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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
Frank Jackson
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Andrea Lavazza
Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Hendrik Lorentz
Werner Loewenstein
Josef Loschmidt
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
Lord Rayleigh
Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
David Shiang
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. S. Unnikrishnan
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Margaret Boden
Margaret Boden's 2006 two-volume Mind As Machine is an extraordinary history of cognitive science, a field, she says, that
would be better defined as the study of "mind as machine".
For the core assumption is that the same type of scientific theory applies to minds and mindlike artefacts. More precisely, cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind, informed by theoretical concepts drawn from computer science and control theory.
(Mind As Machine, p.12)
Boden documents the transition in psychology from the behaviorism of B. F. Skinner (in which the mind was treated as a "black box" or a "blank slate" on which environmental stimuli make their impressions - behaviors being the mechanical result of some responses to stimuli being reinforced) to the new field of cognitive science in the 1960's.

Cognitive scientists explore the mind as containing parts that can be analyzed as logical systems much like the parts of digital computers. This is a very powerful metaphor, which Boden captures in her title, but man is not a machine in the Newtonian sense, as the reductionist behaviorists assumed, and the mind is not a computer, although like a computer, it is an information processing system which acquires, creates, stores, and manages the information needed to guide the actions of its body.

Machines that compute and communicate provide fruitful analogies and metaphors that help us to understand the mind.

In her 1990 book The Creative Mind, Boden explored the conflict between physical determinism and creativity or the freedom that creativity implicitly requires.

[Freedom] can be touched by science without being destroyed by it. A computational psychology can allow that much human action is self-generated and self-determined, involving deliberate choices grounded in personal loyalties and/or moral principles. Indeed, it shows us how free action is possible at all.

To a significant extent, arguments defending freedom against science parallel arguments pitting creativity against a scientific psychology. Worries about predictability and determinism, for example, crop up constantly in such discussions.

In either case, pure indeterminism gives mere chaos. To choose one's actions freely is not to hand responsibility over to the unpredictable...And in either case, predictability may be a virtue. One would not go for advice on a moral problem to someone whose judgments are not usually reliable, nor admire someone whose good deeds were always grounded in passing whims.
(The Creative Mind, p.300)

On the other hand, Boden sees room for random events as bringing us thoughts, supporting the idea that our thoughts come to us, but our actions come from us.
Thoughts triggered by chance events, in the environment or within the brain, may be fruitfully integrated into the psychological structures of the mind concerned.
(The Creative Mind, p.301)
Boden distinguishes "absolute randomness" (such as quantum physics provides) from mere "relative randomness" which may be predictable but is adequately random in some context (for example, pseudo-random numbers).

She is not convinced of quantum mechanics and its absolute chance. But she is optimistic that her "A-randomness" could be harnessed by creative computers. [Indeed, the latest Intel computer processing chips provide a purely random source of noise.]

What is useful for creativity in minds and evolution is useful for creative computers too. A convincing computer model of creativity would need some capacity for making random associations and/or transformations. Its randomizing procedures might be A-random; for example, its instructions or associations might sometimes be chosen by reference to lists of random numbers. But they need not be: R-randomness would do. Indeed, some creative programs rely on random numbers at certain points, and genetic algorithms can produce order out of chaos. Moreover, some computer models spend their 'spare' time searching for analogies in a relatively unconstrained way. This computerized R-randomness could exist alongside more systematic (and somewhat more reliable) 'rules' for generating useful ideas.
(The Creative Mind, p.242)
But Boden wonders whether absolute randomness exists and implies absolute unpredictability.
An event that is unpredictable in the strongest sense is absolutely unpredictable ('A-unpredictable'), unforeseeable in principle because it is subject to no laws or determining conditions whatever. In other words, A-unpredictability (like A-randomness) implies indeterminism of the most fundamental kind.

Whether there are any genuinely A-unpredictable events is disputed. According to quantum physics, there are. Quantum physics claims that some physical events, such as an electron 'jumping' from one energy-level to another, are uncaused and therefore (at that level of description) unpredictable. The electron jumps this way rather than that for no reason at all. In the terminology introduced above, each individual electron-jump is A/E-random (it has no order, and no explanation).

Large volumes of gases show statistical regularities that are adequately determined enough to follow statistical laws because of the law of large numbers, but they are still microscopically random.
However, quantum physics also claims that large classes of supposedly A-random events are neither A-random nor E-random, and are in practice predictable. These large classes of sub-atomic events are not A-random, because they show order in the form of statistical regularities. They are not E-random either, because these regularities can be explained by the wave-equations of quantum physics. Moreover, these equations enable the physicist to make precise predictions about the long-term behaviour (the statistical distributions) of the relevant physical systems.

Some people argue that quantum physics must be either incomplete or mistaken, because (as Albert Einstein put it) 'God does not play dice'. In reply, quantum physicists may admit that quantum theory could conceivably be mistaken, although they insist that only an irrational prejudice in favour of determinism would make anyone think so. However, they refuse to admit the possibility of its being incomplete in the way the determinist wants.

They cite a mathematical proof that quantum theory cannot possibly be extended by adding hidden variables which obey non-statistical laws, because such extensions must alter the experimental predictions in specific ways. (Since this proof was offered, in the mid-1960s, almost all of the experimental tests have come out in favour of quantum theory.) In other words, if quantum theory is correct then the A-unpredictability of quantal events is indeed absolute.

For our purposes, it does not matter whether quantum physics is correct or not. Granted, there may be quantum effects in the brain, triggering some of the ideas that enter the mind 'at random'. If so, then A-unpredictable individual quantum jumps might conceivably contribute to creativity (as other R-random events can do). But this does not put creativity 'outside science', any more than X-rays are. In short, quantum physics illustrates one of the ways in which unpredictability (even A-unpredictability) is not opposed to science.
(The Creative Mind, p.243-4)

Boden took up the subject of free will in her very first publication (Mind, 1959, v. 68, pp.257-8)

Upholders of a free-will doctrine, rather than determinists, would, I think, want to claim a special sort of certainty in relation to decision-statements. They might not be prepared to say that we have free-will at all times, but would at least claim that there are many times when we can, by a free choice, direct our actions as we decide. Now if free-will is to be claimed at all, it is necessary that, at times when we exercise our free choice, we should do so consciously, and that we should have direct and incorrigible knowledge of what we are doing, in order that we may be held fully responsible for our voluntary acts. But in order to claim this incorrigible knowledge, and also to claim absolute certainty that our "act of will" will be followed by the appropriate voluntary act, a free-will theorist will have to distinguish between the voluntary instigation of a chain of events likely to lead to the desired result, X, and the later part of the chain, which is controlled causally. It is only over the first step of the chain that we can have control.

In her massive Mind As Machine, Boden says that "cognitive science showed a way out of the impasse" between determinism and indeterminism, "by sidelining the determinism/
indeterminism issue and focusing instead on the huge cognitive and motivational differences between humans, dogs, and crickets."

Many others developed bizarre free will mechanisms
Before the rise of cognitive science, this issue [freedom] was normally put in terms of determinism versus indeterminism. So the neuroscientist John Eccles, for example, posited mysterious quantum phenomena acting on "critically poised neurones" in the brain. Why such phenomena are absent from the brains of dogs and crickets — or, for that matter, of human babies (who aren't yet free agents) — wasn't discussed. (Nor is this discussed when similar arguments are put forward today).

Here Boden appears to accept the standard argument against free will.

And like many others, she assumes Hobart's "determination" is determinism

Eccles's neurological hypothesis found few followers. But even if they found his "explanation" implausible, many people agreed with him that it's obvious that free choice is incompatible with determinism. The trouble was that the opposite seemed just as "obvious" to others. Compatibilists argued persuasively that indeterminism at the origin of action would destroy human freedom, because it would make it impossible to ascribe moral responsibility to people (e.g. Hobart 1934).
(Mind As Machine, p.394)
But Boden goes on to approve Daniel Dennett's two-stage model for free will.

We have found that Dennett's decision model, and his six basic reasons for supporting it, are more cogent arguments for free will than any libertarian thinker has developed! Unfortunately, Dennett is a determinist and compatibilist who does not subscribe to his own arguments.

Boden writes that

Dennett developed [his idea] in his essay 'On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want' (1978b: 286-99), and especially in his book Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (1984a).

This book was a philosophical analysis, deepened by a cognitive scientist's appreciation of computational architecture. (Many years later, Dennett would return to the topic — now, with a focus on the evolution of the relevant architecture: Dennett 2003a.) It provided a host of examples illustrating the psychological processes that underlie our freedom of action, and various (normal or pathological) restrictions on it. It made clear that only creatures with a certain type of cognitive–motivational complexity are capable of choosing freely. Or, rather, to choose freely just is to exercise those architectural features.

In other words, determinism/indeterminism is largely a red herring. Although (Dennett argued) there must be some element of indeterminism, this can't occur at the point of decision — for that would give us a type of "free will" that's not one worth wanting. The indeterminism, then, affects the considerations that arise during deliberation. The person may or may not think of x, or be reminded (perhaps by some environmental contingency) of y — where x and y include both facts and values. The deliberation itself, by contrast, involves deterministic processes of selection, weighting, and choice. (Deterministic, but not universalist: moral principles, cultural conventions, and individual preferences are all involved.)
(Mind As Machine, p.395)

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