Richard Taylor was born in Charlotte, Michigan on 5 November 1919. He received his A. B. from the University of illinois in 1941, his M. A. from Oberlin College in 1947, and his Ph. D. from Brown University in 1951. He has been William H. P. Faunce Professor of Philosophy at Brown University, Professor of Philosophy (Graduate Faculties) at Columbia University, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester. He is the author of about fifty articles and of five (...) philosophical books. This volume consists of essays presented to Richard Taylor on the occa sion of his sixtieth birthday. Some of the contributors have been Taylor'S students; some have been his colleagues; and all have been, and continue to be, his admirers. I have made several attempts to articulate what it is I (I would not presume to speak for anyone else) admire about Richard Taylor: (1) There is a particular 'flavor' to Taylor's philosophical writing and con versation that is wholly delightful. Like any other flavor, it can be tasted and enjoyed and remembered but never adequately described. (If there should be someone who has picked up this book who does not know what I mean, I recommend that he read the chapter on 'God' in Taylor's Metaphysics. ) (2) Taylor is a masterful dialectician. (shrink)

Integrated information theory (IIT) is a candidate theory of consciousness that highlights the role of complex interactions between parts of a system as the basis of consciousness – and, due to its general information-theoretic formulation, is capable of making statements about consciousness in neural and non-neural systems alike. Here, we argue that a system radically different to a human brain, host to complex physiological and functional structures capable of integrating information, can be found in the meristems and vascular system of (...) higher plants. Following a pragmatic and ontologically innocent approach, neither taking for granted that plants are conscious nor dismissing the possibility that they are, we argue that the time is ripe to apply analysis tools inspired by IIT to plants, taking advantage of recent developments in both plant imaging and information theory. We introduce and discuss the relevant literature, and pro information and integration in plant behaviour, assessing the plausibility of plant sentience. If successful, these experiments could position plants as the next frontier in consciousness science, and urge us to rethink our perspectives on consciousness, how to measure it, and its prevalence amongst living beings. (shrink)

Optimization by definition is the action of making most effective or the best use of a resource or situation and that is required almost in every field of engineering. In this work, the optimization of Least Mean square (LMS) algorithm is carried out with the help of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). Efforts have been made to find out the advantages and disadvantages of combining gradient based (LMS) algorithm with Swarm Intelligence SI (ACO, PSO). This optimization (...) of LMS algorithm will help us in further extending the uses of adaptive filtering to the system having multi-model error surface that is still a gray area of adaptive filtering. Because the available version of LMS algorithm that plays an important role in adaptive filtering is a gradient based algorithm, that get stuck at the local minima of system with multi-model error surface considering it global minima, resulting in an non-optimized convergence. By virtue of the proposed method we have got a profound solution for the problem associated with system with multimodal error surface. The results depict significant improvements in the performance and displayed fast convergence rate, rather stucking at local minima. Both the SI techniques displayed their own advantage and can be separately combined with LMS algorithm for adaptive filtering. This optimization of LMS algorithm will further help to resolve serious interference and noise issues and holds a very important application in the field of biomedical science. (shrink)

The desire to see a sign phenomenon in different ways always has a reason to interpret it in an unbiased, panoramic way, and in some places - even allowing for contradictions in its understanding by different participants in the interpretative process. For modern humanities, this disposition is quite understandable, since it follows from its very postmodern nature, thereby defining the semantic semantic fields of the leading humanities. True, it is not so wide-spread, but instead, it is evident that Ukrainian religious (...) thinkers of the Middle Ages and Baroque have interpreted the iconic phenomena more deeply. In the story of Petro Mohyla "On the Wonderful Elder Grigory Mezhyhirsky" the metropolitan Mohyla clearly expresses the need to build before the thinking gaze of the reader his own, immanently religious-philosophical conception of the Divine, which every time would present him not just as an act of manifestation, otherwise he appears before the person, while remaining alone. The contemporary study of this issue in order to integrate its leading concepts in the religious-philosophical and general cultural discourse of the postmodern era has largely determined the relevance of the proposed article. The study of the phenomenon of "leaving" by itself in changing forms of the phenomenon of the Divine is also one of the key ones in the proposed studio, because it expresses the very meaning of the Divine as a religious, and therefore a cultural phenomenon. (shrink)

On his very first page Feldman ascribes to me a claim about the relation expressed by 'is identical with'. Feldman's way of speaking is, as Ryle might say, systematically misleading: for of course I deny that any one relation, even a relative relation, is the relation expressed by 'is identical with'. My whole thesis was that 'is identical with' expressed now one, now another, relation, according to the context of utterance.

Given a physical system, one knows that there is a logical duality between its properties and its states. In this paper, we choose its states as the undefined notions of our axiomatic construction. In fact, by means of well-motivated assumptions expressed in terms of a transition probability function defined on the set of all pure states of the system, we construct a system of elementary propositions, i.e., a complete orthomodular atomic lattice satisfying the covering law. We also study in this (...) framework the important notion of compatibility of propositions, and we define the superpositions and the mixtures of the states of the physical system. (shrink)