We present a simple distributed concept that appears to insinuate SWARM behavior in a collection of mobile platforms. The control is based on the inter-mobile platform communication links’ signal-to-noise ratio. This double use of communications is a natural linkage for SWARM behavior.

In this book, renowned philosopher Ralph McInerny sets out to review what Thomas meant by the phrase and to defend a robust understanding of Thomas's teaching on the subject.

'Dry,obscure...Prolix.' That was Kant's own critique of his first Critique - and exasperated students since having it extended to the rest of his work. Yet despite it's sprawling for and forbidding content, Kant's moral philosophy has continued to compel the attention of every serious thinker in the field. Clear, Concise - and overwhelmingly convinvcing - Ralph Walker's brilliant guide spells out the power and renewed relevance of histhinking : a genuinely objective, absolute basis for a modern moral law.

Mit beeindruckender Geschwindigkeit hat der Transhumanismus in akademischen Kreisen und den Medien immer mehr Aufmerksamkeit gewonnen. Er wird von angesehenen Denkern unterstützt. Die ihm zugrunde liegende Triebkraft, Technologie zum größtmöglichen Nutzen der Menschen zu nutzen, hat offenbar ihren Reiz. Dennoch begegnet ein beachtlicher Teil der Menschen dem Transhumanismus mit Skepsis, Abneigung, sogar Verachtung. Ein verwirrendes Phänomen.

Ralph D. Ellis interviewed by Samuel Maruszewski / Ralph D. Ellis, one of the strongest advocates of the enactivist approach to consciousness and cognitive theory, began his academic career as a phenomenologist, earning a Ph.D. at Duquesne University under Andre Schuwer, John Sallis and Amedeo Giorgi, and has taught at Clark Atlanta University since 1985. He subsequently received a post-doctoral M.S. in Public Affairs at Georgia State University, and worked also as a social worker in both Pittsburgh and (...) Atlanta. Partly as a result of those experiences, as well as being a life-long practitioner of Gene Gendlin’s focusing method, he gravitated toward emotion research and the intersection of philosophy, psychology and the brain sciences from the enactivist perspective, arguing that action, as opposed to mere reaction, has to be emotionally motivated, and that the understanding of all modalities of consciousness should include that perspective. The author of many books and articles on these topics, he is interested in integrating the social sciences with phenomenology, ethics, and philosophy of mind. He is now trying to integrate enactive consciousness theory with moral and social philosophy, with relevance to our current world-wide crisis of internet disinformation. The Moral Psychology of Internal Conflict (Cambridge University Press 2018) is an attempted beginning in that direction. His latest book, Action, Embodied Mind, and Life-World (SUNY Press 2022) is a continuation of that project. His various books in these areas are listed at the Ralph D. Ellis page of Amazon. (shrink)

According to “imaginability arguments,” given any explanation of the physiological correlates of consciousness, it remains imaginable that all elements of that explanation could occur without consciousness, which thus remains unexplained. The O'Brien & Opie connectionist approach effectively shows that perspicuous explanations can bridge this explanatory gap, but bringing in other issues – for example, involving biology and emotion – would facilitate going much further in this direction. A major problem is the ambiguity of the term “representation.” Bridging the gap requires (...) perspicuously explaining not just how we form “representations” in the sense of outputs isomorphic to what is represented, but also what makes representations conscious; I sketch briefly what this would entail. (shrink)

Dynamical systems promise to elucidate a notion of top–down causation without violating the causal closure of physical events. This approach is particularly useful for the problem of mental causation. Since dynamical systems seek out, appropriate, and replace physical substrata needed to continue their structural pattern, the system is autonomous with respect to its components, yet the components constitute closed causal chains. But how can systems have causal power over their substrates, if each component is sufficiently caused by other components? Suppose (...) every causal relation requires background conditions, without which it is insufficient. The dynamical system is structured with a tendency to change background conditions for causal relations anytime needed substrates for the pattern's maintenance are missing; under the changed background conditions, alternative causal relations become sufficient to maintain the pattern. The system controls the background conditions under which one or another causal relation can subserve the system's overall pattern, while the components remain causally closed under their given background conditions. (shrink)

Naturalism does not necessarily imply an exclusive emphasis on the notoriously fickle empathic emotions. Contemporary neurobiological emotion research strongly suggests that the search for moral meaning, like any other everyday truth-seeking activity, is motivated not only by altruistic instincts or social conditioning, but also and more importantly it is motivated by a basic exploratory drive that makes us want to know what the truth is, independently of whether we happen to feel altruistic or nurturing in a particular instance. This innate (...) biological drive is not socially learned or developed through reinforcement, yet it motivates us to try to find out what we really ought to do. That the love of truth is innate has survival value, yet does not lead to the naturalistic fallacy, as do the more frequently cited “moral” emotions such as sympathy and fellow-feeling. The endogenous love of truth, qua natural emotion, does not lead to the vacuous conclusion that “We ought to act morally because we naturally feel altruistic in a given situation.”. (shrink)

Tmagists' hold that inferential thinking is built up from combinations of sensory and sensorimotor images in various patterns and modalities, and that the images are a more basic mental and neurophysiological operation than the logical thinking and conceptualization that are built up front them. 'Computationalists' hold just the opposite view — that images result from previous inferential processing which is more basic than the images. Suppose we define inference as the kind of thought process that we actually undergo when we (...) do logical thinking, and not in the trivial sense in which any natural phenomenon which receives an 'input' from another then 'responds' to this 'input'. And suppose we define an 'image ' as any instance of imagining what it would be like to entertain some conscious state which we are not undergoing at the time — as for example when we imagine what it would be like to see something, to ride a roller coaster or to have a headache. I. e., 'images ' can be kinaesthetic and proprioceptive s well as sensory. Then it can be shown that inferential thinking is built up from patterns of images, including importantly the imaging of rhythm patterns corresponding to logical syntax. Furthermore, the acquisition of these inference rules can also be traced to a process of trying to imagine scenarios which might serve as counterexamples to the rules, and this kind of 'imagining ' can also be explained in terms of both sensory and proprioceptive images. The reason for this is twofold: First, even the apparently 'imageless ' concepts used to imagine such scenarios consist in each case of a feeling of preparedness to entertain a pattern of images which would be appropriate to provide a directly or indirectly ostensive definition of the concept in question, and this feeling of preparedness can be sensed proprioceptively. Secondly, a concept, even if it is not experienced as involving imagery, may nonetheless occur as an element of a larger pattern whose rhythm can be imaged. This paper defends an expanded version of the imagist approach, suggesting an important pragmatic role for the proprioceptive sensing of rhythm patterns in the acquisition and use of inference skills. (shrink)

In addressing the shortcomings of computationalism, we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. That consciousness is not merely an epiphenomenon with optional access to unconscious computations does not imply that unconscious computations, in the limited domain where they do occur (e.g., occipital transformations of visual data), cannot be reformulated in a way consistent with a self-organizational view.

Excerpted essays from Emerson & Thoreau with additional essay comparing the two.

While the members of the school of Logical Empiricism may differ in various details, nearly all of them are opposed to metaphysics on the ground that a scientific metaphysics is the only possible one. All philosophy is to become scientific. This assumption is based on their epistemological criterion of verifiability which appears to be a basic doctrine of this school. The implications of this doctrine have not been worked out in detail by many, but one of the most explicit accounts (...) has been given by A. J. Ayer in his book on Language, Truth and Logic, which can be taken as a representative work in its attack on metaphysics. (shrink)

_The Writings of Charles De Koninck_, Volume 1, introduces a projected three-volume series that presents the first English edition of the collected works of the Catholic Thomist philosopher Charles De Koninck. Ralph McInerny is the project editor and has prepared the excellent translations. The first volume contains writings ranging from De Koninck’s 1934 dissertation at the University of Louvain on the philosophy of Sir Arthur Eddington, to two remarkable early essays on indeterminism and the unpublished book “The Cosmos.” The (...) short essay “Are the Experimental Sciences Distinct from the Philosophy of Nature?” is also included and demonstrates for the first time De Koninck’s distinctive view on the relation between philosophy of nature and the experimental sciences. A comprehensive introductory essay by Leslie Armour outlines the structure and themes of De Koninck's philosophy. The volume begins with a biographical essay by De Koninck’s son, Thomas. “Charles De Koninck, perhaps because of his untimely death, is not as well known to English-speaking readers as Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, but his work belongs to that same world-class scholarship as his notable contemporaries. It is almost an understatement to say that his contribution to the philosophy of science remains timely. Readers are fortunate that his former student, Ralph McInerny, has seen fit to collect and to translate, where necessary, some of De Koninck's most important work for this volume.” —_Jude P. Dougherty, The Catholic University of America_ “Ralph McInerny is doing us the incalculable good of making available to a general public the writings of Charles De Koninck. This volume, the first of many to come, begins a chronological presentation of the books, articles, essays, and addresses of one of the strongest and most penetrating thinkers of the last century, who was at once an extraordinary philosopher and theologian, with the profound and simple faith of the proverbial peasant. May we continue now to learn from the great De Koninck, and include in our prayers the intentions of his gracious disciple, who is so felicitously discharging the office of piety to a revered and unforgettable master.” —_Ronald P. Mc Arthur, President Emeritus, Thomas Aquinas College_. (shrink)

Novels and short stories written since the last decades of the nineteenth century and employing discourses of technology have contributed to shaping the idea of the “posthuman condition” in the West to such a degree that some critics already feel entitled to announce the Age of the Posthuman. This essay interrogates some of the embarrassingly quixotic proposals of posthumanism, taking H. G. Wells's Time Machine, William Gibson's Neuromancer, and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake as paradigmatic texts exploring patterns of mutation, (...) virtuality, and bioengineering. In their concern for the apocalyptic and their sometime depiction of the glorious moment of Herculean victory over classical “human” man, these novels articulate the Western self's undaunted desire for the perfect Other, implying critical and even ironic gestures that question the propagation of a “new” human condition or the idea of absolute boundaries of the human. (shrink)

Hume's sceptical arguments regarding induction have not yet been successfully answered. However, I shall not in this paper discuss the important attempts to answer Hume since that would be too lengthy a task. On the supposition that Hume's sceptical arguments have not been met, the empirical world is a place where, as the popular metaphor goes, all the glue has been removed. For the Humean sceptic, the only empirical knowledge that we can have is given to us in immediate perception. (...) We have no reason to believe that the patterns of future events will in any way resemble patterns of events in the present or past. We have no reason to believe even that present events not observed resemble present events that are observed, or that knowledge of past and present can be any guide in making new discoveries about what took place in the past. What we have is an ideal setting for the calculation of a priori probabilities. We have a field of distinct events having no logical or evidential ties to one another. The attempt to justify induction that I wish to present is an appeal to a priori probability. (shrink)