Virtual reality enables individuals to be exposed to naturalistic environments in laboratory settings, offering new possibilities for research in human neuroscience and treatment of mental disorders. We used VR to study psychological, autonomic and postural reactions to heights in individuals with varying intensity of fear of heights. Study participants were immersed in a VR of an unprotected open-air elevator platform in an urban area, while standing on an unstable ground. Virtual elevation of the platform elicited robust and reliable psychophysiological activation (...) including increased distress, heart rate, and electrodermal activity, which was higher in individuals suffering from fear of heights. In these individuals, compared with individuals with low fear of heights, the VR height exposure resulted in higher velocity of postural movements as well as decreased low-frequency body sway oscillations. This indicates that individuals with strong fear of heights react to heights with maladaptive rigidity of posture due to increased weight of visual input for balance control, while the visual information is less reliable at heights. Our findings show that exposure to height in a naturalistic VR environment elicits a complex reaction involving correlated changes of the emotional state, autonomic activity, and postural balance, which are exaggerated in individuals with fear of heights. (shrink)

Cellular circadian clocks represent ancient anticipatory systems which co‐evolved with the first cells to safeguard their survival. Cyanobacteria represent one of the most ancient cells, having essentially invented photosynthesis together with redox‐based cellular circadian clocks some 2.7 billion years ago. Bioelectricity phenomena, based on redox homeostasis associated electron transfers in membranes and within protein complexes inserted in excitable membranes, play important roles, not only in the cellular circadian clocks and in anesthetics‐sensitive cellular sentience (awareness of environment), but also in the (...) coupling of single cells into tissues and organs of unitary multicellular organisms. This integration of cellular circadian clocks with cellular basis of sentience is an essential feature of the cognitive CBC‐Clock basis of cellular life. (shrink)

The presented paper proposes a state machine of REA (Resource–Event–Agent) model. This model constitutes a fundamental building block for value modeling applications. Contrary to other appr...

A reductionistic, bottom‐up, cellular‐based concept of the origins of sentience and consciousness has been put forward. Because all life is based on cells, any evolutionary theory of the emergence of sentience and consciousness must be grounded in mechanisms that take place in prokaryotes, the simplest unicellular species. It has been posited that subjective awareness is a fundamental property of cellular life. It emerges as an inherent feature of, and contemporaneously with, the very first life‐forms. All other varieties of mentation are (...) the result of evolutionary mechanisms based on this singular event. Therefore, all forms of sentience and consciousness evolve from this original instantiation in prokaryotes. It has also been identified that three cellular structures and mechanisms that likely play critical roles here are excitable membranes, oscillating cytoskeletal polymers, and structurally flexible proteins. Finally, basic biophysical principles are proposed to guide those processes that underly the emergence of supracellular sentience from cellular sentience in multicellular organisms. (shrink)

The paper proposes a solution to the problem of counterfactuals, building on both Rescher’s epistemic and Tichý’s semantic approaches. The core of the proposed solution is the thesis that when expressing a true counterfactual, the speaker assumes a set of background indicative premises as an implicit parameter. When added tacitly to an unreal antecedent, these premises entail the consequent logically or analytically. We draw a distinction between a potentially unreal and an absolutely unreal condition expressed in the antecedent. We view (...) counterfactuals with a positive time vector and an absolute unreal condition as abbreviated deductive retrodictions. Similarly, we consider counterfactuals with a potentially unreal condition to be abbreviated deductive predictions. In a similar manner, we also explain the truth (falsity) of vacuously true counterpossibles or counterpossible conditionals. In the second part, we discuss the enigmatic backtracking counterfactuals. We propose that their negative time direction is due to their being abductive retrodictions, i.e., explanations of unreal effects based on possible causes in which the conditions remain tacit or unexpressed. The backtracking temporal direction of counterfactual abductive retrodictions is in accordance with the thesis on the positive temporal direction from cause to effect. Thus, we demonstrate that in order to explain backtracking counterfactuals, there is no need to assume violations of laws of nature or a special logic. What we need to do is to take into account the third parameter, i.e., a set of tacit or unexpressed additional propositions, as well as the principle of ceteris paribus as the background. (shrink)

Polarity is an inherent feature of almost all prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. In most eukaryotic cells, growth polarity is due to the assembly of actin‐based growing domains at particular locations on the cell periphery. A contrasting scenario is that growth polarity results from the establishment of non‐growing domains, which are actively maintained at opposite end‐poles of the cell. This latter mode of growth is common in rod‐shaped bacteria and, surprisingly, also in the majority of plant cells, which elongate along the (...) apical–basal axes of plant organs. The available data indicate that the non‐growing end‐pole domains of plant cells are sites of intense endocytosis and recycling. These actin‐enriched end‐poles serve also as signaling platforms, allowing bidirectional exchange of diverse signals along the supracellular domains of longitudinal cell files. It is proposed that these actively remodeled end‐poles of elongating plant cells remotely resemble neuronal synapses. BioEssays 25:569–576, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Předložená práce je textově filosofickou analýzou první části Platónova dialogu Menón, přičemž se snaží předvést, jak v konkrétním literárním díle Platónově je obsažen střet mezi silou již skomírajícího světa tradice (s jejími hodnotami lidského života), a silou jedince, který hodnoty lidského života sám pro sebe vydobyl v kritické diskusi s tradicí. Všechny tři pokusy definovat co je vlastně areté, odhalují při pečlivém rozboru pouhé rétorické střetnutí Menóna se Sókratem jako příklad střetu dvou odlišných paradigmat a sil, uvedených výše.

Considerations related to randomness appear relatively late in European history, at the turn of the Middle Ages and the modern era. They initially concern to the chances of winning in various games or situations and later move on to introduce classical and geometric probabilities. From a mathematical point of view, the probability calculus is completed by Kolmogorov’s axiomatic theory. However, many open questions, problems and paradoxes remain in the way probability is perceived and interpreted. The four main directions in the (...) concept of probability (logical, frequentist, subjective and propensity) are closely related to the way of perceiving randomness (epistemological or ontological). Reflections on the evolution of the perception of randomness and the interpretation of probability bring the ability to navigate the basic principles and findings of science and contributes to a deeper understanding of the entire issue. (shrink)

Cells are central for life, starting some 3.7 billion years ago with the assembly of the first primordial cells in the primeval and prebiotic oceans of the young Earth’s environment. Details of this abiogenesis are still missing but since the first competent, self-reproductive cell emerged, life has been based on continuous cell divisions. Accordingly, all present cells can be traced directly to the very first cells. Our senomic concept of cell sentience based on bioelectromagnetic fields postulated that all cells are (...) sentient and that life and sentience are coterminous. Archaea and bacteria are the most ancient cellular organisms and they still exhibit a unicellular lifestyle. Some two billion years after the emergence of life on Earth, eukaryotic cells were symbiotically assembled from archaeal and bacterial cells. Eukaryotic cells later coalesced to form true multicellular organisms in partnership with bacteria and archaea, forming holobionts, including fungi, plants, and animals. All organisms living presently are integrated into the Earth’s biosphere, which permeates all three major ecological habitats: the geosphere, hydrosphere, and the atmosphere. Coexistence of such vast assemblies of collaborating cells necessitates a highly elevated level of integration, which originates at the level of the senomic spheres of individual prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells across the whole of Earth’s biosphere corresponding to the hypothetical Gaia concept. (shrink)

It is common opinion that relation between the Aristotelian logic and logic of the Stoic is either complemental or rival. In his analysis, the author criticize claim according to which the Stoic examples of conclusions do not contained universal statements. He is showing that they expressed universal statements standard across implication and by anaphoric connection of pronouns. For this reason it is necessary to revise interpretation of basic, so called unprovable inferring rules of the Stoic. These rules are for predicate (...) logic and their interpretation, as propositional rules, is just special case. On the base of revised rules the author proved through Stoic logical system all valid modes of the first syllogistic figure of Aristotelian categorical syllogism. He also concludes that Aristotelian logic was just fragment of evidently more strong Stoic logic. (shrink)

Oceanic languages typically make a grammatical contrast between expres- sions of alienable and inalienable possession. Moreover, further distinctions are made in the alienable category but not in the inalienable category. The present research tests the hypothesis that there is a good motivation for such a development in the former case. As English does not have a grammaticalized distinction between alienable and inalienable possession, it provides a good testing ground. Three studies were conducted. In Study 1, participants were asked to write (...) down the first interpretation that came to mind for possessive phrases, some of which contained inherently relational possessums, while o thers contained possessums that are not inherently relational. Phrases with non-relational possessums elicited a broader range of interpretations and a lower consistency of a given interpretation across possessor modifiers than those with relational possessums. Study 2 demonstrated that users assign a default interpretation to a possessive phrase containing a relational possessum even when another reading is plausible. Study 3, a corpus-based analysis of possessive phrase use, showed that phrases with relational possessums have a narrower range of interpretations than those with other possessums. Taken together, the findings strongly suggest that grammatical distinctions between different types of alienable possession are motivated. (shrink)

The paper deals with the state of the social sciences after the boom of internet services in the Czech Republic in the 1990s. The results of our survey, based on 512 responses from the economics and history departments of major Czech public universities, show that internet services are considered a quality factor for academic output; however, the issues of plagiarism, a lack of resource criticism, inadequacy of impact factor-based evaluations, poor academic training for the new generation of social scientists, the (...) failure of state academic policy, and the generation gap make further development in the Czech social sciences rather problematic. As a result we recommend creating a better communication link between policy makers and scholars, reforming the current state policy which encourages lower quality academic output, and improving academic training, which requires a more individual approach, and also placing higher demands on social scientists. (shrink)

Analyzing the process of keeping promise we identify its sequence structure and its phase sequences in time. This allows us to arrive at a time order principle forming according to which obligation performance cannot precede in time its sufficient or necessary conditions performance. We further observe that a given promise must always be taken as an element of a certain system of promises. As a result we review definitions of the terms sufficient condition and necessary condition as no more allowing (...) their mutual defining, or symmetry . We try to discover the compliance rules concerning the condition – the conditioned vector, the course of events vector and the time vector. We conclude that it indicates an incorrect use if, provided the condition – the conditioned vector complies with the course of events vector, the negative time difference in the descriptive use of sentences involving either the if-then connective or the only if connective is obtained. Only when using sentences for abductive explanation with a dominating epistemic vector the negative difference of time does not indicate erroneous use; however, this is possible only for the term of sufficient condition. We further suggest reviewed definition generalization involving the terms of sufficient condition and necessary condition containing always a parameter element denot-ing a given modality type, or a particular system of rules, laws, etc. Such definition satisfies Brennan’s requirement of a “general formal scheme” where the notion of sufficient condition and necessary condition symmetry does not apply. (shrink)

The study analyses the critique of the Socratic philosophers in Athenaeus’ The Deipnosophists. The main goal of the study is to assess its overall quality, argumentative structure, historical relevance and interpretative plausibility. The first part of the study briefly outlines the main characteristics and features of the anti-philosophical literature in antiquity. The second part examines Athenaeus' argumentative methods and techniques of textual criticism. In the following parts of the study, we scrutinise Athenaeus‘s overall critical assessment of Socratic literature and compare (...) it with extant philosophical, biographical and doxographical evidence. In conclusion, we answer the question of to what extent is Athenaeus' critique relevant and substantiated by available textual evidence. (shrink)

Creative Class, Creative Economy, and the Wisdom Society as a Solution to their Controversy The paper briefly introduces the notion of creativity, linking the concepts of creative class and the related creative economy that are considered by Florida and his followers as the driving force of the current social and economic development. The concept of creative economy and its quantification in form of the Creative Class Index 3T or the Euro-Creativity Index were submitted to strong critique.The critics overturn some key (...) issues of the concept of creative class with an indication that the creative people give priority in choosing the work from the place; and there is no or almost nil correlation of a perceptual representation of the persons of homosexual orientation and the high-tech growth which confirms the opinion that the assertion about higher creativity of homosexual persons is a myth only. The purpose of the article is the examination of propriety of the concept of creative class and its quantification at one hand, and the rightfulness of their critique at the other. The analysis of the axiology of the concept of creative class is the method of examination. From point of view of axiology probably the most significant characteristic of the creative class is its accompanying destruction of thee social capital of creative people and it substitution of the creative capital. The rise of creative class takes place in parallel with the implosion of values at which basis our Jewish-Christian civilization is established. To this Florida expresses rather vague attitude by a statement that all socio-cultural changes that accompany the rise of the creative class will have no favorable impact on society.Florida labeled creativity as a basic human law, furthermore, he announced the need for a new live style in which the quality of life will increase and people become better men. The concept of creativity as an instrument of urban planning evolved into a left-liberal ideology with elements of social engineering that is the most important finding of the axiological analysis. The second finding is the need to accept the meaning of creativity. By implication of the two findings there arises a proposal for wisdom as a new driving force of social and economic development. The conclusion is the contribution is a requirement for formulation of the concept of wisdom society that is currently likely absent in the academic world, and the statement that if the West will not create the wisdom society, it will lose the raison d'être of its existence. (shrink)

This book assembles recent research on memory and learning in plants. Organisms that share a capability to store information about experiences in the past have an actively generated background resource on which they can compare and evaluate coming experiences in order to react faster or even better. This is an essential tool for all adaptation purposes. Such memory/learning skills can be found from bacteria up to fungi, animals and plants, although until recently it had been mentioned only as capabilities of (...) higher animals. With the rise of epigenetics the context dependent marking of experiences on the genetic level is an essential perspective to understand memory and learning in organisms. -/- Plants are highly sensitive organisms that actively compete for environmental resources. They assess their surroundings, estimate how much energy they need for particular goals, and then realize the optimum variant. They take measures to control certain environmental resources. They perceive themselves and can distinguish between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’. They process and evaluate information and then modify their behavior accordingly. -/- The book will guide scientists in further investigations on these skills of plant behavior and on how plants mediate signaling processes between themselves and the environment in memory and learning processes. (shrink)

Book review: Aristotelés, Etika Eudémova, Praha (Dybbuk), transl. Viktor Zavřel – Jan Brázdil, 2020, 168 p.

The similarity between logic and semantics of the Stoics and Frege has long been known, and it can be explained in various ways. In 2021, Susane Bobzien published a work in which she explains this similarity rather surprisingly: she hypothesizes that Frege generously helped himself with the foundations of Stoic logic as it was published in the first volume of History of Logic in the West by Carl Prantl. However, this hypothesis encounters various problems. The key point of the whole (...) accusation is founded on the formulation of a general propo-sition in language using implication and anaphora, which Frege supposedly took from the Stoics, although in Prantl’s text there is only one example of a sentence with this structure. On the contrary, there are many examples of such sentences in contemporary professional (e.g. legal) texts. Many examples of semantic simi-larities that Bobzien presents are based only on the similarities between isolated concepts; however, that is regularly the case for such concepts with the same conceptual basis. Bobzien presents a significant number of matches only on the basis of results that could allegedly be inferred from the texts. However, this cannot be considered a proof of plagiarism. Bobzien does not consider many sources for the continuity of interpretation such as the so-called hypothetical syllogism found in available textbooks of logic. Last but not least, her claims do not consider many differences between Stoic and Frege’s logic. All this leads us to the conclusion that Bobzien does not present sufficient facts and connections between them that would confirm her hypothesis about Frege’s plagiarism of the Stoic logic: Frege simply was not a plagiarist. (shrink)