Tag Archives: cognitive science

James Ladyman and Don Ross, with David Spurrett and John Collier

Attaching epistemic significance to metaphysical intuitions is anti-naturalist for two reasons. First, it requires ignoring the fact that science, especially physics, has shown us that the universe is very strange to out inherited conception of what it is like. Second, it requires ignoring central implications of evolutionary theory, and of the cognitive and behavioural sciences, concerning the nature of our minds.

James Ladyman and Don Ross, with David Spurrett and John Collier, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, Oxford, 2007, p. 10

Quentin Smith

[T]here may be an even more basic (and perhaps unique) problem that arises due to the highly non-conservative shift in thinking that a transition to quantum cognitive science would require. It may be that quantum ontologies are so ‘strange’ that many, most, or virtually all philosophers find them psychologically impossible to believe. This may be a genetic problem, rather than merely a problem in the lack of intellectual acculturation in quantum ontology.

Quentin Smith, ‘Why Cognitive Scientists Cannot Ignore Quantum Mechanics’, in Smith and Aleksandar Jokic (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford, 2003, p. 410