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| 1
March (Wednesday)
5:00
PM
Room 226 |
| Bence Marosán |
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Department
of Economics, College of
International Management and
Business, Budapest Business
School
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Phenomenology
of Animality: A
Phenomenological Approach of
the Origins of Animal
Consciousness
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This
presentation is about the problem how
and when
consciousness emerges in the realm of Nature. When we can say that a
living being is having a consciously lived, subjective experience? In
my opinion consciousness could be defined as a higher level of
information procession performed by living organisms. By
consciousness in this context I mean the lowest
possible degree of conscious activity:
sensation, as a consciously lived experience, as sensory experience
or consciousness.
My
idea is that we can separate conscious and non-conscious beings from
each other, and also unfold the very nature of consciousness, by a
closer analysis of how organisms handle and process information. The
notion of information I use here is a causal
and structural
one, and not a semantic concept. That is to say: it refers to the
peculiar way how a homeostatic material system (in this context: a
living being) reacts
to effects of environment.
In
my interpretation in order to unfold the origins of consciousness (of
lived, subjective, conscious experience) one has to compare the
peculiar way of information procession and integration on the lower
levels of biological complexity – first of all: on the level of
lower level animals (invertebrata) and microbes. We shall see that a
more refined mode of information procession and integration makes
possible a flexible and highly differentiated behavioural set in
animals – and on higher levels of biological complexity we can
understand this behavioural set as an external manifestation, as a
self-evident expression of mental activity. On the lower levels the
case becomes more and more ambiguous, but there are some fix points
of orientation. In my view one has to analyse the functional
isomorphism
between different levels and degrees of biological complexity. This
functional isomorphism could serve as an external
criterion
for conscious activity in different types of living beings. When two
types of living beings are functionally
isomorphic
in regard of information procession and integration, and one of them
is demonstrably conscious, the other must be conscious as well.
I
think that between vertebrata and invertebrates (first of all:
insects) there is a remarkable functional isomorphism, such a high
level isomorphism, which enables us to suppose that insects have a
sort of minimal consciousness, of subjective, sensory experience. The
big question in this context: some higher level microbes
behave complex enough, and they also process and integrate
information in a relatively high degree of complexity, which shows an
astonishing similarity with lower level animals (such as insects) –
so: are they conscious too?
My
answer is: higher level microbes do not behave and integrate
information in a sufficiently high level of complexity, their
behaviour and information procession and integration methods are not
sophisticated enough. But they are complex enough in order to suppose
a sort of proto-consciousness
in them, that is to say: a very rudimentary, very primitive
proto-form of conscious activity.
As
for phenomenology: in this project I use both first person and third
person descriptions, I try to combine them. By phenomenology in this
context I simply mean these first person and third person
descriptions
of biological phenomena.
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| 8
March (Wednesday)
5:00 PM
Room 226 |
| Szilárd Koczka |
| Institute
of Philosophy, Eötvös Loránd
University Budapest
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Ontological
minimalism and the problem
of laws of nature
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Ontological minimalism
about the laws of nature is the view that some of our metaphysical
assumptions about the nature of laws are redundant. According to the
minimalist position, a coherent account of laws can be provided without
reference to extra entities such universals or – metaphysically
motivated – restrictions about the fundamental physical properties. The
minimalist approach has the obvious advantage over ontologically loaded
alternatives that it does not refer to metaphysical assumptions that may
be refuted by future empirical evidence. On the other hand, one may
argue that this metaphysically “stripped down” account of laws may fail
to capture characteristic features of laws of nature. In this talk I
will argue that this objection relies heavily on the metaphysical notion
of laws and those supposedly important features are only relevant when
we commit ourselves to assumptions that cannot be supported by
scientific practice. A coherent account of the laws used in explaining
natural occurrences can be obtained without such commitments.
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| 22
March (Wednesday)
5:00 PM
Room 226 |
| Andrea Komlósi |
| Institute
of Philosophy, Eötvös Loránd
University Budapest
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Implikatúra
és metanyelvi tagadás
(Implicature
and metalinguistic negation)
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Az
úgynevezett metanyelvi, más néven rendhagyó negáció
esetei közé az olyan megnyilatkozások tartoznak, mint „Mi nem
vacsizunk, mi vacsorázunk”, „Nem néhányan látták, mindenki
látta”, vagy „Ez a leves nem meleg, ez forró”. Úgy tűnik,
hogy ha a fenti példák első tagmondatában szereplő negációt
egyszerű, hétköznapi negációként értjük, akkor arra jutunk,
hogy a beszélő ellentmond önmagának. Világos azonban, hogy
amikor hallunk egy olyan megnyilatkozást, miszerint „Ez a leves
nem meleg, ez forró”, rögtön valószínűsítjük, hogy nem az a
helyzet, hogy a beszélő egyszerűen tagadja, hogy a leves meleg, és
egyúttal azt állítja, hogy forró, amiből következik, hogy meleg
is, hanem inkább azt szeretné kommunikálni, hogy a leves nem
pusztán meleg, hanem forró. Vagyis nem egyszerűen azt
tagadja ilyen esetben a beszélő, hogy a leves meleg, hanem azt,
hogy a leves pusztán meleg.
Az
ilyen és ehhez hasonló példák alapján természetesen adódik a
következtetés, hogy többnyire azért nem észlelünk
feloldhatatlan feszültséget a rendhagyó negációt tartalmazó
megnyilatkozások tagmondatai között, mivel a mondat egészét
hallva az első tagmondatban automatikusan egy
implikatúra/explikatúra – példánkban: „A leves pusztán
meleg” – tagadását feltételezzük.
Előadásomban
egy olyan elmélet részleteit vizsgálom, amely a fenti
következtetést elfogadó elképzelésekkel szemben azt állítja,
hogy a metanyelvi negációt tartalmazó kifejezések döntő
többsége valójában az idiómák közé sorolandó, mivel
kiüresedett implikatúrákat tartalmaz, amelyek, elveszítve eredeti
közvetettségüket, már nem tekinthetők valódi implikatúráknak.
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| 29
March (Wednesday)
5:00 PM
Room 226 |
Zalán
Gyenis* and Miklós
Rédei**
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*
Department of Logic,
Jagiellonian University, Kraków
Department of Logic, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest
** Department of Philosophy,
Logic and Scientific Method,
LSE, London
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Categorial
subsystem independence as
morphism
co-possibility
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In the talk we formulate
a notion of independence of
subobjects of an object in a
general (i.e. not necessarily
concrete) category and discuss its
properties. Subobject independence
is the categorial generalization
of what is known as subsystem
independence in the context of
algebraic relativistic quantum
field theory. The content of
subobject independence is morphism
co-possibility: two subobjects of
an object will be defined to be
independent if any two morphisms
on the two subobjects of an object
are jointly implementable by a
single morphism on the larger
object. Examples of subobject
independence will be given in
different categories and subobject
independence in the category of C*
algebras with respect to
operations (completely positive
unit preserving linear maps on
C*-algebras) as morphisms is
suggested as a natural subsystem
independence axiom to express
relativistic locality of the
covariant functor in the
categorial approach to quantum
field theory.
Preprint of paper the talk is
based on: https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.03545
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