Steve Esser

@steveesser.bsky.social

397 Followers 417 Following

Philosopher (Philsci, Metaphysics). Other interests: effective philanthropy, finance/economics, Philly sports. stephenesser.com

Photo of boy with mismatched striped shirt and pants. A wall calendar says it is 1973.
Faded old photo of a boy dressed in colonial era garb.
But It got me wondering: what does even the minimal conclusion—that experience has a qualitative character—say about the mind-body problem? Not a whole lot, because it doesn’t speak to the other dimension of the so-called “hard problem of consciousness”, which is why there is subjective perceptual experience to begin with. It does not license dualism or panpsychism. On the other hand, even if you think, as I do, that the subjective/agential character of conscious experience will succumb to a naturalistic explanation, then we are left with the following: we can rule out a notion of physicalism that denies the world has any qualitative character (i.e. it can be exhaustively and satisfyingly explained by formal or mathematical treatment). Of course, “physicalism” doesn’t need to be committed to this, although most of the time this issue is not confronted head-on (Daniel Stoljar has what I found to be the clearest discussion of how this plays out when trying to offer positive definitions of physicalism).
Selfie of man in black coat with a flat cap.
Text of screenshot: Ball, an excellent and prolific science writer, has written a big long book. It is his attempt to convey the complexity that biologists are uncovering and to argue for a pressing need for new concepts and metaphors to convey this complexity. For example, is DNA a "blueprint" or perhaps a "program" for an organism? No. It is one critical resource for development, but now that we know more of the details of how this occurs these old metaphors fail utterly. Should we describe cellular functions as "mechanisms" or perhaps "computations"? Only if we understand how limited a purchase these concepts have, since the deterministic through lines they imply are nowhere to be found. Biological phenomena feature complicated and noisy fields of interaction involving a huge number of players across a variety of scales. There is no non-biological system that makes for anything more that extremely weak and idealized analogue for how living things work. The most important upshot is that we must use concepts connected to agency and meaning to understand biology. We can do this in a way that does not bring back the bad old days of invoking elan vital or theological purpose. Biological entities have unique causal structures that bootstrap agential behaviors from scratch.
A retail sign that advertises “PHD Jewelers.”
Photo of me (age 1) and my Dad. He is holding me and looking at me while I face the camera. He is wearing a fairly colorful (green/gold) collared shirt, with background mostly blue sky. Time frame is mid-1960’s.
This is a meme with 2 panels drawn from the Scooby-Doo cartoon. In the first panel Fred is about to unmask the villain (labeled "chemistry") by removing his hood. In the second panel it turns out the villain (now labeled "quantum mechanics") is invisible. This appears to imply that chemistry is not concretely identifiable with quantum physics after all.
Snowy field and trees in Bryn Mawr PA USA