Levels of Reality in Science and Philosophy

Stavros Ioannidis is Assistant Professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Bristol (2012). He is the co-author (with Stathis Psillos) of Mechanisms in Science: Method or Metaphysics? (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and the principal investigator of the project MECHANISM, funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation. His research focuses on topics in the philosophy of biology (especially the concept of mechanism and mechanistic explanation, evolutionary and developmental biology) and in the metaphysics of science.

Gal Vishne is a graduate student for computational neuroscience in the international PhD program at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences of the Hebrew University, working under the supervision of Prof. Leon Deouell and Prof. Ayelet Landau. She started her academic journey studying mathematics, but (to paraphrase DavidChalmers) the mind was always occupying her thoughts where mathematics should have been, and she turned to neuroscience. Her research is aimed at distilling the neural underpinnings of conscious experience, trying to integrate mathematical and philosophical insights with cognitive and neuroscientific tools, to solve this age-old problem.

Meir Hemmo is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Haifa working mainly in philosophy of physics and philosophy of mind. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy of physics from the University of Cambridge in 1996. He co-authored (with Orly Shenker) the book The Road to Maxwell's Demon: Conceptual Foundations of Statistical Mechanics (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and published on the foundations and interpretation of quantum mechanics, classical and quantum statistical mechanics, the concept of probability in physics and reductive physicalism in physics, in the special sciences and in philosophy of mind.

Orly Shenker is a Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and holds the Eleanor Roosevelt Chair in History and Philosophy of Science. Her research is mainly in the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of mind. In the philosophy of physics she published (with Meir Hemmo) the book The Road to Maxwell's Demon (Cambridge University Press 2012), which offers a new conceptual foundation for statistical mechanics, and which proves that the second law of thermodynamics is not a universal theorem of physics. The book points out that in the foundations of physics there is an unavoidable role for an observer, which is essential for understanding the concept of macrostates, which - in turn - underlies the concepts of entropy and of probability. To understand the notion of an observer she developed (with Hemmo) a theory of strong reductive physicalism concerning the mind, called Flat Physicalism, proving that it is a coherent and viable approach, which best explains the empirical observations concerning all the special sciences and in particular psychology, and defending it against the currently dominant view called non-reductive physicalism, showing the computational theory of mind is not physicalist at all, but is rather a contemporary form of mind-body dualism.