This article seeks to elaborate the roles of some Muslim scholars and activists who, thanks to the advancement of internet technology, have shaped new forms of religious life in Indonesia. Using social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, they advocate their ideas and attract followers from Muslim groups. These Muslims are divided into four ideologies, namely conservative, moderate, liberal and traditionalist. As this article argues, thanks to their online activism, they successfully shape a new religious authority replacing (...) the old model. Nevertheless, as this article also suggests, religious activism on online media outlets does not lead to the pluralism of religious views and understandings. In contrast, this activism creates the so called echo chamber or isolated bubbles, which means that the activists’ voices are only observed by their limited followers. Taking the activism of most popular conservative activists Felix Siauw, it sees that his view reverberates only among his social media followers and fails to attract those who embrace other views orideologies. The followers of the moderate, the liberal, and the traditionalist on the other hand tend to be heterogenous creating a noisy minority. This leads to the vibrant and robust religious discourses. (shrink)

Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy is the first volume of essays dedicated to the whole question of self-knowledge and its role in Platonic philosophy. It brings together established and rising scholars from every interpretative school of Plato studies, and a variety of texts from across Plato's corpus - including the classic discussions of self-knowledge in the Charmides and Alcibiades I, and dialogues such as the Republic, Theaetetus, and Theages, which are not often enough mined for insights about (...) this crucial philosophical topic. The rich variety of readings and hermeneutical methods allows for an encompassing view of the relevant scholarly debates. The volume is intended to serve as a standard resource for further research on Plato's treatment of self-knowledge, and will highlight the relevance of Plato's thought to contemporary debates on selfhood, self-reflection and subjectivity. (shrink)

Pediatric dentists rely on access to hospital operating rooms for safe, effective, and humane delivery of dental care. The children who benefit most from dental treatment in a hospital operating room are those who are very young, have dental anxieties or phobias, are precommunicative or noncommunicative, need extensive or invasive dental treatments, or have special healthcare needs. Diminishing access to hospital operating rooms for pediatric dental treatment has become an escalating problem in contemporary times. Financial barriers, hospital costs, reimbursement rates, (...) health insurance policies and deductibles, out-of-network hospitals, socioeconomic factors, and the COVID-19 pandemic are prominent contributing factors. This problem in access to care has resulted in long waiting times for hospital operating rooms, deferral of medically necessary dental care, and pain and infection among this vulnerable patient population. Pediatric dentists have responded to the problem by utilizing alternative methods of care delivery, such as in-office deep sedation or in-office general anesthesia, and by implementing aggressive medical management of dental caries. However, the youngest of pediatric patients and children with special healthcare needs still remain at a disadvantage in receiving definitive dental treatment. This article aims to highlight the ethical challenges faced by pediatric dentists in contemporary practice in the face of limitations in hospital operating room access through four case scenarios. (shrink)

The problem of adolescent girls escaping from homes is one of the social problems and phenomena alien to all societies, Arabic in particular, the Iraqi society known for its ancient traditions and family cohesion, and according to the significant changes witnessed by those societies, including Iraqi society, these changes led to the emergence of many deviant phenomena among the most affected youth, resulting in high rates of deviation and the spread of new subcultures that did not exist before that reject (...) conservative family values and create new values that try to adapt to These rapid changes and we find that adolescent girls are often affected by them, as we see a lot of teenage girls between the values of the conservative family and the values of the new subculture that calls for rebellion against parental authority and disobedience to their orders and escape from home, so escape has become a ghost that threatens many safe and stable homes and brings them sadness and shame, as it has become difficult for the family to forget, The fact that escape leads to immediate and long-term risks, the immediate risks of homelessness and social disintegration and long-term involvement in crime and drug addiction, especially those who are in their teens (10_18) as they aim at the unknown as a result of which it is necessary to study the social and psychological effects that can have a profound impact on the feet of adolescent girls to escape from homes and leave the family, which has profound effects not only on the family but on society as a whole. (shrink)

This book presents the Proceedings of the Second International Colloquium on Cognitive Science, held at San Sebastian in May, 1991, to discuss from an interdisciplinary point of view topics which are at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science. With a total of eleven papers from leading scholars in the field, the volume provides many different theoretical approaches to the study of Categories, Consciousness and Reasoning. The book is addressed to researchers, specialists, advanced students and scholars in the fields of (...) epistemology, philosophy of mind, psychology, semantics, logic and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

In the life of any species, extinction is the final evolutionary process. It is a common one at present, as the world is entering a major extinction crisis. The pattern of extinction and threat is very non-random, with some taxa being more vulnerable than others. Explaining why some taxa are affected and some escape is a major goal of conservation biology. More ambitiously, a predictive model could, in principle, be built by integrating comparable studies of past and present extinctions. We (...) review progress towards both explanatory and predictive frameworks, comparing correlates of extinction in different groups at different times. Progress towards explanatory models for the current crisis is promising, at least in some well-studied taxa, but the development of a truly predictive model is hampered by the formidable difficulties of integrating studies of present and past extinctions. BioEssays 22:1123–1133, 2000. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Long time delay before lasing in a II-VI laser diode has been observed. Due to this delay, a nominal threshold current increases as the width of applied current pulse becomes shorter. This delay is attributed to the internal Q switching caused by the balance of injected carriers, temperature rise and gain-guiding. By fitting the calculated data to the experimental ones, rates of refractive index change with carrier concentration and with temperature have been estimated.

Shared decision-making has become a new focus of health policy. Though its core elements are largely agreed upon, there is little consensus regarding which outcomes to prioritize for policy-mandated shared decision-making.

Fabricating Authenticity explores everyday examples that work as productive conversation-starters for those wanting to complicate and examine authenticity claims, thus making this an ideal volume for the introductory classroom and beyond.

The systemic complexity of sustainable development imposes a major cognitive challenge to students’ learning. Faculty can explore new approaches in the classroom to teach the topic successfully, including the use of technology. We conducted an experiment to compare the effectiveness of a simulation vis-à-vis a case-based method to teach sustainable development. We found that both pedagogical methods are effective for teaching this concept, although our results support the idea that simulations are slightly more effective than case studies, particularly to teach (...) its multidimensional and inter-temporal nature. Therefore, our findings suggest the use of both simulations and case studies as pedagogical tools to convey the main ideas associated with sustainable development. (shrink)

The current study aims what is the meaning of disasters, what is the relationship between national disasters and high rates of disease and mortality? what is the relationship between nursing care during emergencies and disasters? Is there a specialized department concerned with disasters and crises in Saudi Arabia? Are there courses and training plans dealing with disasters and crises in the workplaces? A questionnaire was prepared via Google Drive and distributed to the population aged 25-55 years, men and women in (...) city of mecca. As for the questionnaire, it was distributed via the social networking program (WhatsApp) for the purpose of distancing for fear of the presence of the Corona virus. 380 questionnaires were distributed, 365 responses were obtained via email to the principal researcher. This study concluded that nursing provides many nursing services to the injured during emergencies, crises, and natural disasters, checking for fractures or dislocations in the body or limbs, and if the bones are visible, they must be covered with a clean, sterile bandage, and not move the injured person if the fracture is in the spine. Apply clean, sterile bandages to other wounds. The patient should also be closely monitored and given any possible nursing care with any type of belt and chemical, manual, or mechanical restraints according to the doctor’s orders and instructions, according to the opinions of 94.4% of participants. (shrink)

There is good evidence that, in general, autonomic conditioning in humans occurs only when subjects can verbalize the contingencies of conditioning. However, one form of conditioning, evaluative conditioning (EC), seems exceptional in that a growing body of evidence suggests that it can occur without conscious contingency awareness. As such, EC offers a unique insight into what role contingency awareness might play in associative learning. Despite this evidence, there are reasons to doubt that evaluative conditioning can occur without conscious awareness. This (...) paper aims to critically review the EC literature and to draw some parallels to what is known about autonomic conditioning. In doing so, some important general issues about measuring contingency awareness are raised. These issues are illustrated with a brief report of an experiment in which a sensitive measure of contingency awareness is compared against a commonly used measure. (shrink)

It is bad news to find out that one's cognitive or perceptual faculties are defective. Furthermore, it’s not always transparent how one ought to revise one's beliefs in light of such news. Two sorts of news should be distinguished. On the one hand, there is news that a faculty is unreliable -- that it doesn't track the truth particularly well. On the other hand, there is news that a faculty is anti-reliable -- that it tends to go positively wrong. These (...) two sorts of news call for extremely different responses. We provide accounts of these responses, and prove bounds on the degree to which one can reasonably count oneself as mistaken about a given subject matter. (shrink)

Like those famous nations divided by a single tongue, my paper (this volume) and Professor P.M. Churchland's deep and engaging reply offer different spins on a common heritage. The common heritage is, of course, a connectionist vision of the inner neural economy- a vision which depicts that economy in terms of supra-sentential state spaces, vector-to-vector transformations, and the kinds of skillful pattern-recognition routine we share with the bulk of terrestrial intelligent life-forms. That which divides us is, as ever, much harder (...) to isolate and name. Clearly, it has something to do with the role of moral talk and exchange, and something to do with the conception of morality itself (and, correlatively, with the conception of moral progress). Most of this Reply will be devoted to clarifying the nature of the disputed territory. First, though (as a prophylactic against misunderstanding) I shall rehearse some points of agreement concerning moral talk and progress. (shrink)

In January 2023, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward to 90 s before midnight.

J.M. Coetzee’s book, 'Elizabeth Costello' is one of the stranger works to appear in recent years. Yet if we focus our attention on the book’s two chapters dealing with animals, two preoccupations emerge. The first sees Coetzee use animals to evoke a particular conception of ethics, one similar to that of the philosopher Mary Midgley. Coetzee’s second theme connects animals to the phenomena of scapegoating, as it has been characterized by the philosophical anthropologist René Girard. While both themes involve human (...) interactions with animals, each transcends application to that particular issue and raises deeper questions, respectively concerning the foundations of morality and the therapeutic allure of political violence. Making explicit these two preoccupations enhances our understanding of Coetzee’s fiction, particularly Disgrace. However, when Coetzee’s two philosophical strands are analyzed in their own terms, the ethics of sympathy is shown to be a more coherent notion than the understanding of politics he takes over from Girard. (shrink)

Recent EEG studies on the early postmortem interval that suggest the persistence of electrophysiological coherence and connectivity in the brain of animals and humans reinforce the need for further investigation of the relationship between the brain’s activity and the dying process. Neuroscience is now in a position to empirically evaluate the extended process of dying and, more specifically, to investigate the possibility of brain activity following the cessation of cardiac and respiratory function. Under the direction of the Center for Healthy (...) Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, research was conducted in India on a postmortem meditative state cultivated by some Tibetan Buddhist practitioners in which decomposition is putatively delayed. For all healthy baseline and postmortem subjects presented here, we collected resting state electroencephalographic data, mismatch negativity, and auditory brainstem response. In this study, we present HB data to demonstrate the feasibility of a sparse electrode EEG configuration to capture well-defined ERP waveforms from living subjects under very challenging field conditions. While living subjects displayed well-defined MMN and ABR responses, no recognizable EEG waveforms were discernable in any of the tukdam cases. (shrink)

Study and teaching of Islam with refererence to Qurʼan and Hadith.

Introduction Jamie Allen Time, of all the dimensions readily presented to experience, seems to do so most readily through things. Stuff, in supposed counter-valence to the negentropic resilience of living things, appears to us as that which degrades through time, and demarcates a more technical chronometry of sequential events. Situated outside the rotting of fruit and the ticking of clocks, a “deep time” persists. Like the ultra-hearing of the bat, and the infra-vision of the boa-constrictor, there exist living and non-living (...) agents and entities capable of revealing the fixity and finitude of our own perceptual frames for thinking and understanding. The recordings presented here consist of four extracts of documents made in deep geological repository sites (for the storage of nuclear waste). Here re-presented are the Yucca Mountain Repository; HADES, in Mol, Belgium; Gorleben in Germany and a further recording from Forsmark in Sweden (pretty much inaudible behind a loop of a pop song). These recordings are imagined acoustic amplifications of deep time, just as the astronomer’s telescope is (thought of a certain way), also a time machine. Stars and nuclear waste are unapparent objects of temporal thought. Andy Weir is an artist from London researching effects of deprioritised subjectivity and contemporary art. This project draws on work developing sonic fictions, stealthy earworms, and micropolitical agencies. Prompted for further thoughts about the recordings presented here, he offered up the interspersed discussion included. —JA Yucca Mountain Repository, Nevada, USA by continent I became interested in these sites originally as spaces that allude to a time outside of the human (‘deep time’) as they are designed to store waste ‘without future maintenance’. The very fact of thinking about these spaces or working on them—engineering etc.. (as I’m particularly interested them in a kind of practice rather than just an object of thought), in other words, forces a confrontation with thought of the extinction of humanity. I was interested in this as a production of affect at odds with the expected ‘ironic, can be whatever you like’ interpretive condition of contemporary art (art under the condition of neoliberalism, say, where the individual subject is prioritised as a free autonomous producer of the meaning of the work) When I thought about this a bit though it ran into paradoxes—yes, I could allude to deep time, but in doing so I just allude to its un-representability, drawing attention to the limits of representation and so reaffirming it—I was stuck in a representation/non-representational negative dialectic. In trying to somehow create a figure for deep time I was either reducing it to my description of it, or presenting it as irreducible. HADES Facility, Mol, Belgium by continent I don’t think I’ve escaped this in the work but my response to it was to create a sonic-fiction. This was based on the idea of a viral transmission of the affect of deep time (this is the ‘pyroclastic-soaked chrono-dread’) through receiving apparatuses, transforming the screen into an intercessor or mediating lure for the outside, a site of exposure multiplying virulently through its dissemination, invoking as much as trying to represent these spaces, the sounds as durations of exposure to contagious materials, and fictions as a way of excavating the strangeness of a world opaque to subjective reconfiguration... Testing out I suppose ways that art could start thinking about figuring the reality of ecological crisis. Gorleben Repository, Lower Saxony, Germany by continent While everything remains at the level of fiction I think the work is problematic. It doesn’t really model anything, giving too much authority to either romantic abandonment or the recuperation of romantic abandonment under its description by theory/philosophy, all contained and controlled by me within a fairly limited condition of what art can do. Deep Time Contagion is precisely a materialisation of and transmission of this paradox (i.e. with screen-media can only present deep time as unrepresentable or draw attention to an inability to present it) taking the comfort/panic induced by this paradox as its material. I’m working now on some new projects that take this as a point of departure. Forsmark Repository, Sweden (Robitussin Mix) by continent. (shrink)

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) presents a significant problem that necessitates a greater understanding of its underlying molecular complexity in order to improve diagnostics and therapies. Recent studies have shed light on the critical role that mitochondrial dysfunction plays in the development and course of HCC. Once thought to be primarily involved in the synthesis of cellular energy, mitochondria are now known to be key participants in the regulation of a variety of cellular functions that go beyond bioenergetics. The purpose of this (...) review is to elucidate the diagnostic and therapeutic implications of mitochondrial dysfunction in HCC by synthesising ideas from conventional and contemporary scientific literature. Within diagnostics, the discovery of mitochondrial biomarkers such as mutations in mitochondrial DNA and abnormalities in respiratory chain complex activities provides a state-of-the-art viewpoint for the timely identification and accurate description of HCC. In addition, non-invasive imaging methods that focus on mitochondrial function offer prospective means of improving clinical diagnostic accuracy. Moving on to treatment, a growing area of study investigates how mitochondria-targeted therapies might be used to treat HCC. Novel substances and repurposed medications with the potential to induce selective apoptosis in cancer cells, reduce oxidative stress, and restore mitochondrial homeostasis are highly promising. In the fight against hepatocellular carcinoma, an understanding of the complex interactions between mitochondrial dysfunction and HCC opens new diagnostic opportunities and paves the way for individualised treatment plans. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This chapter explores the arguments surrounding the use of human enhancement technologies in sport, arguing for a reconceptualization of the doping debate. First, it develops an overview and critique of the legislative structures on enhancement. Subsequently, a conceptual framework for understanding the role of technological effects in sport is advanced. Finally, two case studies (hypoxic chambers and gene transfer) receive specific attention, through which it is argued that human enhancement technologies can enrich the practice of elite sports rather than diminish (...) them. In conclusion, it is argued that elite sports are at a pivotal moment in their history as an increasing range of enhancements makes less relevant the protection of the natural human through anti-doping. (shrink)

Since its inception in 2010, the Network for Public Health Law has aligned with federal, state, tribal, and local public health practitioners to assess how law can promote and protect the public’s health. In 2013, Network authors illustrated major trends in public health laws and policies emanating from an internal assessment of thousands of requests for technical assistance nationally. More recently, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has invited the Network and other partners to consider new ideas and strategies toward building (...) a “culture of health.” Per Figure 1, RWJF’s conception of a culture of health emphasizes key action areas essential to the promotion of health across all sectors and diverse populations. (shrink)

Like those famous nations divided by a single tongue, my paper and Professor P.M. Churchland's deep and engaging reply offer different spins on a common heritage. The common heritage is, of course, a connectionist vision of the inner neural economy- a vision which depicts that economy in terms of supra-sentential state spaces, vector-to-vector transformations, and the kinds of skillful pattern-recognition routine we share with the bulk of terrestrial intelligent life-forms. That which divides us is, as ever, much harder to isolate (...) and name. Clearly, it has something to do with the role of moral talk and exchange, and something to do with the conception of morality itself. Most of this Reply will be devoted to clarifying the nature of the disputed territory. First, though I shall rehearse some points of agreement concerning moral talk and progress. (shrink)

Ibrāhīm Dīnānī, Ghulām Ḥusayn - Interviews ; Islamic philosophy.

Partly in reply to D. Cannon’s critique of my analytical reconstruction of Polanyi’s post-critical theory of knowledge, I argue that there are good reasons for not appropriating Polanyi’s programme of self-identication and the confessional rhetoric which may be derived from it. Arguing that “post-critical”should not be identified with an uncritical dogmatism, I then go on to suggest that the theory of tacit knowing had best be elaborated further by drawingon the work of J. Searle and M. Johnson. Finally, I make (...) use of E. Meek’s account of the notion of “contact with reality”to highlight the Polanyian criteria of truth. (shrink)

There is a common assumption that intention is a complex behavioural disposition, or a motivational state underlying such a disposition. Associated with this position is the apparently commonsense view that an avowal of intention is a direct report of an inner motivational state, and indirectly an expression of a belief that it is likely that one will A. A central claim of this article is that the dispositional or motivational model is mistaken since it cannot acknowledge either the future-direction of (...) intention or the authority of avowals of intention. I argue that avowals of intention - first-person, present-tense ascriptions - express direct knowledge of a future action, knowledge that is not based on examination of one's present introspectible states or dispositions. Such avowals concern a future action, not a present state or disposition; just as self-ascriptions of belief concern the outer not the inner, so self-ascriptions of intention concern the future outer, not the present inner. One way of capturing this future-direction is to say that avowals of intention - and perhaps sense intentions themselves - are a kind of prediction, and not a description of one's present state of mind. This position is suggested by Anscombe in her monograph Intention (1963), and treats avowals of intention as judgements about the future, which unlike ordinary predictions are not based on evidence. However, since talk of prediction everywhere suggests an evidence-based stance - that meaningful hypothesis about the likely occurrence of events is being proposed, an hypothesis that can be falsified by evidence - the description future-outer thesis is preferred. I defend this thesis against various objections, arguing that it complements Anscombe's characterisation of intentions as based on reasons. (shrink)

Andy Clark has argued that language is “in many ways the ultimate artifact” (Clark 1997, p.218). Fuelling this conclusion is a view according to which the human brain is essentially no more than a patterncompleting device, while language is an external resource which is adaptively fitted to the human brain in such a way that it enables that brain to exceed its unaided (pattern-completing) cognitive capacities, in much the same way as a pair of scissors enables us to “exploit our (...) basic manipulative capacities to fulfill new ends” (Clark 1997, pp.193-4). How should we respond to this bold reconceptualization of our linguistic abilities? First we need to understand it properly. So I begin by identifying and unpacking (and making a small “Heideggerian” amendment to) Clark’s main language-specific claims. That done I take a step back. Clark’s approach to language is generated from a theoretical perspective which sees cognition as distributed over brain, body, and world. So I continue my investigation of Clark’s incursion into linguistic territory by uncovering and illustrating those key ideas from the overall distributed cognition research programme which are particularly relevant in the present context. I then use this analysis as a spring-board from which to examine a crucial issue that arises for Clark’s account of language, namely linguistic inner rehearsal. I argue that while there is much to recommend in Clark’s treatment of this issue, some significant difficulties remain to be overcome. Via this critique of Clark’s position, alongside some proposals for how the revealed problems might be addressed, I hope to edge us that bit closer to a full understanding of our linguistic abilities. (shrink)

Reflection (Philosophy). ; Reason -- Philosophy.

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Marinov''s critique I argue, is vitiated by its failure to recognize the distinctive role of superposition within the distributed connectionist paradigm. The use of so-called subsymbolic distributed encodings alone is not, I agree, enough to justify treating distributed connectionism as a distinctive approach. It has always been clear that microfeatural decomposition is both possible and actual within the confines of recognizably classical approaches. When such approaches also involve statistically-driven learning algorithms — as in the case of ID3 — the fundamental (...) differences become even harder to spot. To see them, it is necessary to consider not just the nature of an acquired input-output function but the nature of the representational scheme underlying it. Differences between such schemes make themselves best felt outside the domain of immediate problem solving. It is in the more extended contexts of performance DURING learning and cognitive change as a result of SUBSEQUENT training on new tasks (or simultaneous training on several tasks) that the effects of superpositional storage techniques come to the fore. I conclude that subsymbols, distribution and statistically driven learning alone are indeed not of the essence. But connectionism is not just about subsymbols and distribution. It is about the generation of whole subsymbol SYSTEMS in which multiple distributed representations are created and superposed. (shrink)

According to the “Embodied Cognition” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the three landmark texts in the 4E cognitive science tradition are Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind, and Andy Clark’s Being There. In my first section, I offer a phenomenological interpretation of these three texts, identifying recuring affirmations of the figure of dance alongside explicit marginalization of the practice of dance, perhaps in part due to cognitive science’s overemphasis on cognition (...) to the exclusion of affect. In my second section, drawing on my previous interpretations of proto-affect theorists (including Spinoza, Deleuze, and Fanon), I channel this tension in 4E cognitive science into a dancing partnership with human science psychology, suggesting three “choreographic provocations” for therapeutic practice and psychological research, namely (1) treating clients/subjects as dancers, (2) reimagining research and therapy as improvised duets between practitioners and clients/subjects, and (3) pursuing an ideal of freer movement and an emergent flourishing singularity for clients/subjects. Finally, I reformulate these three choreographic provocations in terms of my new theoretical method of “dancing-with,” as well as the four psychological prerequisites for flourishing posited by my figuration philosophy of dance. (shrink)

In a previous paper linking Simondon to biological and systems-theoretical discourses in autopoiesis and debates about contemporary technogenesis, I have argued that Simondon’s ontology of individuation furnishes a basis to theorize the “agency” of the environment that comes to the fore as we humans enter, as we do increasingly today, into alliances with sophisticated, computational technologies.1 In concert with researchers like Andy Clark and N. Katherine Hayles, I embrace the “technical distribution” of cognition and perception as a way of understanding (...) the complex couplings between humans and machines that are typical in our contemporary world, but that have, in fact, been part of human techno-genesis since .. (shrink)

Andy Egan has recently produced a set of alleged counterexamples to causal decision theory in which agents are forced to decide among causally unratifiable options, thereby making choices they know they will regret. I show that, far from being counterexamples, CDT gets Egan's cases exactly right. Egan thinks otherwise because he has misapplied CDT by requiring agents to make binding choices before they have processed all available information about the causal consequences of their acts. I elucidate CDT in a way (...) that makes it clear where Egan goes wrong, and which explains why his examples pose no threat to the theory. My approach has similarities to a modification of CDT proposed by Frank Arntzenius, but it differs in the significance that it assigns to potential regrets. I maintain, contrary to Arntzenius, that an agent facing Egan's decisions can rationally choose actions that she knows she will later regret. All rationality demands of agents it that they maximize unconditional causal expected utility from an epistemic perspective that accurately reflects all the available evidence about what their acts are likely to cause. This yields correct answers even in outlandish cases in which one is sure to regret whatever one does. (shrink)

One of the vastly exciting areas in modern science involves the study of the brain. Recent research focuses not only on how the brain works but how it is related to what we normally call the mind, and throws new light on human behavior. Progress has been made in researching all that relates to interior man, why he thinks and feels as he does, what values he chooses to adopt, and what practices to scorn. All of these attributes make us (...) human and help to explain art, philosophy, and religions. Motion, sight, and memory, as well as emotions and the sentiments common to humans, are all given new meaning by what we have learned about the brain. In an introductory essay, Vernon B. Mountcastle traces the progress made in brain science during this century. Gerald M. Edelman touches upon features of the brain that challenge the picture of the brain as a machine. Semir Zeki discusses artists and artistic expression as an extension of the function of the brain. Richard S. J. Frackowiak probes the functional architecture of the brain. Mark F. Bear and Leon N Cooper explore whether complex neural systems can be illuminated by theoretical structures. Jean-Pierre Changeux sheds light on the knowledge gained in recent years concerning the neurobiology and pharmacology of drug action and addiction. Alexander A. Borbuly and Giulio Tononi ponder the quest for the essence of sleep, illuminating its complex dynamic process. George L. Gabor Miklos examines variations in neuroanatomies and sensory systems between individuals of the same species as well as variations across the evolutionary spectrum. Emilio Bizzi and Ferdinando A. Mussa-Ivaldi explain how scientists have approached the study of movement, the problems encountered, and the solutions proposed. Marcel Kinsbourne explores the unity and diversity in the human brain. In the concluding essay, Andy Clark points to recent work in neuroscience, robotics, and psychology that stresses the unexpected intimacy of brain, body, and world, supporting his belief that the mind is best understood as a brain at home in its proper bodily cultural and environmental niche. The breadth and scope of subjects covered in this volume attest to the extraordinary progress taking place in the study of the brain. This brilliant collection of essays by those at the forefront of research in this area will be of interest to all those interested in human behavior. Gerald M. Edelman is director of the Neurosciences Institute and chairman of the Department of Neurobiology at the Scripps Research Institute. Jean-Pierre Changeux is professor at the Collbge de France and the Institute Pasteur. (shrink)