Saturday, 19 November 2022
Sunday, 23 October 2022
New Substack, new free post: Conspiracy theories and theistic-megacultism (theist religion), abductive inference, and psychological evidence.
An introductory and academic-blog-level tutorial about philosophical argumentation combined with a demonstration that megacultist-theist (religious theist) belief is a direct form of conspiracy theoretic belief. If you don't agree demons and Satan will get you. And if they don't some kind of god will.
Conspiracy theories and theistic-megacultism (theist religion), abductive inference, reductios, and psychological evidence., by @longbulusiboshi https://t.co/n0x19EcXBT
— Bruce Long (@longbulusiboshi) October 23, 2022
Monday, 17 October 2022
New Course Syllabus: Naturalistic Metaphysics (Advanced)
Wednesday, 12 October 2022
Unpopular Philosophy of Psychology of Religion: Megacultism as a mental disorder.
I have posted a new blogpost at IIMx:
Unpopular Philosophy of Psychology of Religion: Megacultism as a mental disorder..
— The Institute for Informational Metaphysics (@info_onto_iimx) October 11, 2022
Tuesday, 11 October 2022
New Course Syllabus: Introduction to The Philosophy of Information
Friday, 7 October 2022
New Course Syllabus: The Informational Turn In Philosophy (Advanced)
I have updated the course to provide an advanced version.
Originally I had omitted most of the most historical philosophical texts from the set readings, deferring instead to later commentarial texts with additional theses. This advanced version is very little changed in that respect with the exception of an addition from non-philosopher Rolf Landauer.
There are further additions to the set readings and additional readings by Allo and Sequoiah-Grayson. Some of Allo's papers are quite long, and so this has been taken into consideration.
Details
I have added an esoteric (in philosophical terms) but very relevant (in scientific or naturalistic metaphysical terms) paper by Rolf Landauer about physicalism about information and physicalism about information representation for the purposes of context and historical background. Landauer was not a philosopher and many philosophers regard his physicalism as naïve (and in important ways it is so). However I am inclined towards scientific or naturalistic metaphysics - and so is much of the informational turn in philosophy - and so Landauer's physicalist contribution is important.
I have also added Allo's development of Landauer's principle, and his important work with Mares about informational semantics.
Sequoiah-Grayson, like Restall, is a logician first and a philosopher 'next-first', but his paper Epistemic closure and commutative, nonassociative residuated structures is an excellent introduction to, and advanced development of, the concepts salient to the intersection between informational logic and informational epistemology: especially with regard to epistemic closure and its relation to information flow in deductive inference. I recommend pp113-117 only as required reading, with the remainder of section 2 of the paper left for those familiar with modal, deontic and multi-modal logics. That being said, a scholar trained in classical logic but with some reading in and exposure to non-classical logics should be able to follow Sequoiah-Grayson's exposition, which is clear and very well structured and explains most concepts more than adequately.
There are many other great philosophers of information whose work is not included because it is less salient to the aims of this course, or because it is too advanced or specialised in terms of either informational metaphysics, informational epistemology, or statistics for the intended audience. Moreover, the course is as big as permissible already.
There is one informational metaphysics omission in the current syllabus that is probably egregious:
Bueno, O. (2010). Structuralism and information. Metaphilosophy. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9973.2010.01641.x
Add as you see fit.
Naturally, the ethics module constitutes the least well-fitted and coheres relatively little with the other material, and so drop it if you wish to focus on other subdisciplines.
Course Aims: To make the intermediate and advanced philosophy scholar competent and well-versed in the primary features and concepts of, and issues or controversies surrounding, the informational turn in philosophy broadly construed and as it applies to metaphysics, logic, cognitive science, the philosophy of biology and science, epistemology, and ethics.
You can download the advanced syllabus here.
Thursday, 6 October 2022
New Course Syllabus: The Informational Turn In Philosophy
Rationale:
This course is an intermediate to advanced undergraduate course designed to make scholars already familiar with introductory philosophy of information competent to engage with more difficult and advanced problems and concepts in that subdiscipline in the context of the informational turn in philosophy.
Course Aims:
To make the intermediate and advanced philosophy scholar competent and well-versed in the primary features and concepts of, and issues or controversies surrounding, the informational turn in philosophy broadly construed and as it applies to metaphysics, logic, cognitive science, the philosophy of biology and science, epistemology, and ethics.
You can download the current syllabus here.
Saturday, 16 July 2022
Public philosophy happens...
PDMT or The Probabilistic Difference Maker Theory (Scarantino and Piccinini), Deacon's systems theory and Percian semiotics based 'absence' theory, and Floridi's transcendental binary relation reduction all have two things in common: 1 They're all theories (or perhaps more of
— Bruce Long 龙布鲁斯博士 (@longbulusiboshi) July 16, 2022
Any sufficiently complex information processor *might* do. There is the question of whether the material constituents of the processing system matter. It could be that neuroprotein circuits and synapses, or something very like them, are necessary conditions. #consciousness https://t.co/ZHuyhWPlUV
— Bruce Long 龙布鲁斯博士 (@longbulusiboshi) July 14, 2022
Natural information that inheres in natural systems is not alethic. It's not something that has the property of being true or false (or even only true). This is a statement of rejection of the veridicality thesis. You've either got an encoded representation (signal/message)
— Bruce Long 龙布鲁斯博士 (@longbulusiboshi) July 14, 2022
Friday, 1 April 2022
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