Causal Exclusion and Causal Inheritance: A Defense
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This paper offers an interpretation of Jaegwon Kim’s “Causal Exclusion” and “Causal Inheritance” arguments for reductionism about special science properties, and defends these arguments against standard “compatibilist” responses on behalf of nonreductive physicalism. I interpret Kim’s arguments as…
Reconceiving Evolvability - A Novel Analysis Using Conditional Probability
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The meaning of the term "evolvability" has long been ambiguous within evolutionary biology. Because of this, interpreting and understanding statements made in the literature of the field such as "x is more evolvable than y" has been very difficult. In this paper I propose a novel analysis of…
All Cognitive Content is Conscious Content
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I will argue that all cognitive content is conscious content. More specifically, I will argue that there are no genuinely representational standing states and that thought content is limited to conscious thought content. I will show how we can construct notions of standing state and occurrent state…
The State of the Union: Descartes and Mind-Body Unity and Interaction
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Having distinguished to his satisfaction mind and body so successfully, Descartes faced the challenge of sticking them back together so as to explain how they constitute a single thing, the whole human being. To avoid the charge of Platonism, he asserts that the union is not an accidental unity of…