In this presentation, I set out to clarify, first, what the Jewish tradition finds in the life of Abraham that accords special value to rational reflection and even philosophical inquiry. Second, I examine a specific example of how this characterization and valuation of Abraham plays out within the tradition of medieval Jewish scholastic theology in tenth-century Baghdad by examining Sa‘adia Gaon’s famous “Argument from Time” to establish both the creation of the universe in time and, by implication, the existence of (...) a Creator God. From there, I show how he draws upon the work of John Philoponus in constructing his argument. Third, I present and analyze a well-known philosophical parable that Moses Maimonides, representing the tradition of religious philosophy, introduces early on in The Guide of the Perplexed. This parable deals in a subtle and suggestive way with the possibilities and limitations of trying to free people from perplexity and guide them towards wisdom. It owes a great deal to the work of Abū Bakr ibn al-’ Ṣā’igh, otherwise known as Ibn Bājjah. I conclude with a number of observations on how Maimonides may have interpreted his sources so as to develop his distinctive view of God and how the pursuit of philosophical wisdom is compatible with the love of God. (shrink)

Most of what we know about teaching comes from research among people living in large, politically and economically stratified societies with formal education systems and highly specialized roles with a global market economy. In this paper, we review and synthesize research on teaching among contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. The hunter-gatherer lifeway is the oldest humanity has known and is more representative of the circumstances under which teaching evolved and was utilized most often throughout human history. Research among contemporary hunter-gatherers also illustrates (...) a complex pattern of teaching that is both consistent with and distinct from teaching in other small- and large-scale societies with different subsistence practices and cultural forms. In particular, we find that the cultural emphasis on individual autonomy and socio-political egalitarianism among hunter-gatherers differently shapes how teaching occurs. For example, teaching clearly exists among hunter-gatherers and appears in many forms, including institutionalized instruction in valued cultural and technical skills. However, teaching tends to be less common in hunter-gatherer societies because people live in small, intimate egalitarian, groups that support each other’s learning in a variety of ways without teaching. Furthermore, foundational cultural schemas of autonomy and egalitarianism impact the nature of teaching. For example, adults and older children limit their interventions, permitting autonomous learning, and, when they occur, teaching episodes are generally brief, subtle, indirect, and situated in a present activity. We discuss the implications of this research in terms of discussions of the evolution of human cognition and the co-evolution of teaching and culture through the process of cultural niche construction. (shrink)

The significance of teaching to the evolution of human culture is under debate. We contribute to the discussion by using a quantitative, cross-cultural comparative approach to investigate the role of teaching in the lives of children in two small-scale societies: Aka foragers and Ngandu farmers of the Central African Republic. Focal follows with behavior coding were used to record social learning experiences of children aged 4 to 16 during daily life. “Teaching” was coded based on a functional definition from evolutionary (...) biology. Frequencies, contexts, and subtypes of teaching as well as the identity of teachers were analyzed. Teaching was rare compared to observational learning, although both forms of social learning were negatively correlated with age. Children received teaching from a variety of individuals, and they also engaged in teaching. Several teaching types were observed, including instruction, negative feedback, and commands. Statistical differences in the distribution of teaching types and the identity of teachers corresponded with contrasting forager vs. farmer foundational cultural schema. For example, Aka children received less instruction, which empirically limits autonomous learning, and were as likely to receive instruction and negative feedback from other children as they were from adults. Commands, however, exhibited a different pattern suggesting a more complex role for this teaching type. Although consistent with claims that teaching is relatively rare in small-scale societies, this evidence supports the conclusion that teaching is a universal, early emerging cognitive ability in humans. However, culture structures the nature of teaching. (shrink)

Western scholarly literature suggests that (1) weaning is initiated by mothers; (2) weaning takes place within a few days once mothers decide to stop nursing; (3) mothers employ specific techniques to terminate nursing; (4) semi-solid foods (gruels and mashed foods) are essential when weaning; (5) weaning is traumatic for children (it leads to temper tantrums, aggression, etc.); (6) developmental stages in relationships with mothers and others can be demarcated by weaning; and (7) weaning is a process that involves mothers and (...) children exclusively, with weaned children moving from close relationships with their mothers to strengthened relationships with other children. In many respects, these presumptions are consistent with contemporary Euroamerican practices: nursing stops early (usually before six months) relative to other cultures and takes place over a few days or weeks with the help of bottles and baby foods. Because bottles are available, weaning seldom appears traumatic, but it is seen as an important step in the establishment of independence between mothers and infants. By contrast, weaning from the bottle is often perceived as traumatic. Despite considerable academic and popular interest, weaning has seldom been studied systematically, especially in small-scale cultures. Qualitative and quantitative data from a study of Bofi foragers in Central Africa are used here to evaluate the cross-cultural applicability of the assumptions summarized above. (shrink)

This study evaluated the feasibility of using occipitoparietal alpha activity to drive target/non-target classification in a brain-computer interface for communication. EEG data were collected from 12 participants who completed BCI Rapid Serial Visual Presentation calibrations at two different presentation rates: 1 and 4 Hz. Attention-related changes in posterior alpha activity were compared to two event-related potentials : N200 and P300. Machine learning approaches evaluated target/non-target classification accuracy using alpha activity. Results indicated significant alpha attenuation following target letters at both 1 (...) and 4 Hz presentation rates, though this effect was significantly reduced in the 4 Hz condition. Target-related alpha attenuation was not correlated with coincident N200 or P300 target effects. Classification using posterior alpha activity was above chance and benefitted from individualized tuning procedures. These findings suggest that target-related posterior alpha attenuation is detectable in a BCI RSVP calibration and that this signal could be leveraged in machine learning algorithms used for RSVP or comparable attention-based BCI paradigms. (shrink)

In the developing world, the dramatic male bias in tobacco use is usually ascribed to pronounced gender disparities in social, political, or economic power. This bias might also reflect under-reporting by woman and/or over-reporting by men. To test the role of gender inequality on gender differences in tobacco use we investigated tobacco use among the Aka, a Congo Basin foraging population noted for its exceptionally high degree of gender equality. We also tested a sexual selection hypothesis—that Aka men’s tobacco use (...) is related to risk taking. Tobacco use, income, tobacco purchases, tobacco sharing, reasons for using tobacco, risk taking, and other variables were measured using structured surveys and peer reports. Tobacco use was verified by testing for salivary cotinine, a nicotine metabolite. Contrary to expectations, we found a very large male bias in tobacco use. Low levels of use among females appeared to be explained by aversions to tobacco, concerns over its negative effects on fetal health, and a desire to attract husbands, who prefer nonsmoking wives. High male use appeared to be related to a desire to enhance hunting abilities and attract and/or retain wives, who prefer husbands that smoke. We conclude that low levels of smoking by Aka women are better explained by the hypothesis that women evolved to avoid plant toxins to protect their fetuses and nursing infants. High male use might be better explained by sexual selection. We also highlight the important role that recreational drugs appear to play in hunter-gatherer sharing relationships. (shrink)

Kill one person, and it is considered murder.Kill ten thousand person, and it is considered foreign policy.-Anonymous.

Humans are an exceptionally cooperative species, but there is substantial variation in the extent of cooperation across societies. Understanding the sources of this variability may provide insights about the forces that sustain cooperation. We examined the ontogeny of prosocial behavior by studying 326 children 3–14 y of age and 120 adults from six societies (age distributions varied across societies). These six societies span a wide range of extant human variation in culture, geography, and subsistence strategies, including foragers, herders, horticulturalists, and (...) urban dwellers across the Americas, Oceania, and Africa. When delivering benefits to others was personally costly, rates of prosocial behavior dropped across all six societies as children approached middle childhood and then rates of prosociality diverged as children tracked toward the behavior of adults in their own societies. When prosocial acts did not require personal sacrifice, prosocial responses increased steadily as children matured with little variation in behavior across societies. Our results are consistent with theories emphasizing the importance of acquired cultural norms in shaping costly forms of cooperation and creating cross-cultural diversity. (shrink)

By synthesizing evolutionary, attachment, and acoustic perspectives, Soltis has provided an innovative model of infant cry acoustics and parental responsiveness. We question some of his hypotheses, however, because of the limited extant data on infant crying among hunter-gatherers. We also question Soltis' distinction between manipulative and honest signaling based upon recent contributions from attachment theory.

The Major Sub-degree Problem of A. H. Lachlan (first posed in 1967) has become a long-standing open question concerning the structure of the computably enumerable (c.e.) degrees. Its solution has important implications for Turing definability and for the ongoing programme of fully characterising the theory of the c.e. Turing degrees. A c.e. degree a is a major subdegree of a c.e. degree b > a if for any c.e. degree x, ${{\bf 0' = b \lor x}}$ if and only if (...) ${{\bf 0' = a \lor x}}$ . In this paper, we show that every c.e. degree b ≠ 0 or 0′ has a major sub-degree, answering Lachlan’s question affirmatively. (shrink)

Computability theory concerns information with a causal–typically algorithmic–structure. As such, it provides a schematic analysis of many naturally occurring situations. Emil Post was the first to focus on the close relationship between information, coded as real numbers, and its algorithmic infrastructure. Having characterised the close connection between the quantifier type of a real and the Turing jump operation, he looked for more subtle ways in which information entails a particular causal context. Specifically, he wanted to find simple relations on reals (...) which produced richness of local computability-theoretic structure. To this extent, he was not just interested in causal structure as an abstraction, but in the way in which this structure emerges in natural contexts. Post’s programme was the genesis of a more far reaching research project. In this article we will firstly review the history of Post’s programme, and look at two interesting developments of Post’s approach. The first of these developments concerns the extension of the core programme, initially restricted to the Turing structure of the computably enumerable sets of natural numbers, to the Ershov hierarchy of sets. The second looks at how new types of information coming from the recent growth of research into randomness, and the revealing of unexpected new computability-theoretic infrastructure. We will conclude by viewing Post’s programme from a more general perspective. We will look at how algorithmic structure does not just emerge mathematically from information, but how that emergent structure can model the emergence of very basic aspects of the real world. (shrink)

We are living in an era of multiple crises, multiple social resistances, and multiple cosmopolitanisms. The post-Cold War context has generated a plethora of movements, but no single unifying ideology or global political program has yet materialized. The historical confrontation between capital and its alternatives, however, continues to pose new possibilities for social and systemic transformations. Critical analysis of ideological divisions among today’s diverse emancipatory and transformative movements is important in order to understand past and present shortcomings, and many continuing (...) difficulties in imagining crisis-free alternative futures. Inspired by a multiplicity of responses from the Global South and the Global North, and by furthering Delanty’s critical cosmopolitanist approach, this article aims to create a new framework for interpreting ‘transformative visions’ that challenge systems of domination embedded in capitalist social relations. The framework is designed to enable the evaluative analysis of such visions, as well as the exploration of embedded ideological obstacles to dialogue and collaboration among them. (shrink)

Here we present what we believe is a novel account of what languages are, along with an axiomatically rich representation of languages and language-related data that is based on this account. We propose an account of languages as aggregates of dispositions distributed across aggregates of persons, and in doing so we address linguistic competences and the processes that realize them. This paves the way for representing additional types of language-related entities. Like demographic data of other sorts, data about languages may (...) be of use to researchers in a number of areas, including biomedical research. Data on the languages used in clinical encounters are typically included in medical records, and capture an important factor in patient-provider interactions. Like many types of patient and demographic data, data on a person’s preferred and primary languages are organized in different ways by different systems. This can be a barrier to data integration. We believe that a robust framework for representing language in general and preferred and primary language in particular – which has been lacking in ontologies thus far – can promote more successful integration of language-related data from disparate data sources. (shrink)

It is shown that there exists a low2 Harrington non-splitting base-that is, a low2 computably enumerable (c.e.) degree a such that for any c.e. degrees x, y, if $0' = x \vee y$ , then either $0' = x \vee a$ or $0' = y \vee a$ . Contrary to prior expectations, the standard Harrington non-splitting construction is incompatible with the $low_{2}-ness$ requirements to be satisfied, and the proof given involves new techniques with potentially wider application.

Recent empirical work on the concept of intentionality suggests that people’s assessments of whether an action is intentional are subject to uncertainty. Some researchers have gone so far as to claim that different people employ different concepts of intentional action. These possibilities have motivated a good deal of work in the relatively new field of experimental philosophy. The findings from this empirical research may prove to be relevant to medical ethics. In this article, we address this issue head on. We (...) first describe a study we conducted on intention ascription. Drawing on recent work in experimental philosophy, we investigated the possibility that the ascription of intentions to clinical actors in clinical settings is influenced by prior judgments about the goodness or badness of the consequences of the action in question. Our study was modeled on experimental studies in other contexts that have shown that people, when presented with a range of scenarios, are more likely to classify a side effect of an action as intended if the side effect is negative or reflects poorly on the actor than if it is positive or reflects well on the actor. We investigated whether this asymmetry in intention ascriptions was also present among physicians who were asked to ascribe intentions to clinical actors in certain well-defined clinical scenarios. After describing the study and its results, we discuss its implications for medical ethics. (shrink)

The evolution of the human brain has resulted in the emergence of higher-order cognitive abilities, such as reasoning, planning and social awareness. Although there has been a concomitant increase in brain size and complexity, and component diversification, we argue that RNA regulation of epigenetic processes, RNA editing, and the controlled mobilization of transposable elements have provided the major substrates for cognitive advance. We also suggest that these expanded capacities and flexibilities have led to the collateral emergence of psychiatric fragilities and (...) conditions. (shrink)

We prove that there exists a nonzero recursively enumerable Turing degree possessing a strong minimal cover.

In this paper we examine a class of pairs of recursively enumerable degrees, which is related to the Slaman-Soare Phenomenon.

Computability theory originated with the seminal work of Gödel, Church, Turing, Kleene and Post in the 1930s. This theory includes a wide spectrum of topics, such as the theory of reducibilities and their degree structures, computably enumerable sets and their automorphisms, and subrecursive hierarchy classifications. Recent work in computability theory has focused on Turing definability and promises to have far-reaching mathematical, scientific, and philosophical consequences. Written by a leading researcher, Computability Theory provides a concise, comprehensive, and authoritative introduction to contemporary (...) computability theory, techniques, and results. The basic concepts and techniques of computability theory are placed in their historical, philosophical and logical context. This presentation is characterized by an unusual breadth of coverage and the inclusion of advanced topics not to be found elsewhere in the literature at this level. The book includes both the standard material for a first course in computability and more advanced looks at degree structures, forcing, priority methods, and determinacy. The final chapter explores a variety of computability applications to mathematics and science. Computability Theory is an invaluable text, reference, and guide to the direction of current research in the field. Nowhere else will you find the techniques and results of this beautiful and basic subject brought alive in such an approachable and lively way. (shrink)

Foucault is often thought to have a great deal to say about the history of madness and sexuality, but little in terms of a general analysis of government and the state.; This volume draws on Foucault's own research to challenge this view, demonstrating the central importance of his work for the study of contemporary politics.; It focuses on liberalism and neo- liberalism, questioning the conceptual opposition of freedom/constraint, state/market and public/private that inform liberal thought.

Background: The intentions of clinicians are widely considered to be relevant to the ethical assessment of their actions. A better understanding of the psychological factors that influence the ascription of intentions in clinical practice is important for improving the self-understanding of clinical decision-making and, ultimately, the ethics of clinical care. Drawing on empirical research on intentionality that has been done in other contexts, this is the first study to test whether the “asymmetric effect” of intention ascription is exhibited by respondents (...) when presented with clinical decision-making scenarios. Objective: To assess how individuals attribute intentions to clinical actors in clinical decision-making scenarios. Methods: A total of 149 first and second year medical students was randomly assigned to two groups. Subjects in each group read two scenarios and submitted anonymous responses to questions regarding each scenario. Results: The asymmetric effect was strongly exhibited by the responses given to scenario 2, but it was not exhibited by the responses given to scenario 1. Conclusion: The present study provided evidence for the view that people’s ascription of intentions to others is influenced by their previous evaluative judgement of the conduct in question. (shrink)

We prove the following three theorems on the enumeration degrees of ∑20 sets. Theorem A: There exists a nonzero noncuppable ∑20 enumeration degree. Theorem B: Every nonzero Δ20enumeration degree is cuppable to 0′e by an incomplete total enumeration degree. Theorem C: There exists a nonzero low Δ20 enumeration degree with the anticupping property.

By constructing a maximal incomplete d.r.e. degree, the nondensity of the partial order of the d.r.e. degrees is established. An easy modification yields the nondensity of the n-r.e. degrees and of the ω-r.e. degrees.

Turing’s paper on computable numbers has played its role in underpinning different perspectives on the world of information. On the one hand, it encourages a digital ontology, with a perceived flatness of computational structure comprehensively hosting causality at the physical level and beyond. On the other, it can give an insight into the way in which higher order information arises and leads to loss of computational control—while demonstrating how the control can be re-established, in special circumstances, via suitable type reductions. (...) We examine the classical computational framework more closely than is usual, drawing out lessons for the wider application of information–theoretical approaches to characterizing the real world. The problem which arises across a range of contexts is the characterizing of the balance of power between the complexity of informational structure and the means available to bring this information back into the computational fold. We proceed via appropriate mathematical modelling to a more coherent view of the computational structure of information, relevant to a wide spectrum of areas of investigation. (shrink)

A proof is given that 0′ is definable in the structure of the degrees of unsolvability. This answers a long-standing question of Kleene and Post, and has a number of corollaries including the definability of the jump operator.

We say that a computably enumerable (c.e.) degree b is a Lachlan nonsplitting base (LNB), if there is a computably enumerable degree a such that a > b, and for any c.e. degrees w,v ≤ a, if a ≤ w or; v or; b then either a ≤ w or; b or a ≤ v or; b. In this paper we investigate the relationship between bounding and nonbounding of Lachlan nonsplitting bases and the high /low hierarchy. We prove that there (...) is a non-Low2 c.e. degree which bounds no Lachlan nonsplitting base. (shrink)