"Contemporary Mind - Some Modern Answers" is a fantastic collection of essays by English science writer John W. Sullivan. They deal with a range of subjects, ranging from mysticism and immortality to the relationship between science and art. John William Navin Sullivan (1886 - 1937) was a literary journalist and popular science writer most famous for his study of Beethoven. He is also responsible for having written some of the earliest non-technical accounts of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, and he (...) was acquainted with many important writers in London in the 1920s, including John Middleton Murry, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Aleister Crowley and T. S. Eliot. Other notable works by this author include "Aspects of Science" (1923), "Aspects of Science: Second Series" (1926), and An Outline of Modern Knowledge (1931). Contents include: "The Balanced Life," "The Problem of Suffering," "The Necessity of Mysticism," "Human Immortality," "A Dissertation on Beethoven," "The Scientific Outlook," "A Dissertation on Maxwell," "New Principles," "A Dissertation on Newton," "Science and Art," "Mathematics and Culture," "Sir Josiah Stamp," "Mr. Aldous Huxley," etc. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with the original text and artwork. (shrink)

Le but de cet article est d'examiner à fonds les relations qu'il y a entre les données de la science sur la matière et l'énergie, et les notions philosophiques de substance et d'accident. Il s'agit ici spécialement des deux questions suivantes : d'abord, doit-ön appeler vraiment exacte l'expression : « la matière se transforme en énergie » et ensuite : peut-on vraiment dire qu'il n'y ait pas de matière dans l'espace vide d'air ? C'est de propos délibéré que nous avons (...) choisi pour l'étude de ces questions la méthode qui consiste à interroger, autant que possible, les données mêmes de la science. Nous esquissons dès lors rapidement dans la première partie de l'article les théories physiques concernant notre sujet. Puis, dans la seconde partie, nous essayons d'en donner une interprétation. Cette interprétation met en lumière l'intuition plus profonde, qui se cache dans la connaissance du physicien, et qui ne saurait s'exprimer d'une manière achevée dans le cadre de la théorie physique comme telle. Il est nécessaire dès lors de donner une notion exacte de la substance. Tout physicien d'ailleurs tient implicitement compte de cette notion, dès qu'il ne se contente plus seulement des seules formules, mais qu'il y ajoute des explications. On doit toutefois circonscrire avec un soin particulier le sens attaché à la notion de « substance matérielle ». Il ne faudra pas par exemple trop insister sur l'occupation d'une certaine partie de l'espace bien tranchée. On doit aussi éviter une espèce d'anthropomorphisme dans laquelle on attribuerait à la substance matérielle une intériorité ou une indépendance trop grandes. Nous espérons être arrivé ainsi à des conclusions fondamentales sur la notion de la substance matérielle, ainsi que sur la nature de l'espace appelé vide. (shrink)

Gibbon was a far more subtle, serious and empathetic historian of the triumph of Christianity than his reputation as a sneering infidel historian implies, or so argues Liebert in this short and wel...

Volume 28, Issue 1, January 2020, Page 202-204.

This study argues that the English-born, Edinburgh-educated and Bath-based physician William Falconer (1744–1824) authored the only stadial history published during the British Enlightenment that analysed the influence of socio-economic context upon religious belief. A survey of the conjectural histories of religion written by the leading literati demonstrates that discussion of religion by the Scottish literati was undertaken separate from the “Scottish narrative” of stadial economic and political progress. We have to turn to Falconer’s Remarks on the Influence of Climate (1781) (...) to see a four-stage history of religion that related belief and practice to wider social and economic developments. While heavily derivative of Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois (1748), Falconer’s Remarks has some claim to theoretical innovation and used his conjectural history to tell a story of English (not British) religious exceptionalism. Moreover, the work was received as a serious contribution to the late Enlightenment’s science of human nature and society. (shrink)

A major concern of public health authorities is to also encourage adults to be exposed to enriched environments during the pandemic lockdown, as was recently the case worldwide during the COVID-19 outbreak. Games for adults that require physical activity, known as exergames, offer opportunities here. In particular, the output of the gaming industry nowadays offers computer games with extended reality which combines real and virtual environments and refers to human-machine interactions generated by computers and wearable technologies. For example, playing the (...) game in front of a computer screen while standing or walking on a force plate or treadmill allows the user to react to certain infrastructural changes and obstacles within the virtual environment. Recent developments, optimization, and minimizations in wearable technology have produced wireless headsets and sensors that allow for unrestricted whole-body movement. This makes the virtual experience more immersive and provides the opportunity for greater engagement than traditional exercise. Currently, XR serves as an umbrella term for current immersive technologies as well as future realities that enhance the experience with features that produce new controllable environments. Overall, these technology-enhanced exergames challenge the adult user and modify the experience by increasing sensory stimulation and creating an environment where virtual and real elements interact. As a therapy, exergames can potentially create new environments and visualizations that may be more ecologically valid and thus simulate real activities of daily living that can be trained. Furthermore, by adding telemedicine features to the exergame, progress over time can be closely monitored and feedback provided, offering future opportunities for cognitive-motor assessment. To more optimally serve and challenge adults both physically and cognitively over time in future lockdowns, there is a need to provide long-term remote training and feedback. Particularly related to activities of daily living that create opportunities for effective and lasting rehabilitation for elderly and sufferers from chronic non-communicable diseases. The aim of the current review is to envision the remote training and monitoring of physical and cognitive aspects for adults with limited mobility, through the implementation of concurrent telehealth and exergame features using XR and wireless sensor technologies. (shrink)

Although the theory of definability had many important antecedents—such as the descriptive set theory initiated by the French semi-intuitionists in the early 1900s—the main ideas were first laid out in precise mathematical terms by Alfred Tarski beginning in 1929. We review here the basic notions of languages, explicit definability, and grammatical complexity, and emphasize common themes in the theories of definability for four important languages underlying, respectively, descriptive set theory, recursive function theory, classical pure logic, and finite-universe logic. We review (...) the history of previous studies of the similarities and differences in the theories of definability of the first three of these four languages. A seminal role leading toward unification of the theories has been played by the separation principles introduced by Nikolai Luzin in 1927. Emphasizing analogies and driving toward further unification embracing finite-universe logic we concentrate on a simple example—the first and second separation principles for existential-universal first-order sentences . Using this as a test case for the fundamental problem of how to “finitize” arguments in classical pure logic to the finite-universe case, we are led to the analogous negative solution by using the theory of certain special graphs: a graph is - special for any positive integers m , n , p , q iff it is bipartite with m red points and n blue points and for every p -tuple of red points there is a blue point to which they are all connected . As an aside we introduce for further study a natural “Ramseyesque” increasing sequence A of positive integers, where A is the least positive integer n for which an -special graph exists. (shrink)

Can we understand conscious experience? It can seem that the answer is ‘no’. Even when we have well-supported cognitive accounts of consciousness, such as global workspace theory, experience itself seems to elude our grasp. It is easy to see how a global workspace might be a useful adaptation, much harder to see what role is played by conscious experience. For instance, if I'm looking for a blue notebook, why do I need to experience colours? Why wouldn't it suffice to have (...) an unconscious mechanism that recognized colours, and could make such information available to other systems? Why couldn't the mechanisms of the workspace operate without experience at all? (shrink)

In France, as in other European countries, especially Britain and Germany, the nineteenth century was a period of great progress and achievement in science. This would still have been true if Claude Bernard and Louis Pasteur had been the only outstanding French scientists of the nineteenth century, whereas there were, of course, many others apart from an impressive number of brilliant French mathematicians. Nevertheless, although it was a great century for French science there was perhaps something rather disappointing about it, (...) and something rather ingrowing about the attitude of French scientists towards scientific developments in other countries. For example, the French took it hard that the creator of the theory of evolution should have been an Englishman, remembering too late Darwin's predecessor Lamarck, and they certainly were very slow in accepting Darwin's theory of evolution.1 Again, the French may have felt that after the important contributions of French scientists such as Coulomb, Poisson, Biot and, above all, Ampère, the theory of electricity and magnetism which is today principally associated with the names of Faraday and Maxwell should have been created by a Frenchman. Once again this new theory was only accepted very slowly and hesitantly, and even unwillingly, in France—one thinks, for example, of the criticisms levelled at the theory by Pierre Duhem in his “The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory”.2 Of course it might be that if one knew how to weigh properly the various achievements of French scientists in different branches of science one would find that, allowing for her rather static population during the nineteenth century, thetotalcontribution of France compared well with those of Britain and Germany. Nevertheless, in one case at least, that of theoretical physics, there seems to have been an unmistakable failure to live up to the promise of the beginning of the century. The purpose of this paper is to advance possible reasons to explain this failure. (shrink)