Spoken word recognition involves a perceptual tradeoff between the reliance on the incoming acoustic signal and knowledge about likely sound categories and their co-occurrences as words. This study examined how adult second language (L2) learners navigate between acoustic-based and knowledge-based spoken word recognition when listening to highly variable, multi-talker truncated speech, and whether this perceptual tradeoff changes as L2 listeners gradually become more proficient in their L2 after multiple months of structured classroom learning. First language (L1) Mandarin Chinese listeners and (...) L1 English-L2 Mandarin adult listeners took part in a gating experiment. The L2 listeners were tested twice—once at the start of their intermediate/advanced L2 language class and again two months later. L1 listeners were only tested once. Participants were asked to identify syllable-tone words that varied in syllable token frequency (high/low according to a spoken word corpus) and syllable-conditioned tonal probability (most probable/least probable in speech given the syllable). The stimuli were recorded by 16 different talkers and presented at eight gates ranging from onset-only (gate 1) through onset+40 ms increments (gates 2 through 7) to the full word (gate 8). Mixed-effects regression modeling was used to compare performance to our previous study which used single-talker stimuli (Wiener, Lee, & Tao, 2019). The results indicated that multi-talker speech caused both L1 and L2 listeners to rely greater on knowledge-based processing of tone. L1 listeners were able to draw on distributional knowledge of syllable-tone probabilities in early gates and switch to predominantly acoustic-based processing when more of the signal was available. In contrast, L2 listeners, with their limited experience with talker range normalization, were less able to effectively transition from probability-based to acoustic-based processing. Moreover, for the L2 listeners, the reliance on such distributional information for spoken word recognition appeared to be conditioned by the nature of the acoustic signal. Single-talker speech did not result in the same pattern of probability-based tone processing, suggesting that knowledge-based processing of L2 speech may only occur under certain acoustic conditions, such as multi-talker speech. (shrink)

As this book reveals, his vision was much more complex and interesting. He hoped that machines would release people from relentless and repetitive drudgery in order to achieve more creative pursuits.

Epistemic modal operators give rise to something very like, but also very unlike, Moore's paradox. I set out the puzzling phenomena, explain why a standard relational semantics for these operators cannot handle them, and recommend an alternative semantics. A pragmatics appropriate to the semantics is developed and interactions between the semantics, the pragmatics, and the definition of consequence are investigated. The semantics is then extended to probability operators. Some problems and prospects for probabilistic representations of content and context are explored.

Plato, Allan Bloom wrote, is "the most erotic of philosophers," and his Symposium is one of the greatest works on the nature of love ever written. This new edition brings together the English translation of the renowned Plato scholar and translator, Seth Benardete, with two illuminating commentaries on it: Benardete's "On Plato's _Symposium_" and Allan Bloom's provocative essay, "The Ladder of Love." In the _Symposium,_ Plato recounts a drinking party following an evening meal, where the guests include the poet (...) Aristophanes, the drunken Alcibiades, and, of course, the wise Socrates. The revelers give their views on the timeless topics of love and desire, all the while addressing many of the major themes of Platonic philosophy: the relationship of philosophy and poetry, the good, and the beautiful. (shrink)

This volume is a tribute to the thought of Seth Benardete by contributors who had the rare good fortune of studying with him or those who discovered the treasure of his writings. Benardete was fully immersed in the world of the ancients, starting with Homer, but their works opened up for him a way to the fundamental questions-about justice and love, nature and law, human and divine. Finding "the problem of the human good grounded in the city, and the (...) problem of being in god," he was led to the conclusion that "Political philosophy is the eccentric core of philosophy." While Benardete wrote this statement reflecting on the theological-political issue in the work of his teacher, Leo Strauss, the paradoxical notion of an "eccentric core," in giving this volume its title, is meant to capture a characteristic of his own way of thinking. The essays in this collection-on the Bible and Homer, the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, and the Roman writers-indicate the range of Benardete's studies and teaching. The centrality of Plato is evident at the same time in those pieces as well as in the reviews of Benardete's books included here, along with three of his own previously unpublished essays. Book jacket. (shrink)

In this paper, we suggest that affect meets the traditional definition of “cognition” such that the affect–cognition distinction is phenomenological, rather than ontological. We review how the affect–cognition distinction is not respected in the human brain, and discuss the neural mechanisms by which affect influences sensory processing. As a result of this sensory modulation, affect performs several basic “cognitive” functions. Affect appears to be necessary for normal conscious experience, language fluency, and memory. Finally, we suggest that understanding the differences between (...) affect and cognition will require systematic study of how the phenomenological distinction characterising the two comes about, and why such a distinction is functional. (shrink)

When I tell you that it’s raining, I describe a way the world is—viz., rainy. I say something whose truth turns on how things are with the weather in the world. Likewise when I tell you that the weatherman thinks that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I say turns on how things are with the weatherman’s state of mind in the world. Likewise when I tell you that I think that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I (...) say turns on how things are with my state of mind in the world. (shrink)

This paper considers the question: In what ways can artificial intelligence assist with interdisciplinary research for addressing complex societal problems and advancing the social good? Problems such as environmental protection, public health, and emerging technology governance do not fit neatly within traditional academic disciplines and therefore require an interdisciplinary approach. However, interdisciplinary research poses large cognitive challenges for human researchers that go beyond the substantial challenges of narrow disciplinary research. The challenges include epistemic divides between disciplines, the massive bodies of (...) relevant literature, the peer review of work that integrates an eclectic mix of topics, and the transfer of interdisciplinary research insights from one problem to another. Artificial interdisciplinarity already helps with these challenges via search engines, recommendation engines, and automated content analysis. Future “strong artificial interdisciplinarity” based on human-level artificial general intelligence could excel at interdisciplinary research, but it may take a long time to develop and could pose major safety and ethical issues. Therefore, there is an important role for intermediate-term artificial interdisciplinarity systems that could make major contributions to addressing societal problems without the concerns associated with artificial general intelligence. (shrink)

I argue in this essay that the phenomena we classify as "mental illness" result largely from the refusal of socially authorized "experts" to recognize - and thus to constitute - the Other as a subject. I suggest that Institutional Mental Health refuses to do this not merely because it seeks to aggrandize its own power but also because it fears to acknowledge that we are all participants in a process of historical development. It denies this because it is historically conditioned (...) by its own moment of origin in the project of the Enlightenment, It is conseqently wed to an ethos of rationalized order that does not accomodate, much less support, the unpredictable creative power of the Other and that sustains instead the project of mastery, of domination, of disovering eternal laws that will enable Reason to master history and to master the Other. For this reason Institutional Mental Health and its diverse ideologies, ranging from the pyschoanalytic to genetic defect models, constitute a major obstacle to the evolution of humanity. (shrink)

Hugh Murray seems animated by two basic contentions. First, he believes that blacks and their liberal allies have acted irresponsibly by supporting the thuggish policies of the Nation of Islam and its leader, Louis Farrakhan. He states that this is “the era of Farrakhan,” and implies (without any evidence other than selected anecdotes) that support for Farrakhan among blacks is virtually unanimous. Second, he deplores the replacement in the 1960s of equal opportunity by affirmative action policies — promoted by “the (...) quota-racial-ethnic and gender preference lobby” — which he argues discriminate against more qualified individuals merely because they happen to be white or male. (shrink)

A major approach to the ethics of artificial intelligence is to use social choice, in which the AI is designed to act according to the aggregate views of society. This is found in the AI ethics of “coherent extrapolated volition” and “bottom–up ethics”. This paper shows that the normative basis of AI social choice ethics is weak due to the fact that there is no one single aggregate ethical view of society. Instead, the design of social choice AI faces three (...) sets of decisions: standing, concerning whose ethics views are included; measurement, concerning how their views are identified; and aggregation, concerning how individual views are combined to a single view that will guide AI behavior. These decisions must be made up front in the initial AI design—designers cannot “let the AI figure it out”. Each set of decisions poses difficult ethical dilemmas with major consequences for AI behavior, with some decision options yielding pathological or even catastrophic results. Furthermore, non-social choice ethics face similar issues, such as whether to count future generations or the AI itself. These issues can be more important than the question of whether or not to use social choice ethics. Attention should focus on these issues, not on social choice. (shrink)

Focusing on cases which involve binding into epistemic modals with definite descriptions and quantifiers, I raise some new problems for standard approaches to all of these expressions. The difficulties are resolved in a semantic framework that is dynamic in character. I close with a new class of problems about de re readings within the scope of modals.

Purpose This paper aims to formalize long-term trajectories of human civilization as a scientific and ethical field of study. The long-term trajectory of human civilization can be defined as the path that human civilization takes during the entire future time period in which human civilization could continue to exist. -/- Design/methodology/approach This paper focuses on four types of trajectories: status quo trajectories, in which human civilization persists in a state broadly similar to its current state into the distant future; catastrophe (...) trajectories, in which one or more events cause significant harm to human civilization; technological transformation trajectories, in which radical technological breakthroughs put human civilization on a fundamentally different course; and astronomical trajectories, in which human civilization expands beyond its home planet and into the accessible portions of the cosmos. -/- Findings Status quo trajectories appear unlikely to persist into the distant future, especially in light of long-term astronomical processes. Several catastrophe, technological transformation and astronomical trajectories appear possible. -/- Originality/value Some current actions may be able to affect the long-term trajectory. Whether these actions should be pursued depends on a mix of empirical and ethical factors. For some ethical frameworks, these actions may be especially important to pursue. (shrink)

The standard behavioral index for human consciousness is the ability to report events with accuracy. While this method is routinely used for scientific and medical applications in humans, it is not easy to generalize to other species. Brain evidence may lend itself more easily to comparative testing. Human consciousness involves widespread, relatively fast low-amplitude interactions in the thalamocortical core of the brain, driven by current tasks and conditions. These features have also been found in other mammals, which suggests that consciousness (...) is a major biological adaptation in mammals. We suggest more than a dozen additional properties of human consciousness that may be used to test comparative predictions. Such homologies are necessarily more remote in non-mammals, which do not share the thalamocortical complex. However, as we learn more we may be able to make “deeper” predictions that apply to some birds, reptiles, large-brained invertebrates, and perhaps other species. (shrink)

Whether designing animals, insects, or plants, Nature draws upon symmetry and periodicity to play a fundamental role in defining the body plan. When implemented with the proper chemical mechanisms, these principles guide our bodies from single-celled embryos to bilaterally symmetric creatures with intricate periodic structures, such as the spine and rib cage. The properties of symmetry and periodicity also appear to be fundamental to visual perception. We will show that this is no coincidence, but is a consequence of the fact (...) that these properties are generated by the same underlying phenomenon, standing wave patterns formed from harmonic resonances. The symmetry in life forms arises from chemical harmonic resonances, whereas the symmetry in visual perception arises from harmonic resonances in the visual system. We will show that harmonic resonances have very interesting properties for the representation of geometrical form that make them eminently suitable for encoding geometric form for body plans as well as for visual perception. In particular, we will show that by being simultaneously invariant to perspective transformation and robust to deformation, such resonant representations have fundamental advantages over more traditional techniques. (shrink)

This book traces the intersection of dreams and power in order to analyze the complex ways representations of dreams and paradigms of dream interpretation reinforce and challenge authoritarian, hierarchical structures. The book puts forward the concept of the dreamscape as a pre-representational space that contains anarchistic attributes, including its instability or chaotic nature and the lack of a stable or core selfhood and identity in its subjects. The book situates this concept of the dreamscape through an analysis of the Daoist (...) notions of the “transformation of things” and hundun and the biblical concept of tehom. Using this conceptual framework, this book analyzes paradigmatic moments of dream interpretation along a spectrum from radical, anarchist assertions of the primal dreamscape to authoritarian dream-texts that seek to reify identity, define and establish hierarchy, and support coercive relationships between unequal subjects. The book’s key figures include William Blake, Robert Frost, Jacob and Joseph from Genesis, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jean Rhys, Franz Kafka, and the neurobiologist J. Allan Hobson. (shrink)

I provide a novel, non-reductive, action-first skill-based account of active imagining. I call it the Skillful Action Account of Imagining (the skillful action account for short). According to this account, to actively imagine something is to form a representation of that thing, where the agent’s forming that representation and selecting its content together constitute a means to the completion of some imaginative project. Completing imaginative projects stands to the active formation of the relevant representations as an end. The account thus (...) bakes in the means-end order that some in action theory take to be definitional of intentional action. Moreover, in the spirit of this conception of intentional action, I hold that a central feature of the means-end order exhibited in active imagining is the agent’s direct non-observational knowledge both of her act of imagining and of its having this order. The agent knows that she’s actively imagining (that-)p and knows why she actively imagines this–to carry on the pretense, engage in the fiction, predict another’s behavior, reason about possibility or necessity, reason about contingent matters of fact, just imagine for its own sake, and so on. I show that the account accounts for the possibility of misimagining while holding onto the idea that we imagine what we intend to imagine. I likewise show that the account unifies imagining across types of imaginative project like those just listed in a way that tolerates conflict in the roles that imagining plays in the mental economy across those projects. Finally, I show that the account can accommodate passive imagining like involuntary and automatic imagining as well as mind wandering. -/- Acknowledgments: I'd like to thank Amy Kind, Robert Brandom, Colin Allen, Peter Langland-Hassan, Alison Springle, Daniel Munro, Nick Wiltsher, and Andrew Rubner for excellent comments on earlier drafts from which this paper greatly benefited. I'd also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for extremely helpful comments. And I'd like to thank participants of the 2022 Simulationism Conference hosted by the Centre for Philosophy of Memory and the 4th Annual Conference [Online/Virtual] for Imagination Domination (COVID) hosted by Amy Kind for excellent feedback on earlier versions of the paper. (shrink)

This paper discusses means for promoting artificial intelligence that is designed to be safe and beneficial for society. The promotion of beneficial AI is a social challenge because it seeks to motivate AI developers to choose beneficial AI designs. Currently, the AI field is focused mainly on building AIs that are more capable, with little regard to social impacts. Two types of measures are available for encouraging the AI field to shift more toward building beneficial AI. Extrinsic measures impose constraints (...) or incentives on AI researchers to induce them to pursue beneficial AI even if they do not want to. Intrinsic measures encourage AI researchers to want to pursue beneficial AI. Prior research focuses on extrinsic measures, but intrinsic measures are at least as important. Indeed, intrinsic factors can determine the success of extrinsic measures. Efforts to promote beneficial AI must consider intrinsic factors by studying the social psychology of AI research communities. (shrink)

The temporal structure for motivating, monitoring, and making sense of agency depends on encoding, maintaining, and accessing the right contents at the right times. These functions are facilitated by memory. Moreover, in informing action, memory is itself often active. That remembering is essential to and an expression of agency and is often active suggests that it is a type of action. Despite this, Galen Strawson (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 103, 227–257, 2003) and Alfred Mele (2009) deny that remembering is (...) an action. They claim that memory fails to admit of control. Remembering is automatic—once remembering starts, the process can neither be stopped nor intervened on. Moreover, the agent does not initiate remembering. An agent has control over an event or process if and only if she has the capacity and opportunity to initiate and intervene on that event or process. Actions are events over which an agent has control. Since it is automatic, we fail to have control over remembering. Thus, remembering is not an action. In this paper, I draw out an assumption of Strawson’s and Mele’s accounts: an event-type whose tokens exhibit automaticity cannot, for that reason, be an action (§2). Against this assumption, I draw parallels between skilled bodily action and memory. I show that memory exhibits two defining features of skill: it can be learned with practice and it admits of attributions of excellence (§3). These features reveal how intelligent control is exerted in the exercise of skill despite apparent automaticity—control is gained over time (§4). Since exercises of skill are by definition actions and since memory exemplifies the defining features of skill, memory is a skill and instances of remembering are actions too. (shrink)

"Seth examines the practical origins of much of the research undertaken by Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich, some of which addressed problems carried over from his years of teaching at an engineering school"--OCLC.

Killing civilians is worse than killing soldiers. If any moral principle commands near universal assent, this one does. Few moral principles have been more widely and more viscerally affirmed. And yet, in recent years it has faced a rising tide of dissent. Political and military leaders seeking to slip the constraints of the laws of war have cavilled and qualified. Their complaints have been unwittingly aided by philosophers who, rebuilding just war theory from its foundations, have concluded that this principle (...) is at best a useful fiction. Sparing Civilians aims to turn this tide, and to vindicate international law, and the ruptured consensus. In doing so, Seth Lazar develops new insights into the morality of harm, relevant to everyone interested in normative and applied ethics. (shrink)

In a recent editorial, Raymond Spier expresses skepticism over claims that climate change is driven by human actions and that humanity should act to avoid climate change. This paper responds to this skepticism as part of a broader review of the science and ethics of climate change. While much remains uncertain about the climate, research indicates that observed temperature increases are human-driven. Although opinions vary regarding what should be done, prominent arguments against action are based on dubious factual and ethical (...) positions. Thus, the skepticisms in the recent editorial are unwarranted. This does not diminish the general merits of skeptical intellectual inquiry. (shrink)

The first major piece of unpublished work by Leo Strauss to appear in more than thirty years, this volume offers the public the unprecedented experience of encountering this renowned scholar as his students did. Given as a course in autumn 1959 under the title "Plato's Political Philosophy," these provocative lectures—until now, never published, but instead passed down from one generation of students to the next—show Strauss at his subtle and insightful best.

My thesis is devoted to an attempt to offer, on behalf of mathematical Platonism, a reply to what may seem to be a powerful objection to it. The objection is this: If there is, as the Platonist supposes, mathematical knowledge of abstract objects, then there is a correlation between our beliefs and the mathematical facts. However, how is such a correlation to be explained given that mathematical objects are a-causal? The worry is that no explanation is possible and that this (...) is a considerable mark against mathematical Platonism. The source of the difficulty here is obvious: standard models for explaining such correlations proceed via the idea that facts cause beliefs, or that beliefs cause facts, or that there was a common cause. But these possibilities are not available to the Platonist given the a-causality of mathematical objects. ;I claim that such a correlation is explicable in a way which neither, contra expectation, renders abstract objects causal nor assigns to us capacities the exercise of which allows to us to explain the correlation on some implausible extension of a perceptual model. The thought is this: that explaining the correlation requires explaining conjunctions of facts and beliefs. But the conjunctions in question are, at least for the Platonism here considered, conjunctions of a brute fact and an explicable fact . However I argue, and this is the core of the thesis, that such conjunctions can always be explained by reiterating the brute fact and citing whatever explains the explicable fact. If this thesis about explanation is accepted, then such correlations are readily explicable. ;The rest of the thesis is devoted to examining various objections to this reply and to the thesis concerning explanation. I argue that they are not fatal. (shrink)