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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
Jeremy Butterfield
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
Augustin-Jean Fresnel
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
Travis Norsen
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
 
Daniel Koshland, Jr.

Daniel E. Koshland was an American biochemist, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1985 to 1995 the editor of Science magazine, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of which Koshland was a member.

Koshland's work included a study of bacterial chemotaxis, how single-celled organisms moving through the environment can sense temperature and chemical composition gradients. If nutrients are increasing in the direction of motion, or others conditions are more favorable, the bacterium continues. If not, the rotation direction of its tiny flagella reverse. Rotation of the flagella counter-clockwise drives the bacterium straight ahead. Flagella rotating clockwise cause the bacterium to tumble and face in random new directions.

Their sensors and motion capability let them make two-stage decisions about which way to go. As the bacterium moves, receptors on the bacterium surface detect gradients of chemicals. When the gradient indicates “food ahead” or “toxic behind,” the bacterium keeps going. If the gradients are not promising, the bacterium reverses the flagella rotation direction, which makes it tumble again.

This combination of randomizing its direction (generating random possibilities), followed by an adequately determined decision to continue (or not) is a primitive version of the two-stage model of human free will.

References
Bacterial Chemotaxis as a Model Behavioural System. New York: Raven Press.

In 2002 Koshland offered his definition of life based on "seven pillars."

The first pillar of life is a PROGRAM. By program I mean an organized plan that describes both the ingredients themselves and the kinetics of the interactions among ingredients as the living system persists through time. For the living systems we observe on Earth, this program is implemented by the DNA that encodes the genes of Earth's organisms and that is replicated from generation to generation, with small changes but always with the overall plan intact. The genes in turn encode for chemicals—the proteins, nucleic acids, etc.—that carry out the reactions in living systems. It is in the DNA that the program is summarized and maintained for life on Earth.

The second pillar of life is IMPROVISATION. Because a living system will inevitably be a small fraction of the larger universe in which it lives, it will not be able to control all the changes and vicissitudes of its environment, so it must have some way to change its program. If, for example, a warm period changes to an ice age so that the program is less effective, the system will need to change its program to survive. In our current living systems, such changes can be achieved by a process of mutation plus selection that allows programs to be optimized for new environmental challenges that are to be faced.

The third of the pillars of life is COMPARTMENTALIZATION. All the organisms that we consider living are confined to a limited volume, surrounded by a surface that we call a membrane or skin that keeps the ingredients in a defined volume and keeps deleterious chemicals—toxic or diluting—on the outside. Moreover, as organisms become large, they are divided into smaller compartments, which we call cells (or organs, that is, groups of cells), in order to centralize and specialize certain functions within the larger organism. The reason for compartmentalization is that life depends on the reaction kinetics of its ingredients, the substrates and catalysts (enzymes) of the living system. Those kinetics depend on the concentrations of the ingredients. Simple dilution of the contents of a cell kills it because of the decrease in concentration of the contents, even though all the chemicals remain as active as before dilution. So a container is essential to maintain the concentrations and arrangement of the interior of the living organism and to provide protection from the outside.

The fourth pillar of life is ENERGY. Life as we know it involves movement—of chemicals, of the body, of components of the body—and a system with net movement cannot be in equilibrium. It must be an open and, in this case, metabolizing system. Many chemical reactions are going on inside the cell, and molecules are coming in from the outer environment—O2, CO2, metals, etc. The organism's system is parsimonious; many of the chemicals are recycled multiple times in an organism's lifetime (CO2, for example, is consumed in photosynthesis and then produced by oxidation in the system), but originally they enter the living system from the outside, so thermodynamicists call this an open system. Because of the many reactions and the fact that there is some gain of entropy (the mechanical analogy would be friction), there must be a compensation to keep the system going and that compensation requires a continuous source of energy. The major source of energy in Earth's biosphere is the Sun—although life on Earth gets a little energy from other sources such as the internal heat of the Earth—so the system can continue indefinitely by cleverly recycling chemicals as long as it has the added energy of the Sun to compensate for its entropy changes.

The fifth pillar is REGENERATION. Because a metabolizing system composed of catalysts (enzymes) and chemicals (metabolites) in a container is constantly reacting, it will inevitably be associated with some thermodynamic losses. Because those losses will eventually change the kinetics of the program adversely, there must be a plan to compensate for those losses, that is, a regeneration system. One such regeneration system is the diffusion or active transport of chemicals into the living organism. For example, CO2 and its products replace the losses inevitable in chemical reactions. Another system for regeneration is the constant resynthesis of the constituents of the living system that are subject to wear and tear. For example, the heart muscle of a normal human beats 60 times a minute—3600 times an hour, 1,314,000 times a year, 91,980,000 times a lifetime. No man-made material has been found that would not fatigue and collapse under such use, which is why artificial hearts have such a short utilization span. The living system, however, continually resynthesizes and replaces its heart muscle proteins as they suffer degradation; the body does the same for other constituents—its lung sacs, kidney proteins, brain synapses, etc.

This is not the only way the living system regenerates. The constant resynthesis of its proteins and body constituents is not quite perfect, so the small loss for each regeneration in the short run becomes a larger loss overall for all the processes in the long run, adding up to what we call aging. So living systems, at least the ones we know, use a clever trick to perfect the regeneration process—that is, they start over. Starting over can be a cell dividing, in the case of Escherichia coli, or the birth of an infant for Homo sapiens. By beginning a new generation, the infant starts from scratch, and all the chemical ingredients, programs, and other constituents go back to the beginning to correct the inevitable decline of a continuously functioning metabolizing system

The sixth pillar is ADAPTABILITY. Improvisation is a form of adaptability, but is too slow for many of the environmental hazards that a living organism must face. For example, a human that puts a hand into a fire has a painful experience that might be selected against in evolution—but the individual needs to withdraw his hand from the fire immediately to live appropriately thereafter. That behavioral response to pain is essential to survival and is a fundamental response of living systems that we call feedback. Our bodies respond to depletion of nutrients (energy supplies) with hunger, which causes us to seek new food, and our feedback then prevents our eating to an excess of nutrients (that is, beyond satiety) by losing appetite and eating less. Walking long distances on bare feet leads to calluses on one's feet or the acquisition of shoes to protect them. These behavioral manifestations of adaptability are a development of feedback and feedforward responses at the molecular level and are responses of living systems that allow survival in quickly changing environments. Adaptability could arguably include improvisation (pillar number 2), but improvisation is a mechanism to change the fundamental program, whereas adaptability (pillar number 6) is a behavioral response that is part of the program. Just as these two necessities are handled by different mechanisms in our Earth-bound system, I believe they will be different concepts handled by different mechanisms in any newly devised or newly discovered system.

Finally, and far from the least, is the seventh pillar, SECLUSION. By seclusion, in this context, I mean something rather like privacy in the social world of our universe. It is essential for a metabolizing system with many reactions going on at the same time, to prevent the chemicals in pathway 1 (A→B→C→D for example) from being metabolized by the catalysts of pathway 2 (R→S→T→U). Our living system does this by a crucial property of life—the specificity of enzymes that work only on the molecules for which they were designed and are not confused by collisions with miscellaneous molecules from other pathways. In a sense this property is like insulating an electrically conducting wire so it isn't short-circuited by contact with another wire. The seclusion of the biological system is not absolute. It can be interrupted by feedback and feedforward messages, but only messages that have specifically arranged conduits can be received. There is also specificity in DNA and RNA interactions. It is this seclusion of pathways that allows thousands of reactions to occur with high efficiency in the tiny volumes of a living cell, while simultaneously receiving selective signals that ensure an appropriate response to environmental changes.

These seven pillars of life—P(rogram), I(mprovisation), C(ompartmentalization), E(nergy), R(egeneration), A(daptability), S(eclusion), PICERAS, for short—are the fundamental principles on which a living system is based. Further examination makes it clear how life on Earth has implemented these principles. But these mechanisms may not be perfect and might be improved. For example, the regeneration system used by life on Earth is imperfect for any particular individual and hence requires a “starting over.” That mechanism in turn requires a device for heredity to maintain continuity in the program for the next generation. Suppose the proteins, hormones, and cells had a better feedback system so that the gradual decay with age was constantly being corrected by feedback. Then, the need to start over would disappear. That would eliminate the death and hereditary needs of the current system. It would also mean that a single individual could live forever without aging. There would be a problem, however, because the starting over (death and a new birth) provide an opportunity for improvisations (mutations in the DNA), and that pillar would need to be replaced by a new mechanism to achieve the same advantage.

Such dilemmas make us confront another reality. At the present time the way in which mutation and selection (survival of the fittest) has worked over evolutionary time no longer seems to apply to Homo sapiens. We have become more compassionate, less demanding. Perhaps a newer approach—longer life and deliberate changes in the program by a supreme council of wise Solomons—could be substituted for the cruder survival-of-the-fittest scenario. I do not necessarily advocate such a drastic change in the current mechanism of improvisation, which has served us well over the centuries, but am only pointing out that there is the possibility to change particular mechanisms as long as we maintain the pillars.

This listing of the seven foundations of life allows us to think differently about the goals and therapeutic approaches of current research. The adaptability concept, for example, is certainly one in which better mechanisms could be devised, probably by adjusting existing mechanisms to allow these to work more effectively in real living systems. For example, the eye can adapt to outside light levels that range over 10 orders of magnitude (1010), whereas the other organs of the human body have much smaller ranges. Perhaps other organs such as the lungs, kidneys, or spleen could be improved so that they would function over larger concentrations of regulators and aging would be less harmful to them.

Thus, the PICERAS principles seem to be necessary for the operation of a living system. Mechanisms to achieve such a system can be varied as long as they satisfy the thermodynamic and kinetic requirements. We have one example, life on Earth, showing how it can be done. It will be interesting to see whether a different, self-consistent set of mechanisms could yield a model with life as an outcome.

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