This Chapter provides a short undergraduate introduction to ethical and philosophical complexities surrounding the law’s attempt (or lack thereof) to regulate artificial intelligence. -/- Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom proposed a simple thought experiment known as the paperclip maximizer. What would happen if a machine (the “PCM”) were given the sole goal of manufacturing as many paperclips as possible? It might learn how to transact money, source metal, or even build factories. The machine might also eventually realize that humans pose a (...) threat. Humans could turn the machine off at any point, and then it wouldn’t be able to make as many paperclips as possible! Taken to the logical extreme, the result is quite grim—the PCM might even start using humans as raw material for paperclips. -/- The predicament only deepens once we realize that Bostrom’s thought experiment overlooks a key player. The PCM and algorithms like it do not arise spontaneously (at least, not yet). Most likely, some corporation—say, Office Corp.—designed, owns, and runs the PCM. The more paperclips the PCM manufactures, the more profits Office Corp. makes, even if that entails converting some humans (but preferably not customers!) into raw materials. Less dramatically, Office Corp. may also make more money when PCM engages in other socially sub-optimal behaviors that would otherwise violate the law, like money laundering, sourcing materials from endangered habitats, manipulating the market for steel, or colluding with competitors over prices. The consequences are predictable and dire. If Office Corp. isn’t held responsible, it will not stop with the PCM. Office Corp. would have every incentive to develop more maximizers—say for papers, pencils, and protractors. -/- This chapter issues a challenge for tech ethicists, social ontologists, and legal theorists: How can the law help mitigate algorithmic harms without overly compromising the potential that AI has to make us all healthier, wealthier, and wiser? The answer is far from straightforward. (shrink)

In this book, Tom Cochrane develops a new control theory of the emotions and related affective states. Grounded in the basic principle of negative feedback control, his original account outlines a new fundamental kind of mental content called 'valent representation'. Upon this foundation, Cochrane constructs new models for emotions, pains and pleasures, moods, expressive behaviours, evaluative reasoning, personality traits and long-term character commitments. These various states are presented as increasingly sophisticated layers of regulative control, which together underpin the architecture of (...) the mind as a whole. Clearly structured and containing numerous diagrams and examples to illustrate the discussion, this study draws on the latest research from fields including philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, and will appeal to readers interested in the philosophy and cognitive science of emotion. (shrink)

3500 word interview with Tom Cochrane discussing his philosophical background, the nature of aesthetic value, the benefits of art, and aestheticism.

This book defends Aestheticism- the claim that everything is aesthetically valuable and that a life lived in pursuit of aesthetic value can be a particularly good one. Furthermore, in distilling aesthetic qualities, artists have a special role to play in teaching us to recognize values; a critical component of virtue. I ground my account upon an analysis of aesthetic value as ‘objectified final value’, which is underwritten by an original psychological claim that all aesthetic values are distal versions of practical (...) values. This is followed by systematic accounts of beauty, sublimity, comedy, drama, and tragedy, as well as appendix entries on the cute, the cool, the kitsch, the uncanny, the horrific, the erotic, and the furious. (shrink)

The word ‘dignity’ may be used in a presentational sense, for example, one might say “she presents herself with dignity”, or in a social sense, for example, one might say “she fulfilled her duty with dignity, or honour.” However, in this paper I will not be using ‘dignity’ in either of these senses. Rather, the sense of dignity I will be concerned with is one that is related to ideas about the value or worth of a being. This latter sense (...) of dignity has a long history, and tends to be a concept that is thought to be applicable to human animals only, and more specifically to human persons—moral agents, capable of rationality, of directing their own lives, and of formulating... (shrink)

The rubber hand paradigm is used to create the illusion of self-touch, by having the participant administer stimulation to a prosthetic hand while the Examiner, with an identical stimulus , administers stimulation to the participant’s hand. With synchronous stimulation, participants experience the compelling illusion that they are touching their own hand. In the current study, the robustness of this illusion was assessed using incongruent stimuli. The participant used the index finger of the right hand to administer stimulation to a prosthetic (...) hand while the Examiner used a paintbrush to administer stimulation to the participant’s left hand. The results indicate that this violation of tactile expectations does not diminish the illusion of self-touch. Participants experienced the illusion despite the use of incongruent stimuli, both when vision was precluded and when visual feedback provided clear evidence of the tactile mismatch. (shrink)

If we were to connect two individuals’ brains together, how would this affect the individuals’ conscious experiences? In particular, it is possible for two people to share any of their conscious experiences; to simultaneously enjoy some token experiences while remaining distinct subjects? The case of the Hogan twins—craniopagus conjoined twins whose brains are connected at the thalamus—seems to show that this can happen. I argue that while practical empirical methods cannot tell us directly whether or not the twins share conscious (...) experiences, considerations about the locality of content processing in the brain entails that they most likely do so. (shrink)

Despite emerging attention to Indigenous philosophies both within and outside of feminism, Indigenous logics remain relatively underexplored and underappreciated. By amplifying the voices of recent Indigenous philosophies and literatures, I seek to demonstrate that Indigenous logic is a crucial aspect of Indigenous resurgence as well as political and ethical resistance. Indigenous philosophies provide alternatives to the colonial, masculinist tendencies of classical logic in the form of paraconsistent—many-valued—logics. Specifically, when Indigenous logics embrace the possibility of true contradictions, they highlight aspects of (...) the world rejected and ignored by classical logic and inspire a relational, decolonial imaginary. To demonstrate this, I look to biology, from which Indigenous logics are often explicitly excluded, and consider one problem that would benefit from an Indigenous, paraconsistent analysis: that of the biological individual. This article is an effort to expand the arenas in which allied feminists can responsibly take up and deploy these decolonial logics. (shrink)

Intimate relationships between emotion and action have long been acknowledged, yet contemporary theories and experimental research within affective and movement neuroscience have not been linked into a coherent framework bridging these two fields. Accumulating psychological and neuroimaging evidence has, however, brought new insights regarding how emotions affect the preparation, execution, and control of voluntary movement. Here we review main approaches and findings on such emotion–action interactions. To assimilate key emotion concepts of action tendencies and motive states with fundamental constructs of (...) the motor system, we underscore the need for integrating an information-processing approach of motor control into affective neuroscience. This should provide a rich foundation to bridge the two fields, allowing further refinement and empirical testing of emotion theories and better understanding of affective influences in movement disorders. (shrink)

This article contributes to carework scholarship by examining the nexus of gender, class, and race in long-term care facilities. We draw out a family ideology at work that promotes good care of residents and thus benefits nursing homes. We also found that careworkers value fictive kin relationships with residents, yet we uncover how the family model may be used to exploit these low-income careworkers. Reflecting a subordinate and racialized version of being “part of the family,” we call for an ethic (...) of reciprocity and for concrete change toward valuing equally the humanity of those who need and those who give care. (shrink)

In this paper I present an account of musical arousal that takes into account key demands of formalist philosophers such as Peter Kivy and Nick Zangwill. Formalists prioritise our understanding and appreciation of the music itself. As a result, they demand that any feelings we have in response to music must be directed at the music alone, without being distracted by non-musical associations. To accommodate these requirements I appeal to a mechanism of contagion which I synthesize with the expectation-based arousal (...) mechanism proposed by Leonard Meyer. This account connects musical expressivity and arousal in a way that formalists have rejected, but I argue that it provides the best explanation of our observations of listener responses while also focusing on the music itself. (shrink)

Aristotle claims, in his Nicomachean Ethics, that in addition to being, for example, just and courageous, and temperate, the virtuous person will also be witty. Very little sustained attention, however, has been devoted to explicating what Aristotle means when he claims that virtuous persons are witty or to justifying the plausibility of the claim that wittiness is a virtue. It becomes especially difficult to see why Aristotle thinks that being witty is a virtue once it becomes clear that Aristotle’s witty (...) person engages in what he calls ‘educated insolence’. Insolence, for Aristotle, is a form of slighting which, as he explains in the Rhetoric, generally causes the person slighted to experience shame and anger. In this paper, I attempt to bring some clarity to Aristotle’s claim that being witty is a virtue by examining why Aristotle thinks that the object of a witty person’s raillery will find this joking pleasant. (shrink)

At a book event in March last year—one year into the pandemic and four months after mass immunization programs began—Goldenberg voiced her concerns about the timing of her book's launch into the world. This anxiety is echoed in the preface of the book itself, where she notes that the emergence of a global pandemic as she completed five years of work threatened to introduce a whole new set of issues that might fundamentally alter the book's arguments. Goldenberg's concern is understandable: (...) since the publication of her book, it is undeniable that public trust in vaccines and the experts who advocate for them have been constant topics of debate.This engagingly... (shrink)

There is extensive literature that indicates animals suffer considerably in the practices of factory farming and animal experimentation. In the light of the evidence of this suffering there is an urgent need to answer the question whether our current use of animals is ever morally justifiable. The aim of this thesis is to provide a critical examination of the moral status of animals and of our treatment of animals in these practices. My objective is to assess whether these practices are (...) ever justifiable and whether we have a moral obligation to revise our attitudes towards our use of animals. Animals are often denied moral standing on the basis that they lack certain capacities, such as rationality, language and the ability to think. Further, it is often thought that animals' supposed lack of such capacities could be used as a defence for our use of them in intensive farming and animal experimentation. Thus, in examining the moral status of animals this thesis also examines animals and their capacities in order to determine whether any of the arguments given against the moral standing of animals are sound. In seeking to discover the extent of our moral obligations towards animals and the necessary conditions for moral standing, I will demonstrate that, although animals used in factory farming and experiments do have moral standing, the only consistent course is to extend moral standing to all living things. I will conclude that although the possession of certain much-prized capacities is not necessary for moral standing, many animals do indeed possess such capacities, including the ability to use language. Centrally this thesis calls for a re-evaluation of our attitudes towards animals, particularly in respect of our beliefs about animals used in factory farms and experiments. (shrink)

This book concentrates on Nietzsche's major legacy as a philosopher.

It is an important feature of creatures like us that our various motivations compete for control over our behaviour, including mental behaviour such as imagining and attending. In large part, this competition is adjudicated by the stimulation of affect — the intrinsically pleasant or unpleasant aspects of experience. In this paper I argue that the motivation-affect system controls a sub-type of attention called 'alerting attention' to bring various goals and stimuli to consciousness and thereby prioritize those contents for action. This (...) view allows me to flesh out the global workspace theory of consciousness, as well as some of the phenomenal characteristics of conscious experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Sermon on the Mount and Moral Theology: A Virtue Perspective by William C. Mattison IIIRebekah EklundThe Sermon on the Mount and Moral Theology: A Virtue Perspective William C. Mattison III NEW YORK: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2017. 290 pp. £75.00Undergirding this book is a principle from the Catechism of the Catholic Church: the "analogy of faith" or "the coherence of the truths of faith among themselves" (241). the (...) "truths of faith" under consideration are Matthew's sermon on the Mount (sM) and the virtue ethics of thomas aquinas. Mattison aims to restore the sM to a more prominent place in Catholic moral theology by demonstrating the convergence between the teachings of the sM and thomistic virtue ethics.In this endeavor, the book largely succeeds, even if it occasionally over-reaches—that is, the sM is always shown to be in perfect harmony with thomas's teachings on virtue ethics, in which some readers might see points of tension. For example, Mattison uses thomistic action theory to argue that the beatitudes (Mt 5:3–12) and the sM's concluding exhortations (Mt 7:13–29) both demonstrate an "intrinsic relationship" between action and eternal reward; that is, the "qualifying condition" (e.g., meekness) is itself constitutive of happiness and is thus an activity that continues in eternal life (22–25, 209, 221). Purity of heart works well in this framework, but Mattison struggles to make mourning fit. the thomistic lens determines the sense of the text: Whatever mourning is, it is an activity that must persist in heaven, limiting the options for interpretation.Mattison also aligns the seven virtues—faith, hope, love, prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude—with the seven beatitudes (following augustine's reduction of the beatitudes from eight to seven), with the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer, and with sections of the sM as a whole. these latter, broad pairings are not always easy to find. Mattison matches the beatitudes with the virtue of faith, and the six antitheses with the virtues of temperance and fortitude. the virtue of love pairs with Matthew 6:1–6, 16–18 (teachings on prayer, alms-giving, and fasting, sans the Lord's Prayer); prudence, with Matthew 6:19–34 (worry and money); justice, with Matthew 7:1–12 (judging, asking, the golden rule); and hope, with Matthew 7:13–29 (concluding warnings and exhortations).similarly, a virtue is assigned to each beatitude (47) and to each petition of the Lord's Prayer (252). In the case of the Lord's Prayer, Mattison insists on a particular order of the virtues, following aquinas's ordering (but reversing [End Page 207] temperance and fortitude). But he does not use the same order of virtues for the Beatitudes or for the broader alignments with the whole SM (the orders are completely different for all three lists), raising the question of why Aquinas's order matters for one set but not for the others.Mattison's alignments show both his indebtedness to patristic and medieval tradition and his innovation. Medieval commentators commonly matched sets of sevens (Beatitudes, virtues, vices, gifts of the Spirit), but (rather remarkably) none of them ever appears to have understood the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer as requests for the seven virtues, as Mattison does. Likewise, Mattison's alignment of the Beatitudes with the virtues follows the practice but not the substance of previous lists; his pairings match neither Ambrose's nor Aquinas's. I would have found a discussion of the differences helpful.The question is whether Mattison's alignments are fruitful or merely forced, and here readers may find the results to be mixed. Some are illuminating, such as the vice of presumption in relation to Matthew 7:21–23; others, such as the alignment of the six antitheses with the seven sacraments, "appear a bit of a 'stretch,'" as even Mattison admits (110).Overall, scholars and graduate students interested in Thomistic virtue ethics, and in the relationship between scripture and Catholic moral theology, will find much food for thought here.Rebekah EklundLoyola University MarylandCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Alasdair Cochrane introduces an entirely new theory of animal rights grounded in their interests as sentient beings. He then applies this theory to different and underexplored policy areas, such as genetic engineering, pet-keeping, indigenous hunting, and religious slaughter. In contrast to other proponents of animal rights, Cochrane claims that because most sentient animals are not autonomous agents, they have no intrinsic interest in liberty. As such, he argues that our obligations to animals lie in ending practices that cause their suffering (...) and death and do not require the liberation of animals. Cochrane's "interest-based rights approach" weighs the interests of animals to determine which is sufficient to impose strict duties on humans. In so doing, Cochrane acknowledges that sentient animals have a clear and discernable right not to be made to suffer and not to be killed, but he argues that they do not have a prima facie right to liberty. Because most animals possess no interest in leading freely chosen lives, humans have no moral obligation to liberate them. Moving beyond theory to the practical aspects of applied ethics, this pragmatic volume provides much-needed perspective on the realities and responsibilities of the human-animal relationship. (shrink)

There is now widespread agreement that many non-human animals are sentient, and that this fact has important moral and political implications. This book is devoted to sketching what this 'sentientist politics' might look like.

Western metaphysics has long privileged solidity, presence, fixity, and substance, over the fluid, moving, intangible, and diffuse, that is, over water.1 Emmanuel Levinas noted that Western philosophy seems so incapable of thinking the liquid, moving, and dispersed, that even when we try, we only reduce the elemental to a multiplicity of solids.2 The problem, he concludes, is that water and other elements are "content without form," denying our metaphysical preferences for solidity and fixed shape, even as they are not mere (...) absence or nothingness.3 And still the elemental is our home, our condition of being.Luce Irigaray further notes a "historical lag in... (shrink)

John Dewey was a major figure of the American cultural and intellectual landscape in the first half of the twentieth century. While not the originator of American pragmatism, he was instrumental to its articulation as a philosophy and the spread of its influence beyond philosophy to other disciplines. His prolific writings encompass metaphysics, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, psychology, moral philosophy, the philosophies of religion, art, and education, and democratic political and international theory. The contributors to this Companion examine the (...) wide range of Dewey's thought and provide a critical evaluation of his philosophy and its lasting influence, both elsewhere in philosophy and on other disciplines. (shrink)

Built in Greenwich in 1675–1676, the Royal Observatory was situated outside the capital but was deeply enmeshed within its knowledge networks and communities of practice. Scholars have tended to focus on the links cultivated by the Astronomers Royal within scholarly communities in England and Europe but the observatory was also deeply reliant on and engaged with London's institutions and practical mathematical community. It was a royal foundation, situated within one government board, taking a leading role on another, and overseen by (...) Visitors selected by the Royal Society of London. These links helped develop institutional continuity, while instrument-makers, assistants and other collaborators, who were often active in the city as mathematical authors and teachers, formed an extended community with interest in the observatory's continued existence. After outlining the often highly contingent institutional and personal connections that shaped and supported the observatory, this article considers the role of two early assistants, James Hodgson and Thomas Weston. By championing John Flamsteed's legacy and sharing observatory knowledge and practice beyond its walls, they ensured awareness of and potential users for its outputs. They and their successors helped to develop a particular, and ultimately influential, approach to astronomical and mathematical practice and teaching. (shrink)

This article defends a persona theory of musical expressivity. After briefly summarising the major arguments for this view, it applies persona theory to the issue of whether music can express complex emotions. The expression of jealousy is then discussed by analysis of two examples from Piazzolla and Janacek.

Molly Cochran offers an account of the development of normative theory in international relations over the past two decades. In particular, she analyzes the tensions between cosmopolitan and communitarian approaches to international ethics, paying attention to differences in their treatments of a concept of the person, the moral standing of states and the scope of moral arguments. The book draws connections between this debate and the tension between foundationalist and antifoundationalist thinking and offers an argument for a pragmatic approach (...) to international ethics. (shrink)

"An examination of the writings on virtues and ethics of eighteenth-century Puritan Jonathan Edwards"--Provided by publisher.

In articulating the protection-inclusion dilemma, Friesen et al. (2023) identify an important issue facing institutional review boards (IRBs) and elucidate historical factors contributing to its de...

Two experiments were conducted to explore whether children, who have been exposed to the concept of the soul, differentiate the soul from the mind. In the first experiment, 4- to 12-year-old children were asked about whether a religious ritual affects the mind, the brain, or the soul. The majority of the children claimed that only the soul was different after baptism. In a follow-up study, 6- to 12-year-old children were tested more explicitly on what factors differentiate the soul from the (...) mind and the brain. Children differentiated the soul from the mind and the brain along two dimensions: function and stability. In contrast to their responses about the mind and the brain, children did not claim that the soul was important for cognitive, non-cognitive, or biological functioning. Children consistently indicated that the mind and the brain change and grow over time. In contrast, children indicated that the soul is something that stays constant and is devoted to various, predominantly spiritual, functions. (shrink)

Many theistic philosophers conceive of God’s activity in agent-causal terms. That is, they view divine action as an instance of (perhaps the paradigm case of) substance causation. At the same time, many theists endorse the claim that God acts for reasons, and not merely wantonly. It is the aim of this paper to show that a commitment to both theses gives rise to a dilemma. I present the dilemma and then spend the bulk of the paper defending its premises. I (...) conclude with some suggestions for how one might carve out an alternative model of divine action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John Henry Newman's Art of the EndRebekah LambIn Discourses to Mixed Congregations (1849), John Henry Newman pastorally approaches the question of divine providence by envisioning the purpose or "end" of each life as a dramatic role which unfolds within the theatre of history and which, in turn, has a heavenly destiny, lying within but far beyond the world as we know it, within but beyond the play of the (...) sensible and immediately discernible. In Newman's homiletics, we frequently find him turning and returning to the Christian belief that each life is an unduplicable manifestation of the divine plan, a plan enfolded into the eschatological realization of a new heaven and a new earth.1 In meditating upon this fundamental aspect of the Christian creed and its attending doctrines, Newman appeals to St. Paul and the idea of the world as a theatre, of Christians as spectacles on the world stage of history (1 Cor 4:9; Heb 10: 32–33), in which each person is part of the drama of salvation history:St. Paul on one occasion speaks of this world as a scene in a theatre. Consider what is meant by this. You know, actors on a stage are on an equality with each other really, but for the occasion they assume a difference of character. … Is it not his business, and nothing else, to act his part well? Common sense tells us so. … We are all but actors in this world; each has his special part at present, each has his work, [End Page 893] each has his mission not to indulge his passion, … not to be selfish and self-willed, but to do what God puts on him to do.2Here, we see Newman yoking together eschatology and the everyday through the image of the stage as soteriological microcosm. Throughout his writings, Newman frequently appeals to the arts, to their forms in particular, to flesh out the implications of eschatology in daily life. Paradoxically, he often concludes with the conviction that, however profound and however beautiful, the arts are always already most instructive in pointing to that which transcends or overcomes them. That is to say, the arts are as instructive, as beautiful in their insufficiencies as they are in their capabilities. The arts, in Newman, incline after not only incarnation but also an overcoming, a consummation fully realized through, with, and in beatific vision.3This essay therefore examines Newman's developing perspective on the place of the arts within the Christian life and, by extension, the degree to which his view of the aesthetic is end-driven or eschatological in character. It therefore draws from his poetry and sermons, since, for Newman, the literary is a distinctive mode of theologizing, as opposed to an alternative to it. In so doing, it offers one of the most sustained accounts of Newman's poetic and aesthetic appraisal of daily life in light of eternity. The few extant works touching on Newman's aesthetics have focused on liturgical theology or the devotional imagination, especially as found in Guy Nicholls's Unearthly Beauty: The Aesthetic of St. John Henry Newman (2019) and Ian Ker's The Catholic Revival in English Literature: 1845–1961 (2003). Drawing from these scholarly precedents, my essay also highlights the inextricable links between prayer, liturgical worship, and aesthetic philosophy in Newman's thought. However, it also widens out to consider, among other things, Newman's assessment of the instructive insufficiencies of aesthetics for the spiritual life; the links between aesthetics and doctrine in his thought; and the degree to which Newman's theological aesthetics engaged with the emerging decadent aesthetics of his time. In so doing, this essay offers new directions in engagements with Newman's aesthetics, placing in view the degree to which his end-driven or eschatological imagination enlivened and integrated his considerations of beauty not only in light of history but also in relation to its ultimate unveiling—which lies within yet beyond the historical plane, within yet beyond the veil of sensible things, and in the time [End Page 894] of the Second Coming, when, as Isaiah prophecies, "thine eyes shall see the King in his... (shrink)

The idea that language is necessary for thought and emotion is a dominant one in philosophy. Animals have taken the brunt of this idea, since it is widely held that language is exclusively human. Michael Leahy makes a case against the moral standing of factory-farmed animals based on such ideas. His approach is Wittgensteinian: understanding is a thought process that requires language, which animals do not possess. But he goes further than this and argues that certain factory farming methods do (...) not cause certain sufferings to the animals used, since animals lack full awareness of their circumstances. In particular he argues that animals do not experience certain sufferings at the slaughterhouse since, lacking language, they are unaware of their fate . Through an analysis of Leahy’s claims this paper aims to explore and challenge both the idea that thought and emotion require language and that only humans possess language. (shrink)

BackgroundAn increasing number of studies utilize intracranial electrophysiology in human subjects to advance basic neuroscience knowledge. However, the use of neurosurgical patients as human research subjects raises important ethical considerations, particularly regarding informed consent and undue influence, as well as subjects’ motivations for participation. Yet a thorough empirical examination of these issues in a participant population has been lacking. The present study therefore aimed to empirically investigate ethical concerns regarding informed consent and voluntariness in Parkinson’s disease patients undergoing deep brain (...) stimulator (DBS) placement who participated in an intraoperative neuroscience study.MethodsTwo semi-structured 30-minute interviews were conducted preoperatively and postoperatively via telephone. Interviews assessed participants’ motivations for participation in the parent intraoperative study, recall of information presented during the informed consent process, and participants’ postoperative reflections on the research study.ResultsTwenty-two participants (mean age = 60.9) completed preoperative interviews at a mean of 7.8 days following informed consent and a mean of 5.2 days prior to DBS surgery. Twenty participants completed postoperative interviews at a mean of 5 weeks following surgery. All participants cited altruism or advancing medical science as “very important” or “important” in their decision to participate in the study. Only 22.7% (n = 5) correctly recalled one of the two risks of the study. Correct recall of other aspects of the informed consent was poor (36.4% for study purpose; 50.0% for study protocol; 36.4% for study benefits). All correctly understood that the study would not confer a direct therapeutic benefit to them.ConclusionEven though research coordinators were properly trained and the informed consent was administered according to protocol, participants demonstrated poor retention of study information. While intraoperative studies that aim to advance neuroscience knowledge represent a unique opportunity to gain fundamental scientific knowledge, improved standards for the informed consent process can help facilitate their ethical implementation. (shrink)

I argue for the possibility of an extremely intimate connection between the emotional content of the music and the emotional state of the person who produces that music. Under certain specified conditions, the music may not just influence, but also partially constitute the musician’s emotional state.