Quine's naturalistic empiricism vs epistemological nihilism

Artificial cells as reified quines

Cellular automata were initially conceived as a formal model to study self-replicating systems. Although reproduction by biological cells is characterized by exponential population increase, no population of self-replicating machines modeled as a cellular automaton has ever exhibited such rapid growth. We believe this is due to the inability of cellular automata to model bonded complexes of rei...

Safety vs. efficacy assessment of pharmaceuticals: Epistemological rationales and methods.

In their comparative analysis of Randomised Clinical Trials and observational studies, Papanikoloau et al. (2006) assert that "it may be unfair to invoke bias and confounding to discredit observational studies as a source of evidence on harms". There are two kinds of answers to the question why this is so. One is based on metaphysical assumptions, such as the problem of causal sufficiency, modu...

Logical Nihilism

On the effectiveness of noise masks: Naturalistic vs. un-naturalistic image statistics

It has been argued that the human visual system is optimized for identification of broadband objects embedded in stimuli possessing orientation averaged power spectra fall-offs that obey the 1/f(β) relationship typically observed in natural scene imagery (i.e., β=2.0 on logarithmic axes). Here, we were interested in whether individual spatial channels leading to recognition are functionally opt...

Madhyamaka is Not Nihilism

Introduction Nāgārjuna (c. 200 CE) is the founder of the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy, and easily, after the Buddha himself, the most influential philosopher in the Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition. Despite the great consensus on his philosophical and doctrinal importance, there is little consensus, either in the canonical Buddhist and non-Buddhist literature of India, Tibet and East Asi...