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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
Tom Clark
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
U.T.Place
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
John Duns Scotus
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
David Shiang
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Peter Slezak
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
Werner Loewenstein
Hendrik Lorentz
Josef Loschmidt
Alfred Lotka
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
A.A. Roback
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Robert Sapolsky
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
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
C. S. Unnikrishnan
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Vladimir Vernadsky
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Jeffrey Wicken
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
 
The Only Mystery of Quantum Mechanics
In section 37-1 of volume I and section 1-1 of volume III of his 1964 Lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman wrote the following on the mystery of quantum behavior.
We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery. We cannot make the mystery go away by “explaining” how it works. We will just tell you how it works. In telling you how it works we will have told you about the basic peculiarities of all quantum mechanics.
In his 1967 Messenger Lectures at Cornell which were published as The Character of Physical Law), Feynman famously said that "nobody understands quantum mechanics" (p.129) and that the two-slit experiment contains "all of the mystery of quantum mechanics."

I will take just this one experiment, which has been designed to contain all of the mystery of quantum mechanics, to put you up against the paradoxes and mysteries and peculiarities of nature one hundred per cent. Any other situation in quantum mechanics, it turns out, can always be explained by saying, 'You remember the case of the experiment with the two holes? It's the same thing'. I am going to tell you about the experiment with the two holes. It does contain the general mystery; I am avoiding nothing; I am baring nature in her most elegant and difficult form.

What then is this "only mystery?" And why doesn't Feynman tell us more about it beyond simply describing the two-slit experiment? Information philosophy reframes the question and proposes a deeper question that is without an answer...

How Can Immaterial Waves of Information Influence the Behavior of Material Particles?
How can the pure mathematics of the Schrödinger equation (immaterial information) control the results of physical experiments? A great theoretical physicist like Feynman can appreciate this as "nature in her most elegant and difficult form." Feynman knows how electrons and photons behave, but he says that he (and we) cannot "understand it!"
Now we know how the electrons and light behave. But what can I call it? If I say they behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves. ...They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have ever seen before.

Feynman says particles don't behave like oscillating weights on a spring, nor tiny planets going around in orbits (p.128). What he knows and might have said is that the waves (actually the wave functions Ψ that are the solutions to Schrödinger's wave equation HΨ = EΨ) are not forces like those moving weights or planets! They are just mathematical probabilities for different possible places where experimental measurements will find the particles.

As information philosophy sees it, the deepest mystery is how abstract mathematical predictions (information) about where particles will be found is "influencing" the particles to move to those predicted positions, without concrete forces to push or pull them!

Should Feynman have explained this mystery as something immaterial affecting something material? Do you see the resemblance to René Descartes' Mind-Body Problem?

Can a theory of mechanics survive with such a deep mystery?
A theory we can describe but not explain? A theory that predicts the positions where particles will be found but cannot explain what moves them to those positions. Does it even deserve the name "mechanics"?

Feynman explicitly says "The question now is, how does it really work? What machinery is actually producing this thing? Nobody knows any machinery."(Character of Physical Law, p.144)

We can compare John Bell's paper on the EPR Paradox, which also claimed there must be a mechanism...

In a theory in which parameters are added to quantum mechanics to determine the results of individual measurements, without changing the statistical predictions, there must be a mechanism whereby the setting of one measuring device can influence the reading of another instrument, however remote. Moreover, the signal involved must propagate instantaneously, so that such a theory could not be Lorentz invariant.

Did Feynman think that entanglement is just another "situation in quantum mechanics [which] can...be explained by saying, 'You remember the case of the experiment with the two holes? It's the same thing'"? Not entirely. In his very brief comments on Bell's Theorem, Feynman said it was "no big deal," just another way of presenting what quantum mechanics already knows. See YouTube.com. But entanglement involves something more than the mysterious wave function.

A scientific theory can only be judged by its agreement with experiments. Although the experimental results are only statistical, quantum theory predictions are more accurate by several orders of magnitude than classical physics!

And entanglement is no exception. The two-particle wave function Ψ12 predicts the outcomes perfectly and completely. First, it predicts that the sequence of spins for each particle will be completely random! Secondly (and counterintuitively) it predicts that the total spin will be the same as it was at initial entanglement, conserving total spin angular momentum.

Quantum mechanics predicts that although the first measurement is perfectly random, the second measurement, no matter how far away when measured, will be exactly what is needed to conserve total spin, leading so many thinkers for nearly a century to believe that the first measurement must have "influenced" the second, that the particles are "communicating" at faster than light speed!

And thousands of Bell experiments have confirmed these theoretical predictions perfectly!

Is the "weirdness" of entanglement a part of the "only mystery" of quantum mechanics? It is, but not the only part, because quantum mechanics tells us precisely what causes the two particles to always appear perfectly correlated. The total spin of the particles is a constant of the motion that is conserved at all times, constraining the spins to always agree. We can view this constraint as a common cause in the past light cone of the two particles, coming from the apparatus that initially entangled them, located centrally between the two measurements.

The great exaggeration of entanglement capabilities comes from thinking that Alice and Bob are communicating at faster than light speed with one another. They are not. Alice and Bob's measurements are creating bits of information when they collapse the two-particle wave function coming from the entanglement apparatus located centrally between them. But since the bits are randomly generated, no meaningful information is being communicated from the causal center to Alice and Bob s well.

A ← CC → B
Does "Quantum Reality" depend on Conscious Observers?

Starting most prominently with Einstein himself, critics of the Copenhagen Interpretation say that it denies a "reality" independent of (conscious) "observers." This is extreme and seriously flawed, especially the absurd claim that particles "do not exist" when they are not being observed. What does not exist is the particular value of properties which quantum mechanics says has different possible values when measured.

The conservation of matter and energy means that aA material particle cannot go in and out of "existence."

"Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?," Einstein famously asked his colleague and later biographer, Abraham Pais (Rev. Mod. Phys. 51, 863–914 (1979), p. 907).

N David Mermin

What "doesn't exist" when no one is observing is up-to-date information (knowledge) about a particle's properties, where is it exactly, how is it moving, what is its internal state, etc.

And when an observer does make a measurement, the so-called collapse of the wave function does not mean that anything physical is moving! It is just information changing!

The foolish idea that a particle goes out of existence and returns when observed contradicts a basic principle of physics, more fundamental then the mechanical laws of motion, namely the conservation of mass and energy, as well as conservation of properties like angular momentum and electron spin, which are critical to explaining entanglement.