Evidence is presented that the singularities induced in causal Lorentzian spacetimes by changes in 3-space topology give rise to infinite particle and energy production under reasonable laws of quantum field propagation. In the case of the gravitational field, if 3-space is compact the total energy must vanish. A topological transition therefore induces a violent collapse that effectively aborts the transition, since the collapse mode is the only mode carrying the negative energy needed to compensate the associated infinite energy production. The (...) existence of the Hamiltonian constraint of general relativity suggests that topological stability is a local property of the quantum theory that is maintained even when 3-space is noncompact. (shrink)

Everett (1957a, b, 1973) relative-state formulation of quantum mechanics has often been taken to involve a metaphysical commitment to the existence of many splitting worlds each containing physical copies of observers and the objects they observe. While there was earlier talk of splitting worlds in connection with Everett, this is largely due to DeWitt’s (Phys Today 23:30–35, 1970) popular presentation of the theory. While the thought of splitting worlds or parallel universes has captured the popular imagination, Everett himself favored (...) the language of elements, branches, or relative states in describing his theory. The result is that there is no mention of splitting worlds or parallel universes in any of Everett’s published work. Everett, however, did write of splitting observers and was willing to adopt the language of many worlds in conversation with people who were themselves using such language. While there is evidence that Everett was not entirely comfortable with talk of many worlds, it does not seem to have mattered much to him what language one used to describe pure wave mechanics. This was in part a result of Everett’s empirical understanding of the cognitive status of his theory. (shrink)

An extraordinary, if circumscribed, positive shift has occurred since the mid-twentieth century in the perceived status of Hugh Everett III's 1956 theory of the universal wave function of quantum mechanics, now widely called the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI). Everett's starkly new interpretation denied the existence of a separate classical realm, contending that the experimental data can be seen as presenting a state vector for the whole universe. Since there is no state vector collapse, reality as a whole is strictly deterministic. Explained (...) jointly by the dynamical variables and the state vector, “this reality is not the reality we customarily think of, but is a reality composed of many worlds,” wrote Everett's colleague Bryce DeWitt. In this essay, I account briefly for the change of status in conventional scientific terms, yet chiefly in extended terms of three sets of ideas that I argue can be understood to affect believability in both scientific and religious contexts, illuminating helpfully the MWI phenomenon, and its engagement with theology: orthodoxy and heresy, language and reference, and faith and agnosticism. One's orientation relative to the variable content of these dynamic, socially oriented categories helps to make belief in ideas as metaphysically challenging as Everettian Quantum Mechanics, or particular ideas about God, either more or less believable. The categories will have the same function in a theology engaging Everett's theory, and in any theology at all written in a society deeply marked by what I further argue is a subtle, powerful, and pervasive mode of quasi-scientific thinking we can call societal constructive agnosticism, of which anyone doing theology today must be aware. (shrink)

Hugh Everett’s “Universal Wave Theory Formulation of Quantum Mechanics”, though endorsed and promoted by his mentor John Wheeler, was dismissed by the mainstream in quantum mechanics. Why was it sidelined by those who endorsed the Copenhagen interpretation and John von Neumann’s approach to the famous measurement problem? Everett’s theory was taken up later by Bryce DeWitt under an interpretation, the many worlds universe theory, that is not actually how Everett interpreted his own formulation. I argue that by looking (...) at science as a social institution according to Ian C. Jarvie’s critique of Karl Popper’s view of science as a “Republic,” we can see how Everett was sidelined: external pressures of the Cold War and McCarthy and internal pressures of Big Science and the “military-industrial complex.”. (shrink)

This book develops a novel approach to distributed cognition and collective intentionality. It is argued that collective mentality should be only be posited where specialized subroutines are integrated in a way that yields skillful, goal-directed behavior that is sensitive to concerns that are relevant to a group as such.

Bryce, Ian The following are my personal observations based on several visits to public hearings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. I've also included media reports, and what I've learnt from contacts with interest groups. I recommend others sit in a public hearing for a day, to see the system in action.

While the balance between individual privacy and government monitoring or corporate surveillance has been a frequent topic across numerous disciplines, the issue of privacy within the family has been largely ignored in recent privacy debates. Yet privacy intrusions between parents and children or between adult partners or spouses can be just as profound as those found in the more “public spheres” of life. Popular access to increasingly sophisticated forms of electronic surveillance technologies has altered the dynamics of family relationships. Monitoring, (...) mediated and facilitated by practices of both covert and overt electronic surveillance, has changed the nature of privacy within the family. Parents are tracking children via GPS-enabled cell phone tracking software and are monitoring the Internet use of family members. Parents, siblings, and children are also posting information about their family members online, often without consent, and are creating social media profiles for others online. Prior scholarly work in philosophy and law has primarily addressed the privacy of children from third parties, usually commercial entities, and in the context of making medical decisions. Less attention has been directed at exploring a more general right of privacy of one family member against parents, siblings, children, or spouses. In this article, we do just that. We consider several moral rules that determine appropriate privacy boundaries within the family. More specifically, we will consider when overt or covert surveillance of a child, spouse, or partner by an adult family member is morally permitted. (shrink)

Multivariate pattern analysis, or MVPA, has become one of the most popular analytic methods in cognitive neuroscience. Since its inception, MVPA has been heralded as offering much more than regular univariate analyses, for—we are told—it not only can tell us which brain regions are engaged while processing particular stimuli, but also which patterns of neural activity represent the categories the stimuli are selected from. We disagree, and in the current paper we offer four conceptual challenges to the use of MVPA (...) to make claims about neural representation. Our view is that the use of MVPA to make claims about neural representation is problematic. (shrink)

Anthropology's approach to answering the question of the role of suffering in our lives is limited to empirical data and at best describes an individual's capability to endure it and make sense of it. Levinas was at odds to find meaning in suffering once it had exceeded certain proportions. Various cultures demonstrate greater and lesser capacities for integrating corporate suffering when it has crossed a significant threshold. What is the role of ritual and productive suffering in revealing meaning in suffering? (...) Some examples are drawn from the experiences of pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago de Compostella. Drawing from Dr. Eleonore Stump's exploration of second-person narratives and relationships, a Christian philosophical-theological response is provided. (shrink)

This Article presents an innovative institutional strategy for global climate protection, quite distinct from, but ultimately complementary to and supportive of the currently stalled UNFCCC climate treaty negotiations. The bottom-up strategy relies on a variety of smallerscale transnational cooperative arrangements, involving not only states but sub-national jurisdictions, firms, and CSOs, to undertake activities whose primary goal is not climate mitigation but which will achieve greenhouse gas reductions as an inherent byproduct. This strategy avoids the inherent problems in securing an enforceable (...) treaty to secure the global public good of climate protection by mobilizing other incentives - including economic self-interest, energy security, cleaner air, and furtherance of international development - to motivate such actors to cooperate on actions that will also benefit the climate. These bottom-up regimes will contribute to global climate action not only by achieving emissions reductions in the short-term, but also by linking the bottom-up regimes to the UNFCCC system through greenhouse gas monitoring and reporting systems. In these ways, the bottom-up strategy will help secure eventual agreement on a global climate treaty. (shrink)

Bryce, Ian At a World Humanism Day seminar held at Parliament House, Sydney, the theme was the role of the Enlightenment in the development of humanist thought. My new role as President of HSNSW has led me to reflect further on the journeys many made from the physical sciences to the social sciences.

We motivate five constraints on theorizing about sensory experience. We then propose a novel form of naturalistic intentionalism that succeeds where other theories fail by satisfying all of these constraints. On the proposed theory, which we call structure matching tracking intentionalism, brains states track determinables. Internal structural features of those states select determinates of those determinables for presentation in experience. We argue that this theory is distinctively well-positioned to both explain internal-phenomenal structural correlations and accord external features a role in (...) fixing phenomenology. In addition, we use the theory to shed light on how one comes to experience “missing shades”. (shrink)

Altruistic self-sacrifice is rare, supererogatory, and not to be expected of any rational agent; but, the possibility of giving up one's life for the common good has played an important role in moral theorizing. For example, Judith Jarvis Thomson (2008) has argued in a recent paper that intuitions about altruistic self-sacrifice suggest that something has gone wrong in philosophical debates over the trolley problem. We begin by showing that her arguments face a series of significant philosophical objections; however, our project (...) is as much constructive as critical. Building on Thomson's philosophical argument, we report the results of a study that was designed to examine commonsense intuitions about altruistic self-sacrifice. We find that a surprisingly high proportion of people judge that they should give up their lives to save a small number of unknown strangers. We also find that the willingness to engage in such altruistic self-sacrifice is predicted by a person's religious commitments. Finally, we show that folk-moral judgments are sensitive to agent-relative reasons in a way that diverges in important ways from Thomson's proposed intuitions about the trolley problem. With this in mind, we close with a discussion of the relative merits of folk intuitions and philosophical intuitions in constructing a viable moral theory. (shrink)

Bryce, Ian There has been vigorous discussion between State Humanist societies, about whether ethics should be taught by volunteers, and in the Religious Instruction timeslot, if that is the only option.

Does the brain behave indeterministically? I argue that accounting for ion channels, key functional units in the brain, requires indeterministic models. These models are probabilistic, so the brain does behave indeterministically in a weak sense. I explore the implications of this point for a stronger sense of indeterminism. Ultimately I argue that it is not possible, either empirically or through philosophical argument, to show that the brain is indeterministic in that stronger sense.

The enduring failure of financial institutions to identify and deal with risk events continues to have serious repercussions, whether in the form of small but significant losses or major and potentially far-reaching scandals. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines an innovative version of the classic dictator game to inform prosocial tendencies with the survey-based Theory of Planned Behaviour, we examine the risk-escalation behaviour of individuals within a large financial institution. We discover evidence of purely selfish behaviour that explains the lack (...) significance in pressure to adhere to the Subjective Norms of colleagues around intention to report risks. A finding that has potentially important implications for efforts to instil a high-error management climate and incentivise risk reporting within organisations where risk, if ignored or unchecked, could ultimately have consequences that extend far beyond the institutions themselves. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of a work by Adam Smith. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

In recent years, a number of well-known intentional realists have focused their energy on attempts to provide a naturalized theory of mental representation. What tends to be overlooked, however, is that a naturalized theory of mental representation will not, by itself, salvage intentional realism. Since most naturalistic properties play no interesting causal role, intentional realists must also solve the problem of showing how intentional properties , even if naturalized, could be causally efficacious. Because of certain commitments, this problem is especially (...) difficult for intentional realists such as Fodor. In the current paper I focus on the problem as it arises for such realists, and I argue that the best-known solution proposed to date is inadequate. If what I say is correct, then such intentional realists are left with an additional and substantial problem, and one that has generally not been sufficiently appreciated. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Getting Out of the Gate Banking the Turn in Pursuit of Fairness Counting Down the Laps in Pursuit of Happiness The Bell Lap Notes.

This book contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the creation of the (...) United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography. (shrink)

Depuis une époque immémoriale, nous sommes entourés d'êtres et de choses qui ont une forme reconnaissable, un certain 'visage', et c'est une donnée première de notre expérience. Cela contribue à tisser une 'texture des choses' que diverses théories contemporaines, de concert avec certaines forces sociales, s'emploient à défaire ou nier. Ainsi s'effectuent peu à peu une disparition des formes et un retour à une réalité supposée être originairement un flux indifférencié. Pour s'opposer à cette tendance, Jacques Dewitte met en évidence (...) un terrain commun pouvant accueillir à la fois une pensée des apparences vivantes et du "tact" qu'exige toute classification (Adolf Portmann), un renouveau de la 'typologie' en architecture (Léon Krier), une exigence de faire des 'distinctions conceptuelles' dans la théorie sociale et politique (Hannah Arendt), et une théologie des êtres créés selon leur espèce. Un petit livre fondamental au sens où il pose les fondements rationnels de l'émerveillement devant un 'monde beau et très divers'."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Given the importance of scientific research in shaping our perception of the world, and our senses of what policies will and won’t succeed in altering that world, it is of great practical, political, and moral importance that we carry out scientific research with integrity. The phenomenon of scientific fraud stands in the way of that, as scientists may knowingly enter claims they take to be false into the scientific literature, often knowingly doing so in defiance of norms they profess allegiance (...) to. In this chapter we take a look at some of the causes of scientific fraud, and how it might be manifested in large-scale research teams and situations of anonymous authorship. We find that such cases make trouble for what might seem like intuitive answers to the question “who should be held responsible for this fraud?”, and we argue that in such cases it would be better to hold the entire community responsible for seeing to it that there is less fraud. (shrink)

Bryce, Ian As part of the CAHS Convention in May this year, I organised a Panel discussion entitled 'Ethics Education Initiatives in Australia'. It was to take advantage of the presence in Sydney of Humanist Society delegates from interstate, and acquaint them with the success story of the NSW Primary Ethics program.

Bryce, Ian Robertson's talk was an analysis of the legal positions around many of the crimes of organised religion, and consequent legal actions already in progress or possible in the future.

The Philosophy of Daniel Dennett explores the intellectual significance of Daniel C. Dennett's 45 years of philosophical research, while providing a critical and constructive overview of Dennett's stance-based methodology and his claims about metal representation, consciousness, cultural evolution, and religion.

Pourquoi les oiseaux chantent-ils, le paon se pavane-t-il? Pourquoi le lion ou le tigre ont-ils une livrée aussi somptueuse? Mais aussi : pourquoi édifie-t-on des monuments sur les places publiques de nos villes? Pourquoi les hommes ressentaient-ils jadis le besoin de s'exhiber en uniformes rutilants sur les champs de bataille? Pourquoi les objets d'usage courant ont-ils le plus souvent été ornementés? Bref, pourquoi cet étalage de formes? A ces questions, on répond le plus souvent par diverses explications utilitaires et fonctionnelles (...) : la vie animale comme la vie humaine seraient régies en dernière instance par l'exigence de la survie et de la conservation. Or un examen sans préjugés montre que le principe d'utilité n'a qu'une validité limitée. Pour des fins purement utilitaires, des moyens réduits auraient largement suffi. Il est donc nécessaire, par fidélité au réel, d'élaborer un horizon élargi où ces laissés-pour-compte éclatants puissent devenir intelligibles sans cesser d'être partiellement énigmatiques. Et s'il y avait, chez l'homme comme dans la vie animale et végétale, une tendance à manifester ce que l'on est, à paraître au lieu de simplement être? La réflexion sur l'apparaître menée dans cet ouvrage a une analogie profonde avec celle qui s'interroge sur le cycle du donner-recevoir-rendre. Car l'une comme l'autre montrent que les formes sociales comme les formes naturelles, comportent une dimension de gratuité et de contingence qui excède tout principe de nécessité et d'utilité. Même si l'on peut s'apercevoir ensuite qu'il existe quelque chose comme une utilité de l'inutile. (shrink)

This article describes and discusses research into lifelong learning in secondary schools that was undertaken at the Australian Council for Educational Research. The project explored ways of helping secondary school students develop an intrinsic interest in learning, in the belief that such an approach will encourage young people to keep learning throughout their lives. Skills and values that help young people to develop characteristics of lifelong learners are outlined. The article suggests that development of these characteristics may be impeded by (...) the strong influence of competitive end-of-school assessment in many schools, and the difficulty of changing the practices and attitudes of some of the people who play a significant role in a young person's education: parents and teachers. (shrink)