Materialism de Terry Eagleton

Michael Terry

The first topic I would like to explore is probabilistic reasoning with Bayesian nets. I see that reasoning under situations of uncertainty is a very important area of AI, and it is apparent that these techniques are the standard approach for effectively modeling this uncertainty. I am particularly interested in learning how to model complex relationships between variables in spite of redundant...

ALKALIPHILY Terry

Against Materialism

Materialism is the idea that human beings are material objects—brains, perhaps, or some part of the brain—without immaterial selves or souls. I give two arguments against materialism. The first is an argument from possibility: it is possible that I should exist when no part of my body exists, in which case I am not identical with my body or any part of my body. The second is an argument from im...

Aristotelian Materialism

I argue that a modern gloss on Aristotle’s notions of Form and Matter not only allows us to escape a dualism of the psychological and the physical, but also results in a plausible sort of materialism. This is because Aristotle held that the essential nature of any psychological state, including perception and human thought, is to be some physical property. I also show that Hilary Putnam and Mar...

Terry A. Loring

Consider the partition function S μ( ) associated in the theory of Rényi dimension to a finite Borel measure μ on Euclidean d-space. This partition function S μ( ) is the sum of the q-th powers of the measure applied to a partition of d-space into d-cubes of width . We further Guérin’s investigation of the relation between this partition function and the Lebesgue Lp norm (Lq norm) of the convol...