Among the objections to the implementation of what I will call "genome editing in human reproduction" is that it does not address any unmet medical need, and therefore fails to meet an important criterion for introducing an unproven procedure with potentially adverse consequences. To be clear: what I mean by GEHR is the use of any one of a number of related biological techniques, such as the CRISPR-Cas9 system, deliberately to modify a functional sequence of DNA in a cell of (...) a human embryo, so that the modified sequence is replicated in the cells of a resulting child and may, without further intervention, be passed on to that child's biological descendants. It is... (shrink)

The classic, influential essay in 'descriptive metaphysics' by the distinguished English philosopher.

The Frame/Content theory deals with how and why the first language evolved the present-day speech mode of programming syllable “Frame” structures with segmental “Content” elements. The first words are considered, for biomechanical reasons, to have had the simple syllable frame structures of pre-speech babbling, and were perhaps parental terms, generated within the parent–infant dyad. Although all gestural origins theories have iconicity as a plausible alternative hypothesis for the origin of the meaning-signal link for words, they all share the problems of (...) how and why a fully fledged sign language, necessarily involving a structured phonology, changed to a spoken language. (shrink)

A revision of the author's thesis, Harvard University, 1967.

Henry David Thoreau, though often characterised as individualist or apolitical, is in fact an important link between Jeffersonian agrarian republicanism and environmentalism. Like the Jeffersonians, Thoreau espouses a political economy of citizenship, criticises modern capitalism, and celebrates simplicity and personal independence. However, Thoreau rejects the Jeffersonians' focus on conquest of the wilderness and economic industriousness, both of which were meant to promote virtue. Thoreau advocates preservation of wild nature as essential for cultivating virtue and regards nature as a community deserving (...) respect and protection. He criticises an emphasis on economic industriousness as promoting overwork, environmental destruction and greed. Thoreau emerges as a complex figure whose legacy points in two contrasting directions: toward a more ecologically responsible or sustainable republicanism embracing preservation of a spectrum of landscapes from wilderness to agrarian, and also toward a problematic, depoliticising separation between human beings and nature. (shrink)

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus pandemic, otherwise known as COVID-19 brought about the use of new terminologies—new lexical items such as social distancing, self-isolation, and lockdown. In developed countries, basic social amenities to support these are taken for granted; this is not the case in West African countries. Instead, those suggested safeguards against contracting COVID-19 have exposed the infrastructural deficit in West African countries. In addition, and more profoundly, these safeguards against the disease have distorted the traditional community-individuality balance. (...) The enforcement of social distancing, self-isolation, and lockdown has made it impossible for West Africans to drift to their ancestral homes and villages, as is usually the case in times of crisis, with attendant consequences for communal life and traditional burial rites. This could be one of the reasons why some COVID-19 patients are escaping from isolation centres, since to die in such centres violates their bodily integrity at an ontological level. (shrink)

All developed human beings possess a practical mastery of a vast range of concepts, including such basic structural notions as those of identity, truth, existence, material objects, mental states, space, and time; but a practical mastery does not entail theoretical understanding. It is that understanding which philosophy seeks to achieve. In this book, one of the most distinguished of living philosophers, assuming no previous knowledge of the subject on the part of the reader, sets out to explain and illustrate a (...) certain conception of the nature of analytical philosophy. Strawson draws on his many years of teaching at Oxford University, during which he refined and developed what he regards as the most productive route to understanding the fundamental structure of human thinking. Among the distinctive features of his exposition are the displacement of an older, reductive conception of philosophical method in favor of elucidating the interconnections between the complex but irreducible notions which form the basic structure of our thinking; and the demonstration that the three traditionally distinguished departments of metaphysics, epistemology, and logic are but three aspects of one unified enquiry. Strawson has produced an elegant work that will be invaluable to students and stimulating for professional philosophers and general readers alike. (shrink)

Current diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia place emphasis on delusions and hallucinations, whereas the classical descriptions of schizophrenia by Kraepelin and Bleuler emphasized disorganization and impoverishment of mental activity. Despite the availability of antipsychotic medication for treating delusions and hallucinations, many patients continue to experience persisting disability. Improving treatment requires a better understanding of the processes leading to persisting disability. We recently introduced the term classical schizophrenia to describe cases with disorganized and impoverished mental activity, cognitive impairment and predisposition to persisting (...) disability. Recent evidence reveals that a polygenic score indicating risk for schizophrenia predicts severity of the features of classical schizophrenia: disorganization, and to a lesser extent, impoverishment of mental activity and cognitive impairment. Current understanding of brain function attributes a cardinal role to predictive coding: the process of generating models of the world that are successively updated in light of confirmation or contradiction by subsequent sensory information. It has been proposed that abnormalities of these predictive processes account for delusions and hallucinations. Here we examine the evidence provided by electrophysiology and fMRI indicating that imprecise predictive coding is the core pathological process in classical schizophrenia, accounting for disorganization, psychomotor poverty and cognitive impairment. Functional imaging reveals aberrant brain activity at network hubs engaged during encoding of predictions. We discuss the possibility that frequent prediction errors might promote excess release of the neurotransmitter, dopamine, thereby accounting for the occurrence of episodes of florid psychotic symptoms including delusions and hallucinations in classical schizophrenia. While the predictive coding hypotheses partially accounts for the time-course of classical schizophrenia, the overall body of evidence indicates that environmental factors also contribute. We discuss the evidence that chronic inflammation is a mechanism that might link diverse genetic and environmental etiological factors, and contribute to the proposed imprecision of predictive coding. (shrink)

An action-oriented perspective changes the role of an individual from a passive observer to an actively engaged agent interacting in a closed loop with the world as well as with others. Cognition exists to serve action within a landscape that contains both. This chapter surveys this landscape and addresses the status of the pragmatic turn. Its potential influence on science and the study of cognition are considered (including perception, social cognition, social interaction, sensorimotor entrainment, and language acquisition) and its impact (...) on how neuroscience is studied is also investigated (with the notion that brains do not passively build models, but instead support the guidance of action). A review of its implications in robotics and engineering includes a discussion of the application of enactive control principles to couple action and perception in robotics as well as the conceptualization of system design in a more holistic, less modular manner. Practical applications that can impact the human condition are reviewed (e.g., educational applications, treatment possibilities for developmental and psychopathological disorders, the development of neural prostheses). All of this foreshadows the potential societal implications of the pragmatic turn. The chapter concludes that an action-oriented approach emphasizes a continuum of interaction between technical aspects of cognitive systems and robotics, biology, psychology, the social sciences, and the humanities, where the individual is part of a grounded cultural system. (shrink)

The current implementation of the Neo-Darwinian model of evolution typically assumes that the set of possible phenotypes is organized into a highly symmetric and regular space. Most conveniently, a Euclidean vector space is used, representing phenotypic properties by real-valued variables. Computational work on the biophysical genotype-phenotype model of RNA folding, however, suggests a rather different picture. If phenotypes are organized according to genetic accessibility, the resulting space lacks a metric and can be formalized only in terms of a relatively unfamiliar (...) structure. Patterns of phenotypic evolution—such as punctuation, irreversibility, and modularity—result naturally from the properties of the genotype-phenotype map, which, given the genetic accessibility structure, define accessibility in the phenotype space. The classical framework, however, addresses these patterns exclusively in terms of natural selection on suitably constructed fitness landscapes. Recent work has extended the explanatory level for phenotypic evolution from fitness considerations alone to include the topological structure of phenotype space as induced by the genotype-phenotype map. Lewontin’s notion of “quasi-independence” of characters can also be formalized in topological terms: it corresponds to the assumption that a region of the phenotype space is represented by a product space of orthogonal factors. In this picture, each character corresponds to a factor of a region of the phenotype space. We consider any region of the phenotype space that has a given factorization as a “type”, i.e., as a set of phenotypes that share the same set of phenotypic characters. Thus, a theory of character identity can be developed that is based on the correspondence of local factors in different regions of the phenotype space. (shrink)

Neural organization achieves its stated goal to “show how theory and experiment can supplement each other in an integrated, evolving account of structure, function, and dynamics” (p. ix), showing in a variety of contexts – from olfactory processing to spatial navigation, motor learning and more – how function may be realized in the neural tissue, with explanatory and predictive neural network models providing a cornerstone in this approach.

Deictic pointers allow the nervous system to exploit information in a frame that is centered on the object of interest. This processing may take place in visual or haptic space, but the information processing advantages of deictic pointing can also be applied in abstract spaces, providing the basis for analogical transfer. Simulation and behavioral results illustrating this progression from embodiment to abstraction are discussed.