Eastern Carpets in David Chalmers Alesworth’s Art

David Chalmers ' s The Conscious Mind BRIAN

David Chalmers's book is impressive in many ways. I admire the great skill, incisiveness and breadth of vision with which he conducts his argument. Many of his controversial theses and intuitions I find congenial. Unfortunately I do not believe the book's central thesis, namely, that facts about consciousness are not physical facts. Much of the book is devoted either to establishing this, or to...

David J. Chalmers The Singularity A Philosophical Analysis

What happens when machines become more intelligent than humans? One view is that this event will be followed by an explosion to evergreater levels of intelligence, as each generation of machines creates more intelligent machines in turn. This intelligence explosion is now often known as the ‘singularity’. The basic argument here was set out by the statistician I.J. Good in his 1965 article ‘Spe...

Comment on David Chalmers ’ s “ Probability and Propositions ”

For David Chalmers et al, eds., Metametaphysics, OUP forthcoming The Metaontology of Abstraction

ion as a legitimate form of implicit definition has been authenticated. And it is this, so it may be suggested, that requires the development of satisfactory answers to (M) and (E) and related questions. If it looks as if the truth of abstraction principles may turn on substantial metaphysical hostages, or as if there are special problems about knowing that they are true, or can be stipulated t...

Quantum carpets, carpets of light

In 1836 Henry Fox Talbot, an inventor of photography, published the results of some experiments in optics that he had previously demonstrated at a British Association meeting in Bristol. "It was very curious to observe that though the grating was greatly out of the focus of the lens...the appearance of the bands was perfectly distinct and well defined...the experiments are communicated in the h...