The Philosophers’ Carnival is Here

Welcome to the Carnival! This is a biweekly summary of interesting Philosophy blog posts submitted from around the net. Each installment is hosted on a different blog, and this time around it's my turn. So here goes!

At the Experimental Philosophy blog, Hagop Sarkissian outlines a case that people generally are not moral objectivists. Specifically, when thinking about clashes between different cultures' norms, people tend to skew (apparently) relativist. I'm not sure they're actually being relativist—they may just be more inclined to consider it possible there are mitigating factors when people from other cultures do apparently horrendous things—but go read the post and see what you think.

MandM make an argument that religious considerations shouldn't be excluded from political thought just because they may be infallible. Sounds obvious? They attribute the opposing view to Audi, so who knows…

Thom Brooks provides a must-read essay about publishing as a grad student. I really need to get on that.

Kenny Pearce suggests that loose speech is "an attempt to express truth by uttering falsehood." If it's the uttering of a falsehood, is it dishonest? Kenny thinks not. I think it depends on how firm a grasp on the truth you're trying to express you really have. If you can't give a non-loose account of that truth, can you really attempt to express it at all? How would you know?

At the Florida Student Philosophy Blog, Andrew Brenner argues that in On Miracles, Hume failed to distinguish between the claim that miracles couldn't possibly be identified, and the claim that in fact no miracles have had strong evidentiary support, though one could have such support in principle. Quotations support both readings, so he could be onto something.

The Uncredible Hallq offers a definition of physicalism, and has something to say about whether physicalism implies that all facts can be deduced from the laws of physics and the present state of the universe. Hallq thinks not. Questions about what counts as what are not settled by physicalism, and neither are philosophical questions about thinks like explanation, causality and identity.

Diana Hsieh casts podly about objections to design arguments for the existence of God. With apologies to Diana, I confess I have not listened to the podcast, having had no access to headphones today. But hey, it's a discussion about objections to design arguments. What's not to like? Go listen!

Finally, as usual, we have Chaospet, this time giving a nice exposition of a paradox concerning causation—the one where two people take actions sufficient to bring about some wrong, yet because both did so, arguably neither actually caused the wrong. Huh? Go read it, it makes sense, it's funny, and it will asplode your head in the Philosophically virtuous sense.

That is all we have for this installment of the Philosphers' Carnival. Read all and comment!

Swampman, Meet the Turing Test

Not directly related to extended cognition, but these remarks spun out of my thinking about Swampman, which spun out of my thinking about extended cognition.

Too long to put here, but here's a link:

Swampman Takes The Turing Test

The linked document is an organized collection of remarks shaping into an argument. I wouldn't even call it a "draft" yet.

Basically, I argue that the Turing Test provides no evidence that a machine is thinking, because in order for it to provide such evidence to us, we'd have to make certain assumptions which either trivialize or cancel out any conclusions we might have drawn from our observations during the test. The Turing Test provides no evidence for psychology in the same way that an examination of Swampman provides no evidence for biofunction.

Extended Cognition and Personal Fission

This post deals with implications Ex-Cog may have for the philosophical topic of Personal Identity.

Just suppose that there is a kind of close causal coupling (between a cognizing system and its environment) which does issue forth in the constitution of a cognizing system encompassing the coupled environment.

Say cognizing system C₁ engages in this sort of coupling with its environment, thereby causing a cognizing system C₂ to exist.

C₂ has parts, and one of those parts seems to be, simply, C₁. The system C₁, after all, doesn't cease to exist just because it has coupled with its environment to form C₂. Rather, C₁ persists, as part of C₂.

The physical system C₁ persists as part of C₂. But suppose that, at least before the coupling, C₁ is a person. Call her Carla. There are now two cognizing systems—C₁ and C₂—which seem to have a prima facie case to be the continuation of Carla. For example, should C₂ cease to exist, this would not seem to be a case of Carla's destruction. Rather, Carla continues, in that case, as C₁. This is a prima facie case that C₁ is the proper continuation of Carla and not C₂. Yet, who Carla is seems to have much to do with how Carla cognizes. And once C₁ couples with its environment to form C₂, it seems as though C₂'s cognitions have the better claim to be continuations of Carla's own cognitions. For what C₂ is trying to cognize its way through is what Carla is trying to cognize her way through. She does this (per the hypothesis stated at the outset of this post) by causing C₁ to couple with its environment to form the cognitive system C₂.

(The case for C₂'s being Carla's continuation may seem to assume a Psychologistic account of Personal Identity. I prefer such an account, but I don't want to presume it. In fact, similar arguments for C₂'s status as Carla-continuer can be built on other accounts of Personal Identity. For the kind of close causal coupling that is supposed to support the formation of an extended mind would seem also to support the formation of an extended cognizing body. Insert difficult discussions about biofunction here, but I think it's clear how, given the Ex-Cog picture, the physical boundary between body and environment is just as indistinct as that between mind and environment. Indeed, the body/environmental blurriness is probably more obvious than the mind/environment blurriness.)

A lot has been skipped over here, but suppose I'm right that both C₁ and C₂ can lay an equally valid claim to be Carla's continuation. In that case, an interesting situation arises. We have here a case of personal fission—that strange sort of event usually found only in philosophical thought experiments and science fiction stories. Two objects lay equal claim to being the same person as some past personage.

I'm pointing this out because I find it interesting—and kind of exciting—to think that, if the extended mind hypothesis is true, it turns out personal fissions aren't a hypothetical logical possibility that can serve only to jog our rarified philosophical intuitions. Rather, it turns out personal fissions happen regularly, as a matter of course, here on the ground. Our data for working through problems in Personal Identity don't have to be intuitions about what we would or should say given the actualization of various improbable fantasies. Rather, we can work through Personal Identity issues by looking at what people actually do, in the real world, in their day to day persistence as cognitive agents.

My Long Absence

I considered simply not addressing my long absence at all. But it seemed likely people would wonder why I would have been gone for so long from a blog I myself created. Yet, the reasons for my absence are not particularly interesting, and do not have anything to do with the topic of this blog. So with this post, I acknowledge my absence, and register an intention not to let there be so long an absence again. If anyone really wants to know what happened, they can contact me privately. But fair warning: the response will be boring.

ZiF Conference on Extended Mind

The Extended Mind Thesis in Theory and Applications

Date: November 23 - 25, 2009

Venue: ZiF Bielefeld, Germany

http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/philosophie/extendedmind/

Workshop on Rob Rupert's new book

Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind (November 26, 2009)

a one-day conference hosted by the Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrueck, organized by Sven Walter.

Speakers include:

Ken Aizawa (Centenary College of Louisiana)

Miriam Kyselo (University of Osnabrueck)

Holger Lyre (University of Bielefeld)

Robert Rupert (University of Colorado at Boulder)

Mark Sprevak (King's College, Cambridge)

Sven Walter (University of Osnabrueck)

The conference mainly focuses on Robert Rupert's critique of the Extended Mind Hypothesis in his forthcoming book Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind (OUP 2009), but is also devoted to a discussion of the related more general work he has done in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science in the past.

Participants will also be able to attend to the ZiF-conference on The Extended Mind Thesis in Theory and Applicationto be held at the university of Bielefeld, from November 23 to November 25 (for more information see www.uni-bielefeld.de/philosophie/extendedmind/) .

Noe gets around

First at Salon magazine here, then in a recent podcast on the Brain Science Podcast here. (The latter also has an interview with Patricia Churchland.)

Episode #36 here also has an interview with another of the EC folks, Arthur Glenberg.