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Contemporary discussions of the success of science often invoke an ancient metaphor from Plato’s Phaedrus: successful theories should “carve nature at its joints,” but is nature really “jointed?” Are there natural kinds of things around which our theories cut? This book offers reflections by a group of philosophers on a series of intertwined issues in the metaphysics and epistemology of classification. The chapters consider such topics as the relevance of natural kinds in inductive inference; the role of natural kinds in natural laws; the nature of fundamental properties; the naturalness of boundaries; the metaphysics and epistemology of biological kinds; and the relevance of biological kinds to certain questions in ethics.

Emergence, largely ignored just thirty years ago, has become one of the liveliest areas of research in both philosophy and science. Fueled by advances in complexity theory, artificial life, physics, psychology, sociology, and biology, and by the parallel development of new conceptual tools in philosophy, the idea of emergence offers a way to understand a wide variety of complex phenomena in ways that are intriguingly different from more traditional approaches. This reader collects classic writings on emergence from contemporary philosophy and science. The chapters cover the major approaches to emergence. Each of the three sections (“Philosophical Perspectives,” “Scientific Perspectives,” and “Background and Polemics”) begins with an introduction putting the chapters into context and posing key questions for further exploration. A bibliography lists more specialized material, and an associated website (http://mitpress.mit.edu/emergence) links to downloadable software and to other sites and publications about emergence.

This largely antimetaphysical treatment of free will and determinism argues that the philosophical problem of free will boils down to an open scientific question about the causal histories of certain kinds of neural events. In the course of its argument, the book provides a naturalistic defense of the libertarian view of free will. The metaphysical component of the problem of free will, it argues, essentially boils down to the question of whether humans possess libertarian free will. Furthermore, the book claims that, contrary to traditional wisdom, the libertarian question can be reduced to a question of indeterminacy—in particular, to a straightforward empirical question about whether certain neural events in our heads are causally undetermined in a certain specific way. In other words, it argues that the right kind of indeterminacy would bring with it all of the other requirements for libertarian free will. Finally, the book suggests that because there is no good evidence as to whether or not the relevant neural events are undetermined in the way which is required, the question of whether human beings possess libertarian free will is a wide-open empirical question.

Proposals to make us smarter than the greatest geniuses or to add thousands of years to our life spans seem fit only for the spam folder or trash can, yet these are what contemporary advocates of radical enhancement offer in all seriousness. They present a variety of technologies and therapies that will expand our capacities far beyond what is currently possible for human beings. This book argues against radical enhancement, describing its destructive consequences. It examines the proposals of four prominent radical enhancers: Ray Kurzweil, who argues that technology will enable our escape from human biology; Aubrey de Grey, who calls for anti-aging therapies which will achieve “longevity escape velocity”; Nick Bostrom, who defends the morality and rationality of enhancement; and James Hughes, who envisions a harmonious democracy of the enhanced and the unenhanced. The author argues that the outcomes of radical enhancement could be darker than the rosy futures described by these thinkers. The most dramatic means of enhancing our cognitive powers could, in fact, kill us; the radical extension of our lifespan could eliminate experiences of great value from our lives; and a situation in which some humans are radically enhanced and others are not could lead to tyranny of posthumans over humans.

Information shapes biological organization in fundamental ways and at every organizational level. Because organisms use information—including DNA codes, gene expression, and chemical signaling—to construct, maintain, repair, and replicate themselves, it would seem only natural to use information-related ideas in our attempts to understand the general nature of living systems, the causality by which they operate, the difference between living and inanimate matter, and the emergence, in some biological species, of cognition, emotion, and language. Yet philosophers and scientists have been slow to do so. This book fills that gap. It offers a collection of original chapters in which scientists and philosophers discuss the informational nature of biological organization at levels ranging from the genetic to the cognitive and linguistic. The chapters examine not only familiar information-related ideas intrinsic to the biological sciences but also broader information-theoretic perspectives used to interpret their significance. The contributors represent a range of disciplines, including anthropology, biology, chemistry, cognitive science, information theory, philosophy, psychology, and systems theory, thus demonstrating the deeply interdisciplinary nature of the book’s bioinformational theme.

Each of us is a collection of more than ten trillion cells, busy performing tasks crucial to our continued existence. Gene regulation networks, consisting of a subset of genes called transcription factors, control cellular activity, producing the right gene activities for the many situations that the multiplicity of cells in our bodies face. Genes working together make up a truly ingenious system. This book investigates how gene regulation works and how such a refined but simple system evolved, describing in detail two frameworks for understanding gene regulation. The first, developed by the theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman, holds that gene regulation networks are fundamentally systems which repeat patterns of gene expression. The author finds it an inadequate explanation for how cells overcome the difficulty of development, and proposes an alternative: The connectionist framework. Drawing on work from artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind, he argues that the key lies in how multiple transcription factors combine to regulate a single gene, acting in a way which is qualitatively consistent. This allows the expression of genes to be finely tuned to the variable microenvironments of cells. Because of the nature of both development and its evolution, we can gain insight into the developmental process when we identify gene regulation networks as the controllers of development. The ingenuity of genes is explained by how gene regulation networks evolve to control development.

Most people assume that technology and romanticism are opposed. They share this assumption with many contemporary philosophers of technology, who tend to reduce romanticism to nostalgia. This book questions these assumptions and shows that the relation between romanticism and technology is much more complex. For this purpose it delves into the history of technology and thinking about technology, from the early Romantics to hippie computing and today’s romantic cyborgs. The book updates the literature on technoromanticism, but also raises a new question: it seems that as machines become more human-like and informational, they disappear from view or merge with the human. Do we witness the end of the machine? The author then discusses criticisms of romanticism and of “the end of the machine” vision he constructed. Yet the author avoids a simplistic rejection or defence of technoromantic visions; when it comes to understanding technology, the romantic tradition is more ambiguous and also more resourceful that we might suppose. The book ends with the question if and how we could ever move beyond romanticism and beyond machine thinking. It turns out that, given the persistence of our modern-romantic form of life including language and technologies, the end of the machine is not even in sight. In the meantime, we have to live with our romantic machines, with our new cyborgs. That is, we have to live with ourselves as cyborgs: living meetings, mergers, and hybrids of romanticism and technology.

After World War II, a systems approach to solving complex problems and managing complex systems came into vogue among engineers, scientists, and managers, fostered in part by the diffusion of digital computing power. Enthusiasm for the approach peaked during the Johnson administration, when it was applied to everything from military command and control systems to poverty in American cities. Although its failure in the social sphere, coupled with increasing skepticism about the role of technology and “experts” in American society, led to a retrenchment, systems methods are still part of modern managerial practice. This book charts the origins and spread of the systems movement. It describes the major players—including RAND, MITRE, Ramo-Wooldrige (later TRW), and the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis—and examines applications in a wide variety of military, government, civil, and engineering settings. The book is international in scope, describing the spread of systems thinking in France and Sweden. The story it tells helps to explain engineering thought and managerial practice during the last sixty years.