, and along borders. Neatly organized in four parts, the book begins with chapters that present a conceptual analysis of race, borders, and social control, moving to the institutions that make up and shape the criminal justice and migration complex. The remaining chapters are convened around the key sites where criminal justice and migration control intersect: policing, courts, and punishment. Together the volume presents a critical and timely analysis of how race shapes and complicates mobility and how racism is enabled and reanimated when criminal justice and migration control coalesce. Race and the meaning of race in relation to citizenship and belonging are excavated throughout the chapters presented in the book, thereby transforming the way we think about migration.

How Reality is Reasonable

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald C. Williams
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Dimensional Manifold ◽  
The World ◽  
Being There ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Fundamental Entity ◽  
Spatiotemporal Relations ◽  
Priori Knowledge

This chapter begins with a systematic presentation of the doctrine of actualism. According to actualism, all that exists is actual, determinate, and of one way of being. There are no possible objects, nor is there any indeterminacy in the world. In addition, there are no ways of being. It is proposed that actual entities stand in three fundamental relations: mereological, spatiotemporal, and resemblance relations. These relations govern the fundamental entities. Each fundamental entity stands in parthood relations, spatiotemporal relations, and resemblance relations to other entities. The resulting picture is one that represents the world as a four-dimensional manifold of actual ‘qualitied contents’—upon which all else supervenes. It is then explained how actualism accounts for classes, quantity, number, causation, laws, a priori knowledge, necessity, and induction.

Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Stroud
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Structural Description ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Transcendental Deduction ◽  
The World ◽  
Empirical Realism

This chapter presents a straightforward structural description of Immanuel Kant’s conception of what the transcendental deduction is supposed to do, and how it is supposed to do it. The ‘deduction’ Kant thinks is needed for understanding the human mind would establish and explain our ‘right’ or ‘entitlement’ to something we seem to possess and employ in ‘the highly complicated web of human knowledge’. This is: experience, concepts, and principles. The chapter explains the point and strategy of the ‘deduction’ as Kant understands it, as well as the demanding conditions of its success, without entering into complexities of interpretation or critical assessment of the degree of success actually achieved. It also analyses Kant’s arguments regarding a priori concepts as well as a posteriori knowledge of the world around us, along with his claim that our position in the world must be understood as ‘empirical realism’.

Pragmatic Reconstruction in Jurisprudence: Features of a Realistic Legal Theory

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-202
Author(s):  
Brian Z. Tamanaha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Coercive Force ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Planning System ◽  
Universal Feature ◽  
Moral Problems ◽  
Theory Of Law

A century ago the pragmatists called for reconstruction in philosophy. Philosophy at the time was occupied with conceptual analysis, abstractions, a priori analysis, and the pursuit of necessary, universal truths. Pragmatists argued that philosophy instead should center on the pressing problems of the day, which requires theorists to pay attention to social complexity, variation, change, power, consequences, and other concrete aspects of social life. The parallels between philosophy then and jurisprudence today are striking, as I show, calling for a pragmatism-informed theory of law within contemporary jurisprudence. In the wake of H.L.A. Hart’s mid-century turn to conceptual analysis, “during the course of the twentieth century, the boundaries of jurisprudential inquiry were progressively narrowed.”1 Jurisprudence today is dominated by legal philosophers engaged in conceptual analysis built on intuitions, seeking to identify essential features and timeless truths about law. In the pursuit of these objectives, they detach law from its social and historical moorings, they ignore variation and change, they drastically reduce law to a singular phenomenon—like a coercive planning system for difficult moral problems2—and they deny that coercive force is a universal feature of law, among other ways in which they depart from the reality of law; a few prominent jurisprudents even proffer arguments that invoke aliens or societies of angels.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document