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HandWiki. Mechanism. Encyclopedia. Available online: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/28865 (accessed on 23 September 2026).
HandWiki. Mechanism. Encyclopedia. Available at: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/28865. Accessed September 23, 2026.
HandWiki. "Mechanism" Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/28865 (accessed September 23, 2026).
HandWiki. (2022, October 11). Mechanism. In Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/28865
HandWiki. "Mechanism." Encyclopedia. Web. 11 October, 2022.
Mechanism
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The content is sourced from: https://handwiki.org/wiki/Philosophy:Mechanism

Mechanism is the belief that natural wholes (principally living things) are similar to complicated machines or artifacts, composed of parts lacking any intrinsic relationship to each other. The doctrine of mechanism in philosophy comes in two different flavors. They are both doctrines of metaphysics, but they are different in scope and ambitions: the first is a global doctrine about nature; the second is a local doctrine about humans and their minds, which is hotly contested. For clarity, we might distinguish these two doctrines as universal mechanism and anthropic mechanism.

metaphysics mechanism philosophy

References

  1. Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001/1966), p. 175.
  2. "Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems". 20 January 2015. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/#GdeArgAgaMec. "These Gödelian anti-mechanist arguments are, however, problematic, and there is wide consensus that they fail." 
  3. Stuart J. Russell; Peter Norvig (2010). "26.1.2: Philosophical Foundations/Weak AI: Can Machines Act Intelligently?/The mathematical objection". Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-604259-4. "...even if we grant that computers have limitations on what they can prove, there is no evidence that humans are immune from those limitations." 
  4. Mark Colyvan. An introduction to the philosophy of mathematics. Cambridge University Press , 2012. From 2.2.2, 'Philosophical significance of Gödel's incompleteness results': "The accepted wisdom (with which I concur) is that the Lucas-Penrose arguments fail." https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge%20University%20Press
  5. LaForte, G., Hayes, P. J., Ford, K. M. 1998. Why Gödel's theorem cannot refute computationalism. Artificial Intelligence, 104:265–286, 1998.
  6. Gödel, Kurt, 1951, Some basic theorems on the foundations of mathematics and their implications in Solomon Feferman, ed., 1995. Collected works / Kurt Gödel, Vol. III. Oxford University Press: 304-23.
  7. Putnam, Hilary, 1960, Minds and Machines in Sidney Hook, ed., Dimensions of Mind: A Symposium. New York University Press. Reprinted in Anderson, A. R., ed., 1964. Minds and Machines. Prentice-Hall: 77.
  8. The Gödel Theorem and Human Nature, a talk given by Hilary Putnam in the Gödel centenary 2006 [1]
  9. Lucas, J. R., 1961, "Minds, Machines, and Gödel." Philosophy 36:112-27. http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/Godel/mmg.html
  10. Webb, Judson, 1968, "Metamathematics and the Philosophy of Mind," Philosophy of Science 35: 156–78.
  11. Feferman, S. (1996). "Penrose's Godelian argument", Psyche 2(7). http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/penrose.pdf
  12. Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1979). Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1st ed.). Basic Books. p. 708. ISBN 9780465026852. 
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