1/20/2024 0 Comments Earman and norton 1999To end the scandal, philosophers need to examine a new method of philosophizing, based not on language but on information. According to Bob Doyle, it is a scandal that academic philosophers are convincing young students, against their common sense, that mind, consciousness, free will, values, even the external world, do not exist. Information philosophy is a new philosophical methodology that goes “beyond logic and language” to the underlying information structures being created in the cosmos, in the world, in biological information-processing systems, and in the human mind - structures without which logic, language, and science would be impossible. They typically include metaphysics - what is there?, the problem of knowledge - how do we know what exists?, the mind/body problem - can an immaterial mind move the material body?, the “hard problem” of consciousness, freedom of the will, theories of ethics - is there an objective universal Good?, and problems from theology - does God exist?, is God responsible for evil? This book introduces the Information Philosopher website, a work in progress on these classic questions in philosophy that logical positivists and analytic language philosophers thought they could dis-solve as logical puzzles, pseudo-problems, or conceptual errors. At the same time, I indicate the way that conclusive testing of CCP can be done within the theoretical framework of physics.Ī survey of several popular textbooks on philosophy produces a remarkable consensus on the problems facing philosophers from ancient to modern times. After arguing that a probabilistic, interactionist model of mental causation is conceivable, which renders the argument from causal closure of the physical ineffective, I point to some basic features that such a model must have in order to be intelligible. However, it is conceivable and possible that mental causation is manifested through the redistribution of energy, momentum and other conserved quantities in the system, brought about by altering the state probability distribution within the living system and leading to anomalous correlations of neural processes. those which manifest themselves by causing accelerations. I show that the arguments offered for CCP are effective only against the accounts of mental causation based on the action of the mental forces of a Newtonian nature, i.e. I demonstrate, however, that physical science has no bias in the ontological debate between proponents of physicalism and dualism. Many authors, most notably Papineau, assume that CCP implies that physicalism is supported by physics. Landauer's principle is the loosely formulated notion that the erasure of n bits of information must always incur a cost of k ln n in thermodynamic entropy.The argument from causal closure of the physical (CCP) is usually considered the most powerful argument in favor of the ontological doctrine of physicalism. It can be formulated as a precise result in statistical mechanics, but for a restricted class of erasure processes that use a thermodynamically irreversible phase space expansion, which is the real origin of the law's entropy cost and whose necessity has not been demonstrated. General arguments that purport to establish the unconditional validity of the law (erasure maps many physical states to one erasure compresses the phase space) fail. They turn out to depend on the illicit formation of a canonical ensemble from memory devices holding random data. To exorcise Maxwell's demon one must show that all candidate devices-the ordinary and the extraordinary-must fail to reverse the second law of thermodynamics. The theorizing surrounding Landauer's principle is too fragile and too tied to a few specific examples to support such general exorcism. Charles Bennett's recent extension of Landauer's principle to the merging of computational paths fails for the same reasons as trouble the original principle.Ī sizeable literature is based on the claim that Maxwell's demon must fail to produce violations of the second law of thermodynamics because of an inevitable entropy cost associated with certain types of information processing. In the second edition of their standard compilation of work on Maxwell's demon, Leff and Rex (2003, p. Xii) note that more references have been generated in the 13 years since the volume's first edition than in all years prior to it, extending back over the demon's 120 years of life.
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