So just after I wrote about qualia in last week's Philosophy Monday, Sabine Hossenfelder comes out with a video claiming the exact opposite citing a recent study. In the video she says the following about the claim that qualia are a hard limit to science: I’ve always thought this is bullshit. You can measure what’s going on in the brain, therefore you can study what experience means, in scientific terms. You cannot of course yourself experience the same as some other person, or bat, or carrot...

So just after I wrote about qualia in last week's Philosophy Monday, Sabine Hossenfelder comes out with a video claiming the exact opposite citing a recent study. In the video she says the following about the claim that qualia are a hard limit to science: I’ve always thought this is bullshit. You can measure what’s going on in the brain, therefore you can study what experience means, in scientific terms. You cannot of course yourself experience the same as some other person, or bat, or carrot...

Today's Philosophy Mondays will be an interlude from our exploration of knowledge and values. I just finished reading Erik Hoel's wonderful book "The World Behind the World," which I highly recommend reading (I may write a short review). One of the concepts in the book is that of "scientific incompleteness." This is the idea that while science has proven extremely powerful there are some areas of understanding that will remain forever elusive. We of course have a hint of this already from mat...

Today's Philosophy Mondays will be an interlude from our exploration of knowledge and values. I just finished reading Erik Hoel's wonderful book "The World Behind the World," which I highly recommend reading (I may write a short review). One of the concepts in the book is that of "scientific incompleteness." This is the idea that while science has proven extremely powerful there are some areas of understanding that will remain forever elusive. We of course have a hint of this already from mat...

In the last two Philosophy Mondays we first defined what values are and then posed the question of a basis for values. The key requirements for such a basis is that it has to be objective so that it can be universal, i.e. apply to all humans. This will be the subject of today's post. Let's first consider some possibilities that fall short of this goal. What about a God? Much as religions would like to make this claim, there is nothing objective about the existence of a God. That could of cour...

In the last two Philosophy Mondays we first defined what values are and then posed the question of a basis for values. The key requirements for such a basis is that it has to be objective so that it can be universal, i.e. apply to all humans. This will be the subject of today's post. Let's first consider some possibilities that fall short of this goal. What about a God? Much as religions would like to make this claim, there is nothing objective about the existence of a God. That could of cour...

The last Philosophy Monday was nearly a month ago as I got distracted by the launch of my book in Germany and also current political events. The prior post was on values and today’s post picks up this topic by asking where values should come from. One historic answer has been “from God.” Obviously, unless you have direct conversations with God, this usually means that the values come from a religious tradition in the form of sacred texts and/or some group of religious authority figures (e.g. ...

The last Philosophy Monday was nearly a month ago as I got distracted by the launch of my book in Germany and also current political events. The prior post was on values and today’s post picks up this topic by asking where values should come from. One historic answer has been “from God.” Obviously, unless you have direct conversations with God, this usually means that the values come from a religious tradition in the form of sacred texts and/or some group of religious authority figures (e.g. ...

At present it is once again wildly popular to speculate about the relationships between fundamental physics and concepts such as consciousness and free will. Despite the often high quality of the people participating in this I do consider this to be largely bunk. Or slightly less dramatically, I believe this path is unlikely to lead to deep insights. The deep flaw here is the application of theories that describe particles with little or no information content to complex systems which cannot ...

At present it is once again wildly popular to speculate about the relationships between fundamental physics and concepts such as consciousness and free will. Despite the often high quality of the people participating in this I do consider this to be largely bunk. Or slightly less dramatically, I believe this path is unlikely to lead to deep insights. The deep flaw here is the application of theories that describe particles with little or no information content to complex systems which cannot ...