Wesley Cooper

Henri Matisse, “Fenêtre Ouverte” (1905)

I’m handing out midterms today. If you’re absent from class, you’ll have to wait until next Friday, I’m afraid.

Review of Copeland’s chapter on Freedom

• Think of compatibilism (soft determinism) and libertarianism (indeterminism) as two extremes, represented by Hobbes and Copeland, at one extreme, and Descartes and Searle, at the other. There are problems at each pole: Many think that freedom goes deeper than compatibilism allows, and libertarianism has a hard time separting free action from arbitrary, random action.
• Are there alternatives to these extremes? Think of Nagel’s “romantic” view that we are bound to think of ourselves and the world from two incompatible points of view, subjective and objective. That’s one alternative. Think of Deutsch’s multiverse solution: One could have done otherwise means One did to otherwise in other worlds. (Deutsch elaborates on this a little bit later in the book, but it must be said that his alternative is sketchy.)

Review of Copeland on Consciousness

• Think of materialism and dualism as two extremes. Define materialism as committed to an account of mind exclusively by reference to “third-person facts” typified by current natural science. Define dualism as Cartesian substance dualism and variants on it, including not only “parallel substances” but also “property dualism” (one substance that is material, but it “gives off” non-physical mental properties) — Huxley’s epiphenomenalism is an example.
• Are there alternatives to these extremes? Searle offers an alternative which demands that subjective physical facts be recognized as a part of the natural sciences. (”Physics” in his sense includes objective physics, defined by the third-person point of view, and also subjective physics, defined by a first-person mode of access.). Another alternative is Colin McGinn’s “mysterianism“, which argues that the relationship between mind and body is cognitively closed to humanity: our species doesn’t  have the right kind of mind to comprehend the “world knot”, even though the relationship is presumably a natural one that is in principle available to some continuation of the natural sciences, a continuation that is beyond us.

• Deutsch’s chapter on Life: The essential point to grasp in this chapter is that life is to be understood in Darwinian evolutionary theory, especially as developed by Richard Dawkins, and that the defining features of life — of evolving replicators — are best explained by the multiverse: by life’s being a an organized cross-world structure. Life (and knowledge, and freedom, etc.) are phenomena that support counterfactuals: This DNA (which hasn’t replicated in our universe) would replicate under the appropriate circumstances. Counterfactuals are puzzling to philosophers. What makes them true? MWI offers one answer: other worlds make them true.
• Deutsch’s chapter on Quantum Computing: The essential idea here is tractability. Things get computed in nature. How is this possible? Maybe some fancy architecture of a USS (UTM) is sufficient to explain how the brain is able to process information sufficiently fast to keep us alive, but how does Shor’s algorithm get computed in nature? Factorization of very large numbers seems intractable for classical computing, but Shor’s algorithm renders it tractable. How does it do that? Deutsh thinks that quantum computing banishes the specter of intractability in such cases.
• I’ve invited Dave Adams to talk to us about how Shor’s algorithm works on the formal side.
• I’m cancelling class on Monday, and the University is cancelling class on Wednesday in observance of Remembrance Day. So: Start reading Chapter 9 in Copeland (”Are we computers”). You know what it’s about! Also start Chapter 10 in Deutsch (”The Nature of Mathematics”). This chapter shows how uncompromising his physicalism is. Also, in lieu of class on Monday, please listen to Deutsch’s introductory video on QM. You should understand the first few minutes, even if, like me, you start listening to it as background music later on.

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