Objects and Arrows

Haven’t been posting to this blog due to a very heavy work schedule over the past few months.  The good news is that Paco Calvo and I have nearly finished editing The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology (we’re still waiting on one last contributor to send us his chapter) and we hope to have the book out very soon.  This has been a mammoth project.

This Friday I’ll be presenting to the neuphi group at BU.  I’m looking forward to seeing lots of old friends and colleagues.  The topic is pain and I’ll post some slides shortly.

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.

Helder Coelho and Jorge Louçã are organizing a conference on complexity in social systems for January 11-12 in Lisbon. Send a paper in if you’re working in complexity, it should be a good meeting (except for the lousy invited speaker) and Lisbon is a spectacularly wonderful city. The webpage for the conference is here
Here’s the announcement and CFP:

The 1st ICC Workshop on Complexity in Social Systems will be concerned with theories, methodologies, and computational tools related to the study of complexity in social systems, aiming to bring together researchers to report on progress in interdisciplinary domains. Papers examining both theory and practice are welcome.

Theoretical areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• methodological issues addressing complexity in social systems
• measures of complexity
• models of emergent social phenomena
• social structure identification and pattern matching in social representations
• tools to represent social systems, including dynamic social networks, multi-agent based simulation, cellular automata, and dynamic systems

Application domains might concern, for instance:

• logistics
• traffic regulation
• urban and regional social studies
• decision support systems
• public policies
• economic models
• innovation diffusion networks
• biological inspired representations of social phenomena
• ecological models
• e-health
• propagation models applied to biology, public health (epidemiology), and others
• communication networks
  Workshop chairs: Helder Coelho and Jorge Louçã

Light summary of the events at the levels of reality conference  at Bolzano here.

I gave a talk at the Bolzano Levels of Reality conference  discussing the implications of the work I’ve been doing along with Jorge, David and Andre on computational models of social networks for debates concerning levels. Here are the slides from that session. bolzano-slides.pdf

It was a very diverse and interesting group of speakers. Getting to Copenhagen from Bolzano was tricky given an Italian train strike. But Bolzano is a nice place to be stuck for a little while.

The Copenhagen conference on Lewis was also great. We’ll be editing a volume from those papers in early 2008.

These three vandals were foiled in their attempted beheading of the mermaid by some powerful intuitions concerning counterpossible lotteries… or something like that. Their counterparts are denying all responsibility.

Brit and Joe blog about the first day of the Lewis conference here

As you can see there, some superb papers. A great start to the meeting.

Roberto Poli just posted the timetable for his Levels of Reality Workshop  in Bolzano.   In addition to the  always interesting work of Johanna Seibt, Mark Bickhard  and Roberto ,  I’m especially interested in  Michael Healey’s  attempt to make use of category theory in ontology.  I’ve taken some baby steps in this direction, and have a short paper (coauthored with Vladik and Julio) on the relationship between category theory and physical invariance (here).  We are currently trying to understand the notion of naturalness in category theory.  I think there’s something very deep there.  There are many good papers on category theory in philosophy of math, but most focus on the relationship between CT and foundations of math rather than on ontological or philosophy of physics issues.  Bell’s 1981 paper Category Theory and the Foundations of Mathematics gives a good background on the issues for philosophers.   There is a good, but not widely publicized, collection  from Polimetrica What is Category Theory? that I’m  reviewing  for Studia Logica.  I’ll post that review here when  it’s  finished.  I’ll wait to see what Healey says before finishing. 

Roberto’s put together a good meeting and I hope that he will be able to make the talks available.  Maybe we can talk him into doing a podcast.   Here’s the schedule of the workshop: 

27 September

9,00                 Welcome
9,30     10,00   Roberto Poli (Trento), Introduction: The Old and the New Ontology
10,00—10,45  Roberto Poli (Trento), Levels: The Categorial Stance

 10,45—11,15  Coffee break

11,15—12,00  Roy Clouser (New Jersey), Reduction as a Strategy for Theories of Reality
15,00—15,45  Jorge Gracia (Buffalo), The Ontology of Categories and the Levels of Reality 
15,45-16,30     Jerzy Perzanowski (Cracow), Onto\logical Conditions for Emergence

 16,30—17,00 Coffee break

 17,00—17,45  Johanna Seibt (Aarhus), Levels of Reality as Forms of Interactivity
17,45—18,30  John Symons (El Paso), Emergence in the Interplay of Networks: A Non-fundamentalist Approach to Levels

28 September 
9,00—9,45      L. Albertazzi (Trento), The Ontology of Perception
9,45—10,30    Mark H. Bickhard (Lehigh), The Emergence of the Social Level of Reality

 10,30—11,00  Coffee break
11,00—11,45  B. Hiller (London), The Problem of Levels in Complex Systems: The Instructive Example of Cities
11,45—12,30  A. Kameas, Modeling activity spheres in ubiquitous computing environments
15,00—15,45  John F. Sowa (Vivomind), Logic and Ontology as a Byproduct Of Mapping Language to the World
15,45-16,30     Heinrich Herre (Leipzig), Principles of Core Ontologies and Levels of Reali

16,30—17,00  Coffee break
17,00—17,45  Matthew West (Shell), Levels of reality in ISO 15926 and Shell’s Downstream Data Model
17,45—18,30  Leo Obrst (Mitre Foundation), (title)

3nd day
9,00—9,45      Michael J. Healy (New Mexico), Category Theory as a Mathematical Language for Ontology
9,45—10,30    Costas Drossos (Patras), Mathematics and Levels of Reality
10,30—11,00  Coffee break

 11,00—12,30  Concluding session

I hope you’ll consider coming to down to El Paso for the New Mexico/West Texas meeting (April 4-6). These meetings are always quite interesting. In the old days, I’m told that the New Mex West Tex meetings were a regular destination for Carnap when he had his place in Taos.

The CFP is here.