Citation for this page in APA citation style.           Close


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
 
David Shiang

In 2008, David Shiang wrote God Does Not Play Dice: The Fulfillment of Einstein's Quest for Law and Order in Nature, a polemic against the idea that chance is involved in the creation of the universe and the evolution of life. Shiang agrees with Einstein's well known quotation.

Like Einstein, Shiang's god is not that of any religion, but his basis for the origin of rational laws and order in nature.

Shiang's basic argument is that we can know through the use of memory that the past could not have occurred otherwise. This means that the future is not open to alternative possibilities and that there are no such things as equally likely outcomes.

If a coin came up heads, it could not have come up tails, according to Shiang. Each individual physical event is unique, and events can be treated as identical only for statistical purposes. But predictions about what will happen in the long run do not mean that chance or alternative possibilities are possible for any given event.

It is of course only an assumption that events that are otherwise similar can be assumed to have equal a priori probabilities. However productive that assumption, Shiang is logically correct that we cannot prove it to be true in any particular experiment.

Scientific evidence is always only statistical, based on large numbers of experiments. Evidence can not prove or disprove, so can not disprove the possibility (sic) that whatever happens is the only possible thing that could have happened. This is called actualism.

The hypothesis of the "uniformity of nature" lies behind the idea that a number of independent experiments can be treated as "identical." But the metaphysical problem of identity shows that although any two events can share some identical information, there is always some information in which they differ. So identity is always only "identical in some respects." which Shiang claims invalidates the claims by scientists.

Actualism is consistent with the idea that the total information in the universe is conserved. This is the case for a deterministic universe like "classical" Newtonian mechanics. It also describes pre-determinism by the laws of Nature or theological pre-destination by an omnipotent God.

The idea that information cannot be destroyed can be interpreted as the lack of disorder in the universe, that thermodynamic entropy is zero, as Shiang claimed in his 1979 book On the Absence of Disorder in Nature.

All science consists of theories built on statistical evidence gathered from a very large number of experiments assumed to be identical. But as David Hume's skepticism established centuries ago when he studied the problem of induction, the constant conjunction of any number of events B following events A cannot prove that a "causes" B.

Here is Shiang on chance...

It is often contended that there is experimental evidence for the scientific viewpoint that "chance" plays a part in the fundamental workings of nature, but we will see that there is none. Only those who are ignorant of the underpinnings of science state that nature has been shown to be ruled by "chance" and "probability." It is unfortunate that extraordinarily large numbers of scientists fall into this category.

When a fair coin is tossed several times, we observe that some of the time it lands heads, some of the time it lands tails. In the long run, we find that it lands heads about 50% of the time, tails about 50% of the time. Does this observation about the long run in any way lead us to the conclusion that on any single toss "we must give equal likelihoods for heads and tails," as Feynman asserts? Not in the least.

If we think carefully about a specific toss that is about to be made, all we can say is that one of two future states (heads or tails) will occur. We have no actual evidence to support the notion that these states are "equally likely" or "equally probable." This view of the event is simply an assumption based on long-term frequencies. The assumption is of such considerable importance that scientists and philosophers have even given it a formal label, "the hypothesis of equal a priori probabilities."

Shiang's argument against free will is very simply stated. Just as you cannot affect the past, he argues that by symmetry, you cannot affect the future. Shiang is in the tradition of actualists from Diodorus Cronus to Daniel Dennett, who claim that the only possible thing that can happen in the future is the one thing that actually happens.

One confirms the notion of actualism, the view that the actual, the real, is the only possibility. Dennett poses the question, "Could anything happen other than what actually happens?" The answer is a resounding and unequivocal "No." One finds that nothing could have taken place in any way other than the way it actually happened. "Could have," with all its ghosts and shadows, is reduced to the actual. No more uncertainty and speculation about "what might have been."

The shocking realization that the past could not have taken place otherwise is made by consciously exploring what has been called the "collective unconscious" or "universal mind." There is a wealth of knowledge in the unconscious that extends far beyond the life of the individual—some of this knowledge has to do with the past...

The actual (real) situation we find ourselves in today, whether arrived at in a straightforward manner or through what may be (erroneously) seen as a series of "chance encounters," "improbable accidents," "amazing coincidences," "astronomical odds," and "fortuitous events," was bound to occur. The present was wholly unavoidable and unpreventable. Physicists and evolutionarv biologists alike are constantly telling us how lucky we are to be alive and how we have overcome huge and overwhelming odds, but luck has nothing to do with it. The mathematically wild improbabilities they calculate are based on a fundamental misreading of reality, little more.

At first glance, it may appear that human freedom has no place in a predetermined world. Nothing could be further from the truth, although we must define precisely what we mean by "freedom." It can be said that all future events are completely predetermined, from the place where the next electron will appear in an atomic experiment to the winners of all future Olympic Games, but humans still make choices and act upon them. We feel free and go about acting as though there are no artificial constraints that limit our activities, but we are acting in the only manner possible.

We have the feeling of being free but we are not free.

I myself find this an ingenious state of affairs (brilliantly simple, one might say), but you can find it objectionable if you so desire. However, if given the choice, I think most of us would rather feel free than be free.

Perhaps there is a paradox here. (No one ever said that nature was straightforward.) We are reminded of Einstein's "Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht," which has been translated in various ways, including, "The Lord God is subtle, but malicious he is not." The only alternative in the future that is really "open" to us is the one that actually occurs, but since we don't know in advance which it will be, we are forced to choose among various courses of action. If we don't make a choice, we will probably end up not doing anything! We might not get out of bed in the morning. Or we might end up playing golf all the time. (It's not such a bad life; I know a few people who wouldn't mind trading places with Tiger Woods.) Incidentally, it is not as well known that Einstein later added, "I have second thoughts. Maybe God is malicious." Please keep this sentiment in mind as we explore why scientists have allowed themselves to believe that the lack of perfect design in nature is proof of Darwin's theory of evolution.

The fact that we don't know what the future will bring is an important and absolutely essential part of the way things have been designed. If we knew in advance that we were going to break a leg running the New York City Marathon, how many of us would choose to make the effort? Before the race is run, however, the future appears as limitless as our imaginations allow. We may even have hopes of winning! If everything is predictable in principle, things would be very boring (except in places like a casino or the racetrack). Much activity would revolve around refining our measurements and trying to make better predictions. Having irreducible human uncertainty about the future is what makes things interesting and keeps us guessing. We know that we cannot know what will happen, but we realize that only one outcome is possible.

Very few of us go about feeling that we are manipulated by unseen forces; to the contrary, most of us find that there is nothing stopping us from doing what we want. We make choices all the time and exert efforts to fulfill our desires. The fact that the future is not "open" poses few practical problems. Think of the issue in another way. In the view of reality I propose, you have been living in a predetermined world all along. You never have had any "free will," despite what you may have thought. But even though your choices may not have been "free," have you ever felt like a mere puppet? Have you ever felt a lack of "freedom"? Of course not.

Shiang is also in the philosophical tradition of hard determinists like Derk Pereboom and Ted Honderich. Philosophers of science like J. J. C. Smart defend a belief in strict determinism on Einstein's theory of special relativity, in which the future is already out there.

Shiang is sympathetic to the concept of superdeterminism.

[A]ccording to John Bell (of Bell's Theorem), who used the term "super-deterministic," the lack of free will solves a fundamental mystery posed by quantum experiments. The physicist assumes that he or she can choose which experiment to perform, but if this is not the case and there is no real choice, then "'the difficulty which this experimental result creates disappears." In response to an interviewer's question "Free will is an illusion - that gets us out of the crisis, does it?," Bell answers "That's correct." This elegant and uncomplicated solution to many mysteries of the quantum world is of the utmost importance, but it is hardly taken seriously by the vast majority of physicists. They would rather reject Bell's "super-deterministic" explanation (despite its beauty, symmetry, and simplicity) and keep the crisis of quantum theory alive and well, as they want to preserve free will.

Superdeterminism denies the important "free choice" of the experimenter (originally suggested by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg) and later explored by John Conway and Simon Kochen. Conway and Kochen claim that the experimenters' free choice requires that atoms must have free will, something they call their Free Will Theorem.

Following John Bell, Nicholas Gisin and Antoine Suarez argue that something might be coming from "outside space and time" to correlate results in their own experimental tests of Bell's Theorem. Since everything inside space and time is completely causal, the scientific equivalent of divine intervention - something like Kant's noumenal world - would be needed for a miracle or creative event outside the laws of nature.

In his 1996 book, Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point, Huw Price proposes an Archimedean point "outside space and time" as a solution to the problem of nonlocality in the Bell experiments in the form of an "advanced action."

Rather than a "superdeterministic" common cause coming from "outside space and time" (as proposed by Bell, Gisin, Suarez, and others), Price argues that there might be a cause coming backwards in time from some interaction in the future.

Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have also promoted this idea of "backward causation," sending information backward in time in the EPR experiments.

Shiang's insight into the unique character of each event is reminiscent of John McTaggart's "B-series" of time, which lies behind modern metaphysicians who support a "presentist" or "perdurantist" theory of persistence and the idea of "temporal parts."

The great Anglo-American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead attributed the continued existence of objects from moment to moment to the intervention of God. Without a kind of continuous creation of every entity, things would fall apart. This notion can also be traced back to the American theologian Jonathan Edwards, who thought God creates every person anew from moment to moment, and is responsible for the way the world is at every instant.

Willard van Orman Quine proposed that we consider an object as existing in "stages." Quine's student, David Lewis argues that at every instant of time, every object disappears, ceases to exist, to be replaced by a very similar new entity.

He proposes temporal parts as a solution to the problem of persistence. He calls his solution "perdurance," which he distinguishes from "endurance," in which the whole entity exists at all times. Lewis says:

Our question of overlap of worlds parallels the this-worldly problem of identity through time; and our problem of accidental intrinsics parallels a problem of temporary intrinsics, which is the traditional problem of change. Let us say that something persists iff, somehow or other, it exists at various times; this is the neutral word.
The road parts do not exactly persist. They are intrinsically different parts. The enduring entity does persist simpliciter.
Matter that disappears and reappears violates the conservation laws for matter and energy..
Something perdures iff it persists by having different temporal parts, or stages, at different times. though no one part of it is wholly present at more than one time; whereas it endures iff it persists by being wholly present at more than one time. Perdurance corresponds to the way a road persists through space; part of it is here and part of it is there, and no part is wholly present at two different places. Endurance corresponds to the way a universal, if there are such things, would be wholly present wherever and whenever it is instantiated. Endurance involves overlap: the content of two different times has the enduring thing as a common part. Perdurance does not.
References
Shiang's God Does Not Play Dice Video

Shiang's Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine Video

Normal | Teacher | Scholar