A Study in Philosophy

In his recent book,   From Bacteria to Bach and Back  (2017), Dennett utilizes memetics to develop his ideas on consciousness. I haven't finished it yet. I paused after 120 or so pages, because I have concerns with his preliminary discussion of information.There are areas where I agree with Dennett, but I have problems with his discussion of both Shannon information and semantic information. The problems with the latter are unfortunately predictable given Dennett's longstanding approach to intentionality.  I. Shannon Information In a chapter entitled "What is Information?,” Dennett follows a seventy-year tradition of making a strong distinction between semantic information and Shannon information. Here is how Claude Shannon (" A Mathematical Theory of Communication ," 1948) introduces the distinction:  The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.   Frequently the...

This is a list of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries that I will (continue to) utilize in my research. I will update occasionally. The Philosophy of Mind a long list of pages (curated by David Chalmers) Culture, Memetics and Evolutionary Theory culture cultural evolution teleological notions in biology replication and reproduction Semantics, Logic and Information theories of meaning semantic conceptions of information intensional logic logic and information information logical pluralism modal logic pragmatics Knowledge and Method naturalism naturalism in epistemology epistemic contextualism scientific method science and pseudoscience scientific progress

The aim of this blog is to document and further my studies in philosophy. I'm planning on applying to a PhD program--most likely in the fall of 2025, and most likely in Poland--and I have a lot of work to do before I can confidently approach a dissertation topic and make myself a desirable PhD candidate.       Until very recently, I hadn't engaged with philosophy at all for about ten years. I'm a bit daunted by my decision to return to the discipline after such a break. The thing is, I don't simply want to catch up on what's been going on in the past ten years; I also need to fill in a lot of gaps in my education.       See, I never earned a philosophy degree. Though Philosophy was one of my dual majors (the other was Mathematics) when I began my undergraduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University in 1992, I graduated with a degree in Literary & Cultural Studies and only a minor in Philosophy. I went on to work towards an MA in Philosophy at t...