Fun question. Let's say that a characteristic or property or whatnot is intrinsic if we can tell whether someone has it without needing information about other people/things. The fact that I have blue eyes is an intrinsic feature in that sense. My eye color doesn't depend on your eye color. But to know that I'm the shortest person in the room, you have to know things about the other people in the room as well as things about me (namely, our heights.) Being the shortest person in the room isn't an intrinsic property/quality/characteristic. Note that we're using "property", "characteristic", "quality" so as to include abstract things, and things that depend in possibly quite recondite ways on how an individual is related to other individuals, sets of individuals... We don't tend to use the word feature so abstractly. Your features are the things we'd talk about to describe you yourself. Some of them, like height, may not be purely intrinsic, but to make things simple, we'll set those aside. If we...

It's an interesting question. If an emotion simply wells up in you, it might not be reasonable to blame you—especially if you don't act on it. In any given moment, we may not have much control over what we feel. But here are two things to consider. First, we do sometimes say that certain reactions aren't appropriate; we do use broadly moral language to talk about emotions. When we say things like "He should get over himself!", we're often making a judgment about the moral appropriateness of staying in the grip of an inappropriate emotional reaction. Second, most of us do have at least some ability, over the long haul, to train and reshape our emotions. This is one of the goals of certain kinds of psychotherapy, but therapy isn't the only path to the goal. This suggests that we can hold people (including ourselves!) responsible for not doing what it takes to modulate their habitual emotional responses. Here's another way to put it. It's part of a person's character that s/he reacts to things in...

The rule of thumb when you hear someone claim that quantum mechanics explains or underwrites something about minds is to be very, very suspicious. Let's suppose that two particles within some microtubule get entangled. (Caveat: I know more or less nothing about microtubules, but that won't matter for what follows.) Now suppose that these particles get dispersed into spacetime. The chance that these particles will remain entangled for any significant length of time at all is near enough to zero that the difference isn't worth arguing about. That's because if anything else interacts with either particle, the entanglement will be destroyed. Entanglement is very fragile. In entanglement experiments, physicists have to go to great lengths to prevent decoherence—the process by which interaction with the environment destroys entanglement, or more accurately, disperses it into the environment, in effect diluting it. But even if the two particles somehow stayed entangled, this wouldn't give us any special...

It depends on what you think probability is, but even then the answer is probably (heh!) no. Nothing in the mathematical theory of probability requires that all events have probabilities. Probability theory simply imposes coherence conditions on any probability assignments there may be. And the mathematical theory of probability doesn't tell us what probability is but only what its formal properties are. Some believe that there are objective probabilities—that if we specify our probability question appropriately, then there may be an answer to the question independent of what anyone thinks. For example: someone might think that if a quantum system has been prepared in a certain way, then the probability that a measurement interaction will have a certain result is, say, 1/3 regardless of what anyone thinks. This may or may not be right, though it still leaves us in the dark about what exactly this probability is. Is it a propensity or tendency of some sort? Is it a disguised way of talking about...

There's no simple uncontroversial answer to your question, but perhaps a couple of points will be at least somewhat helpful. "Wave-particle duality" is ultimately too narrow a way to think about what you're interested in. The things that get described as illustrating "wave-particle duality" are special cases of the phenomenon of quantum interference, and that, in turn, is a manifestation of the fact that quantum states obey a superposition principle . At the end of the day, there's no substitute for thinking of this mathematically, but I'll do my best to avoid that here. You probably know at least a bit about polarization. If we hold a polarizing filter (e.g., a lens from good sunglasses) up to a light source, the light that gets past it is polarized along a common axis—let's say the vertical axis. In principle, with the right kind of light source, we can turn the intensity down so that only one photon is emitted at a time. If such a photon passes the filter, it will hit a screen in one spot—like a...

I'm not convinced that there's really a paradox here. Let's consider various cases. 1) You want to coin a new term, perhaps "snurp" which you define as the sound a half-empty balloon makes when cut with scissors. No paradox here. You wanted a word to refer to this sound. You coined a word and assigned it that meaning. You know what a snurp is because you decided what a snurp is. That's what makes the sentence right. 2) You're in a contest in which you get points if you can recite the standard definition of a term correctly. The quizmaster asks what the definition of "bachelor" is. You reply "an unmarried male of marriageable age." You defined it correctly. You had to know what a bachelor is to give the correct definition, but again, no mystery. That amounts simply to knowing a certain convention about a certain word. No paradox. The sentence summing up the definition is made right by social facts about accepted conventions. 3) You're a lexicographer, and you are trying to give a definition of some...

You're quite right to be skeptical of the idea that physical reality needs observers to exist. But very few people who work in foundations of quantum mechanics would disagree. Bohr never claimed otherwise. What he insisted is that in describing quantum experiments, we have no choice but to appeal to classical concepts. There's room to argue about what that means, but nothing I've ever read by Bohr suggests that measurements are necessary for the very existence of physical systems. The same is even more clearly true of Bohmian "pilot-wave" interpretations. Bohmians claim that there really are particles that really have positions and trajectories---whether or not anyone makes measurements. It's just that the details of these trajectories aren't accessible to us. Everettian ("many-worlds") accounts of quantum theory likewise don't hold that the existence of physical reality depends on measurement. It's true that "branching" in Everettian quantum mechanics has a connection with measurement, but this is...

Usually, when we use the word "defined," it's about words. We might ask, for example, whether the word "chair" can be defined. If a definition is supposed to rule in exactly the things that are chairs and rule out exactly the things that aren't, then I doubt that "chair" can be defined. We can, of course, say things about what typical chairs are like. But any supposed strict definition we offer will, I'm willing to bet, have various counterexamples. Typical chairs are for sitting on. But benches aren't chairs, and we often sit on benches. And some chairs---certain works of art, perhaps---aren't actually meant for sitting on. And yet there are chairs. In fact, I'm sitting on one as I type this. However, there's another use of the word "defined" that isn't about words but about things. When we ask for definitions in this sense, we're asking for an account of the nature of the thing itself. For example: it's of the nature of an electron that it has negative charge and spin one-half. Or so we might say....

You ask an excellent question and I'm sympathetic to your point. Since this isn't my field, I don't have much to offer by way of readings, but there's a paper from some years ago by my former colleague Susan Wolf that might be at least somewhat relevant. It's called "Moral Saints." It's in The Journal of Philosophy vol. 79 no. 8, August 1982, pp. 419--439. Her worry is not the same as yours, but it's closely related.

Let's suppose that the machine is my computer and I'm using the function =TRUNC(100*RAND(),0). Then as I put the function in more and more cells, I'll get a list of integers between 0 and 100 that pass various tests for randomness. Let's suppose that the fifth integer on the list is 12. Is there a reason for that? There is, at least superficially. The function =TRUNC(100*RAND(),0) works by performing various well-defined mathematical operations on an input. The input is the time when you hit "ENTER," according to the computer's clock. Given that input and the cell, the output is determined. Put another way, if two computers ran the program starting at the same time according to their clocks, they would give the same output. So there's an explanation for why the fifth cell ends up containing 12 rather than some other integer. It's a matter of the input and the program. You might protest that this isn't truly random. If it were, two computers with the same input wouldn't produce the same supposedly ...