The Immortal Demon

The debasing demon

Reprinted in Byrne and Hilbert 1997, 137–76. McGinn, C. 1983. The Subjective View: Secondary Qualities and Indexical Thoughts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGinn, C. 1996. Another look at color. The Journal of Philosophy 93: 537–53. Nichols, S. and T. Folds-Bennett. 2003. Are children moral objectivists? Children’s judgments about moral and response-dependent properties. Cognition 90: B23–...

Mendel's demon

on the shelves of any evolutionary biologist or student of the subject and you are likely to see a textbook by Mark Ridley. But Ridley, formerly at Emory University in Atlanta, and now in Oxford, has had another book in his mind for quite some time. He believes there are some ideas sparked by the Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel, that are of broader interest and has set out to explore some of them ...

Maxwell’s Demon

This problem is prob. 2 of [1]. One of the earliest conceptual “supercomputers” was Maxwell’s Demon [2], who uses intelligence in sorting molecules to appear to evade the Second Law of Thermodynamics. To place the demon in a computational context, consider a computer “memory” that consists of a set of boxes (bits), each of volume V and each containing a single molecule. A (re)movable partition ...

God, the Demon, and the Cogito

The purpose of this essay is to exhibit in detail the setting for the version of the Cogito Argument that appears in Descartes’s Meditations. I believe that a close reading of the text can shed new light on the nature and role of the “evil demon”, on the nature of God as he appears in the first few Meditations, and on the place of the Cogito Argument in Descartes’s overall scheme.

Becoming Immortal Becoming Immortal Combining Cloning and Stem-Cell Therapy