Predictive processing accounts of neural function view the brain as a kind of prediction machine that forms models of its environment in order to anticipate the upcoming stream of sensory stimulation. These models are then continuously updated in light of incoming error signals. Predictive processing has offered a powerful new perspective on cognition, action, and perception. In this chapter we apply the insights from predictive processing to the study of emotions. The upshot is a picture of emotion as inseparable from (...) perception and cognition, and a key feature of the embodied mind. (shrink)

"Blending literary and photo-journalism, history, and storytelling, essays examine eighteen Texas dance halls in terms of their music, culture, and community. Also considers the predominantly Czech and German heritage from which these halls evolved, as we.

Cognitive niche construction is the process whereby organisms create and maintain cause–effect models of their niche as guides for fitness influencing behavior. Extended mind theory claims that cognitive processes extend beyond the brain to include predictable states of the world. Active inference and predictive processing in cognitive science assume that organisms embody predictive (i.e., generative) models of the world optimized by standard cognitive functions (e.g., perception, action, learning). This paper presents an active inference formulation that views cognitive niche construction as (...) a cognitive function aimed at optimizing organisms' generative models. We call that process of optimization extended active inference. (shrink)

Can what we know change what we see? Does language affect cognition and perception? The last few years have seen increased attention to these seemingly disparate questions, but with little theoretical advance. We argue that substantial clarity can be gained by considering these questions through the lens of predictive processing, a framework in which mental representations—from the perceptual to the cognitive—reflect an interplay between downward-flowing predictions and upward-flowing sensory signals. This framework provides a parsimonious account of how what we know (...) ought to change what we see and helps us understand how a putatively high-level trait such as language can impact putatively low-level processes such as perception. Within this framework, language begins to take on a surprisingly central role in cognition by providing a uniquely focused and flexible means of constructing predictions against which sensory signals can be evaluated. Predictive processing thus provides a plausible mechanism for many of the reported effects of language on perception, thought, and action, and new insights on how and when speakers of different languages construct the same “reality” in alternate ways. (shrink)

Over the last 30 years, representationalist and dynamicist positions in the philosophy of cognitive science have argued over whether neurocognitive processes should be viewed as representational or not. Major scientific and technological developments over the years have furnished both parties with ever more sophisticated conceptual weaponry. In recent years, an enactive generalization of predictive processing – known as active inference – has been proposed as a unifying theory of brain functions. Since then, active inference has fueled both representationalist and dynamicist (...) campaigns. However, we believe that when diving into the formal details of active inference, one should be able to find a solution to the war; if not a peace treaty, surely an armistice of a sort. Based on an analysis of these formal details, this paper shows how both representationalist and dynamicist sensibilities can peacefully coexist within the new territory of active inference. (shrink)

The emerging neurocomputational vision of humans as embodied, ecologically embedded, social agents—who shape and are shaped by their environment—offers a golden opportunity to revisit and revise ideas about the physical and information-theoretic underpinnings of life, mind, and consciousness itself. In particular, the active inference framework makes it possible to bridge connections from computational neuroscience and robotics/AI to ecological psychology and phenomenology, revealing common underpinnings and overcoming key limitations. AIF opposes the mechanistic to the reductive, while staying fully grounded in a (...) naturalistic and information-theoretic foundation, using the principle of free energy minimization. The latter provides a theoretical basis for a unified treatment of particles, organisms, and interactive machines, spanning from the inorganic to organic, non-life to life, and natural to artificial agents. We provide a brief introduction to AIF, then explore its implications for evolutionary theory, ecological psychology, embodied phenomenology, and robotics/AI research. We conclude the paper by considering implications for machine consciousness. (shrink)

Recent work in cognitive and computational neuroscience depicts the human cortex as a multi-level prediction engine. This ‘predictive processing’ framework shows great promise as a means of both understanding and integrating the core information processing strategies underlying perception, reasoning, and action. But how, if at all, do emotions and sub-cortical contributions fit into this emerging picture? The fit, we shall argue, is both profound and potentially transformative. In the picture we develop, online cognitive function cannot be assigned to either the (...) cortical or the sub-cortical component, but instead emerges from their tight co-ordination. This tight co-ordination involves processes of continuous reciprocal causation that weave together bodily information and ‘top-down’ predictions, generating a unified sense of what’s out there and why it matters. The upshot is a more truly ‘embodied’ vision of the predictive brain in action. (shrink)

There are not enough solid organs available to meet the needs of patients with organ failure. Thousands of patients every year die on the waiting lists for transplantation. Yet there is one currently available, underutilized, potential source of organs. Many patients die in intensive care following withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment whose organs could be used to save the lives of others. At present the majority of these organs go to waste.In this paper we consider and evaluate a range of ways (...) to improve the number and quality of organs available from this group of patients. Changes to consent arrangements (for example conscription of organs after death) or changes to organ donation practice could dramatically increase the numbers of organs available, though they would conflict with currently accepted norms governing transplantation.We argue that one alternative, Organ Donation Euthanasia, would be a rational improvement over current practice regarding withdrawal of life support. It would give individuals the greatest chance of being able to help others with their organs after death. It would increase patient autonomy. It would reduce the chance of suffering during the dying process. We argue that patients should be given the choice of whether and how they would like to donate their organs in the event of withdrawal of life support in intensive care.Continuing current transplantation practice comes at the cost of death and prolonged organ failure. We should seriously consider all of the alternatives. (shrink)

This article introduces a special section concerned with precariousness and cultural work. Its aim is to bring into dialogue three bodies of ideas — the work of the autonomous Marxist `Italian laboratory'; activist writings about precariousness and precarity; and the emerging empirical scholarship concerned with the distinctive features of cultural work, at a moment when artists, designers and (new) media workers have taken centre stage as a supposed `creative class' of model entrepreneurs. The article is divided into three sections. It (...) starts by introducing the ideas of the autonomous Marxist tradition, highlighting arguments about the autonomy of labour, informational capitalism and the `factory without walls', as well as key concepts such as multitude and immaterial labour. The impact of these ideas and of Operaismo politics more generally on the precarity movement is then considered in the second section, discussing some of the issues that have animated debate both within and outside this movement, which has often treated cultural workers as exemplifying the experiences of a new `precariat'. In the third and final section we turn to the empirical literature about cultural work, pointing to its main features before bringing it into debate with the ideas already discussed. Several points of overlap and critique are elaborated — focusing in particular on issues of affect, temporality, subjectivity and solidarity. (shrink)

In a previous paper (Moore, 2001), the headline findings from a study of social and financial performance over three years of eight firms in the UK supermarket industry were reported. These were based on the derivation of a 16‐measure social performance index and a 4‐measure financial performance index. This paper discusses the formulationof the indices and then reports on: discussions with two supermarket firms concerning the overall results; inter‐relationships between individual financial performance measures; inter‐relationships between individual social performance measures; stakeholder (...) group analysis; and inter‐relationships between turnover, age and gearing with social performance measures. The paper discusses these inter‐relationships, incorporating comments from the interviews with the two supermarket firms, and reports on both factor and cluster analysis. The interviews lend support for Preston and O’Bannon’s (1997) Available Funding Hypothesis in both its positive and negative form. The findings show that there are individual or combinations of related measures that could be used as surrogate measures for social and financial performance, instead of deriving a full index. However, the recommendation is that a full index continues to be used until there is further corroboration of these results. The findings also provide statistically significant support for the Negative Synergy Hypothesis (Preston and O’Bannon, 1997), show a statistically significant association between pre‐tax profits (both lagged and contemporaneous) with community contributions, and show that all statistically significant associations between individual social performance measures are positive – suggesting that they are mutually reinforcing. The association of size with social performance, noted in the previous paper, is also reinforced. Findings in relation to the proportion of women managers and the number of women on the Board and positive associations with other social and environmental performance measures raise interesting gender issues for business ethics. Factor analysis leads to no clear conclusions but cluster does show two or three clear clusters of firms, where size would seem to be the main but not sole factor. Further areas of research are noted. (shrink)

The key question in this three way debate is the role of the collectivity and of agency. Collins and Shrager debate whether cognitive psychology has, like the sociology of knowledge, always taken the mind to extend beyond the individual. They agree that irrespective of the history, socialization is key to understanding the mind and that this is compatible with Clark’s position; the novelty in Clark’s “extended mind” position appears to be the role of the material rather than the role of (...) other minds. Collins and Clark debate the relationship between self, agency, and the human collectivity. Collins argues that the Clark’s extended mind fails to stress the asymmetry of the relationship between the self and its material “scaffolding.” Clark accepts that there is asymmetry but that an asymmetrical ensemble is sufficient to explain the self. Collins says that we know too little about the material world to pursue such a model to the exclusion of other approaches including that both the collectivity and language have agency. The collectivity must be kept in mind! (Though what follows is a robust exchange of views it is also a cooperative effort, authors communicating “backstage” with each other to try to make the disagreements as clear and to the point as possible.). (shrink)

The accelerating adoption of electronic health record systems will have profound impacts on clinical care. It will also have far-reaching implications for public health research and surveillance, which in turn could lead to changes in public policy, statutes, and regulations. The public health benefits of EHR use can be significant. However, researchers and analysts who rely on EHR data must proceed with caution and understand the potential limitations of EHRs.Much has been written about the risk of EHR privacy breaches. This (...) paper focuses on a different set of concerns, those relating to data quality. Unlike clinical trial data, EHR data is not recorded primarily to meet the needs of researchers. Because of clinicians’ workloads, poor user-interface design, and other factors, EHR data is surprisingly likely to be erroneous, miscoded, fragmented, and incomplete. Although EHRs eliminate the problem of cryptic handwriting, other kinds of errors are more common with EHRs than with paper records. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Fictionalist Psychiatry?Sam Wilkinson, PhD (bio)I am deeply sympathetic to what Giulio Ongaro (2024a, 2024b, 2024c) writes in these three excellent interlocking papers. I will argue that there is a slightly more efficient way of approaching these issues. It involves adopting fictionalism rather than externalism (although fictionalism can accommodate externalist insights). Fictionalism is something that Ongaro briefly, and approvingly, mentions, in the final paper, but there is (...) an implicit realism in the initial approach. I am not sure there is much disagreement, however, and perhaps we end up in the same place, having approached from different starting points. The fictionalist approach is largely compatible with all of the substantive things Ongaro wants to say, but is, strictly speaking, in tension with the most natural interpretation of externalism, namely, construed as a form of descriptivism and realism (two notions I unpack later).Externalism, Evaluativism, and Social IntegrationA major theme of the first paper is that mainstream internalist Western psychiatry is bad at integrating the social dimension of mental illness. I agree. Furthermore, recent externalistic (enactive and predictive processing) approaches, while better, are still lacking in that they collapse the “social” into the “psychosocial.” Again, I agree. But my diagnosis (excuse the pun) is slightly different. The social dimension of illness concerns in large part the evaluative nature of illness, not the need to descriptively, causally capture a complex, objectively real phenomenon called “illness.”Having said this, in integrating this evaluative social dimension, we need to tread carefully lest we fail to meet the “demarcation challenge” (Murphy, 2008). This concerns the challenge of demarcating different kinds of problem. Humans have always had problems, for which they have needed help, accommodation, allowances made, and so on, but how do you distinguish mental health problems, from other kinds of problems? How do you distinguish money woes, or marital strife, both of which certainly cause unhappiness, or even psychological states that look like psychiatric symptoms (e.g., anxiety, low mood), from properly mental health problems?The biomedical “internalist” says: Easy! Either there is something objectively wrong with you, or there is not. However, notice that this is exactly [End Page 337] what externalists can say too, to the extent that they are trying to describe and define disorder in value-free terms. The only difference is that the internalist will talk about what is wrong within the biological boundaries of the organism, whereas the externalist will go beyond that.Externalism about a particular phenomenon, if it is to be a non-trivial position, needs to be sensitive to the distinction between cause and constitution (or what Adams & Azaiwa [2001] call “coupling-constitution confusion”). We see this in externalism about the mind in general. In the Extended Mind Hypothesis (Clark & Chalmers 1998), the claim is not that Otto’s notebook causally contributes to Otto’s mind (his belief about where MOMA is). Nobody would deny that. The interesting claim is that the notebook is constitutive of his belief: it is literally part of his mind. Similarly, nobody is denying that external (e.g., social) factors cause mental health problems, the question is: Do they constitute those problems? Externalism takes this question seriously and answers in the affirmative, at least in some cases. But the articulation of this has to be nuanced.Suppose I have crippling anxiety over financial concerns. Anxiety can be a mental health problem, but if, in this case, you transferring money into my bank account makes my anxiety disappear, then one might think this is not a mental health problem. It is a money problem. Or is it? Enter fictionalism (Wilkinson, 2022).Fictionalism is the view that calling someone mentally ill is not describing them as having a particular property, but involves something like engaging in a fiction, a fiction that has been constructed in order to encourage certain courses of action. According to fictionalism, given the facts, there is a lot of wiggle room about how we are to think of, and respond to, people’s problems.To borrow some insights from meta-ethics, when we examine normative discourse (one canonical domain being ethics) we can ask: what does the discourse do? And what... (shrink)

A growing genre of ‘crisis studies’ traces liberal-democratic instability to technocratic reformism and populist reaction to it. Most contributions recommend restoring economic growth, rebuilding civic culture and eschewing populist ‘us-versus-them’ narratives. This literature relies on a problematic way of thinking we label irenicism, and show to be a contemporary variant of what political realists call progressive moralizing. Irenicism portrays liberal-democracy as the product of voluntary consensus among rational individuals to sustain institutions that, by promoting endless economic growth, support universal interests (...) and values. By way of a synthesis of realist thinking and Dewey’s pragmatic approach to experimental theory-building, irenicism is shown to preserve a lacuna for political interpretation. The task for current political theory should not be to affirm old ideas in the face of new challenges. Rather, it should be to do away with ‘traditionalized’ ideas, to clear the field for experimental responses to democratic political thought and action. (shrink)

The unsustainable growth in U.S. health care costs is in large part attributable to the rising costs of pharmaceuticals and medical devices and to unnecessary medical procedures. This fact has led health reform advocates and policymakers to place considerable hope in the idea that increased government support for research on the comparative effectiveness of medical treatments will eventually help to reduce health care expenses by informing patients, health care providers, and payers about which treatments for common conditions are effective and (...) which are not. Comparative effectiveness research has shown in some cases that expensive but commonly used treatments are significantly less effective than relatively inexpensive alternatives. Critics warn, however, that CER will homogenize patient care, limit patient choices, and lead to improper health care rationing and even to the denial of lifesaving treatments. (shrink)

Dr Dominic Wilkinson, Department of Neonatal Medicine, University of Adelaide, 72 King William Rd, North Adelaide, South Australia 5006, Australia; dominic.wilkinson@adelaide.edu.au, [email protected] it good for there to be both males and females of our species? This question seems highly fanciful, and a long way from the ethical questions that health professionals face on a daily basis. However, philosophical thought experiments like this sometimes help to clarify questions that are of much broader relevance. In this case, the prospect of (...) an all-female planet focuses our attention on what it means to be normal or abnormal, on the nature and implications of the different behaviour of men and women, on the political ramifications and resonances of bioethical debate, and on our obligations to future generations.The possibility of an all-female world has featured in recent debates about enhancement—the use of medical technologies to enhance the capacities and characteristics of humans beyond what is considered normal. Philosopher Rob Sparrow has provocatively suggested that since females have a longer lifespan and are able to bear children, supporters of enhancement should support the deliberate selection of only female …. (shrink)

Previous writers have examined how topic and disagreement in assessments are managed within everyday conversation. This work, however, has focused on two-party interaction and little research has examined these issues in the context of multi-party discussion. In this article we examine these issues in the context of discussion by the admissions group of an arts and crafts guild. Analysis of the group’s discussions shows that on occasion group members find themselves in outright disagreement in assessment which leads to what is (...) here described as ‘gainsaying’. However, a number of other instances reveal that the group is able to avoid problematic conversational structures of this sort by deploying a variety of topic control devices: insertion of collusive laughter, conversation restart and topic flow manoeuvres. The article concludes by drawing out some analytic distinctions between two-party and multi-party interactions. (shrink)

Pentecostals have a gospel to proclaim and yet in the rush to share don’t often stop to reflect on the nature of the gospel. This article reflects on the ‘Full gospel’ that is proclaimed by many within classical Pentecostalism, against historical and contemporary considerations. It suggests that there are limits to who the Full gospel is good news for, particularly given the diversity within pentecostalism.

There are many people in organizations who have feelings of alienation; that is they feel they do not fit in, they get no meaning out of their work, they feel belittled or abused by their superiors or colleagues; they desire to break loose the masks they wear, or to find some sense of meaningfulness. In our paper, we demonstrate our assumption of alienation in the workplace by reviewing a collection of satirical and ironic organizational stories from police officers working at (...) a county sheriff’s department. Our argument is that if it seems that alienation might not be resolved through organizational change efforts and interventions, or might not be resolved through radical change of the economic conditions of modern industrial life, then alienation might be changed through the aggregation of individual projects from below. We discuss the possibility of resolving alienation at the workplace by using the legend of Percival as an analogy. (shrink)

This paper reports on research undertaken into the processes through which student teachers begin to formulate an identity as a professional teacher. Using Fuller's investigations into the attitudes of trainee teachers towards their courses (1969) as a baseline, a discussion is established on the place of the student voice in contemporary initial teacher training programmes. In order to further investigate the potential importance of affording student teachers the opportunity to reflect on and express their thinking and feeling as they embark (...) on their chosen career path, the concerns of a group of student drama teachers were recorded and interpreted. The vehicle for this exercise involved writing and subsequently performing reflective monologues. These were analysed by using The Listening Guide as composed by Gilligan et al (2003). This paper illustrates how the methodology revealed distinct yet generally harmonious voices at work in the group in the first few weeks of their training year. Subsequent analysis suggests a model for the initial formation of a teaching identity built on aspects of self role and character. Recognising the relative values and relationships between these factors for student teachers may, it is argued, provide greater security for them while affording their tutors insights which could help them to re-shape initial teacher training programmes. (shrink)

Some argue the common practice of inferring multiple processes or systems from a dissociation is flawed. One proposed solution is state-trace analysis, which involves plotting, across two or more conditions of interest, performance measured by either two dependent variables, or two conditions of the same dependent measure. The resulting analysis is considered to provide evidence that either a single process underlies performance or there is evidence for more than one process. This article reports simulations using the simple recurrent network in (...) which changes to the learning rate produced state-trace plots with multiple functions. We also report simulations using a single-layer error-correcting network that generate plots with a single function. We argue that the presence of different functions on a state-trace plot does not necessarily support a dual-system account, at least as typically defined ; it can also indicate variation in a single parameter within theories generally considered to be single-system accounts. (shrink)

The elements which every schoolboy learns on beginning Latin Verse Composition include a number of rules which seem arbitrarily designed to make the game harder. In hexameters, he is told, he must have a masculine caesura either in the third foot or in the second and fourth, and end normally with a disyllabic or a trisyllable; in pentameters he must end with a disyllabic; and in neither line may a single monosyllable stand at the end. Rarely, in my experience, is (...) any reason given him by way of redress, and he will search for one in vain in most of the school text-books, in introductions like Postgate's to Tibullus and Propertius, and in histories of Latin literature like Wight Duff's and Mackail's. This reticence may be due to the dissensions of experts on this subject and on the subject of Latin accentuation in general, but the theory that predominates in England, among those who hold a theory at all, explains so many of the phenomena that it deserves to be more widely and precisely known. The most detailed exposition of it is by E. H. Sturtevant, who summed up his analyses in a pair of articles in the Transactions of the American Philological Association in 1923–4. While his careful work is invaluable as marshalling the statistics and evidence, it errs on the side of excessive minuteness, and leaves room not merely for some additions, but for a different kind of treatment concerned less with bare statistics and more with poetic principles and historical development. Since Latin Verse Composition plays such an important part in English higher classical education, it seems desirable that a less technical and more accessible account should be available for English readers. Such an account I attempt to give here, keeping separate as far as possible the exposition and the consideration of the criticisms and rival theories that have been advanced. (shrink)

Much of the research in higher education has treated student bodies as homogeneous groups with a consequent neglect of any consideration of gender differences. To test the validity of such research a questionnaire was administered to 255 psychology students. The results showed some important differences in responses between the genders. In particular, the female students reported attaching more importance than males to pre?course aims, rated various learning activities as more valuable and interesting than males and reported more improvement in nine (...) of the 12 skills surveyed than the males. The males rated experiencing less difficulty for various aspects of the course than anticipated than did the females for 11 of 12 potential difficulties listed. As a consequence, it is suggested that researchers ought to be wary of conducting research into various aspects of higher education without considering potential gender differences. (shrink)

River conservation is rooted in the importance of managing watersheds (D.A.S.) in Indonesia, with 42,210 watersheds forming the basis for management policies. To ensure ecosystem sustainability, these policies consider various aspects such as land conditions, water quality, and regional land use. However, the reality on the ground shows that rapid urbanization and a lack of public awareness have led to river pollution and damage to riverbanks. Therefore, more robust conservation efforts are required to achieve environmental justice. This research employs a (...) normative juridical method and focuses on the Cirebon area. The findings reveal that implementing urban river conservation policies in Cirebon includes controlling illegal construction, conducting community outreach on the importance of river protection, and executing environmental rehabilitation programs to raise awareness of the negative impacts of unauthorized development. Despite progress in data collection and action planning, challenges such as community resistance and budget constraints continue to hinder the effectiveness of policy implementation. Collaboration between the Government, communities, and other stakeholders is essential to ensure the success of these conservation efforts. (shrink)

In The Rationality of Perception, Susanna Siegel defends the claim that beliefs can influence our perceptions. Faulty beliefs make our experiences irrational. This explains why the biases some people hold are so tenacious. The authors point out weaknesses in Siegel’s argument.

Health information technology is becoming increasingly prevalent in medical offices and facilities. Like President George W. Bush before him, President Obama announced a plan to computerize all Americans’ medical records by 2014. Computerization is certain to transform American health care, but to ensure that its benefits outweigh its risks, the federal government must provide appropriate oversight.President Obama’s stimulus legislation, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, dedicated $27 billion to the promotion of health information technology. It provides payments of (...) up to $44,000 per clinician under the Medicare incentive program and $63,750 per clinician under the Medicaid program. (shrink)

The biological and neurological capacity to symbolize, and the products of behavioral, cognitive, sociocultural, linguistic, and technological uses of symbols (symbolism), are fundamental to every aspect of human life. The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution explores the origins of our characteristically human abilities - our ability to speak, create images, play music, and read and write. The book investigates how symbolization evolved in human evolution and how symbolism is expressed across the various areas of human life. The field is (...) intrinsically interdisciplinary - considering findings from fossil studies, scientific research from primatology, developmental psychology, and of course linguistics. Written by world leading experts, thirty-eight topical chapters are grouped into six thematic parts that respectively focus on epistemological, psychological, anthropological, ethological, linguistic, and social-technological aspects of human symbolic evolution. The handbook presents an in-depth but comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the of the state of the art in the science of human symbolic evolution. This work will be of interest to academics and students active in all fields contributing to the study of human evolution. (shrink)

If a disabled newborn infant dies, her parents may be able to conceive another child without impairment. This is sometimes referred to as 'replacement'. Some philosophers have argued that replacement provides a strong reason for disabled newborns to be killed or allowed to die. In this paper I focus on the case for replacement as it relates to decisions about life support in newborn intensive care. I argue (following Jeff McMahan) that the impersonal reason to replace is weak and easily (...) outweighed. I assess and reject several possible ways in which the impersonal reason to replace could be defended. I then address an alternative justification for replacement - as an individual-affecting benefit. The strongest justification for replacement may be the interests of parents. In the latter part of the paper I look at a related question. What role should replacement play in decisions about the funding of newborn intensive care? (shrink)

An attempt is made in this paper to analyze the purely formal nature of information-theoretic concepts. The suggestion follows that such concepts, used to supplement the logical and mathematical structure of the language of science, represent an addition to this language of such a sort as to allow the use of a unitary language for the description of phenomena. (The alternative to this approach must be certain multi-linguistic and mutually untranslatable descriptions of related phenomena, as with the various versions of (...) Complementarity). This conception is tested for the specific case of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, in order to show that, with the assumption of a suitable and intuitively satisfactory definition of the quantity of information contained in a measurement, the Heisenberg Principle becomes an informational restriction arising from the formal properties of the symbols of a given language rather than as a "law" of nature. (shrink)

Suppose you found that the universe around you was infinite—that it extended infinitely far in space or in time and, as a result, contained infinitely many persons. How should this change your moral decision-making? Radically, it seems, according to some philosophers. According to various recent arguments, any moral theory that is ’minimally aggregative’ will deliver absurd judgements in practice if the universe is (even remotely likely to be) infinite. This seems like sound justification for abandoning any such theory. -/- My (...) goal in this thesis is simple: to demonstrate that we need not abandon minimally aggregative theories, even if we happen to live in an infinite universe. I develop and motivate an extension of such theories, which delivers plausible judgements in a range of realistic cases. I show that this extended theory can overcome key objections—both old and new—and that it succeeds where other proposals do not. With this proposal in hand, we can indeed retain minimally aggregative theories and continue to make moral decisions based on what will promote the good. (shrink)

To what extent should parents be allowed to use reproductive technologies to determine the characteristics of their future children? Is there something morally wrong with choosing what their sex will be, or with trying to 'screen out' as much disease and disability as possible before birth? Stephen Wilkinson offers answers to such questions.

_Bodies for Sale: Ethics and Exploitation in the Human Body Trade _explores the philosophical and practical issues raised by activities such as surrogacy and organ trafficking. Stephen Wilkinson asks what is it that makes some commercial uses of the body controversial, whether the arguments against commercial exploitation stand up, and whether legislation outlawing such practices is really justified. In Part One Wilkinson explains and analyses some of the notoriously slippery concepts used in the body commodification debate, including exploitation, (...) harm and consent. In Part Two he focuses on three controversial issues outlining contemporary regulation and investigating both the moral issues and the arguments for legal prohibition. (shrink)

In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that the human mind is not bound inside the head but extends into body and environment.

We show that a popular class of connectionist models (which we label 'first order connectionism') looks unlikely to provide the kind of resources required by the hypothesis. We examine some alternative hybrid models that seem more promising. Finally, we raise a more purely philosophical issue concerning the conditions under which a being can count as a genuine believer or cognizer.".

How is it that thoroughly physical material beings such as ourselves can think, dream, feel, create and understand ideas, theories and concepts? How does mere matter give rise to all these non-material mental states, including consciousness itself? An answer to this central question of our existence is emerging at the busy intersection of neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and robotics.In this groundbreaking work, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores exciting new theories from these fields that reveal minds like ours (...) to be prediction machines - devices that have evolved to anticipate the incoming streams of sensory stimulation before they arrive. These predictions then initiate actions that structure our worlds and alter the very things we need to engage and predict. Clark takes us on a journey in discovering the circular causal flows and the self-structuring of the environment that define "the predictive brain." What emerges is a bold, new, cutting-edge vision that reveals the brain as our driving force in the daily surf through the waves of sensory stimulation. (shrink)

Connectionism and classicism, it appears, have at least this much in common: both place some notion of internal representation at the heart of a scientific study of mind. In recent years, however, a much more radical view has gained increasing popularily. This view calls into question the commitment to internal representation itself. more strikingly still, this new wave of anti-representationalism is rooted not in 'armchair' theorizing but in practical attempts to model and understand intelligent, adaptive behaviour. In this paper we (...) first present, and then critically assess, a variety of recent anti-representationalist treatments. We suggest that so far, at least, the sceptical rhetoric outpaces both evidence and argument. Some probable causes of this premature scepticism are isolated. nonetheless, the anti-representationalist challenge is shown to be both important and progressive insofar as it forces us to see beyond the bare representational/ non-represenational dichotomy and to recognize instead a rich continuum of degrees and types of represenatationality. (shrink)

In _Action in Perception _Alva No develops and presents a sensorimotor account of vision and of visual consciousness. According to such an account seeing (and indeed perceiving more generally) is analysed as a kind of skilful bodily activity. Such a view is consistent with the emerging emphasis, in both philosophy and cognitive science, on the critical role of embodiment in the construction of intelligent agency. I shall argue, however, that the full sensorimotor model faces three important challenges. The first is (...) to negotiate a path between two prima facie unsatisfactory readings of the central claim that conscious perceptual experience is constituted by knowledge of patterns of sensorimotor dependence. The second is to convince us that the sensorimotor contribution, in such cases, is actually constitutive of perceptual experience rather than merely causally implicated in the origination of such experience.² And the third is to respond to the important challenge raised by what I will dub 'sensorimotor summarizing' models of the relation between conscious experience and richly detailed sensorimotor routines. According to such models³ conscious perceptual experience only rather indirectly reflects the rich detail of our actual sensorimotor engagements, which are instead lightly sampled as a coarse guide, optimized for planning and reasoning, and geared and filtered according to current needs and purposes. (shrink)