Mary's Room is a poor argument for Dualism.

Mary is a bril­liant sci­en­tist who is, for what­ever rea­son, forced to inves­ti­gate the world from a black and white room via a black and white tele­vi­sion mon­i­tor. She spe­cialises in the neu­ro­phys­i­ol­ogy of vision and acquires, let us sup­pose, all the phys­i­cal infor­ma­tion there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe toma­toes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’,’ ‘blue’, and so on. She dis­cov­ers, for exam­ple, just which wave-length com­bi­na­tions from the sky stim­u­late the reti­na, and exactly how this pro­duces via then cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem the con­trac­tion of the vocal chords and expul­sion of air from the lungs that results in the utter­ing of the sen­tence ‘The sky is blue’. [..] What will hap­pen when Mary is released from he black and white room or is given a colour tele­vi­sion mon­i­tor? Will she learn any­thing or not? It seems just obvi­ous that she will lean some­thing about the world and our visual expe­ri­ence of it. But then it is inescapable that her pre­vi­ous knowl­edge was incom­plete. But she had all the phys­i­cal infor­ma­tion. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Phys­i­cal­ism is false.

…So goes the famous Mary’s Room thought exper­i­ment… Read More

Universals and the Game of Life

The Problem of Universals

In this world we are sur­rounded by par­tic­u­lar things. A table, a chair, a house, a per­son… these are all indi­vid­ual par­tic­u­lar things. But, many of the par­tic­u­lar things around us have some­thing in com­mon. An apple is red and so might be a fire hydrant. A horse is fast and so is a race car. Napoleon was a per­son and so was his wife. Philoso­phers often use the term universals to describe these things that dif­fer­ent par­tic­u­lar objects have in com­mon, or in other words, any word that can be pred­i­cat­ed, or said, of mul­ti­ple things is a universal. That means just about any­thing, “Horse” in a uni­ver­sal, because it refers to a cat­e­gory of things called “hors­es”. “Hu­man” is a uni­ver­sal because it refers to a cat­e­gory of things called “hu­man­s”. “Red­ness” is a uni­ver­sal because it’s pos­si­ble for more than one thing to be the color red. “Large”, “short”, “white”, “table”, etc… just about any adjec­tive or noun that isn’t a proper noun is arguably a uni­ver­sal… Read More

Civilizations are complex systems

There is an inter­est­ing paper called How Com­plex Sys­tems Fail. It’s a col­lec­tion of 18 related obser­va­tions about com­plex sys­tems and about when and how they fail. The obser­va­tions are as follows:

1. Complex systems are intrinsically hazardous systems.
2. Complex systems are heavily and successfully defended against failure.
3. Catastrophe requires multiple failures – single point failures are not enough.
4. Complex systems contain changing mixtures of failures latent within them.
5. Complex systems run in degraded mode.
6. Catastrophe is always just around the corner.
7. Post - accident attribution accident to a ‘root cause’ is fundamentally wrong.
8. Hindsight biases post - accident assessments of human performance.
9. Human operators have dual roles: as producers & as defenders against failure.
10. All practitioner actions are gambles.
11. Actions at the sharp end resolve all ambiguity.
12. Human practitioners are the adaptable element of complex systems.
13. Human expertise in complex systems is constantly changing.
14. Change introduces new forms of failure.
15. Views of ‘cause’ limit the effectiveness of defenses against future events.
16. Safety is a characteristic of systems and not of their components.
17. People continuously create safety.
18. Failure free operations require experience with failure… Read More