Simon Cicak

We provide three innovations to recent debates about whether topological or “network” explanations are a species of mechanistic explanation. First, we more precisely characterize the requirement that all topological explanations are mechanistic explanations and show scientific practice to belie such a requirement. Second, we provide an account that unifies mechanistic and non-mechanistic topological explanations, thereby enriching both the mechanist and autonomist programs by highlighting when and where topological explanations are mechanistic. Third, we defend this view against some powerful mechanist objections. We conclude from this that topological explanations are autonomous from their mechanistic counterparts.

Permissivism is the view that, sometimes, there is more than one doxastic attitude that is perfectly rationalised by the evidence. Impermissivism is the denial of Permissivism. Several philosophers, with the aim to defend either Impermissivism or Permissivism, have recently discussed the value of (im)permissive rationality. This paper focuses on one kind of value-conferring considerations, stemming from the so-called “truth-connection” enjoyed by rational doxastic attitudes. The paper vindicates the truth-connected value of permissive rationality by pursuing a novel strategy which rests on two main planks: first, there is a distinction between a fine-grained and a coarse-grained type-individuation of belief-forming methods. Secondly, different kinds of decision-theoretic reasoning, i.e. expected-accuracy reasoning and accuracy-domination reasoning, must be paired with a fine-grained and a coarse-grained type-individuation of methods, respectively. I argue that while the first pair is wholly irrelevant to the question of the truth-connection, the second affords the means to a permissivist explanation of the truth-connected value of rationality.

In this paper I take up the question of the nature of the doxastic attitudes we entertain while inquiring into some matter. Relying on a distinction between two stages of open inquiry, I urge to acknowledge the existence of a distinctive attitude of cognitive inclination towards a proposition qua answer to the question one is inquiring into. I call this attitude “hypothesis”. Hypothesis, I argue, is a sui generis doxastic attitude which differs, both functionally and normatively, from suspended judgement, full belief, credences, and acceptance. In closing, I point to the epistemological significance of hypothesis. More specifically, I contend that holding an attitude of hypothesis enables us to respond rationally to peer disagreement, and I suggest that such an attitude offers a suitable articulation of the view, originally put forward by Philip Kitcher, that cognitive diversity in inquiry has epistemic benefits.

Traditional epistemology has, in the main, presupposed that the primary task is to give a complete account of the concept knowledge and to state under what conditions it is possible to have it. In so doing, most accounts have been hierarchical, and all assume an idealized knower. The assumption of an idealized knower is essential for the traditional goal of generating an unassailable account of knowledge acquisition. Yet we, as individuals, fail to reach the ideal. Perhaps more important, we have epistemic goals not addressed in the traditional approach – among them, the ability to reach understanding in areas we deem important for our lives. Understanding is an epistemic concept. But how we obtain it has not traditionally been a focus. Developing an epistemic account that starts from a set of assumptions that differ from the traditional starting points will allow a different sort of epistemic theory, one on which generating understanding is a central goal and the idealized knower is replaced with an inquirer who is not merely fallible but working from a particular context with particular goals. Insight into how an epistemic account can include the particular concerns of an embedded inquirer can be found by examining the parallels between ethics and epistemology and, in particular, by examining the structure and starting points of virtue accounts. Here I develop several interrelated issues that contrast the goals and evaluative concepts that form the structure of both standard, traditional epistemological and ethical theories and virtue–centered theories. In the end, I sketch a virtue–centered epistemology that accords with who we are and how we gain understanding.

Immanuel Kant famously thought that the presuppositions of Newtonian physics are the necessary conditions of the possibility of experience in general – both “outer” and “inner” experience. Today we know, of course, that Newtonian physics only applies to a limited domain of physical reality and is radically inadequate in the quantum and relativistic domains. This gives rise to an interesting question: could the radical changes in physics suggest new conditions for the possibility of experience? In other words, does post-Newtonian physics suggest a post-Kantian view of human experience?

Ladyman and Ross argue that quantum objects are not individuals and use this idea to ground their metaphysical view, ontic structural realism, according to which relational structures are primary to things. LR acknowledge that there is a version of quantum theory, namely the Bohm theory, according to which particles do have denite trajectories at all times. However, LR interpret the research by Brown et al. as implying that "raw stuff" or haecceities are needed for the individuality of particles of BT, and LR dismiss this as idle metaphysics. In this paper we note that Brown et al.'s research does not imply that haecceities are needed. Thus BT remains as a genuine option for those who seek to understand quantum particles as individuals. However, we go on to discuss some problems with BT which led Bohm and Hiley to modify it. This modified version underlines that, due to features such as context-dependence and non-locality, Bohmian particles have a very limited autonomy in situations where quantum effects are non-negligible. So while BT restores the possibility of quantum individuals, it also underlines the primacy of the whole over the autonomy of the parts. The later sections of the paper also examine the Bohm theory in the general mathematical context of symplectic geometry. This provides yet another way of understanding the subtle, holistic and dynamic nature of Bohmian individuals. We finally briefly consider Bohm's other main line of research, the "implicate order", which is in some ways similar to LR's structural realism.

Mainstream cognitive neuroscience typically ignores the role of quantum physical effects in the neural processes underlying cogni¬tion and consciousness. However, many unsolved problems remain, suggesting the need to consider new approaches. We propose that quantum theory, especially through an ontological interpretation due to Bohm and Hiley, provides a fruitful framework for addressing the neural correlates of cognition and consciousness. In particular, the ontological interpretation suggests that a novel type of 'active information', connected with a novel type of 'quantum potential energy', plays a key role in quantum physical processes. After introducing the ontological interpretation we illustrate its value for cognitive neuroscience by discussing it in the light of a proposal by Beck and Eccles about how quantum tunneling could play a role in controlling the frequency of synaptic exocytosis. In this proposal, quantum tunneling would enable the 'self' to control its brain without violating the energy conservation law. We argue that the ontological interpretation provides a sharper picture of what actually could be taking place in quantum tunneling in general and in synaptic exocytosis in particular. Based on the notions of active information and quantum potential energy, we propose a coherent way of understanding how mental processes (understood as involving non-classical physical processes) can act on traditional, classically describable neural processes without violating the energy conservation law.

Recent advances in the field of quantum cognition suggest a puzzling connection between fundamental physics and the mind. Many researchers see quantum ideas and formalisms merely as useful pragmatic tools, and do not look for deeper underlying explanations for why they work. However, others are tempted to seek for an intelligible explanation for why quantum ideas work to model cognition. This paper first draws attention to how the physicist David Bohm already in 1951 suggested that thought and quantum processes are analogous, adding that this could be explained if some neural processes underlying thought involved non-negligible quantum effects. The paper next points out that the idea that there is a connection between fundamental physics and the mind is not unique to quantum theory, but was there already when Newtonian physics was assumed to be fundamental physics, advocated most notably by Kant. Kant emphasized the unique intelligibility of a Newtonian notion of experience, and this historical background prompts us to ask in the final part of the paper whether we can really make sense of any quantum-like experience. It is proposed that intelligibility is a relative notion and that, regardless of initial difficulties, quantum approaches to cognition and consciousness are likely to provide valuable new ways of understanding the mind.

Researchers have suggested since the early days of quantum theory that there are strong analogies between quantum phenomena and mental phenomena and these have developed into a vibrant new field of quantum cognition during recent decades. After revisiting some early analogies by Niels Bohr and David Bohm, this paper focuses upon Bohm and Hiley’s ontological interpretation of quantum theory which suggests further analogies between quantum phenomena and biological and psychological phenomena, including the proposal that the human brain operates in some ways like a quantum measuring apparatus. After discussing these analogies I will also consider, from a quantum perspective, Hintikka’s suggestion that Kant’s notion of things in themselves can be better understood by making an analogy between our knowledge-seeking activities and an elaborate measuring apparatus.

The received view in physicalist philosophy of mind assumes that causation can only take place at the physical domain and that the physical domain is causally closed. It is often thought that this leaves no room for mental states qua mental to have a causal influence upon the physical domain, leading to epiphenomenalism and the problem of mental causation. However, in recent philosophy of causation there has been growing interest in a line of thought that can be called causal antifundamentalism: causal notions cannot play a role in physics, because the fundamental laws of physics are radically different from causal laws. Causal anti-fundamentalism seems to challenge the received view in physicalist philosophy of mind and thus raises the possibility of there being genuine mental causation after all. This paper argues that while causal anti-fundamentalism provides a possible route to mental causation, we have reasons to think that it is incorrect. Does this mean that we have to accept the received view and give up the hope of genuine mental causation? I will suggest that the ontological interpretation of quantum theory provides us both with a view about the nature of causality in fundamental physics, as well as a view how genuine mental causation can be compatible with our fundamental (quantum) physical ontology.

The paper explores whether David Bohm’ s proposal about quantum theoretical active information, and the mind-matter scheme he developed on the basis of it, can help us to explain consciousness. Here it is important to acknowledge that other researchers in philosophy of mind and consciousness studies have also made use of the concept of information in their theories of mind and consciousness. For example, Dretske and Barwise and Seligman have explored the possibility that information in the sense of factual semantic contents can be grounded in environmental information. For Dretske this was an important part of his attempts to give a naturalistic account of sensory experiences, qualia and consciousness. During recent years the notion of information has been used to explain consciousness most notably by David Chalmers, as well as by Giulio Tononi and his co-workers. The strategy of this paper will be to first describe Bohm’ s mind-matter scheme, and then to briefl y consider Chalmers’ and Tononi et al.’ s ideas in the light of this scheme.

Scientific studies have shown that non-conscious stimuli and représentations influence information processing during conscious experience. In the light of such evidence, questions about potential functional links between non-conscious brain representations and conscious experience arise. This article discusses models capable of explaining how statistical learning mechanisms in dedicated resonant circuits could generate specific temporal activity traces of non-conscious representations in the brain. How reentrant signaling, top-down matching, and statistical coincidence of such activity traces may lead to the progressive consolidation of neural signatures of conscious experience in networks extending across large distances beyond functionally specialized brain regions is then explained.

The quantization error in a fixed-size Self-Organizing Map (SOM) with unsupervised winner-take-all learning has previously been used successfully to detect, in minimal computation time, highly meaningful changes across images in medical time series and in time series of satellite images. Here, the functional properties of the quantization error in SOM are explored further to show that the metric is capable of reliably discriminating between the finest differences in local contrast intensities and contrast signs. While this capability of the QE is akin to functional characteristics of a specific class of retinal ganglion cells (the so-called Y-cells) in the visual systems of the primate and the cat, the sensitivity of the QE surpasses the capacity limits of human visual detection. Here, the quantization error in the SOM is found to reliably signal changes in contrast or colour when contrast information is removed from or added to the image, but not when the amount and relative weight of contrast information is constant and only the local spatial position of contrast elements in the pattern changes. While the RGB Mean reflects coarser changes in colour or contrast well enough, the SOM-QE is shown to outperform the RGB Mean in the detection of single-pixel changes in images with up to five million pixels. This could have important implications in the context of unsupervised image learning and computational building block approaches to large sets of image data (big data).

In the field theories in physics, any particular region of the presumed space-time continuum and all interactions between elementary objects therein can be objectively measured and/or accounted for mathematically. Since this does not apply to any of thefield theories, or any other neural theory, of consciousness, their explanatory power is limited. As discussed in detail herein, the matter is complicated further by the facts than any scientifically operational definition of consciousness is inevitably partial, and that the phenomenon has no spatial dimensionality. Under the light of insights from research on meditation and expanded consciousness, chronic pain syndrome, healthy aging, and eudaimonic well being, we may conceive consciousness as a source of potential energy that has no clearly defined spatial dimensionality, but can produce significant changes in others and in the world, observable in terms of changes in time. It is argued that consciousness may have evolved to enable the human species to generate such changes in order to cope with unprecedented and/or unpredictable adversity. Such coping could, ultimately, include the conscious planning of our own extinction when survival on the planet is no longer an acceptable option.

Technological progress has brought about the emergence of machines that have the capacity to take human lives without human control. These represent an unprecedented threat to humankind. This paper starts from the example of chemical weapons, now banned worldwide by the Geneva protocol, to illustrate how technological development initially aimed at the benefit of humankind has, ultimately, produced what is now called the “Weaponization of Artificial Intelligence (AI)”. Autonomous Weapon Systems (AWS) fail the so-called discrimination principle, yet, the wider public is largely unaware of this problem. Given that ongoing scientific research on AWS, performed in the military sector, is generally not made available to the public domain, many of the viewpoints on this subject, expressed across different media, invoke common sense rather than scientific evidence. Yet, the implications of a potential weaponization of our work as scientists, especially in the field of AI, are reaching further than some may think. The potential consequences of a deployment of AWS for citizen stakeholders are incommensurable, and it is time to raise awareness in the public domain of the kind of potential threats identified, and to encourage legal policies ensuring that these threats will not materialize.

The laws which predict how the perceptual quality of figure-ground can be extracted from the most elementary visual signals were discovered by the Gestaltists, and form an essential part of their movement (see especially Metzger, 1930, and Wertheimer, 1923 translated and re-edited by Lothar Spillmann, 2009 and 2012, respectively). Distinguishing figure from ground is a prerequisite for perception of both form and space (the relative positions, trajectories, and distances of objects in the visual field. The human brain has an astonishing capacity for selecting and combining a few critical visual signals to accurately represent both form and space.

I believe that there is a ubiquitous pre-reflective self-awareness accompanying first-order conscious states. However, I do not think that such self-awareness is itself typically conscious. On my view, conscious self-awareness enters the picture during what is sometimes called “introspection” which is a more sophisticated form of self-consciousness. I argue that there is a very close connection between consciousness and self-consciousness and, more specifically, between the structure of all conscious states and self-consciousness partly based on the higher-order thought theory of consciousness. A plausible notion of self-consciousness is, I think, simply having any degree of higher-order or meta-psychological thought. I argue that the connection between conscious states and self-consciousness is representational but also critically evaluate several different options. I then critique the alternative “acquaintance” theory of self-awareness and address a couple of recent criticisms of HOT theory. There is the potential danger of misrepresentation between self-awareness and conscious states which I also briefly address.

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how and why physical processes give rise to consciousness (Chalmers 1995). Regardless of many attempts to solve the problem, there is still no commonly agreed solution. It is thus very likely that some radically new ideas are required if we are to make any progress. In this paper we turn to quantum theory to find out whether it has anything to offer in our attempts to understand the place of mind and conscious experience in nature. In particular we will be focusing on the ontological interpretation of quantum theory proposed by Bohm and Hiley (1987, 1993), its further development by Hiley (Hiley and Callaghan 2012; Hiley, Dennis and de Gosson 2021), and its philosophical interpretation by Pylkkänen (2007, 2020). The ontological interpretation makes the radical proposal that quantum reality includes a new type of potential energy which contains active information. This proposal, if correct, constitutes a major change in our notion of matter. We are used to having in physics only mechanical concepts, such as position, momentum and force. Our intuition that it is not possible to understand how and why physical processes can give rise to consciousness is partly the result of our assuming that physical processes (including neurophysiological processes) are always mechanical. If, however, we are willing to change our view of physical reality by allowing non-mechanical, organic and holistic concepts such as active information to play a fundamental role, this, we argue, makes it possible to understand the relationship between physical and mental processes in a new way. It might even be a step toward solving the hard problem.