Objects and Arrows

I’ll be giving a talk called ‘Pain and Embodiment’ at NMSU next week Dec 4 at 4pm and everyone’s welcome. (Directions to NMSU here and the philosophy department is in Breland Hall). The NMSU department has a superb crew and there’s sure to be some excellent discussion. I’ll try to post the slides and maybe a draft text ahead of time. In the meantime, here’s the abstract:

What is the relationship between our bodies and our pains? Many philosophers have argued that there is something ontologically special about qualitative experience and that pains do not necessarily have anything to do with bodies. Such arguments move from claiming that we have special epistemic access to qualia to the ontological claim that qualitative states are non-physical. Specifically, Saul Kripke argued that because we know the essence of pain and because we can conceive of disembodied agents who suffer pain there is no way to identify pain with any physical state. This talk examines both components of Kripke’s argument and challenges the identification of my pains with the pains of possible non-physical agents. The talk concludes by rejecting the identification of embodied pains with stipulated pains.

I’m scheduled to give this talk at NeuPhi The Boston Philosophy of Neuroscience Workshop in April. I’m hoping that the good folks at NMSU will help me work out some of the kinks well ahead of time.

…from October are here

September’s are here

Jorge has put together a beautiful presentation of our work here.  Beware, this is a very large file.

Instead of watching people in bikinis eating real maggots during their real plastic surgeries, the Danes will be getting philosophy on their televisions this spring.  How Scandinavian of them!  Vincent (Hendricks that is) will be on DK4 (one of their national networks).  He’ll have his own weekly show ‘The Power of the Mind’ (he assures me that this wasn’t his first choice title).  It will begin broadcasting in April of 08.  Unfortunately it’ll be in Danish, so most of us will still have to stick with our maggots and plastic surgery.   I hope those Danes don’t start thinking they’re better than us.

Anyhow, according to Vincent, the first 10 shows will cover the following topics:  moral philosophy (Jesper Ryberg), philosophy of mind (Dan Zahavi), epistemology and logic, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics (Andur Pedersen), aestetics, history of ideas, legal philosophy, philosophy of religion, … 25 minutes a piece. Production will begin in March, and the first show will air in April or May.

Congratulations to Vincent and kudos to DK4 for having such good taste.

By way of the experimental philosophy blog an interesting (if a bit too cute) description of a survey of peer opinion concerning the behavior of ethicists.  The post is here and the draft paper is here 

Eric Schwitzgebel’s conclusion is gloriously unilluminating:

“The majority of philosophers expressed the view that ethicists do not behave better than non-ethicists.  Ethicists themselves were about evenly divided between saying ethicists behave better and saying they behave the same.  Non-ethicists were about evenly divided between saying that ethicists behave better, the same, and worse“

Well done lads.

What if we excluded meta-ethics… then I bet the non-ethicists would definitely have opted for worse…

Currently plugging away at a paper with Vladik Kreinovich, Eric Madrid and Julio Urenda on the notion of naturalness in category theory.  They are doing the heavy lifting in this paper and are kindly allowing me to tag along.  I’m looking at some of the nice connections with discussions of plenitude.  There is some great stuff here.   For example, Phillip Bricker had an elegant paper in JPhil back in 1991 ‘ The Plenitude of Possible Structures’ in which he discusses the idea of naturalness in the characterization of possible structures.  He wasn’t thinking about the notion of naturalness as it appears in category theory and avoids giving any explicit definition of what he means by naturalness, however there might be some light shed here from a categorial perspective.  He was particularly interested in ways of characterizing gaps in the inventory of possible structures.  So, for example, there are six and eight-sided polyhedra (cubes and octohedra), but not seven-sided polyhedra.  This is a fact about what it is to be a polyhedron.  This is not a gap in logical space, it’s not as though there might have been a 7-sided polyhedron and we’re simply leaving it out of our inventory.  Instead, what Bricker suggests is that the very notion of logical space normally at work in these discussions may depend on some prior mathematical characterization of naturalness!  Bricker writes: “In sum, mathematics pro-vides the backdrop of structures and the natural orderings on struc-tures, without which the notion of a gap in logical space would make no sense.” (p.611)  This seems right to me.

So, naturalness means what exactly?

He writes:

“Naturalness applies both to classes of physical entities and to classes of mathematical entities. In either case, what the natural classes are is not determined by us: it is a matter of objective, non- contingent fact. Examples of natural classes of mathematical entities include: the natural numbers, the real numbers, the ordinal num-bers, recursive functions of natural numbers, continuous functions of real numbers. Examples of natural classes of mathematical struc-tures include: groups, vector spaces, topologcal spaces, Euclidean spaces. Each of these natural classes serves as the principle object of
study for some major area of mathematics. “  (611)

Nice stuff, no?