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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
 
Tim Maudlin

Tim Maudlin's book Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity is a critical analysis of Bell's Theorem.

Maudlin says that the "interaction among distantly separated particles presents profound interpretive difficulties." (p.20). He cites three features of this "quantum connection" between particles as surprising, even "weird." (pp.22-23)

  1. The quantum connection is unattenuated.

    It appears to be unaffected by distance. Quantum theory predicts that exactly the same correlations will continue unchanged no matter how far apart the two wings of the experiment are

  2. The quantum connection is discriminating.

    It is a private arrangement between two particles. When one is measured, its twin is affected, but no other particle need be. Only particles which have interacted with each other in the past seem to retain this power of private communication.

  3. The quantum connection is faster than light (Instantaneous).

    [N]o relativistic theory can permit instantaneous effects or causal processes. We must therefore regard with grave suspicion anything thought to outpace light.

Maudlin does not discuss the possibility that there is a "common cause" for these distant but perfect correlations, coming along with the particles from the past light cone, so not violating relativity. Nor does he mention David Bohm's claim that no such common cause is possible.

Bohm suggested that "local hidden variables" traveling with the particles might explain the perfect correlations (which John Bell said seemed "pre-determined"), but it could not explain the apparent randomness (indeterminism) of the sequence of measurement outcomes of each particle (critically needed for the random bit strings of quantum cryptography).

Maudlin's method is a logical analysis of the "questions" and "answers" in a game that reproduces the results of a sequence of Bell-test experiments, similar to that in David Mermin's 1985 "contraption."

Maudlin writes...

Over a long run of this game you are aiming to reproduce the behavior of the photons in similar circumstances, That is, after a long series of plays, you want to ensure that
  • Fact 1: When you and your friend happen to be asked the same question you always give the same answer.
  • Fact 2: When your questions differ by 30, that is, when one is asked "0?" and the other "30?" or one is asked "30?" and the other "60?", you and your friend agree 3/4 of the time
  • Fact 3: When your questions differ by 60, that is, when one of you is asked "0?" and the other "60?", your answers agree 1/4 of the time.

After all, this is what the photons manage to do. (Non-Locality, p.14)

The "questions" in Maudlin's logical game correspond to the physical angle settings of the particle detectors at positions A and B. The "answers" correspond to the spin directions ("up" or "down") found as outcomes of the measurements. When A and B measure by pre-agreement at the same angle (ask the same "questions"), their spins are always perfectly correlated in opposite directions. This is Maudlin's fact 1.

When their "questions" (the measurement angles) differ by angle θ, their correlations are diminished by the square of the angle's cosine - cos2θ, as Maudlin explains.

The mathematics of quantum theory predicts precisely the observed experimental results.

The Dirac/Schrödinger "superposition" equation for Schrödinger's two-particle wave function is

| ψ12 > = (1/√2) | + - > - (1/√2) | - + >

The coefficients 1/√2, when squared, tell us that there is a 50/50 chance that the particles will be found in the state + - or in the state - +.

When measurements by A and B (the "questions") are made at angles differing by angle 30°, since the cosine of 30° is 1/2, the "answers" agree cos230° = 1/4 of the time. This is Maudlin's fact 2.

When measurements by A and B (the "questions") are made at angles differing by angle 60°, since the cosine of 60° is √3/2, the "answers" agree cos260° = 3/4 of the time. This is Maudlin's fact 3.

Now when measurements differ by 30°, the "answers" disagree sin230° = 1/4 of the time.

Instead of the state + - or the state - +, the outcomes that disagree are found randomly in states + + or - -. Either outcome appears to violate the conservation of total spin angular momentum zero.

We call the conserved total spin zero a "hidden constant of the motion". The initial entangled state is a "singlet" state that is spherically symmetric. The rotational symmetry means it has spin angular momentum zero in any and all directions. Measurements will find the spins opposite as long as the measurements are made in perfectly parallel or perfectly opposite directions.

Conservation ensures that this shared property of the two particles is true at all times up to the moment of (simultaneous) measurements. If measurements are not made symmetrically, the measurement apparatus imparts additional spin angular momentum to the particles, and its loss of that spin balances the particles' gain, so the particles plus the apparatus continue to conserve the total spin angular momentum zero.

The conservation law is the implicit reason why David Bohm, John Bell, and many others say that when one particle is measured spin-up, we instantly know the other must be spin-down.

Exactly how the bit strings of data at A and at B are indeterministically random, even as the combined A and B results appear to be deterministically correlated, Maudlin does not discuss.

But the Dirac/Schrödinger "superposition" equation also explains this perfectly. The fact there is a 50/50 chance that the particles will be found in the state + - or in the state - +, just as observed, means that the bit strings at A and B can be used as quantum keys that have been distributed to A and B in a way that cannot be intercepted by an eavesdropper.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) does not require impossible faster-than-light instantaneous actions at a distance. No "hidden variables" are needed. The "hidden constant" will suffice.

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