Philosophy of Science Commons^™

Consciousness And Physicalism, Brian Mcgowan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Physicalism is a philosophy of mind which attempts to explain consciousness as resulting from physical causes. The lack of a complete and consistent mathematical theory to explain physical causation has led other philosophers of mind to propose that consciousness is a nonphysical essence, property, or substance. However, the idea that physics can be defined atomically and/or deterministically leads to explanatory problems for consciousness, as well as for the dualisms which explain consciousness under these assumptions. This thesis advances a position called “continuous physicalism” which takes all material to result from deformations in the physical medium of space, and any changes …

Cosmological Models And The Christian Faith In John Milton's Paradise Lost, Jacob R. Taylor

Tenor of Our Times

In this work the author argues that John Milton justifies the intelligibility and priority of Christian faith against modern revolutions of science in his epic poem Paradise Lost. Milton argues against scientists who choose to believe modern astronomy over cosmology. He argues that Christian faithfulness stands firm despite the crumbling of its medieval cosmological basis. This endurance of the faith is the primary scientific theme of the epic English poem.

Probabilistic Reasoning In Cosmology, Yann Benétreau-Dupin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cosmology raises novel philosophical questions regarding the use of probabilities in inference. This work aims at identifying and assessing lines of arguments and problematic principles in probabilistic reasoning in cosmology.

The first, second, and third papers deal with the intersection of two distinct problems: accounting for selection effects, and representing ignorance or indifference in probabilistic inferences. These two problems meet in the cosmology literature when anthropic considerations are used to predict cosmological parameters by conditionalizing the distribution of, e.g., the cosmological constant on the number of observers it allows for. However, uniform probability distributions usually appealed to in such arguments …