Pete Mandik, Slow Earth and the Slow-switching Slowdown Showdown | PhilPapers

Pete Mandik, Slow Earth and the Slow-switching Slowdown Showdown | PhilPapers

The present paper has three aims. The first and foremost aim is to introduce into philosophy of mind and related areas (philosophy of language, etc) a discussion of Slow Earth, an analogue to the classic Twin Earth scenario that features a difference from aboriginal Earth that hinges on time instead of the distribution of natural kinds. The second aim is to use Slow Earth to call into question the central lessons often alleged to flow from consideration of Twin Earth, lessons having to do with relations of minds to spatially definable boundaries of bodies such as skin or skull. The third aim is to suggest a puzzle for adherents of cognitive content externalism having to do with the metaphysical requirements on slow-switching, a hypothetical process whereby changes in the relations between subjects and their environments are followed by gradual changes in cognitive contents.

Abstract: The Slow-switching Slowdown Showdown

Spiral clock
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The Slow-switching Slowdown Showdown

Abstract:

The point of this paper is to raise a puzzle for cognitive content externalism. Central to the kind of externalism I wish to raise a puzzle for is a commitment to a thesis of slow switching: were Oscar stealthily transplanted on Twin Earth, replacing Twin Oscar, the thought contents expressed by Oscar’s “water” utterances would switch slowly from being thoughts of H2O to being thoughts of XYZ. The puzzle I want to raise centers on the question of how the externalist can account for the rate of slow switching. What’s especially puzzling about this question of rate is best brought out by considering certain natural extensions of externalism to contents concerning time and a modification of the Twin Earth thought experiment involving Slow Earth—a version of XYZ-covered Twin Earth where (just about) everything takes hundred times longer to occur on Slow Earth. It is a natural extension of externalism to time concepts to hold that Oscar and his counterpart on Slow Earth, Slow Oscar, express different thoughts by utterances employing temporal vocabulary such as “day,” “hour,” and “minute.” A further natural extension of externalism is to hold that if Oscar were stealthily transplanted to Slow Earth, not just his “water”-related concepts would slowly switch their contents, so would, e.g., his “hour”-related concepts. The question at the heart of my puzzle for the externalist is this: How long would slow switching take on Slow Earth? If everything is a hundred times slower on Slow Earth compared to non-slowed Twin Earth, then if slow switching takes a year on Twin Earth, it takes 100 years on Slow Earth (which is, of course, just one Slow Earth year). However, as I shall argue, it raises certain problems for externalists to hold that even slow switching is slowed down on Slow Earth. The core problem raised, I will argue, is that the externalist, in holding that slow switching slows on Slow Earth, is led to embrace a contradictory account of what the supervenience base is for wide-content temporal thoughts.

Summer Seminar in Philosophy of Mind, Cognitive Science, and Neuroethics

Next week, I'll be heading out to Arlington, Texas where I'll be keynote speaker at a workshop organized by Ken Williford. The talk I'll be giving is based on a project of mine concerning conceptual content, externalism, and time. My talk is "The Slow-switching Slowdown Showdown" and I'll be blogging some more about it the rest of the week or so.

Here's the schedule for workshop:

The 2010 UTA Summer Seminar in Mind, Cognition, and Neuroethics

July 13-15, UTA Campus, 303 CPB

The Department of Philosophy and Humanities

The College of Liberal Arts

The Office of the Vice President for Research

Schedule

DAY ONE—Tuesday, July 13

9:30—“Continental” Breakfast in 303 CPB

9:45 Beth S. Wright, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts

Opening remarks

10:00 Dan Levine (UTA, Psychology)

It’s Not Just “Survival and Reproduction, Stupid”

11:15—Break

11:30 Daniel C. Krawczyk (UTD, Center for Brain Health, UTSW, Psychiatry)

What can Neuroscience tell us about Reasoning?

1:15-3:00—Lunch at Potager

315 S Mesquite St. Arlington, TX (817) 861-2292

http://www.potagercafe.com/

3:30 Heekyeong Park (UTA, Psychology)

Neural Correlates of Encoding Within- and Across-Domain Inter-Item Associations

4:45—Break

5:00 Erik Nylen (University of Iowa, Biomedical Engineering, NYU, Center for Neural Science)

How much can a Diseased Eye See?

6:00—Break

6:15 Fabrice Jotterand (UTSW, Departments of Clinical Sciences and Psychiatry/Philosophy and Bioethics)

Please Engineer My Brain…I Was Born a Criminal!:  Neuroimaging Technologies, Psychopathy and Moral Neuro-enhancement

8:00—Dinner at The Blue Danube

2230-A W Park Row Dr, Pantego, TX (817) 861-5900

http://archive.fwweekly.com/content.asp?article=4137

DAY TWO—Wednesday, July 14

9:30—“Continental” Breakfast in 303 CPB

10:00 Nathanial Blower (University of Iowa, Philosophy)

Dennett vs. Hacker: Mind, Metaphor and the Mereological Fallacy

11:15—Break

11:30 Jeremy Shipley (University of Iowa, Philosophy)

Varying Variance (Invariantly)

1:15-3:00—Lunch at Beirut Rock Café

1201 S Cooper St Arlington, TX (817) 860-5499

http://www.yelp.com/biz/beirut-rock-cafe-arlington

3:30 Peter LeGrant (Kirkwood College, Philosophy) and Kenneth Williford (UTA, Philosophy)

Spinoza and Functionalism

4:45—Break

5:00 Harry P. Reeder (UTA, Philosophy)

The Role of Language in Phenomenological Description

6:00—Break

6:15 Adam Briggle (UNT, Philosophy)

What Bioethics can Teach Neuroethics

8:00—Dinner at The Istanbul Grill

6204 S.Cooper St. Arlington, TX (817) 557-3377

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Arlington-TX/ISTANBUL-GRILL-TURKISH-MEDITERRANEAN-CUISINE/131433256039

DAY 3—Thursday, July 15

9:30—“Continental” Breakfast in 303 CPB

10:00 Matthew J. Brown (UTD, Philosophy, Center for Values in Science, Technology, and Medicine)

Love Slaves and Wonder Women: Values and Popular Culture in the Psychology of W.M. Marston

11:15—Break

11:30 Justin Fisher (SMU, Philosophy)

The Challenge of Syntactic Typing

1:15-3:00—Lunch at The University Club

Lower level of Davis Hall, UTA Campus (817) 272-5999 http://www.uta.edu/provost/newfaculty/docs/NFO%2009%20-%20Online-University%20Club.pdf

3:30 Charles Nussbaum (UTA, Philosophy)

 Can Natural Necessity Be Naturalized?

4:45—Break

5:00 Timothy Odegard (UTA, Psychology)

Diachronic Disunity:  The Severing of the Self across Time

6:00—Break

6:15 KEYNOTE ADDRESS:  Pete Mandik (William Paterson University of New Jersey, Philosophy)

The Slow-switching Slowdown Showdown

Temporal-content internalism

My Boltzman-brain doppelgänger, BB, is intrinsically physically identical to me throughout a duration in which I imaginatively estimate how long it takes to write my signature. It looks like there's a common temporal content between me and BB that supervenes narrowly. Further, the content looks to be Russelian, the content itself is an amount of time.

Suppose, however, that BB's in an accelerating reference frame and subsequently time dilated. Do the conceptual contents of our respective duration estimates diverge?

Pete Mandik
www.petemandik.com

Posted via email from petemandik's posterous