Conscious perception, like the sight of a coffee cup, seems to involve the brain identifying a stimulus. But conscious input activates more brain regions than are needed to identify coffee cups and faces. It spreads beyond sensory cortex to frontoparietal association areas, which do not serve stimulus identification as such. What is the role of those regions? Parietal cortex support the ‘first person perspective’ on the visual world, unconsciously framing the visual object stream. Some prefrontal areas select and interpret conscious (...) events for executive control. Such functions can be viewed as properties of the subject, rather than the object, of experience – the ‘observing self’ that appears to be needed to maintain the conscious state. (shrink)

La dialectique de la reconnaissance héritée du Hegel de la Phénoménologie de l'Esprit est actuellement retravaillée de façon critique par de grands éthiciens. Leurs recherches visent à produire de nouveaux cadres théoriques susceptibles d'accompagner positivement la mondialisation présente, dans ses développements politiques, économiques et culturels, sans tomber dans un syncrétisme destructeur des cultures et des identités et pourvoyeur de revanches archaïsantes. En cette conjoncture, la théologie chrétienne se trouve conviée elle aussi à concevoir, sur le terrain social, de nouvelles articulations (...) entre le particulier et l'universel. C'est ce à quoi se consacre cet article, qui évoque successivement la situation du monde occidental et celle de l'Afrique. Nowadays important ethicists are critically working on the dialectics of recognition inherited from Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit. Their research intends to produce new theoretical frameworks which can positively accompany the actual globalization, in its political, economical, and cultural developments, without falling into a destructive syncretism of cultures and identities which could inspire archaistic revanchism. In these circumstances, Christian theology is also invited to create new links between the particular and universal aspects of social life. This article, which is devoted to these questions, deals subsequently with the situations in the western world and in Africa. (shrink)

It's a truism to say that politicians lie. They twist the truth, exaggerate and spin. But blatant lying has now become the norm, led by Donald Trump and carried on by Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison. Combine this with an all-out assault on the truth in public debate along with the biggest communications revolution since the printing press, and you have a disaster in real time: a sea of fake news, hyper-partisanship and polarisation. No society or democracy can function without (...) trust, and the consequences of this profound shift are clear. The first step to a remedy is in understanding both the liars and the environments in which they lie. Lies and Falsehoods does exactly that, in this account of how we found ourselves in this fractured post-truth world, and how we might get out. (shrink)

Sustainability is typically viewed as consisting of three forces, economic, social, and ecological, in tension with one another. In this paper, we address the dangers posed to societal sustainability. The concern being addressed is the very survival of societies where the rights of individuals, personal and collective freedoms, an independent judiciary and media, and democracy, despite its messiness, are highly valued. We argue that, as a result of various technological innovations, a range of dysfunctional impacts are threatening social and political (...) stability. For instance, robotics and automation are replacing human labor and decision-making in a range of industries; search engines, monetized through advertising, have access to, and track, our interests and preferences; social media, in connecting us to one another often know more about us than we ourselves do, enabling them to profit in ways which may not coincide with our well-being; online retailers have not only acquired the ability to track and predict our buying choices, but also they can squeeze vendors based on their outsize bargaining power; and, in general, virtual technologies have changed both the way we think and our sense of self. With the rising deployment of the Internet of Things, and developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence, the threats to individual freedoms and rights, societal cohesion and harmony, employment and economic well-being, and trust in democracy are being ratcheted up. This paper lauds the benefits and addresses the harm wrought by the high tech giants in Information and Communication Technologies. The search for rapidly growing revenues drives firms to accelerate product innovation without fully investigating the entire gamut of their impacts. As greater wealth accrues to the leaders of tech firms, inequalities within firms and societies are widening, creating social tensions and political ferment. We explore the ethical nature of the challenge employing a simple utilitarian calculus, complemented by approaches rooted in rights, justice, and the common good. Various options to address the challenges posed by ICTs are considered and evaluated. We argue that regulation may do little more than slow down the damage to society, particularly since societal values and political preferences vary internationally. Firms need to establish ethical standards, imbuing the upholders of these standards with sufficient authority, while creating a culture of morality. User involvement and activism, and shareholders’ concerns for the sustainability of societies on whose continued prosperity they depend, are imperative to humanity’s ability to decide the future direction of technology. (shrink)

The characteristic features of ortho- and para-helium are investigated within the framework of Relativistic Schrödinger Theory (RST). The emphasis lies on the conceptual level, where the geometric and physical properties of both RST field configurations are inspected in detail. From the geometric point of view, the striking feature consists in the splitting of the $\mathfrak{u}(2)$ -valued bundle connection $\mathcal{A}_{\mu}$ into an abelian electromagnetic part (organizing the electromagnetic interactions between the two electrons) and an exchange part, which is responsible for their (...) exchange interactions. The electromagnetic interactions are mediated by the usual four-potentials A μ and thus are essentially the same for both types of field configurations, where naturally the electrostatic forces (described by the time component A 0 of A μ) dominate their magnetostatic counterparts (described by the space part A of A μ). Quite analogously to this, the exchange forces are as well described in terms of a certain vector potential (B μ), again along the gauge principles of minimal coupling, so that also the exchange forces split up into an “electric” type ( $\rightsquigarrow B_{0}$ ) and a “magnetic” type ( $\rightsquigarrow {\bf B}$ ). The physical difference of ortho- and para-helium is now that the first (ortho-) type is governed mainly by the “electric” kind of exchange forces and therefore is subject to a stronger influence of the exchange phenomenon; whereas the second (para-) type has vanishing “electric” exchange potential (B 0 ≡ 0) and therefore realizes exclusively the “magnetic” kind of interactions ( $\rightsquigarrow {\bf B}$ ), which, however, in general are smaller than their “electric” counterparts. The corresponding ortho/para splitting of the helium energy levels is inspected merely in the lowest order of approximation, where it coincides with the Hartree–Fock (HF) approximation. Thus RST may be conceived as a relativistic generalization of the HF approach where the fluid-dynamic character of RST implies many similarities with the density functional theory. (shrink)

Today, research in the human sciences must investigate both (a) what are the theoretical considerations appropriate to good writing and reading of texts, and (b) how well do any of the contemporary «grand theorists» handle the problems posed by particular texts. The essays in this volume, written by experts in law, literature, philosophy, and religion, explore these issues through analyses of texts of major import in their respective disciplines. Taken together, the essays make no pretense to have settled any theoretical (...) matters. But they do show both that theory is of major importance for proper reading of texts and that the plethora of kinds of texts make theorizing a difficult, risky, even if exhilarating, enterprise. They also show the importance of further studies like them. (shrink)

Verwantschap en tegenstelling tussen het existentialisme van bovenvermelde filosofen, in korte karakteristieken geschetst.

As media reports have made widely known, in November 2009, the ethics committee of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, permitted the abortion of an eleven-week-old fetus in order to save the life of its mother. This woman was suffering from acute pulmonary hypertension, which her doctors judged would prove fatal for both her and her previable child. The ethics committee believed abortion to be permitted in this case under the so-called principle of double effect, but Thomas J. Olmsted, the (...) bishop of Phoenix, disagreed with the committee and pronounced its chair, Sister Margaret McBride, excommunicated latae sententiae, “by the very commission of the act.” In this article, I take the much discussed Phoenix case as an occasion to subject the principle of double effect to another round of philosophical scrutiny. In particular, I examine the third condition of the principle in its textbook formulation, namely, that the evil effect in question may not be the means to the good effect. My argument, in brief, is that the textbook formulation of the principle does not withstand philosophical scrutiny. Nevertheless, in the end, I do not claim that we should then “do away” with the principle altogether. Instead, we do well to understand it within the context of casuistry, the tradition of moral reasoning from which it issued. (shrink)

The transparency argument concludes that we're directly aware of external properties and not directly aware of the properties of experience. Focusing on the presentation used by Michael Tye (2002) I contend that the argument requires experience to have content that it cannot plausibly have. I attribute the failure to a faulty account of the transparency phenomenon and conclude by suggesting an alternative understanding that is independently plausible, is not an error-theory and yet renders the transparency of experience compatible with mental-paint (...) style views. (shrink)

B.F. Skinner was the voice of radical behaviourism for some five decades, fighting relentlessly against consciousness as a scientific question. While in public he always argued the case for behaviourism, in fact Skinner was deeply at odds with himself, as he reveals in several books. Surprisingly, as a college student he was deeply interested in becoming a stream-of-consciousness novelist. When that ambition failed, he reacted with a radical rejection of the conscious life. Decades later Skinner's inner struggle still continued, as (...) his autobiography shows. Like a mystery novelist, B.F. Skinner again and again provides the clues to his own secret. Skinner's conflict about consciousness was not just a personal idiosyncracy. Behaviourism and its radical rejection of personal experience was a major theme of the twentieth century, and continues even today. Rejection of consciousness became a core belief for academic psychologists and philosophers in the English-speaking world, justifying their claim to standing among the physical sciences. Skinner's life suggests that radical behaviourism may be associated with psychological conflict and some degree of dissociation. It also raises questions about the cultural climate that celebrated the rejection of consciousness. (shrink)

Descartes est aujourd'hui malmené dans l'opinion. Accusé d'indifférence morale envers les animaux, d'apologie de la toute-puissance technicienne, de mépris de la vie affective au nom d'une raison omnipotente, de plagiat grossier du cogito de saint Augustin, de réduction de la philosophie à une suite de savoirs dogmatiquement ordonnés, ne finit-il pas par ramener la diversité naturelle à l'espace géométrique? N'encourage-t-il pas le conformisme moral le plus docile à travers l'alibi d'une « morale par provision »? Cela fait beaucoup de chefs (...) d'accusation. Sont-ils pour autant justifiés? Cet ouvrage montre que la pensée de Descartes est plus complexe que ce que l'on rapporte. (shrink)

Abduction was first introduced in the epistemological context of scientific discovery. It was more recently analyzed in artificial intelligence, especially with respect to diagnosis analysis or ordinary reasoning. These two fields share a common view of abduction as a general process of hypotheses formation. More precisely, abduction is conceived as a kind of reverse explanation where a hypothesis H can be abduced from events E if H is a good explanation of E. The paper surveys four known schemes for abduction (...) that can be used in both fields. Its first contribution is a taxonomy of these schemes according to a common semantic framework based on belief revision. Its second contribution is to produce, for each non-trivial scheme, a representation theorem linking its semantic framework to a set of postulates. Its third contribution is to present semantic and axiomatic arguments in favor of one of these schemes, ordered abduction, which has never been vindicated in the literature. (shrink)

How do we distinguish between cause and effect? The main argument of this paper is that if a realist account of the meaning of causal statements is adopted, then two clear distinctions between cause and effect emerge. By realist account is meant conceiving a cause as something with a power to act. Since a realist approach to causality is not widely accepted among philosophers, two arguments against a realist approach to causality are countered. The asymmetry of causality is defended against (...) the claim that physics, in the main, describes a symmetrical universe. (shrink)

We provide a suitable theoretical foundation for the notion of the quantum coherent state which describes the electrostatic field due to a static external macroscopic charge distribution introduced by the author in 1998 and use it to rederive the formulae obtained in 1998 for the inner product of a pair of such states. (We also correct an incorrect factor of 4π\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$4\pi$$\end{document} in some of those formulae.) Contrary to what one might expect, (...) this inner product is usually non-zero whenever the total charges of the two charge distributions are equal, even if the charge distributions themselves are different. We actually display two different frameworks that lead to the same inner-product formulae, in the second of which Gauss’s law only holds in expectation value. We propose an experiment capable of ruling out the latter framework. We then address the problem of finding a product picture for QED—i.e. a reformulation in which it has a total Hamiltonian, arising as a sum of a free electromagnetic Hamiltonian, a free charged-matter Hamiltonian and an interaction term, acting on a Hilbert space which is a subspace (the physical subspace) of the full tensor product of a charged-matter Hilbert space and an electromagnetic-field Hilbert space. (The traditional Coulomb gauge formulation of QED isn’t a product picture in this sense because, in it, the longitudinal part of the electric field is a function of the charged matter operators.) Motivated by the first framework for our coherent-state construction, we find such a product picture and exhibit its equivalence with Coulomb gauge QED both for a charged Dirac field and also for a system of non-relativistic charged balls. For each of these systems, in all states in the physical subspace (including the vacuum in the case of the Dirac field) the charged matter is entangled with longitudinal photons and Gauss’s law holds as an operator equation; albeit the electric field operator (and therefore also the full Hamiltonian) while self-adjoint on the physical subspace, fails to be self-adjoint on the full tensor-product Hilbert space. The inner products of our electrostatic coherent states and the product picture for QED are relevant as analogues to quantities that play a rôle in the author’s matter-gravity entanglement hypothesis. Also, the product picture provides a temporal gauge quantization of QED which appears to be free from the difficulties which plagued previous approaches to temporal-gauge quantization. (shrink)

Carruthers claims that (target article,). This may be true in many cases. But like other constructivist claims, it fails to explain occasions when constructed knowledge is accurate, like a well-supported scientific theory. People can know their surrounding world and to some extent themselves. Accurate self-knowledge is firmly established for both somatosensory and social pain.

Partage de la nuit -- La révolution sensible.

[opening paragraph]: As some of us in the brain and cognitive sciences struggled in relative obscurity over the last two decades to gain some sound empirical understanding of conscious experience, a succession of celebrated philosophers and scientists told us that our work was doomed to failure. They expended extraordinary ingenuity trying to prove their case, at least as much as those of us toiling in the trenches devoted to the job of gaining a little bit of clarity. Fortunately, `impossibility proofs' (...) of this kind tend to have a short half-life. They succeed each other year after year; in the same way that impossibility proofs were flourished triumphantly by critics to demonstrate, once and forever, that we could never understand planetary motion, biological evolution, quantum mechanics -- or whatever next topic science, in its Brobdignagian march, was threatening to clarify. Arthur C. Clarke once proposed a law stating that for every major advance in knowledge one can find at least one celebrated scientist who was able to `prove', shortly before it was achieved, that it could not be done. In the case of conscious experience the quest to prove impossibility is especially passionate, as if a reasonable scientific approach to human experience were the enemy of all that is good and decent. (shrink)

Intuitively, we judge that our responsibility has more to do with what we do than what we omit to do, and that it extends more to intended effects than to side-effects of our deeds. These intuitions have been expressed in our tradition through two principles: the doctrine of acts and omissions and the doctrine of double effect. Jonathan Glover acknowledges that these two principles are important, but believes that it is eventually better to discard them and, instead, to stick to (...) the consequentialist view that our responsibility extends equally to all the consequences of our behavior. I first examine Glover’s objections against the two principles and then present Joshua Greene’s research on the neuropsychology of moral judgment. These rest heavily on our reactions to certain moral dilemmas, in particular the trolley problem, and have recourse to neuroimaging. Greene’s conclusions go in the same direction as Glover’s more conceptual arguments. However, both authors share a common philosophical view, i.e., consequentialism. Thus, in a last section I consider some difficulties that this moral view encounters, and with the aid of other neuropsychological studies, I conclude that it is not judicious to put aside the intentions of an agent. (shrink)

Distributive justice, like every other value, is not suspended in mid-air: its implementation depends on certain conditions, the well-known ‹circumstances of justice›. In this paper, I attempt to spell them out, first for justice proper , then for international justice. Those circumstances relate to the conceptual parts of justice and are four in number: scarcity, needs and merit, social cooperation, and authority of distribution. As far as international justice is concerned, there is a problem with the last circumstance: as yet (...) no international authority of distribution exists. This does not, however, mean that international justice is impossible or undesirable; only that we have the task to create such an authority. (shrink)