All articles tagged with #metaphysics
In the AI era, Sam Buntz argues that consciousness may be irreducible or metaphysical, suggesting that digital AI (like large language models) are probably philosophical zombies—highly capable but lacking inner experience—while various viewpoints from neuroscience to Buddhism question materialist explanations and explore consciousness as a fundamental aspect of reality.
Biologist Timothy Jackson argues that the laws of physics are not eternal givens but descriptions of patterns that persist in a fundamentally changing, lawless cosmos. In biology, variation is abundant and inherently unpredictable, yet natural selection produces order. Darwin’s insight shows how variation plus selection explains stable patterns without invoking invariant physical laws, urging a shift from physics-dominated thinking to a biologically grounded metaphysics (biologism) to understand how structured order emerges from change.
The essay explores different philosophical models explaining the laws of nature, focusing on the 'layer-cake' model, which views laws as deterministic and producing future states from present ones, and the 'newspaper' model, which sees laws as descriptive rather than prescriptive. It also introduces the 'straitjacket' model, which suggests laws constrain possibilities without a flow of time. The discussion highlights the metaphysical challenges each model faces in explaining stable regularities in the universe, such as the consistent rising of the Sun or the boiling point of water.
Philosophy has yet to solve some of its most difficult problems, including the hard problem of consciousness, the question of why there is something rather than nothing, the Ship of Theseus paradox, and the demarcation problem of distinguishing science from non-science. Proposed solutions include weak reductionism, panpsychism, and the idea that the problems are unsolvable. Philosophers have also suggested paradigms, falsification, and a lack of concern for truth as ways to distinguish science from non-science.