Artificial Neural Networks have reached “grandmaster” and even “super-human” performance across a variety of games, from those involving perfect information, such as Go, to those involving imperfect information, such as “Starcraft”. Such technological developments from artificial intelligence (AI) labs have ushered concomitant applications across the world of business, where an “AI” brand-tag is quickly becoming ubiquitous. A corollary of such widespread commercial deployment is that when AI gets things wrong—an autonomous vehicle crashes, a chatbot exhibits “racist” behavior, automated credit-scoring processes (...) “discriminate” on gender, etc.—there are often significant financial, legal, and brand consequences, and the incident becomes major news. As Judea Pearl sees it, the underlying reason for such mistakes is that “... all the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting.” The key, as Pearl suggests, is to replace “reasoning by association” with “causal reasoning” —the ability to infer causes from observed phenomena. It is a point that was echoed by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis in a recent piece for theNew York Times: “we need to stop building computer systems that merely get better and better at detecting statistical patterns in data sets—often using an approach known as ‘Deep Learning’—and start building computer systems that from the moment of their assembly innately grasp three basic concepts: time, space, and causality.” In this paper, foregrounding what in 1949 Gilbert Ryle termed “a category mistake”, I will offer an alternative explanation for AI errors; it is not so much that AI machinery cannot “grasp” causality, but that AI machinery (qua computation) cannot understand anything at all. (shrink)

Hilde Lindemann argues that personhood is the shared practice of recognizing and responding to one another. She calls this practice holding. Holding, however, can fail. Holding failure, by stereotyping for example, can inhibit others’ epistemic confidence and ability to recall true beliefs as well as create an environment of racism or sexism. How might we avoid holding failure? Holding failure, I argue, has many epistemic dimensions, so I argue that moral encroachment has the theoretical tools available to avoid holding failures. (...) The goal of this paper, therefore, is to articulate and understand the epistemology of holding in an attempt to remedy holding failure. I show that the virtue of wokeness emerges from an epistemic environment tainted with moral encroachment. I argue that as long as an individual is woke, she will have a tendency to avoid holding failures. Wokeness and moral encroachment, consequently, are fundamental to the epistemology of holding and consistent proper holding. (shrink)

A cross-sectional study to ascertain what the Singapore population would regard as material risk in the anaesthesia consent-taking process and identify demographic factors that predict patient preferences in medical decision-making to tailor a more patient-centered informed consent. A survey was performed involving patients 21 years old and above who attended the pre-operative evaluation clinic over a 1-month period in Singapore General Hospital. Questionnaires were administered to assess patients’ perception of material risks, by trained interviewers. Patients’ demographics were obtained. Mann–Whitney U (...) test and Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance was used. Statistical significance was taken at p < 0.05. Four hundred fourteen patients were eligible of which 26 refused to participate and 24 were excluded due to language barrier. 364 patients were recruited. A higher level of education, being employed and younger age group are factors identified in patients who wanted greater participation in medical decisions. Gender, marital status, type of surgery, and previous surgical history did not affect their level of participation. The complications most patients knew about were Nausea, Drowsiness and Surgical Wound Pain. Patients ranked Heart Attack, Death and Stroke as the most significant risks that they wanted to be informed about in greater detail. Most patients wanted to make a joint decision with the anaesthetist, instead of letting the doctor decide or deciding for themselves. Discussion with the anaesthetist is the preferred medium of communication compared to reading a pamphlet or watching a video. Age and educational level can influence medical decision-making. Despite the digital age, most patients still prefer a clinic consult instead of audio-visual multimedia for pre-operative anaesthetic counselling. The local population appears to place greater importance on rare but serious complications compared to common complications. This illustrates the need to contextualize information provided during informed consent to strengthen the doctor-patient relationship. (shrink)

The proclamation of the death of God came at a pivotal time in the history of humankind. It far transcended the concerns of the religious faithful and dented the entire fabric of human existence. Left to its own devices, humans intended their consciousness to replace God's. This proved to be a terrible mistake that collapsed the entire modern project. One of the worldviews that emerged in the wake of this eruption was antinatalism, which refers to the conviction that human reproduction (...) should be brought to an absolute halt. This is the most modern outgrowth of the death of God and represents the most radical face of secular humanism. In spite of the admittedly dark fumes that leak out from the term ‘antinatalism’, this philosophical position emerges quite naturally when we consider the depletion of our traditional sources of philosophical enquiry. (shrink)

While my own philosophical views are largely in keeping with my mentor, Dallas Willard, nevertheless, I find his conception of the human person puzzling, hard to specify precisely, and prima facie contradictory in a few places. Dallas's central goal in formulating his anthropology was to develop a model that shed light on, allowed for deeper insight into, and fostered interest in spiritual formation, especially the role of the body in spiritual maturation. I share this goal, and agree with most of (...) his model. But in what follows, I will make more precise what his views were, try to clear up what, prima facie, seem to be contradictions in his theory, and, finally, recommend an alternative that captures the central concerns Dallas had for his own position. Thus, I will lay out a few general points of Dallas's ontology, provide a description of his philosophical/theological anthropology, along with two problems that seem to be present, and offer a slightly adjusted alternative to his position that accomplishes his main goal in a way with which I believe he would be satisfied. (shrink)

Introduction Jan Abbink and Hans Vermeulen This volume consists of essays and studies by authors inspired by the work of Eric Wolf, a central figure in ...

At some distance from a high-rate source in an elastic half-space, the dominant wave motion at the free surface is a Rayleigh surface wave. The calculation of surface waves generated by a concentrated force in a half-space is a basic problem in elastodynamics. By straightforward manipulations, the result can be used to obtain surface waves for other kinds of wave-generating body-force arrangements. For example, appropriate combinations of double-forces (or dipoles) can be used to represent the surface loading due to laser (...) irradiation, or due to acoustic emission from the opening of a sub-surface crack or from sliding over a fault surface. The surface wave motion is usually obtained by the application of integral transform techniques and the subsequent extraction of the surface waves as the contributions from poles in the integral for the inverse transform. In this paper, we use a much simpler approach based on the elastodynamic reciprocity theorem. We consider a transversely isotropic solid whose axis of symmetry is normal to the surface of the half-space. Surface wave pulses generated by a single force, by irradiation from a laser source, and by opening of a crack, have been determined. (shrink)

What are sanctuary cities? What are the political stakes? The literature provides inadequate answers. Liberal migration theorists offer few insights into sanctuary city politics. Critical migration scholars primarily address the relationship between sanctuary cities and political activism, a small part of the phenomenon. The historical literature examines continuities between 1970s sanctuary church activism and contemporary sanctuary cities, confusing what is essential to sanctuary churches and what is only sometimes associated with sanctuary cities. Together these approaches obscure more than they reveal. (...) This article suggests a republican account of sanctuary cities. Reconstructing American migration politics from the colonial era onward shows that sanctuary cities have roots in both the colonial republican revolt and the republican principle of freedom as nondomination. That reconstruction reveals much about both sanctuary cities and the federal government’s long-running assault on them. The resulting robust analytical framework clarifies what is at stake in the politics of sanctuary cities: federal sovereignty in migration politics specifically and republican liberty in migration politics generally. (shrink)

This paper examines political norms and relationships associated with governance of pandemic risk. Through a pair of linked controversies over scientific access to H5N1 flu virus and genomic data, it examining the duties, obligations, and allocations of authority articulated around the imperative for globally free-flowing information and around the corollary imperative for a science that is set free to produce such information. It argues that scientific regimes are laying claim to a kind of sovereignty, particularly in moments where scientific experts (...) call into question the legitimacy of claims grounded in national sovereignty, by positioning the norms of scientific practice, including a commitment to unfettered access to scientific information and to the authority of science to declare what needs to be known, as essential to global governance. Scientific authority occupies a constitutional position insofar as it figures centrally in the repertoire of imaginaries that shape how a global community is imagined: what binds that community together and what shared political commitments, norms, and subjection to delegated authority are seen as necessary for it to be rightly governed. (shrink)

Most discussions of near-death experiences (NDEs) in both the academic and popular literature contend that they establish ('prove') supernaturalism (about NDEs): they show that the mind is not the brain (and can continue after the brain stops functioning), and they bring us into contact with non-physical realms. I believe that the evidence provided by NDEs for supernaturalism is not persuasive, but I offer an alternative, naturalistic interpretation of these phenomena. On this interpretation, NDEs are 'real' in both senses of the (...) term: they really occur (people really have them, with the experiential content ascribed to them), and they are accurate. On this interpretation, NDEs are fundamentally about a journey from the known to the unknown, guided by a trusted mentor. Thus, NDEs accurately depict the possibilities for dying. Negative NDEs indicate the possibility of dying in cold, sterile, lonely circumstances, whereas positive NDEs point to the possibility of 'dying well', surrounded by loved ones. This is an interpretation that avoids the problems for supernaturalism of the gap between evidence and conclusion, and the commitment to causal interaction between physical and non-physical realms. (shrink)

Sociologists studying gender have debated West and Zimmerman’s premise that “doing gender is unavoidable,” seeking to ascertain whether people can “undo” or only “redo” gender. While sociologists have been correct to focus on the interactional accomplishment of gender, they have neglected one of Garfinkel’s key insights about interaction: that people hold each other accountable to particular narratives. Neglecting the narrative aspect of doing—and undoing—gender impedes our ability to recognize processes of social change. Based on a qualitative study, we show how (...) the movement for LGBTQI acceptance within U.S. conservative Protestant churches works to make gender not “omnirelevant” by challenging conservative “complementarity” narratives that posit two complementary, opposite sexes as a commandment preceding the Ten Commandments in time and importance. We explore this movement’s ambivalent relationship with homonormativity, highlight three ways this movement resists projecting binary gender narratives into scripture, and examine how some in this movement see the pursuit of social justice as a Christian mandate. The efforts of LGBTQI conservative Christians exemplify how reshaping sex/gender/sexual narratives can create possibilities for undoing gender. (shrink)

In this article, we examine the ways gendered frames shift to make room for societal changes while maintaining existing pillars of systemic gender inequality. Utilizing the case of U.S. media representations of transgender people who reproduce, we analyze how media outlets make room for increasing societal recognition of transgender people and maintain cisnormative and repronormative traditions and beliefs in the process. Specifically, we outline how these media outlets accomplish both outcomes in two ways. First, they reinforce cisgender-based repronormativity via conceptualizations (...) of transgender reproduction as new and occurring in contrast to normative, cisgender reproduction. Second, they create a transnormative reproductive subject, which establishes a new socially sanctioned script for what it means to be transgender and what types of transgender experience may be recognized or accepted in mainstream society. In conclusion, we draw out implications for understanding how social authorities may shift existing gender frames to make room for changes in society while at the same time maintaining normative beliefs. These normative beliefs continue to facilitate societal patterns of gender inequality within such new frames. (shrink)

J. E. J. Altham; XV*—Reproach, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 74, Issue 1, 1 June 1974, Pages 263–272, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/74.

J. Arthur Baird is the author of several important books in New Testament studies, his best known perhaps being his Audience Criticism and the Historical Jesus. At his untimely death, he left a nearly complete manuscript, now published here. In this timely and relevant manuscript, Baird offers first a critical introduction to the historical paradigm, pointing out its limitations in terms of tracing the paradigm of New Testament formation. He then traces this development himself, beginning with the starting point of (...) the Holy Word and noting its development through the context, theological interpretation, and application, to its manifestation in the apostles, schools and fathers. He concludes with comments on its current implications. This book represents the last and lasting final thoughts of a scholar who was very much devoted to the importance of the Holy Word. (shrink)

J. J. Valberg; VIII*—Improper Singular Terms, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 71, Issue 1, 1 June 1971, Pages 121–146, https://doi.org/10.1093/a.

It is proposed that a human conscious experience of the sort we report to each other reflects a direct causal interaction between a pattern of information about the world, encoded in a field of postsynaptic potentials, and a quantized mode of excitation occupying dendritic cytoskeleton. The requirement for a quantized account is seen simply as the need for an event of experience to be a single indivisible, but richly patterned, causal relation between information and an 'informee'. It is argued that (...) the informee is likely to be a higher-order quantized collective mode (much as proposed by Craddock and colleagues, 2017) with the biologically relevant dynamics likely also to be describable in classical terms. No specific interpretation of quantum theory is needed. In this scenario, anaesthetics would abrogate reportable experience by detuning parameters underpinning cytoskeletal informee modes, perhaps critically increasing associated impedence. It is also proposed that tuning and detuning of informee modes in individual dendritic trees by binding of accessory proteins to cytoskeleton plays a physiological role in short-term memory and truth evaluation through ascertainment of sequential signal pattern consonance. Components of this model may be involved in cellular adaptive responses in many types of organism. (shrink)