Presence and Absence

Valerie Bernard is a graduate of the University of Toronto’s doctoral program in philosophy. She writes on theories of perception and imagination in philosophy of mind. She has taught at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, New Brunswick and St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. She currently works as an independent researcher and consultant specializing in AI ethics and governance. A post by Valerie Bernard > _Of course, it is indeed the genuine room that I aim at, just as I aim at the genuine Pierre. But it is given as absent; and at the same time its character is deeply modified since the external relation of contiguity that links it to Pierre is transformed into an internal relation of belonging._ > > Jean-Paul Sartre, _The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination_ , p. 129 It is a peculiar thing to think about what is absent. As I sit in this café, my eyes scan the dark stained maple bookcase, the woman on her phone, the computer in front of me. I try not to hear the awkward conversation at the next table or be distracted by the song playing overhead. I am confronted by these things. They are _present_ , annoyingly, inescapably present. But my eyes are doing something else as I scan this café. My focus shifts in and out, my eyes remain forward but it is as if they are turned around and looking back inside my head. I am thinking about what is _absent_ , about the person I wish was here, but who is not. He is gone. And so I watch the woman on her phone as she jots down notes and I scan the crowd at the counter, but it is as if I am _double_ seeing: I am looking at what is present, but I’m focused on what is absent. My inner eye is not turned toward the present but the past, to what is remembered, to what is _imagined._ Edmund Husserl (1931/1977) thought through the way that the intentionality of experience – meaning, minimally, the mind’s directedness towards its objects – goes beyond what is strictly speaking seen or sensorily experienced. By his lights, subjective experience involves an “intentional horizon of reference” that extends beyond what is immediately present to the senses. It involves “potentialities of consciousness” that include what Jonathan Mitchell (2026) calls _explicit_ alongside _implicit_ intentionality. Somehow the mind manages to fill in the gaps so that what is explicitly sensed is complemented by what is implicitly experienced, whether it is the obstructed opposite side of a chair, awareness of what is missing from a scene, or thoughts about what is imagined. In analytic literature this is referred to as phenomenal or perceptual presence. On Alva Noë’s (2004) account, my perceptual experience of the chair across from me acquires the content of the obstructed backside thanks to my possession of bodily skills. My sensorimotor capacities provide the information to make what is unseen from my vantage point part of my overall perceptual experience of the chair as a three-dimensional object. He calls this an experience of “presence in absence,” arguing that what is occluded is made part of perceptual experience through the active interplay between perceivers and the world. The question is _how_ what is absent can be part of my intentional experience when I am not moving around trying to see behind the chair. Kant (1781/1998) understands the imagination as playing this role: it is our imaginative faculties that fill in the gaps so that while we may see only three sides of a cube we are implicitly aware that it is a three-dimensional object with three more unseen sides. Amy Kind (2018) draws upon Kant’s theory of the imagination to offer an alternative to Noë, arguing that it is the imagination, not bodily engagement, that furnishes what she calls “imaginative presence.” But if you focus your attention to your _experience_ of what is imagined – whether it is an occluded side or an object that is not there – you may find that “presence” is an odd word to give to this experience. Try this: imagine that there is a chair in front of you when there is none. When I do this, my eyes move around the imagined contours of the imaginary chair to give me a sense of its dimensions and the space it would occupy. If I squint a bit, I can picture its color and how it would fit into the space. But this activity takes a lot of mental work and as soon as I get bored of doing it, the chair vanishes. It feels painfully clear that there is nothing there. The true defining feature of my imagined chair is its absence, its nonexistence, its nothingness. Across from my table at this café there is an empty chair. I can see the concave inside of its back rest and, logically, I know there is a backside as well but I cannot see it. Probabilistic thinking and memory tell me that the backside is likely the same as that of all the other chairs I see around me. But what if I play a game with myself and imagine that the back is painted in psychedelic colors and swirls? I can visualize that, but if I examine in myself what my experience is, I find that I am “double seeing” again. I had no problem attaching the backside to the chair when I held it conceptually as an implicit awareness. But once I engage my imagination and try to “see” the psychedelic swirls, my focus on the actual chair blurs while what I visualize is held somewhere in imagined space in a way that allows it to imaginatively face me. What I am visualizing now is not attached to the chair. It is apprehended as a separate thing, an imagined thing, a back-of-the-chair-that-is-not-there thing. I find this even if I now posit that the backside of the chair looks the same as all the rest. Once I try to “see” it in my mind’s eye, it feels separated from the chair somehow. But the image’s detachment feels abstract when it’s about chairs. It feels visceral and agonizing when it is about Pierre. Here the concept of “imaginative presence” feels like a cruel joke. I can look at the chair across from me and imagine him sitting in it, I can “see” his smile and “hear” his laugh, but there is no way in which that feels like his presence to me. The more I long for his presence in that chair, the more deeply his absence is felt. My mind is transported somewhere else, to moments when he was actually sitting across from me. That is the real Pierre, existing in another time and place. What is before me is an empty chair and no amount of concentrated visualization fixes that. I can use my imagination to make the imagined Pierre happy, angry or sad, but what I cannot do is use my imagination to make him feel present. Even when I dream of him, it doesn’t really feel like true presence. He looks distorted, his actions are strange, it is too fleeting and that dreamed Pierre is somehow not really experienced as external to me. His actions and features are malleable according to my wishes and fears, and I’m not entirely sure that I can truly see his face. It is more subtle, but it is still absence: absence of alterity, of reality, of a true encounter. This was Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1940/2004) point about the imagination; the imagination deals in absence and that is its fundamental distinction from perception, which deals in presence. Kant describes two levels or kinds of imagination, one _a priori_ and one _a posteriori_ , with the former allowing us to recognize objects as three-dimensional as a condition of experience. This is different from _a posteriori_ sensory imagination, which is what I have been discussing in this post. While it may be that at an _a priori_ level the imagination is filling in the gaps of experience such that I implicitly recognize that the chair across from me has a backside, it is not clear that sensory imagination truly gives me a sense of _presence_ of that backside. I can mentally _reach for_ , so to speak, the backside of the chair with the active use of my imagination, but now I am doing something quite different than perceiving. I’m imagining: I’m effectively _guessing_ at what is there and what it looks like. The point is that the imagination is giving us something that is unique to it, distinct from perception. The imagination allows us to experience what is _absent_ and make it part of the intentional horizon of reference for a given experience. But in doing so, it is not furnishing a sense of presence. Rather, sensory imagination is enriching experience by allowing us to access intentional objects that are absent and experienced as such. It allows us to do what I above called “double seeing” – we sensorily perceive what is present through perception while also attending to what is absent through the imagination. * * * **References** Husserl, E. (1977). _Cartesian Meditations_ (J. S. Churchill, Trans.). Martinus Nijhoff. (Original work published 1931) Kant, I. (1998). _Critique of Pure Reason_ (P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1781) Kind, A. (2018). Imaginative Presence. In _Phenomenal Presence_. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199666416.003.0007 Mitchell, J. (2026, September 9). The Puzzle of Perceptual Presence and Imagination. _The Junkyard of the Mind_. https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2026/9/6/the-puzzle-of-perceptual-presence-and-imagination Noë, A. (2004). _Action in Perception_. The MIT Press. Sartre, J.-P. (2004). _The Imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination_ (J. Webber, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1940)

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The Pedagogy of Disruption: Confronting the Mainstream Resistance to Philosophical Inquiry and Radical Education | Blog of the APA

In the landscape of higher education, teaching a graduate-level course on Philosophy for Children (P4C) within a research university presents a unique set of pedagogical and psychological challenges. This blog post explores the systemic and ideological resistance encountered when introducing mdaster’s degree students—most of whom are practicing educators in mainstream school systems—to the radical foundational

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Mini-Heap - Daily Nous

New links… Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may […]

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The Two Truths of Voting: Conventional Politics and Ultimate Ideals

--- Thumbs up for democracy after voting last week I went to vote early last week (and you should, too, my fellow voting eligible Americans!). As I did so, I thought about one of the stranger aspects of my personality. I’m interested in politics. I’m interested in philosophy. You’d think I’d love political philosophy, but it has never been my favorite part of philosophy. I’ve been known to dabble (another feature of my personality: I dabble in just about everything). But sometimes I even wonder if too much philosophy makes for bad politics, at least in one specific way—it often leads to making perfection the enemy of the good. To understand this odd fact about myself, I think—as I often do—about Buddhist philosophy. In particular, I think about the two truths. Originally this distinction was intended to make sense of a perceived incongruity in the Buddha’s teachings. The Buddha (in)famously denies the existence of a self or a core of personality within each being. But then he also talks about “persons” and “beings” in other contexts. It would be downright embarrassing if the founder of your tradition were to contradict himself so blatantly, so Buddhist intellectuals came up with a neat trick. There are two levels of truth: ultimate and conventional (originally this was expressed in interpretive terms as “drawn out” meanings versus “that which is to be drawn out”). Ultimately, the Buddha is saying there is no self, no core of identity, no essential “you” apart from the causal hustle and bustle of the rest of reality. But we do have conventions of talking about “persons” with “names” and “pronouns.” These are, as one of my favorite Buddhist texts, _The Questions of King Milinda_ , informs us, “mere appellations” or “mere counters” that name bundles of what are actually impermanent streams of impersonal events. The classic example is a chariot, which goes back even further to the nun Vārjira in the early Buddhist texts. “Chariot” names what is ultimately a bunch of non-chariot parts put together in a way that we conventionally designate as a “chariot” depending on human conventions like needing transportation, wanting to look cool with your horses, etc. Other examples might include statistical abstractions like “the average college student” (there is no such person) or my favorite, a cake, which cannot be reduced to the flour, water, sugar, chocolate, eggs, etc., but is in fact a complex causal process that arises from these items interacting in various ways. What does this have to do with 21st century politics? Ultimately, I’d describe my political views as anarcho-socialist, owing as much to science fiction authors like Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson as to any more standard political philosophers like Emma Goldman or Noam Chomsky. I think we’d be better off without anything quite so organized as nation-states, militaries, prisons, social hierarchies, capitalism, Soviet communism, etc. But as social creatures, we’re all in this together and cooperation is key—I’d just prefer it to be on a more local, nonviolent, egalitarian, ecologically sustainable, and voluntary scale. There’s no real reason we can’t make a relative paradise of this Earth for each and every human being. This is “utopian,” sure, but it is, as Le Guin would say, an “ambiguous utopia.” It would not be easy, but nobody ever said realizing true human freedom would be easy. Neither the United States nor any modern nation-state is currently anywhere near my political ideals. Should I wait until anarcho-socialists are on the ballot before I decide to cast a vote? That would be ridiculous. There are many things I care about more than my political ideals: human suffering, for one. And there’s plenty of that. Thus, I feel called to take part in the conventional world of politics. For a citizen of a relatively democratic nation-state, one of the most powerful ways I have of doing so is to vote. I’m willing to ironically entertain conceptual abstractions like nation-states and city governments as long as they serve real human interests, like reducing suffering. The problem, as I see it, is that humans often end up serving these ontological mirages instead of the other way around (a similar point can be made about much of our technology, most obviously these days AI controlled by tech behemoths).* There’s a lot of talk of voting as harm reduction, and some critiques of this idea. Some argue that the longer you focus on harm _reduction_ the less you are focusing on harm _elimination_. Voting for the lesser evil still leaves you with evil. I take this critique seriously. It’s not easy, for instance, to vote for national candidates who are going to continue my country’s military exploits (even a relatively benevolent military-industrial complex is still harming a lot of humans). I do understand the impulse to keep one’s hands morally clean, to quote a famous Le Guin story, to walk away from Omelas. But for me, voting is about better and worse, not good and bad. Good for me would require such a radical transformation of the human world that it would take far more than one election to accomplish this. I also don’t see this as an either/or. I can _both_ engage in conventional political action _and_ also work toward my ultimate political ideals. I can show up to vote, to protest, or to work for a political candidate one day and on the next day do the deeper conceptual work of challenging and changing the thinking of myself and others, often through the radically transformative work of philosophy and science fiction. To riff on Le Guin yet again: conventional politics is working as a realist; ultimate politics is working as a realist of a larger reality. Some of my favorite parts of Plato’s _Republic_ are when Socrates and friends wonder, quite openly, about whether this “beautiful city” (_Kallipolis_ in Greek) they’ve been imaging could actually exist on Earth. They never quite come to an answer, which gives both career Plato scholars and my students something to think about. Are my political ideals even possible? I simply don’t know. But I take heart from Mary Midgley’s essay “Practical Utopianism.” Utopian ideals are not precise blueprints for some possible future. This is, in fact, the problem with a lot of political philosophy: it’s far too specific. Like Midgley, I think utopian ideals can be directions on a map or spotlights plunging into the space of possibility showing us futures muted by the mists of our inability to predict the future. Ignorance can be a beautiful thing. In ignorance, there is hope. Despair comes from a belief that the future will be a certain way, often by the same predictive capacities of dystopian science fiction writers (last year I covered _The Hunger Games_ in a class, which seems far more prescient in the 2020’s than when it was published in 2008). My favorite dystopia is the Parable series by Octavia Butler. Butler’s brilliance there is not just her dystopian predictions (she even got “Make American Great Again” right), but her way of finding an ambiguous utopia through that dystopia. My own utopian ideals don’t necessarily require humanity to “take root among the stars” as the character Lauren Olamina says in the novels. Yet I think it’s precisely because I don’t know if my ideals are possible or what they would even look like should they be achieved on Earth or elsewhere that makes them hope rather than optimism. Recent election results in Serbia and Brazil give me optimism, as results here in the US may next week. But hope is deeper than optimism. It must live in Le Guin’s larger reality. Hope cannot be found in conventional politics, yet it animates conventional politics. Hope may even be ineffable, as some Buddhists claim—paradoxically or not—of ultimate reality. Hope lives in that space of “we can do better than this” even if we’re not entirely sure what “better” is or how we’ll get there. Conventional politics is always, at best, the lesser evil, but _less_ evil is how to you get to _more_ good—and eventually maybe even to an ultimate good. To use another Buddhist metaphor, voting and conventional politics are the mud from which the lotus of ultimate ideals may grow. Of course, I can’t know that. It would take an enlightened Buddha to know any such thing. But for the rest of us, ultimately all we have is the hope that the seeds we plant in the mud of conventional politics just might yield lotuses in a better world to come. --- **My fellow voting-eligible Americans: we have an important election on Tues. Nov. 3. I hope you will vote if you haven't already voted early. If you need information about voting, seehere. ** _--_ _ _ _*This is why I’ve never been “patriotic” in any conventional sense. There are great things about my country. We invented jazz, rock ‘n roll, and hip hop—all led by the efforts of African Americans, of course. We are the land of insipid boot-licking modern country music and Kid Rock, but we’re also the land of Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, and Rage Against the Machine. We’re the land of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, but we’re also the land of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Angela Davis. I love America, not because of its government or because I accept mythologies that ignore the horrors of our past and present, but because I love humanity, and part of humanity lives here, complicated as we are._

examinedworlds.blogspot.com

Zoom Info for Tomorrow’s Substack Philosophy Class for Paying Subscribers

Since the Ch. 5 ate up basically the whole class last week, we’re sticking with Ch. 5 for another week so we can do a proper discussion about it.

benburgis.substack.com

Zoom Info for Tomorrow’s Substack Philosophy Class for Paying Subscribers

Since the Ch. 5 ate up basically the whole class last week, we’re sticking with Ch. 5 for another week so we can do a proper discussion about it.

benburgis.substack.com

Zoom Info for Tomorrow’s Substack Philosophy Class for Paying Subscribers

Since the Ch. 5 ate up basically the whole class last week, we’re sticking with Ch. 5 for another week so we can do a proper discussion about it.

benburgis.substack.com

Zoom Info for Tomorrow’s Substack Philosophy Class for Paying Subscribers

Since the Ch. 5 ate up basically the whole class last week, we’re sticking with Ch. 5 for another week so we can do a proper discussion about it.

benburgis.substack.com

Platonism, nominalism and parsimony

**Platonist** : Platonism is ideologically way more parsimonious than nominalism. For Platonism has one fundamental predicate applying to objects: “instantiates”. Nominalism, on the other hand, has many: “is charged”, “has mass”, “is ____ units away from”, etc. **Nominalist** : Platonism also has properties or relations such as charge, mass, or being ____ units away from. **Platonist** : Yes, it has these properties among its objects, but there are no fundamental predicates corresponding to them. Platonism has extra fundamental objects, but that’s a question of ontological, not ideological parsimony. **Nominalist** : But the Platonist has names for these objects: “charge”, “mass”, etc. And if fundamental predicates count against ideological parsimony, so do names of fundamental entities. **Platonist** : If names of fundamental entities count against ideological parsimony, then either we have an objectionably anthropocentric notion of parsimony on which the parsimony of a theory depends on how many fundamental things we have in fact named, or else we are counting _nameable_ fundamental things, and we have to say that a theory on which there are 1090 fundamental particles is far less ideologically parsimonious than one on which there are 1080 of them, since they’re all nameable. But it seems absurd to decide how many particles we have on grounds of ideological parsimony. **Nominalist** : But Platonism has an additional categorial division, between properties (including non-monadic ones, if we want to be charitable and not count relations separately) and non-properties. **Platonist** : Yes, but this division is not fundamental, since it can be entirely defined in terms of the Platonist’s one fundamental predicate, and logical and modal operators that nominalists also need: a property is an _x_ such that possibly there are things that instantiate _x_. (Granted, this requires a sparse Platonism that doesn’t have properties like square circularity.) **Nominalist** : But surely there is a difference in kind that explains why some things can be instantiated and others cannot. **Platonist** : Sure, but not a difference in _fundamental_ kind. Fundamentally, Platonism should be considered a one-category theory with one predicate, and lots and lots of names.

alexanderpruss.blogspot.com

NAZA – on being a cog in a machine

I went to see NAZA last week. In case you haven’t heard yet, NAZA is a documentary on the Israeli machinery of mass killing in Gaza. It draws a picture of this machinery by interviewing 24 Israeli who work(ed) for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The interviewees describe how the machinery of killing Palestinians in Gaza works and relies on AI. Israel is able to listen to the phone conversations and read phone messages of people living in Gaza. It uses that information to guess who works for Hamas, and where those people might be. It then bombs the houses of those AI-identified targets, and in that process allows their families or anyone else in the house also to be killed, hence the title of the film: NAZA means ‘collateral damage’. “20 NAZA” then means that the Israeli military accepts that there will be 20 other people as collateral damage for the attempted elimination of one (presumed) member of Hamas. The numbers mentioned in the film vary – I recall the numbers 15 and 20, but also one situation where “500 NAZA” allegedly was approved by the IDF. The film is deeply disturbing for various reasons. One is to see the use of AI in this genocide, and the mistakes it inevitably makes (a house is bombed because the phone of a target is there, assuming that means the target is asleep; but since the target left his phone before leaving the house, his entire family is murdered, but the target is not). Another one is the evil actions the IDF takes – such as when the interviewees describe that at some point, a mental line is drawn in north-Gaza, whereby anyone who crosses that line will be killed. Civilians have never been informed of that line, and have to find out by trial and error. The dogs know about the line, since they wait until they hear shooting, so that they can then go and eat the murdered Palestinian (bodies are not taken away). A third, and what I might have found the most disturbing thread in the documentary, is the interviewees justifying their actions as being mere cogs in a machine, a machine they need to trust and believe in. They just follow orders; if they don’t do the work, someone else will – and after all, doing intelligence work for the IDF is a prestigious function to hold. There is very little self-reflection on the part of the interviewees, and almost no asking of the bigger moral questions (with perhaps one exception, which you’ll figure out when you see the film). It’s been more than twenty years since I read Hannah Arendt on the banality of evil – but I know I am not the only one who was reminded of her analysis while watching the film. But apparently it does not cross their minds that they might be perpetrators of evil, rather than only the descendants of those who suffered from evil. The documentary is stylistically very effective, since the interviews are conducted (in the darkness) on rooftops of buildings in Tel Aviv, while we see people around them in their homes conducting their lives. Only in the last five minutes do we see some footage of the massacres in Gaza, making the contrast between the technocratic talk of the IDF officers and the reality on the ground all the more painful. I watched NAZA Tuesday last week in an almost sold-out film theatre. At the end, there was complete silence. Sure, those who choose to watch this film must want to be informed about what Israel is doing in Gaza; we can assume that they read up on the atrocities. But this was different from both all the written reporting and the footage of the carnage in Gaza – for the banality of evil was given a voice. Defenders of Israeli politics have for many years been trying to gaslight defenders of human rights, and of the rights of Palestinians in particular. One of their strategies is to label any critique antisemitic; another is to claim that only Jews can truly understand the “conflict” and others should refrain from commenting. (This is why there will be no comments possible on this post; I’m fed up with defenders of Israeli politics trying to gaslight us). Many of us are citizens whose governments are supporting Israel, with military deals or otherwise. Israeli, and anyone with ties to Israel, can’t look away. But neither can we. Go watch this film if you can.

crookedtimber.org

Reminder: World Philosophy Day Coming Up Next Month

World Philosophy Day this year is Thursday, November 19th, 2026. World Philosophy Day, created by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), celebrates […] The post Reminder: World Philosophy Day Coming Up Next Month appeared first on Daily Nous.

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Russell’s chicken

The future is predictable (until it isn’t)

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52. The Basics of Cynicism

In this episode, I discuss the basics of Cynicism, an ancient philosophical school or way of life.

platosfishtrap.substack.com

The Fragrant Crystal of Time

thephilosophicalsalon.com

An Argument for Vastly Many Observers Smaller than a Proton

Here's an argument that I'm sure will give my philosopher of physics collaborator Jacob Barandes the fits. The conclusion will be that there are vastly many complex structures smaller than a proton, right here in our region of spacetime, populated by vastly many scientific and philosophical observers. Look at that drop of water running from the faucet to the drain. Within it are many tiny people, living many tiny lives. [Cancer can go hang. I'll keeping fly my weird philosophical speculations on this blog as long as I can. Naturally, I'm hoping to land in the long statistical tail, so that the field won't be rid of me anytime soon.] **Assumption 1: The universe is infinite.** The _observable portion_ of the universe, of course, is not infinite. It extends a only minuscule 46 billion light-years in every direction from us. But there's no reason to think the universe ends exactly at the observational horizon, with us at the center! How inelegant and un-Copernican that would be. An infinite universe is slightly more elegant than one with an edge. (Why would there be an edge? What would happen there?) And current physical estimates also tend to suggest that at the largest scales, the universe is spatially flat, rather than looping back upon itself in a closed but edgeless geometry. Lots of theoretical physicists think infinitude is a good guess. In any case, I will assume it. **Assumption 2: If the universe is infinite, complexity recurs at large scales.** This assumption is less standard and harder to justify, but not, I think, wholly implausible. Imagine zooming out and out and out so that our galaxy becomes a speck, less than a speck, less less less than less than less of a speck; keep zooming. It _might_ be that once you've zoomed out far enough, every scale looks smooth and boring -- that things simplify at large scales and zooming further out yields only more featureless simplicity. But it might instead be that complexity reappears at some larger scales, generating structures as intricate as those at our familiar scale. Given infinitude, we can keep zooming out until we find those scales. My second assumption is that however far we zoom out, there will always be larger scales at which complexity reappears. Such complexity could arise from large-scale interactions among processes governed by the laws we already know. Or it could arise from phenomena we're familiar with but don't yet understand (such as dark matter or dark energy). Or it could arise from unfamiliar processes with measurable effects only at enormous scales. Compare: If we were proton-sized, we'd have difficulty detecting gravity, which accumulates noticeably only at macroscopic scales. There is no guarantee -- nor indeed any particular reason -- to think that all physical laws must operate at scales we can readily detect. **Assumption 3: If the universe is infinite and complexity recurs at large scales, so do life and intelligence.** I see no reason to suppose that the evolutionary processes that produced life and intelligence on Earth could occur _only_ at our scale. Evolution by natural selection requires patterns that reproduce with stable heritable variation and differential reproduction rates depending on that heritable variation. If complexity recurs at large scales, some of these scales will plausibly host complex processes capable of sustaining evolution over long time periods, producing entities approximately as intelligent as we are. Since we have infinitude to play with, if one otherwise complex level for whatever reason can't host stable evolutionary processes like we see on Earth, forget that level and keep going up. Now let this evolution run until we have scientific and philosophical observers. Putting Assumptions 1-3 together suggests that there are infinitely many cosmic observers, capable of philosophy and science, vastly larger than we are, whose worlds contain us as tiny parts -- far tinier relative to them than a proton is relative to us. There's no particular reason to think their sensory organs or scientific equipment could detect events at our scale, which would be to them sub-sub-sub-sub-microscopic. **Assumption 4: Given Assumptions 1-3, it would be an un-Copernican coincidence if we happened to occupy the smallest scale hosting intelligent observers.** According to the Copernican Principle in cosmology we should assume as a default -- pending contrary evidence -- that we don't occupy any particularly special position in the universe, such as its exact center. To dwell at the very lowest, most fundamental level would make us special in an un-Copernican way. Why should we, of all the infinitely many observers at infinitely many scales, be so lucky as to occupy the foundation? Copernican reasoning thus gives us grounds to think that if there are larger philosophical and scientific observers there are also smaller ones. Now if we had good reason to rule out life-supporting complexity at smaller scales, we'd know that we are at the lowest level. But our failure to detect complexity at smaller scales doesn't establish its absence. As I mentioned above, there's no particular reason to think all scientific laws operate at scales we can measure or perceive. Thus, Assumptions 1-3, plus a plausible application of the Copernican Principle and the absence of a reason to think we do dwell at the lowest level, invite the conclusion that within that tiny droplet falling toward the drain are realms of complexity far too small for us to register, populated by vastly many tiny tiny lives and tiny tiny philosophers and scientists, gazing out across their portion of the droplet, wondering what exists beyond the reach of their senses and equipment. [droplets from a faucet: image source]

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Sunday photoblogging: Cherry trees near Céret

crookedtimber.org

Portrait of a MAGA

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502. United States: the Dutch Republic | History of Philosophy without any gaps

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“Ancient footsteps, like the motion of the sea”

Bob Dylan’s Gospel Music

mostlyaesthetics.com

When your counterexample proves my point

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Don’t be a horse’s ass

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jenniferleelawson.com

Survey: “Dualist And Physicalist Minds”

Christoffer Lundbak Olesen (Aarhus University), Mads Hansen (University of Bristol), and Karsten Olsen (Aarhus University) invite academics who work in or are familiar with consciousness research to take part in a preregistered study on whether differences in subjective experience shape philosophical intuitions about consciousness. The invitation reads: > We are conducting a research study investigating academics who work in or are familiar with consciousness research. The study explores whether differences in subjective experience influence philosophical intuitions about consciousness, particularly the divide between physicalist and dualist perspectives. The study is part of an accepted Preregistered Report. > > We kindly invite you to participate in this study by completing an anonymous questionnaire (approx. 30 minutes). Your participation would help to illuminate how theoretical and experiential factors relate, and whether disagreement within the field may be influenced by pre-theoretic experiential biases. > > Read more about the study and access the survey here: https://survey.au.dk/LinkCollector?key=81KSG25CS136 > > Or visit the Aarhus University survey website https://survey.au.dk/collect and type in the code: 81KS-G25C-S136 > > The link will take you to the website containing the survey. Here you will first be asked to provide your voluntary consent before proceeding to the study survey, which includes questions about your metaphysical views on consciousness, scenario-based thought experiments, and a set of validated psychological instruments that help us understand your experiential profile. Participation is entirely voluntary and anonymous. All data will be handled securely and in full compliance with GDPR. > > We would also be very grateful if you could forward this invitation to colleagues who work on or are interested in consciousness. > > The study is conducted as a collaboration between experimental researchers and philosophers at Aarhus University and the University of Bristol. If you would like to be informed when the results of the study come out, please reply with your preferred email, and you will receive a message from us.

xphi.net

APA Member Interview: Steven Zani | Blog of the APA

Steven J. Zani is an interdisciplinary scholar with an MA in Philosophy and a PhD in Comparative Literature. He has worked at 2-yr and 4-yr institutions, state and private schools, faith-based and tribal schools, and overseas, with expertise in a wide range of topics, including publications and presentations in Literature, Philosophy, Drama, Art, Computer Science,

blog.apaonline.org

PEA Soup is pleased to announce October’s _Ethics_ discussion, featuring David O’Brien (University of Wisconsin-Madison) paper, “Can Luck Egalitarians Handle Self-Sacrifice?” with a précis by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (Aarhus University). The discussion is scheduled for 29–30 October.

peasoupblog.com

Where Intuitions Conflict

If you ask a group of people a philosophical question or present them with a challenging thought experiment, it’s often the case that they will […] The post Where Intuitions Conflict appeared first on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

What are we researching for?

The sacred and the profane

hilariusbookbinder.substack.com

What to know about Sweden in 2026

Brian Leiter’s blog post. ### Share this: * Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr *

jenniferleelawson.com

Mini-Heap - Daily Nous

Latest links… Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may […]

dailynous.com

The thing about science.

Oh, this is rich. Apparently, due to the nature of truth and facts, which are contrary to their hapless ideology, Colin Wright and Andrew Hartz have to be Nazi apologists, claiming the American Psychological Association (APA) is simply a left-wing activism organization. They must be terrified that science would stop otherwise innocent Americans’ belief in their far-right fantasy-land. Why else would they write this, right now?–in an outlet the unchurched may take as credible. Peruse my profile page on Facebook, and you’ll see not only facts based on empirical evidence–you’ll see the APA kicking serious Nazi (read: MAGA) ass. ### Share this: * Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr *

jenniferleelawson.com