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Dupré and Nicholson (2018), among others, have advanced the view that biology has much to gain from adopting an ontology that consists of processes rather than one composed of substances. And while philosophers of biology have explored many of the implications this ontological shift might have, little attention has been given to how it might alter our notions of biological complexity.  In this talk, I examine what happens to the concept of complexity when we shift from an ontology that includes substances to an ontology composed only of processes. To do this, I begin by looking to the account of complexity offered in McShea (1991;1996), situating it within a fairly traditional mechanistic framework that includes substances. I then offer some ways of interpreting of what happens to complexity when we try thinking about it using only processes. I argue that the most accurate interpretation ends up restricting how we’re able to think about the complexity of biological systems. Therefore, I suggest that if we want to be able to aptly capture all of biology’s complexity there are reasons for retaining ontologies that include more than just processes.

Under scrutiny, there appears to be a mutual incompatibility between two theses central to the Humean account of laws of nature.

The first thesis, Humean Supervenience, is the thesis that laws supervene upon local particular matters of fact (Lewis, 1986: ix; Lewis, 1994: 475). In this article, I argue that Humean Supervenience cannot be understood as the claim that laws supervene merely on a conjunction of local particular matters of fact.  To my knowledge, no Humean has argued for this specific interpretation of the thesis, but what this argument is intended to demonstrate is that an additional element is required to act as the subvenience base for laws alongside the conjunction of local facts. Importantly, I argue, it looks as if this element will have to be ���ǻ岹����in nature, in so far as it is required to necessitate the non-existence of a contravening instance of that law.

The second thesis is the Humean denial of necessary connections. The source of Humeanism’s primary theoretical benefit, its ontological frugality, is the denial. Commitment to this thesis, I argue, means that Humeans will struggle to account for the additional element required for a suitable subvenience base for laws, in so far as that element is required to place a necessary connection on distinct local particular matters of fact, contrary to the denial.

After explaining the incompatibility of these two theses, I then explore some potential ways to mitigate the problem. I examine the putative response from arch-Humean David Lewis’s account of truthmaking for negative existentials. I argue this solution amounts to solving the problem by fiat, with the solution appearing to require commitment to necessary connections, anyway. I then examine the stronger response that worlds, defined as maximalities of local facts, entail that when we talk about the local facts of a world, we are talking about ��������the local facts of a world. I argue that this response similarly entails a commitment to offensive external relations.

I conclude with the suggestion that this objection can be seen to represent an example of a promising strategy for opponents of modal reductionism, more broadly; in reducing the range of modal phenomena modal reductionism can account for, the attractiveness of the account might be gradually eroded.

The question of how physicalism should be defined has been much discussed in metaphysics. I will argue that the metaphysians' definitions are unsuitable for the historian, even if they are suitable for metaphysics. I will then suggest a historian's answer to the question, "What is Physicalism?" I will briefly discuss, as an example, the question of whether Carnap and Neurath should be classified as physicalists.

Could Artificial Intelligence (AI) ever become conscious? The hard problem of consciousness bears on this question. Chalmers (2010) defines the “hard problem” as an unbridgeable epistemic gap between physical and phenomenal states, which he claims entails an ontological gap and a form of ontological dualism. The hard problem challenges physicalism, a form of ontological monism, where consciousness emerges from the right physical structure. Frequently in the literature, physicalists are regarded as reductionists and skeptical of AI consciousness (see Aru et al. 2023), whereas dualists are regarded as anti-reductionists and more sympathetic (see Block 1997).

I argue that physicalism and dualism should not be conflated with reductionism and anti-reductionism respectively. To decouple these debates, I propose a novel account of non-reductive physicalism that maintains an epistemic gap while rejecting an ontological gap. My account confines ‘levels of relative fundamentality’ to scientific theories and refrains from transforming them into ontological hierarchies. Finally, I contend that it’s important to pursue non-reductive physicalism as a solution to the hard problem in order to reflect advances in AI research.

Humeanism is the claim that modal facts (facts about what can and must be the case) depend on the non-modal facts (facts about what actually does and does not happen). Humeanism has traditionally been formulated as a supervenience thesis: a thesis that the modal supervenes on the nonmodal, that is, any two metaphysically possible worlds which agree in their nonmodal facts will also agree in their modal facts. There is something strange about formulating a thesis about the reduction of the modal using modal terminology. In this paper, I’ll argue that Humeanism should not be understood primarily as a supervenience thesis. Instead, we should understand it primarily as a thesis about metaphysical or ontological dependence of the modal on the non-modal. It may be that the supervenience thesis follows from the dependence thesis, but whether or not it follows depends on substantive theses about metaphysical possibility.

In this talk, I argue that pain is a weakly emergent natural kind. I begin by arguing that pain is an emergent natural kind by appeal to Hawley and Bird's (2011) framework of kinds. On this view, natural kinds can explain the similarity that natural entities or phenomena possess. They encapsulate the many natural properties that distinct entities share into one. Kinds, it is argued, are best understood as a complex universal. Complex universals are conjunctive and structural universals. On my view, pain is a natural kind because it meets both conjunctive and structural conditions of a complex universal and functions as a homeostatic cluster of properties. Next, I argue that pain is weakly, rather than strongly emergent. Here, I address the concern that if pain is a real phenomenon, cotemporally materially depends on, is distinct from, and distinctively efficacious as compared to the physiological features, then the explanatory gap between our physiological states and our subjective experience of it will forever remain open. On the contrary, I suggest, appealing Feinberg and Mallatt's (2020) account of the emergence of consciousness, pain is better understood as a weakly rather than strongly emergent phenomena. Together, I conclude, we ought to consider pain as a weakly emergent natural kind because it meets the conditions for both a complex universal and for weak emergence.

How do we decide if an emergent phenomenon is real? I take a pragmatist approach to philosophy of science that identifies the roles of agency and judgment in the inferential and experimental practices that support claims about nature. Within the metaphysics of science, a top-down structural realist approach is understood as antithetical to a bottom-up entity realist approach.  In this talk I will suggest a third way which requires both top-down and bottom-up considerations and more.  I suggest that starting from scientific practices, and the perspectival character of both theories and experiments, supports an affordance account of realism. 

Some (Carroll 2021, McLaughlin 2024) claim that Strong emergence, understood (as on my preferred implementation) as involving a novel configurational fundamental interaction, is incompatible with quantum field theory (QFT), on grounds that interactions on QFT are 'local'---such as to operate only at spacetime points. I offer four lines of response to the Carroll/McLaughin objection, according to which, first, locality of interactions is not 'baked into' QFT, as historical and ongoing investigations into non-local QFT indicate; second, that such investigations are well-motivated, since the supposed locality of interactions is the source of UV divergence; third, that Strong emergence need not violate micro-causality; and fourth, that the supposition that QFT "has been enormously successful in its regime of applicability, and ... human brains fall well within that regime" involves a massive and as-yet-unjustified extrapolation.