Artykuł przedstawia implementację popularnego modelu przetwarzania informacji czasowej — modelu skalarnego postrzegania upływu czasu (ang. Scalar Timing Model, STM). Implementacja teoretycznego modelu wymaga jego ukonkretnienia i doprecyzowania, pozwala na symulację działania, analizę wyników dostarczanych przez działający model, a także jego weryfikację. Opisywana realizacja STM osadzona jest w środowisku sztucznych sieci neuronowych i potrafi odzwierciedlić jeden ze znanych efektów obserwowanych eksperymentalnie — tzw. błąd porządku czasowego. W pracy przedstawiono podstawy działania sieci neuronowej realizującej ideę STM; sieć ta stanowi pierwszy krok w (...) kierunku stworzenia interdyscyplinarnej koncepcji mechanizmu percepcji czasu u człowieka. Artykuł zawiera również krótką dyskusję na temat zalet, konsekwencji i ograniczeń związanych z tworzeniem działających implementacji modeli teoretycznych. (shrink)

A fascinating exploration of the nature of consciousness This engaging and readable book provides an introduction to consciousness that does justice both to the science and to the philosophy of consciousness, that is, the mechanics of the mind and the experience of awareness. The book opens with a general discussion of the brain and of consciousness itself. Then, exploring the areas of brain science most likely to illuminate the basis of awareness, Zeman focuses on the science of sleep and waking (...) and on the science of vision. He describes healthy states and disorders--epilepsy, narcolepsy, blindsight and hallucinations after stroke--that provide insights into the capacity for consciousness and into its contents. And he tracks the evolution of the brain, the human species, and human culture and surveys the main current scientific theories of awareness, pioneering attempts to explain how the brain gives rise to experience. Zeman concludes by examining philosophical arguments about the nature of consciousness. A practicing neurologist, he animates his text with examples from the behavioral and neurological disorders of his patients and from the expanding mental worlds of young children, including his own. His book is an accessible and enlightening explanation of why we are conscious. (shrink)

I assess Churchland's views on folk psychology and conceptual thinking, with particular emphasis on the connection between these topics.

This paper considers the implications of precautionary restrictions against technologies, in the context of the potential for creating and sustaining rumours. It focuses on the restriction against mobile phone use at petrol stations, based on the rumour that a spark might cause an explosion. Rumours have been substantiated by precautionary usage warnings from mobile phone manufacturers, petrol station usage restrictions, and a general lack of technical understanding. Petrol station employees have themselves spread the rumour about alleged incidents, filling the information (...) gap about the basis for the restriction. (shrink)

People’s beliefs about normality play an important role in many aspects of cognition and life (e.g., causal cognition, linguistic semantics, cooperative behavior). But how do people determine what sorts of things are normal in the first place? Past research has studied both people’s representations of statistical norms (e.g., the average) and their representations of prescriptive norms (e.g., the ideal). Four studies suggest that people’s notion of normality incorporates both of these types of norms. In particular, people’s representations of what is (...) normal were found to be influenced both by what they believed to be descriptively average and by what they believed to be prescriptively ideal. This is shown across three domains: people’s use of the word ‘‘normal” (Study 1), their use of gradable adjectives (Study 2), and their judgments of concept prototypicality (Study 3). A final study investigated the learning of normality for a novel category, showing that people actively combine statistical and prescriptive information they have learned into an undifferentiated notion of what is normal (Study 4). Taken together, these findings may help to explain how moral norms impact the acquisition of normality and, conversely, how normality impacts the acquisition of moral norms. (shrink)

Behemoth is traditionally read as supporting Hobbes's science from the treatises, but it also goes beyond the strict limitations of Hobbes's science. Understanding how Hobbes expands his approach requires that we examine how A's confidence in institutional reform is met by B's cynicism. Hobbes shifts from an analysis of general inclinations to an analysis of the particular strategies that skilful sovereigns use to acquire and maintain peace. The result is a theory of the state that relies less on> institutional arrangement, (...) and more on effective statesmanship, than we typically see when considering Hobbes's treatises alone. (shrink)

language="EN"> The eighth annual meeting of the ASSC took place between June 25th and 28th in Antwerp, an extremely beautiful Belgian city, a major European port and the home of the Peter Paul Rubens, 'the prince of painters and painter of princes'. The meeting was held in a University building at the edge of the old town. This part of the city is remarkable both for the elegance of its architecture and for its innumerable short, interlocking, streets with oddly indistinguishable (...) names. The demands on spatial memory were high and some delegates may still be hunting for the conference dinner which took place, magnificently but improbably, in a hotel - the Elzenveld - inside a hospital. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the metaphysics of race as a valuable philosophical project against deflationism about race. The deflationists argue that metaphysical debate about the reality of race amounts to a non-substantive verbal dispute that diverts attention from ethical and practical issues to do with ‘race.’ In response, I show that the deflationists mischaracterize the field and fail to capture what most metaphysicians of race actually do in their work, which is almost always pluralist and very often normative and (...) explicitly political. Even if debates about the reality of race turn out to be verbal disputes, they are substantive, and worth having. (shrink)

Mental fictionalism is the view that, even if mental states do not exist, it is useful to talk as if they do. Mental states are useful fictions. Recent philosophy of mind has seen a growing interest in mental fictionalism. To date, much of the discussion has concerned the general features of the approach. In this paper, I develop a specific form of mental fictionalism by drawing on Kendall Walton’s work on make-believe. According to the approach I propose, talk of mental (...) states is a useful pretence for describing people and their behaviour. I try to clarify and motivate this approach by comparing it to well-known alternatives, including behaviourism, instrumentalism and eliminativism. I also consider some of the challenges that it faces. (shrink)

Modeling is central to scientific inquiry. It also depends heavily upon the imagination. In modeling, scientists seem to turn their attention away from the complexity of the real world to imagine a realm of perfect spheres, frictionless planes and perfect rational agents. Modeling poses many questions. What are models? How do they relate to the real world? Recently, a number of philosophers have addressed these questions by focusing on the role of the imagination in modeling. Some have also drawn parallels (...) between models and fiction. This chapter examines these approaches to scientific modeling and considers the challenges they face. (shrink)

In the past few years, the subject of AI rights—the thesis that AIs, robots, and other artefacts (hereafter, simply ‘AIs’) ought to be included in the sphere of moral concern—has started to receive serious attention from scholars. In this paper, I argue that the AI rights research program is beset by an epistemic problem that threatens to impede its progress—namely, a lack of a solution to the ‘Hard Problem’ of consciousness: the problem of explaining why certain brain states give rise (...) to experience. To motivate this claim, I consider three ways in which to ground AI rights—namely: superintelligence, empathy, and a capacity for consciousness. I argue that appeals to superintelligence and empathy are problematic, and that consciousness should be our central focus, as in the case of animal rights. However, I also argue that AI rights is disanalogous from animal rights in an important respect: animal rights can proceed without a solution to the ‘Hard Problem’ of consciousness. Not so with AI rights, I argue. There we cannot make the same kinds of assumptions that we do about animal consciousness, since we still do not understand why brain states give rise to conscious mental states in humans. (shrink)

I discussed the ways in which folk psychology is influenced by the need for small-scale cooperation between people. I argue that considerations about cooperation and mutual benefit can be found in the everyday concepts of belief, desire, and motivation. I describe what I call "solution thinking", where a person anticipates another person's actions by first determining the solution to the cooperative problem that the person faces and then reasoning backwards to a prediction of individual action.

Most contemporary interpreters of Aquinas have assumed that Thomas subscribed to a “non-repeatability principle” such that created entities, once destroyed entirely, cannot be “brought back" into existence, even by God's power. Souls persisting in the interim between death and resurrection thus play an essential identity-preserving role between our death and rising again. No separated souls, no resurrection. Two of Aquinas’s best medieval interpreters, however, reject this interpretation. Leaning largely on one of Aquinas’s late quodlibetal questions, they deny that Thomas held (...) any non-repeatability principle strong enough to bar God’s resurrecting us even from complete destruction, souls and all. Here the chapter argues that careful analysis of the quodlibet and other texts largely vindicates the contemporary interpretation. It does so in a surprising way, however, since it turns out Aquinas’s non-repeatability principle applies only to corruptible, material entities like us, and not to incorruptible entities like angels. The reason Aquinas held this view, the chapter argues, is rooted in his theory of individuation. (shrink)

This study investigated the link between meditation, self-reported mindfulness and cognitive flexibility as well as other attentional functions. It compared a group of meditators experienced in mindfulness meditation with a meditation-naïve control group on measures of Stroop interference and the “d2-concentration and endurance test”. Overall the results suggest that attentional performance and cognitive flexibility are positively related to meditation practice and levels of mindfulness. Meditators performed significantly better than non-meditators on all measures of attention. Furthermore, self-reported mindfulness was higher in (...) meditators than non-meditators and correlations with all attention measures were of moderate to high strength. This pattern of results suggests that mindfulness is intimately linked to improvements of attentional functions and cognitive flexibility. The relevance of these findings for mental balance and well-being are discussed. (shrink)

The article explains the origins of European civilization in relation to Minoan (Cretan) civilization. In a synthetic form, it outlines phases of Minoan civilization (prepalatial, protopalatial, neopalatial, postpalatial). It also describes the circumstances and causes of the fall of Minoan civilization. It concludes with an outlook of the Minoan heritage.

This paper provides a sustained investigation into ancient teichopolitics – the politics of constructing walls – and the question of whether the best city should be surrounded by walls. Plato’s Laws adopts the Spartan view that walls have a negative effect on national character and argues that they should be ‘left lying asleep and undisturbed in the ground’. Aristotle’s Politics puts forward a series of objections to Plato and adopts the more pragmatic view that walls are necessary. Although both philosophers (...) debate the status of walls and foreigners within the best city, they fail to draw the thoroughly modern connection between teichopolitics and immigration. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics is humanity's finest scientific achievement. It explains why the sun shines and how your eyes can see. It's the theory behind the LEDs in your phone and the nuclear hearts of space probes. Every physicist agrees quantum physics is spectacularly successful. But ask them what quantum physics means, and the result will be a brawl. At stake is the nature of the Universe itself. What does it mean for something to be real? What is the role of consciousness (...) in the Universe? And do quantum rules apply to very small objects like electrons and protons, but not us? In What is Real?, Adam Becker brings to vivid life the brave researchers whose quest for the truth led them to challenge Bohr: David Bohm, who picked up Einstein's mantle and sought to make quantum mechanics deterministic, all while being hounded by the forces of McCarthyism; Hugh Everett, who argued that everything, big and small, must be governed by the same rules; and John Bell, who went to great lengths to eradicate the power of the god-like observer from the core of quantum physics. And they paid dearly, their reputations, careers, and sometimes lives ruined completely. But history has been kinder to them than their contemporaries were. As Becker shows, the brave intellectual giants have inspired a growing army of physicists and philosophers intent both on making a philosophically more satisfying theory of the universe and a more useful one as well. A gripping story of some of humanity's greatest ideas and the high cost with which many have pursued them, What is Real? is intellectual history at its passionate best. (shrink)

Argumentation Frameworks provide a fruitful basis for exploring issues of defeasible reasoning. Their power largely derives from the abstract nature of the arguments within the framework, where arguments are atomic nodes in an undifferentiated relation of attack. This abstraction conceals different senses of argument, namely a single-step reason to a claim, a series of reasoning steps to a single claim, and reasoning steps for and against a claim. Concrete instantiations encounter difficulties and complexities as a result of conflating these senses. (...) To distinguish them, we provide an approach to instantiating AFs in which the nodes are restricted to literals and rules, encoding the underlying theory directly. Arguments in these senses emerge from this framework as distinctive structures of nodes and paths. As a consequence of the approach, we reduce the effort of computing argumentation extensions, which is in contrast to other approaches. Our framework retains the theoretical and computational bene.. (shrink)

Traditionally, the philosophical study of Folk Psychology has focused on how ordinary people (i.e., those without formal training in academic fields like Psychology, Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, etc.) go about attributing mental states. Those working in this tradition have tended to focus primarily on intentional states, like beliefs and desires . Recently, though a body of work has emerged in the growing field of Experimental Philosophy that focuses on folk attributions of mental states that are not paradigmatically considered intentional. (...) This emerging discussion is concerned with figuring out how (and whether) ordinary people go about attributing mental states of qualitative experience, or what philosophers might call states of phenomenal consciousness . This paper briefly describes some of the primary works in the existing experimental philosophy literature and presents new experimental data that weigh on those hypotheses. Finally, it offers a cognitive model of the processes underlying attributions of mental states, called the Agency Model. (shrink)

This article suggests that Facebook embodies a new logic of capitalist governance, what has been termed the ‘social logic of the derivative’. The logic of the derivative is rooted in the now dominant financial level of the capitalist economy, and is mediated by social media and the algorithmic processing of large digital data sets. This article makes three precise claims: First, that the modus operandi of Facebook mirrors the operations of derivative financial instruments. Second, that the algorithms that Facebook uses (...) share a genealogy with those of derivative financial instruments – both are outcomes of the influence of the ‘cyber sciences’ on managerial practice in the post-war years. Third, that the future potential of Facebook lies in its ability to apply the logic of derivatives to the financial valuation of ordinary social relations, thus further extending the process of financialization of everyday life. (shrink)

Causal decision theory is one of our most prominent theories of rational choice and the “why ain’cha rich?” argument is one of the most prominent objections to this theory. According to WAR, CDT is not an adequate theory of rational choice because it leads agents to make decisions that foreseeably leave them less well off than agents that decide in some other manner. Some philosophers take WAR to decisively undermine CDT. On the other hand, others take WAR to fail to (...) resolve the debate over CDT’s adequacy. In this paper, I will defend this second view: WAR does not resolve the debate at hand but instead leads to deadlock. Then, in the second half of this paper, I will show that this deadlock is not broken by a recent variant on WAR due to Caspar Hare and Brian Hedden. Not only does this result have implications for the debate over CDT’s adequacy but this discussion also casts light on the broader success/rationality link. (shrink)

Relates Eastern concepts to Western religion, art, and modern science, and suggests their relevance to the reader.

[t. 1.] 1750-1830 -- [t. 2.] 1831-1864 -- [t. 3.] 1865-1895 -- [t. 4., zesz. 1.-2.] 1896-1918.

The problem of trust in social relationships was central to the emergence of the modern form of civil society and much discussed by social and political philosophers of the early modern period. Over the past few years, in response to the profound changes associated with postmodernity, trust has returned to the attention of political scientists, sociologists, economists, and public policy analysts. In this sequel to his widely admired book, The Idea of Civil Society, Adam Seligman analyzes trust as a (...) fundamental issue of our present social relationships. Setting his discussion in historical and intellectual context, Seligman asks whether trust--which many contemporary critics, from Robert Putnam through Francis Fukuyama, identify as essential in creating a cohesive society--can continue to serve this vital role. Seligman traverses a wide range of examples, from the minutiae of everyday manners to central problems of political and economic life, showing throughout how civility and trust are being displaced in contemporary life by new "external' system constraints inimical to the development of trust. Disturbingly, Seligman shows that trust is losing its unifying power precisely because the individual, long assumed to be the ultimate repository of rights and values, is being reduced to a sum of group identities and an abstract matrix of rules. The irony for Seligman is that, in becoming postmodern, we seem to be moving backward to a premodern condition in which group sanctions rather than trust are the basis of group life. (shrink)

Modern technology has changed the way we live, work, play, communicate, fight, love, and die. Yet few works have systematically explored these changes in light of their implications for individual and social welfare. How can we conceptualize and evaluate the influence of technology on human well-being? Bringing together scholars from a cross-section of disciplines, this volume combines an empirical investigation of technology and its social, psychological, and political effects, and a philosophical analysis and evaluation of the implications of such effects.

Epistemic trust in others frequently cannot be disentangled from interpersonal trust more generally, but the epistemic implications of how we affectively express our trust in others are under-investigated. This essay claims that gratitude, despite its empirically undeniable importance to human flourishing generally, is also important epistemically and in several intersecting ways. To be grateful to a person is to represent the world differently in key respects. Gratitude, even if it is for past non-epistemic benefits, should play an important role in (...) shaping who we epistemically rely on. Gratitude for specifically epistemic benefits is an important way in which we show our attunement to epistemic value and contribute to the incentive structures that make much of our public knowledge and informational ecosystems possible. Likewise, ingratitude is a crippling epistemic vice that renders our dependence on quality sources of information fragile and vulnerable to capture by misinformation. (shrink)

In this essay I argue first that De anima 3.4–5 shows Aristotle answering affirmatively a question that he raises near the beginning of the work, namely, whether any of the soul’s affections are proper to it alone. Second, I argue that this initial conclusion reveals something important about the very first question that Aristotle broaches in the work, viz., the method and starting-points employed in the science of the soul. Aristotle’s position, I claim, shows that investigating the human soul is (...) not merely an empirical concern discharged by natural science but also a rational concern discharged by logic, epistemology, and possibly even metaphysics. I defend these views against two rival interpretations of the passage, the “transcendental interpretation,” on which it does not describe a faculty immanent to human beings at all, and the “bad science interpretation,” on which it does but only as the result of Aristotle’s faulty physiology of cognition. (shrink)

Taxes are closely related to the functioning of the state. From the moral and social point of view, it should always be directed towards the common good. Implementing this principle, the state supports the improvement of citizens’ welfare. Provides them with collected taxes their services, such as internal and external security, education, culture, infrastructure, social services and others. The formation of fair tax system and the mechanism of budgetary resources also has great importance because of the importance of the whole (...) economy. In addition, the state’s fiscal system applies to every citizen as a taxpayer. Therefore, this issue also has important ethical dimension of individuality. The article focuses on these issues, emphasizing an ethical perspective the following three issues: (1) The social context of contemporary reflections on the obligations to the state, (2) the state and its goals, and (3) the moral aspects of the duty to pay taxes. (shrink)

I call the Particular Problem of Hell the problem of explaining why God allows a certain set of created persons to populate hell, as opposed to allowing some other set of created persons to do so. This paper proposes a solution to PPH on behalf of proponents of Divine Universal Causality — the view, roughly, that God causes everything distinct from himself to exist at any time it exists. Despite initial appearances, I argue, proponents of DUC can adopt a version (...) of the popular approach to the Problem of Hell sometimes called the Choice Model. My proposal is based upon Eleonore Stump's Thomistically-inspired notion that our wills can enter a state of "quiescence" with respect to a given option. While proponents of DUC will, I argue, most likely find Stump's own quiescence-based solution to PPH unacceptable, there is a way of modifying her approach that renders it compatible with God's causing everything distinct from himself, including the free choices of his creatures. (shrink)