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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
 
Brian Goodwin

Brian Goodwin was a mathematician and biologist who helped found the field of mathematical and theoretical biology, which includes modeling, complex systems biology, bioinformatics, and computational biology. He was a co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, where the emphasis was on deterministic chaos and the self-organization of complex adaptive systems as the model for biology.

But Goodwin did not like the prevalent opinion that biology can be "reduced" to chemistry and physics. Like Ernst Mayr and others who called for a new philosophy of biology, Goodwin emphasized that biological systems have a history, unlike anything in physics. He liked the "philosophy of organism" proposed by Alfred North Whitehead's Process Philosophy and disliked René Descartes' dualism of mind and body.

He was a bit skeptical about Darwinism, arguing that genes cannot fully explain the complexity of biological systems. He thought that nonlinear phenomena and perhaps even new fundamental laws were needed to understand evolutionary biology. Complex patterns observed in nature might result from constraints imposed by complexity, with natural selection in a secondary role.

Perhaps Goodwin's greatest contribution to biology was the suggestion that biological systems, and subsystems down to the proteins (Jacques Monod thought proteins were purposeful - "teleonomic"), should be regarded as creative cognitive systems, using their knowledge to decide on actions and behaviors. He named this idea cognitive biology.

He described what he meant by knowledge, and how knowledge (and a knowing system) can give "meaning" to information.

I have defined knowledge as a useful description of some aspect of the world, giving the possessor the competence to behave in a manner which contributes to its survival and reproduction. The fact that we are dealing with descriptions means that there are codes or sets of codes which relate them to that which is described. The unravelling of such codes, which is the equivalent of learning to read an unknown language, together with the solution of the problem how the knowledge is transmitted reliably from generation to generation, has been a major preoccupation of contemporary biology: coded knowledge is located largely in the DNA, which acts as a primary memory store for the organism, this knowledge being in the form of hypotheses which need to be translated into active form for testing. However, there is a great deal of 'tacit' knowledge in other structures. The elucidation of the translation and assembly process from the coded linear sequences in the DNA to active three-dimensional proteins, which function as tests of genetic hypotheses by revealing their meaning, constitutes one of the triumphs of twentieth-century biology.

I used the term 'meaning' above in relation to the translation and testing of genetic hypotheses and it needs some clarification in this context. In coded form as it occurs in the DNA, the information for a particular protein such as the enzyme β-galactosidase (required for the catabolism of the nutrient lactose in micro-organisms) or a crystallin (a protein which forms the transparent lens of the eye) cannot be tested because it exerts no action upon the organism or its environment. Before it can be tested, the information in the DNA must be translated into a form in which it exerts a particular type of force and acts within a particular context. Thus the β-galactosidase converts lactose into glucose and galactose when it operates within the context of the bacterial cell (which defines particular conditions of pH, osmotic concentration, substrate level, etc.); while a crystallin transmits light rays in a particular way within the context of the eye. These activities may be said to constitute tests of meaning of the coded hypotheses in the hereditary material, involving the interpretation of the information. This interpretation takes place within a particular context, which in part determines the pattern of forces which operate during the testing operation. We then arrive at a distinction between information and knowledge. The technical definition of information involves only selection (e.g. specifying one out of a set of possibilities), but says nothing about meaning, which I take always to involve activity in real space-time. Thus knowledge differs from information in that it not only involves selection of alternative possibilities, but also includes instruction for action which, operating in a particular context, conveys meaning.

Goodwin marks the "discontinuity" between the human and the biological spheres as the use of symbols (abstract thought like his mathematics), a view shared by many theoretical scientists. Information philosophy focuses on the creation of abstract, symbolic information by humans, its communication, and its external storage for use by future humans (the Sum).
My own definition of knowledge as a useful description of an aspect of the world has itself dualistic overtones, since it can be taken to mean that the description need not reproduce the essence of that described, but only represent it in some formal sense. My meaning is that knowledge is manifest when there is a re-enactment of the process which is described, as the biological clock re-enacts the cyclic process of the night-day-night transition. The evolutionary history of the organism, which includes the experience of these day-night cycles, is embodied in the organism's activity. Therefore its knowledge is in its process; it is not something static, set aside from this process. Thus instead of a description of the organism's world emerging from the organism as subject, which is the Cartesian or the Kantian way of looking at knowledge, we have the organism emerging from the world as an organised, coherent whole in which knowledge is a constituent of activity: a constraining, ordering constituent, as described above. As Whitehead (Process and Reality) has put it: 'Descartes in his philosophy conceives the thinker as creating the occasional thought. The philosophy of organism inverts the order, and conceives the thought as a constituent operation in the creation of the occasional thinker . . . . In this inversion we have the final contrast between a philosophy of substance and a philosophy of organism.' The creative process thus realises itself through the organised activities of beings. For Whitehead this description applies not only to organisms, but to Nature in general, thus avoiding a physical-biological dualism. But we then find ourselves in the position of asking what is the nature of these beings if they are other than biological organisms; i.e. how are we to recognise other 'actual entities' apart from ourselves and other organisms? We are faced with some kind of distinction between the organic and the inorganic, between animate and inanimate. Whitehead regards this distinction as fictitious, arising from an abstraction. He also appears to deny that there is any significant distinction between organic order and mind. This denial results in the important assertion of continuity, of a basic unity in the world; but it fails to recognise different levels of creative organisation, and to distinguish between them. I have suggested a distinction between biological and physical process in terms of the concept of a cognitive system; but a distinction between organisms and minds requires, I believe, a theory of symbolic and moral processes which characterises human intelligence and contrasts it sharply with the constrained knowledge which operates in organisms. Symbolic thought has degrees of freedom not available to processes which employ fixed relationships of interpretation and meaning between structures and their descriptions (reproductions or re-enactments).

However, despite the necessity for clear distinctions between levels of organisational complexity in Nature, I believe that a major consequence of Whitehead's philosophy of organism is the resolution of the Cartesian duality in his vision of the world as creative process. The fundamental category of being is activity, creative activity. In relation to organismic process, knowledge is an essential ordering ingredient. Man as an actual entity interacts with every other actual entity, i.e. the rest of the universe, and this is how the world can be known, why it is intelligible. Knowledge cannot be obtained without this union and the way of science is the way of experience. Knowledge comes through the resolution of complication into greater and greater simplicity and the art of resolution is the art of life. A cognitive biology seeks to bring this vision into clearer perspective. The way is made infinitely easier by the extraordinarily penetrating insights of Whitehead.

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Chapter 1.5 - The Philosophers Chapter 2.1 - The Problem of Knowledge
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