Jason WinningUniversity of Toronto | U of T · Department of Philosophy
Jason Winning
Doctor of Philosophy
About
10
Publications
2,282
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Introduction
I recently completed an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in philosophy and cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. My research focuses on the theoretical foundations and interrelatedness of agency, information, and the structure and organization of reality. I am also the creator of a free, open-source research productivity software application for Mac, Windows, and Linux called Hypernomicon (http://hypernomicon.org/).
Education
September 2011 - March 2019
University of California San Diego
Field of study
- Philosophy and Cognitive Science
Publications
Publications (10)
Any successful account of the metaphysics of mechanistic causation must satisfy at least five key desiderata. In this paper, I lay out these five desiderata and explain why existing accounts of the metaphysics of mechanistic causation fail to satisfy them. I then present an alternative account which does satisfy the five desiderata. According to th...
Existing accounts of mechanistic causation are not suited for understanding causation in biological and neural mechanisms because they do not have the resources to capture the unique causal structure of control heterarchies. In this paper, we provide a new account on which the causal powers of mechanisms are grounded by time-dependent, variable con...
In this paper, I argue that what counts as the proper function of a trait is a matter of the de facto perspective that the biological system, itself, possesses on what counts as proper functioning for that trait. Unlike non-perspectival accounts, internal perspectivalism does not succumb to generality problems. But unlike external perspectivalism,...
Emergence is much discussed by both philosophers and scientists. But, as noted by Mitchell (2012), there is a significant gulf; philosophers and scientists talk past each other. We contend that this is because philosophers and scientists typically mean different things by emergence, leading us to distinguish being emergence and pattern emergence. W...
Some recent discussions of mechanistic explanation have focused on control operations. But control is often associated with teleological or normative-sounding concepts like goals and set-points, prompting the question: Does an explanation that refers to parts or mechanisms "controlling" each other thereby fail to be mechanistic? In this paper I int...
I develop an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the nature of agents and agency that is compatible with recent developments in the metaphysics of science and that also does justice to the mechanistic and normative characteristics of agents and agency as they are understood in moral philosophy, social psychology, neuroscience, robotics, a...
