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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
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
 

John Bell Inequality Video

On the 22nd of January 1990, Bell gave a talk explaining his inequality at CERN in Geneva, organized by Antoine Suarez (of the Center for Quantum Philosophy).

This is a ten-minute excerpt from that talk, where Bell describes how Einstein's hope fails - that "hidden variables" could eliminate "nonlocality," with its strange "action at a distance."

Actually, it is only non-physical information about probabilities that changes instantaneously over large regions of space when a measurement is made and a wave function collapses.

Click here to see it on YouTube, where you can turn on a line-by-line version of the transcript below (CC subtitles), which will follow along as Bell talks.

(For a transcription of the complete talk, click here. Video of the full talk is available here in Windows Media WMV format, but the sound is hopelessly out of sync, making it almost impossible to understand what Bell is saying, unless you read the transcript while watching. We have corrected the audio sync for this excerpt.)


(Partial) Transcription of Bell Video

It just is a fact that quantum mechanical predictions and experiments, in so far as they have been done, do not agree with [my] inequality. And that's just a brutal fact of nature. The genetic hypothesis, which seems absolutely compelling for parallel devices, simply doesn't work for nonparallel devices. You can't get away with the genetic hypothesis, and therefore the Einsteinian argument fails. No action at a distance led you to determinism, in the case of parallel polarisers, but determinism, in the case of off parallel polarisers, leads you back to action at a distance:

What Bell Writes on the Blackboard

Now, in my opinion, in answer to the question that you posed at the beginning, I don't know this phrase is too strong and active an assertion, I cannot say that action at a distance is required in physics. But I can say that you cannot get away with no action at a distance. You cannot separate off what happens in one place and what happens in another. Somehow they have to be described and explained jointly. Well, that's just the fact of the situation; the Einstein program fails, that's too bad for Einstein, but should we worry about that? So what?

Now, there are three replies to the question “So what?” One is that the whole idea of action at a distance is very repugnant to physicists. If I were speaking for an hour..., I would bombard you with quotations from Newton, and Einstein, and Bohr, and all the other great men, telling you how unthinkable it is that by doing something here, we can change the situation in a removed place. I think that the founding fathers of quantum mechanics did not so much need Einstein's arguments about the desirability of no action at a distance, as they looked away. The whole idea that, either there might be determinism, or action at a distance, was so repugnant to them that they looked away. Well that's tradition, and we have to learn in life sometimes to learn new traditions. And it might be that we have to learn to accept not so much action at a distance, but inadequacy of no action at a distance.

There are two more professional reasons for being discontented with the situation. Now one is relativity. According to relativity, the notion of simultaneity is relative. And events which are simultaneous for one observer are not simultaneous for another. So it does not make sense for very distant situations, to say that one event has occurred before or after another. So if we allow the result at one of these experimental set-ups to depend on what an experimenter does at the other, we have a puzzle, because we would not like what he does here to have an effect there, before it is done here. But if I say that this is affecting that, I can find some observer for whom this comes after that. So if I set up a traditional causal model, which the cause effects are allowed to be nonlocal, in the sense of propagating instantaneously over large distances, in some frame of reference the cause will come before the effect. So we have to be a bit more subtle than that somehow. I have to find some way out of this situation, which allows something somehow to go from one place to another, very quickly, but without being in conflict with special relativity. And that has not been done. We have the statistical predictions of quantum mechanics, and they seem to be right. The correlations seem to cry out for an explanation, and we don't have one.

The other reason is no signals. It is a fact that I cannot use whatever this nonlocal connection is to send signals. When you look at what quantum mechanics predicts, it predicts so long as you look at just one side or other of this experiment, you will simply have no information about what is happening in the other place. No matter what that other fellow does with his equipment, you will not notice anything funny happening in your side. As an analogy of that, I could say, supposing we were tossing coins, I here and one of you people down here. And supposing I had the power to say that your coin will turn an extra time before it falls on the table. Now you are looking at your coins and you see heads tails heads tails. And you don't know when I have exercised my power to turn it once more, because you didn't know whether it was going to fall heads or tails. So we have the curious situation, that to explain the correlations between my results and yours, we have to invoke some such mysterious power. But it is one which I absolutely cannot use to send you a message. I got here a demonstration of that. This is a computer simulation of such an experiment in which people are calling heads and tails. And when it comes up heads I have written 'H', and for tails I have written blank, so that you can see it from where you're sitting. And they're a whole series of random heads and tails, you can see it there (Fig 2).


Fig. 2. Result of computer simulation of a random series of heads ‘H’ and tails (blank)

Now at some point I exercised my power. My remote power to turn a head to a tail. And here is the result (Fig. 3).


Fig. 3. Inverted display of Fig.2: heads (blank), tails ‘H’. In some places the random code is changed.

So somewhere in there I have done something to the random code. I exchanged heads for tails, but you absolutely cannot see that. This message, as far as you're concerned, is as meaningless as the other. It's only if you have two copies of that, that you can compare it, that you can get something (Fig. 4).


Fig. 4. Superposed images of Figs. 2 and 3 (after B. Julesz)

That curious situation has inspired a musical composition. There is a musical composition called `The Bell's theorem blues'. I'm not going to sing it, I'll say the words:

Doctor Bell says we’re connected,
He called me on the phone,
But if we’re really together baby,
How can I feel so all alone?

Conclusion
And that is the dilemma. We are led by analysing this situation to admit that in somehow distant things are connected, or at least not disconnected. And yet we do not feel that we are connected. So as a solution of this situation, I think we cannot just say 'Oh oh, nature is not like that.' I think you must find a picture in which perfect correlations are natural, without implying determinism, because that leads you back to nonlocality. And also in this independence as far as our individual experiences goes, our independence of the rest of the world is also natural. So the connections have to be very subtle, and I have told you all that I know about them. Thank you.
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