Jenann Ismael

Three types of unity that self-governing systems possess are discussed. The first is the synthetic unity attained when information drawn from incommensurate sources is mapped into a common frame of reference. The second is the unity of voice—or “univocity”—attained when a set of separate, potentially conflicting informational streams is united into a single collective voice. The third is the dynamical unity achieved when the parts of a system operate under the command of a single voice. Peeling back the curtain and looking at how the personal point of view arises, and how the unities that are given introspectively are generated by work that the brain does dispels the mystery that is at least partly behind the imaginative pictures of self as mental substance or soul-stuff.

This chapter suggests that what is special about being human—i.e., about being a self in the sense of a possessor of a first-personal deliberative standpoint—is that you have a self-consciously creative role in the production of your life and an unavoidably creative role in the production of your self. The sense in which you create your life is that your life is partly made up of your choices. And the sense in which you create your self is that you are the author of your choices. This vindicates the perfectly familiar and perfectly mundane fact that by making choices, you partly make your life what it is. The discussion draws on Koorsgaard’s work on self-constitution, work in moral psychology on human autonomy, and the large body of literature on the construction of a first-personal narrative.

Dennett’s story “Where am I?” is used to set up the difficulty of locating the self in the natural world. The story is told from a first-person point of view in which the narrator maintains his identity across exchanges of brain and body, but there is no physical thing in the story that can act as bearer of his identity. The story seems to present a dilemma between Cartesian dualism and Dennett’s a “no-self” view. This chapter argues for a third option. Prepersonal processes in the brain stabilize separable conceptions of self and world out of patterns in sensory information. The conception of self starts out as a mere sensorimotor point of view but gradually develops into something richer. Seeing how the first-person point of view arises is seeing how the self arises, because the self is nothing but the proper subject of a first-person point of view.

Bayesians take “definite” or “single-case” probabilities to be basic. Definite probabilities attach to closed formulas or propositions. We write them here using small caps: PROB(P) and PROB(P/Q). Most objective probability theories begin instead with “indefinite” or “general” probabilities (sometimes called “statistical probabilities”). Indefinite probabilities attach to open formulas or propositions. We write indefinite probabilities using lower case “prob” and free variables: prob(Bx/Ax). The indefinite probability of an A being a B is not about any particular A, but rather about the property of being an A. In this respect, its logical form is the same as that of relative frequencies. For instance, we might talk about the probability of a human baby being female. That probability is about human babies in general — not about individuals. If we examine a baby and determine conclusively that she is female, then the definite probability of her being female is 1, but that does not alter the indefinite probability of human babies in general being female. Most objective approaches to probability tie probabilities to relative frequencies in some way, and the resulting probabilities have the same logical form as the relative frequencies. That is, they are indefinite probabilities. The simplest theories identify indefinite probabilities with relative frequencies.3 It is often objected that such “finite frequency theories” are inadequate because our probability judgments often diverge from relative frequencies. For example, we can talk about a coin being fair (and so the indefinite probability of a flip landing heads is 0.5) even when it is flipped only once and then destroyed (in which case the relative frequency is either 1 or 0). For understanding such indefinite probabilities, it has been suggested that we need a notion of probability that talks about possible instances of properties as well as actual instances..

This chapter argues that the formal requirements on self-describing media shed light on two elusive questions in the philosophy of mind. The first is a question that Dretske raised in Naturalizing the Mind: why do we have conscious access to the intrinsic properties of experience? In his terms, the question is: what is experience for? The second is a question that has hounded philosophy of mind since Brentano: in what sense, if any, is thought intrinsically intentional? What is the property that some states have of pointing, or purporting to point, beyond themselves? The chapter also addresses the question of why we self-represent, and what advantage self-representation gives us in the fight for survival.

This chapter introduces some central notions. It treats the conscious mind as part of a larger dynamical system and focuses on the interfaces with other parts of the system; that is, experience, on the incoming end, and action or volition, on the outgoing end. The fundamental point of contrast with traditional representational approaches is that whereas representational approaches treat intentional relations expressed by model-theoretic mappings as fundamental mind-world relations, the dynamical approach takes relations of covariation relative to specified ranges of contexts as basic and recognizes no mind-world relations that cannot be understood in these terms.

This chapter begins with a discussion of Dennett's view of self-representation. It introduces the so-called “Joycean Machine”, special narrative module in the brain charged with production of an autobiography. It is argued that the synchronic unity of the thinking subject is the unity of voice and agency wrought by the unifying activity of the Joycean Machine. In dynamical terms, the collective voice can have a causal role. Turned outward, it can mediate the communication between systems, allowing them to act as unified agents in interaction with one another. Turned inward, it can govern the activity of the components.

This chapter examines Frank Jackson's argument for dualism. It argues that transitions between media involve information-preserving transformations of vehicles of content that convert the output of one medium into something that can interact computationally with the states of another. Just as the contents of observations have to be expressed symbolically before they can be fed into the computational apparatus of a physical theory, and English sentences have to be rendered in French before they can be combined in inferences with French expressions, phenomenal states have to be converted into an inferentially articulated form before they can interact with the machinery of thought. So conceived, the transition from experience into thought involves little more than a simple transformation of vehicle.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts. It addresses the problem of how to bring the view from within, on which I am the frame of the world, the unrepresented representer who contains the whole of it, together with the view from without, on which the world is the frame, and I am somewhere inside the picture, an undistinguished thing among things. It argues that the pressures that lead us to view the self, or the individual consciousness, as something outside of the natural order are many and deep, but a surprising number hinge in one way or another, on misunderstandings about reflexivity.

This chapter discusses the Problem of Inverted Spectra, which has been used as fuel against a number of different philosophical positions, for example, in attempts to analyze phenomenal properties in functional or behavioral terms, and recently by David Chalmers as another argument for dualism. It argues that by recognizing the ineliminable relationality of thought about the experience of others, we can acknowledge the epistemic and cognitive gaps brought out by the Knowledge Argument and the possibility of inverted spectra, while restricting them to purely epistemic ones.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the objection Anscombe lodged against Descartes, to illustrate the gap between the momentary subject of the reflexive thought and the temporally extended subject to which we attribute thought and experience. It defends a familiar view about identity over time, underscoring how some of the most puzzling features of thought about ourselves can be resolved by focusing on the architectural underbelly of thought. It argues that identification of oneself in thought in a manner that supports reidentification is just indexical identification, characterized by the very special feature that identification is made without any conceptualization.

This chapter discusses “conceptual evolution” and the role of the environment in maintaining an invariant link between thought and the world. It shows how coordination breaks down when one moves into unaccustomed circumstances, and describes a general technique for decoupling thought from context by developing an increasingly articulated representation of the causal fabric in which phenomenal states are embedded. It then recommends a generalization of Perry's vocabulary of unarticulated constituents. Finally, the chapter brings the discussion back around and incorporates this into the general story of how the mind turns the fragile, fleeting links provided by experience into reliable, continuing connections that reach far into the spatial landscape and deeply into the circle of causes.

What is time? What does it mean for time to pass? Is it possible to travel in time? What is the difference between the past and future? Until the work of Newton, these questions were purely topics of philosophical speculation. Since then we've learned a great deal about time, and its study has moved from a subject of philosophical reflection to instead became part of the subject matter of physics. This Very Short Introduction introduces readers to the current physical understanding of the direction of time, from the Second Law of Thermodynamics to the emergence of complexity and life. Jenann Ismael charts the line of development in physical theory from Newton, via Einstein's Theory of Relativity, to the current day. Einstein's innovations led to a vision of time very different from the familiar time of everyday sense. In this new vision, time is one of the dimensions in which the universe is extended alongside the spatial dimensions. The universe appears as a static block of events, in which there is no more a difference between past and future than there is between east and west. Discussing the controversy and philosophical confusion which surrounded the reception of this new vision, Ismael also covers the contemporary mixture of statistical mechanics, cognitive science, and phenomenology that point the way to reconciling the familiar time of everyday sense with the vision of time presented in Einstein's theories."--Amazon.com.

This chapter argues that Humean analyses do not provide content‐preserving reductions and non‐trivial accounts of the reference. It introduces a distinction between structure in the realm of Being and structure in the representations of Being. The chapter argues that there are good reasons not to expect content‐preserving reductions of the modal to the non‐modal at the level of content, or useful mappings of content‐level structures into structures at the level of Being. In the rest of the chapter, the author deals with the relationship between content‐level structure and structure at the level of Being. The debate between the Humean and non‐Humean should be reconceived as a debate about whether non‐Humean facts play a substantive role in the story of how beliefs about laws and chances are formed and used.

Before the twentieth century, the Universe was usually imagined as a large spatially extended thing unfolding in time. The past was fixed and the future was open; unfolding was conceived as an asymmetric process of coming into being. Relativity introduced a new vision in which space and time are presented together as a single four-dimensional manifold of events. That, together with the fact that the fundamental laws of our classical theories are symmetric in time, made understanding why the past and future present themselves so differently in our experience one of the central challenges of physics. The last two centuries have seen a great deal of progress in understanding various of the so-called arrows of time: the thermodynamic arrow, the cosmological arrow, the arrow of knowledge or information. There remains an outstanding piece of this puzzle that has seen little progress, one that Roger Penrose described in his beautiful paper Singularities and Time-Asymmetry in 1979 as: “The arrow most difficult to comprehend … namely the feeling of relentless forward temporal progression, according to which potentialities seem to be transformed into actualities.”I will propose that the insight needed to resolve the problem involves taking into account that we are part of the universe and that any attempt to model it as a totality involves self-reference. I will argue specifically that self-reference, against the background of a thermodynamic gradient, creates an instability in an embedded agent’s ability to know the future or even treat it as a potential object of knowledge. That instability captures the sense in which the future remains for her perpetually open and the passage of time resolves openness into the fixity of fact.

Quantum mechanics seems to portray nature as nonseparable, in the sense that it allows spatiotemporally separated entities to have states that cannot be fully specified without reference to each other. This is often said to implicate some form of “holism.” We aim to clarify what this means, and why this seems plausible. Our core idea is that the best explanation for nonseparability is a “common ground” explanation, which casts nonseparable entities in a holistic light, as scattered reflections of a more unified underlying reality.

In a famous passage drawing implications from determinism, Laplace introduced the image an intelligence who knew the positions and momenta of all of the particles of which the universe is composed, and asserted that in a deterministic universe such an intelligence would be able to predict everything that happens over its entire history. It is not, however, difficult to establish the physical possibility of a counterpredictive device, i.e., a device designed to act counter to any revealed prediction of its behavior. What would happen if a Laplacean intelligence were put into communication with such a device and forced to reveal its prediction of what the device would do on some occasion? On the one hand, it seems that the Laplacean Intelligence should be able to predict the device's behavior. On the other hand, it seems like that device should be able to act counter to the prediction. An examination of the puzzle leads to clarification of what determinism does entail, with some insights about various other things along the way.

On April 1, 2016, at the Annual Meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, a book symposium, organized by Alyssa Ney, was held in honor of David Albert’s After Physics. All participants agreed that it was a valuable and enlightening session. We have decided that it would be useful, for those who weren’t present, to make our remarks publicly available. Please bear in mind that what follows are remarks prepared for the session, and that on some points participants may have changed their minds in light of the ensuing discussion.

In 1687 Isaac Newton ushered in a new scientific era in which laws of nature could be used to predict the movements of matter with almost perfect precision. Newton's physics also posed a profound challenge to our self-understanding, however, for the very same laws that keep airplanes in the air and rivers flowing downhill tell us that it is in principle possible to predict what each of us will do every second of our entire lives, given the early conditions of the universe. Can it really be that even while you toss and turn late at night in the throes of an important decision and it seems like the scales of fate hang in the balance, that your decision is a foregone conclusion? Can it really be that everything you have done and everything you ever will do is determined by facts that were in place long before you were born? This problem is one of the staples of philosophical discussion. It is discussed by everyone from freshman in their first philosophy class, to theoretical physicists in bars after conferences. And yet there is no topic that remains more unsettling, and less well understood. If you want to get behind the façade, past the bare statement of determinism, and really try to understand what physics is telling us in its own terms, read this book. The problem of free will raises all kinds of questions. What does it mean to make a decision, and what does it mean to say that our actions are determined? What are laws of nature? What are causes? What sorts of things are we, when viewed through the lenses of physics, and how do we fit into the natural order? Ismael provides a deeply informed account of what physics tells us about ourselves. The result is a vision that is abstract, alien, illuminating, and-Ismael argues-affirmative of most of what we all believe about our own freedom. Written in a jargon-free style, How Physics Makes Us Free provides an accessible and innovative take on a central question of human existence.