The complexity that we observe in nature can often be explained in terms of cooperative behavior. For example, the major transitions of evolution required the emergence of cooperation among the lower-level units of selection, which led to specialization through division-of-labor ultimately resulting in spontaneous order. There are two aspects to address explaining how such cooperation is sustained: how free-riders are prevented from free-riding on the benefits of cooperative tasks, and just as importantly, how those social benefits arise. We review these (...) problems from an economic perspective, and highlight how ideas from economics can help us to better understand how the benefits of social interactions arise, how they are sustained, and how they affect the underlying social dilemmas. (shrink)

Social grooming is an important element of social life in terrestrial primates, inducing the putative benefits of β-endorphin stimulation and group harmony and cohesion. Implicit in many analyses of grooming (e.g. biological markets) are the assumptions of costs and benefits to grooming behaviour. Here, in a review of literature, we investigate the proximate costs and benefits of grooming, as a potentially useful explanatory substrate to the well-documented ultimate (functional) explanations. We find that the hedonic benefits of grooming are well documented. (...) However, we did not find convincing evidence for costs. If proximate costs do exist, they might consist of energetic, cognitive, opportunity costs, or some combination of all of these. Nonetheless, there remains the possibility that grooming costs are negligible, or even that the provision of allogrooming is rewarding in itself. We suggest empirical research to resolve this issue. (shrink)

In what ways should we include future humanoid robots, and other kinds of artificial agents, in our moral universe? We consider the Organic view, which maintains that artificial humanoid agents, based on current computational technologies, could not count as full-blooded moral agents, nor as appropriate targets of intrinsic moral concern. On this view, artificial humanoids lack certain key properties of biological organisms, which preclude them from having full moral status. Computationally controlled systems, however advanced in their cognitive or informational capacities, (...) are, it is proposed, unlikely to possess sentience and hence will fail to be able to exercise the kind of empathic rationality that is a prerequisite for being a moral agent. The organic view also argues that sentience and teleology require biologically based forms of self-organization and autonomous self-maintenance. The organic view may not be correct, but at least it needs to be taken seriously in the future development of the field of Machine Ethics. (shrink)

In this article, we posit that a cross-scale perspective is valuable for studies of organizational resilience. Existing research in our field primarily focuses on the resilience of organizations, that is, the factors that enhance or detract from an organization’s viability in the face of threat. While this organization level focus makes important contributions to theory, organizational resilience is also intrinsically dependent upon the resilience of broader social-ecological systems in which the firm is embedded. Moreover, long-term organizational resilience cannot be well (...) managed without an understanding of the feedback effects across nested systems. For instance, a narrow focus on optimizing organizational resilience from one firm’s perspective may come at the expense of social-ecological functioning and ultimately undermine managers’ efforts at long-term organizational survival. We suggest that insights from natural science may help organizational scholars to examine cross-scale resilience and conceptualize organizational actions within and across temporal and spatial dynamics. We develop propositions taking a complex adaptive systems perspective to identify issues related to focal scale, slow variables and feedback, and diversity and redundancy. We illustrate our theoretical argument using an example of Unilever and palm oil production in Borneo. (shrink)

Examining the origin and development of my views of social epistemology, I contrast my position with the position held by analytic social epistemologists. Analytic social epistemology (ASE) has failed to make significant progress owing, in part, to a minimal understanding of actual knowledge practices, a minimised role for philosophers in ongoing inquiry, and a focus on maintaining the status quo of epistemology as a field. As a way forward, I propose questions and future areas of inquiry for a post-ASE to (...) address. (shrink)

Despite Kant's belief in a universal causal determinism among phenomena and his rejection of any noumenal agency in brutes, he nevertheless rejected Descartes's hypothesis that brutes are machines. Explaining Kant's response to Descartes forms the basis for this discussion of the nature of consciousness and matter in Kant's system. Kant's numerous remarks on animal psychology-as found in his lecture notes and reflections on metaphysics and anthropology-suggest a theory of consciousness and self-consciousness at odds with that traditionally ascribed to him.

I compare a ‘realist’ with a ‘social–relational’ perspective on our judgments of the moral status of artificial agents (AAs). I develop a realist position according to which the moral status of a being—particularly in relation to moral patiency attribution—is closely bound up with that being’s ability to experience states of conscious satisfaction or suffering (CSS). For a realist, both moral status and experiential capacity are objective properties of agents. A social relationist denies the existence of any such objective properties in (...) the case of either moral status or consciousness, suggesting that the determination of such properties rests solely upon social attribution or consensus. A wide variety of social interactions between us and various kinds of artificial agent will no doubt proliferate in future generations, and the social–relational view may well be right that the appearance of CSS features in such artificial beings will make moral role attribution socially prevalent in human–AA relations. But there is still the question of what actual CSS states a given AA is capable of undergoing, independently of the appearances. This is not just a matter of changes in the structure of social existence that seem inevitable as human–AA interaction becomes more prevalent. The social world is itself enabled and constrained by the physical world, and by the biological features of living social participants. Properties analogous to certain key features in biological CSS are what need to be present for nonbiological CSS. Working out the details of such features will be an objective scientific inquiry. (shrink)

The recent discovery of an interpretation of constructive type theory into abstract homotopy theory suggests a new approach to the foundations of mathematics with intrinsic geometric content and a computational implementation. Voevodsky has proposed such a program, including a new axiom with both geometric and logical significance: the Univalence Axiom. It captures the familiar aspect of informal mathematical practice according to which one can identify isomorphic objects. While it is incompatible with conventional foundations, it is a powerful addition to homotopy (...) type theory. It also gives the new system of foundations a distinctly structural character. (shrink)

Appeals to intuitions as evidence in philosophy are challenged by experimental philosophers and other critics. A common response to experimental philosophical criticisms is to hold that only professional philosophers? intuitions count as evidence in philosophy. This ?expert intuitions defence? is inadequate for two reasons. First, recent studies indicate significant variability in professional philosophers? intuitions. Second, the academic literature on professional intuitions gives us reasons to doubt that professional philosophers develop truth-apt intuitions. The onus falls on those who mount the expert (...) intuitions defence to meet these objections because it is implicitly being claimed that training and practice caused professional philosophers to acquire reliably accurate intuitions and we are owed an account of how this transformation takes place. A possible response to this situation is to attempt to reform philosophical practice to improve the quality of intuitions. Another possible response, advocated here, is to avoid appeals to intuitions as evidence. (shrink)

I discuss the realizability and the ethical ramifications of Machine Ethics, from a number of different perspectives: I label these the anthropocentric, infocentric, biocentric and ecocentric perspectives. Each of these approaches takes a characteristic view of the position of humanity relative to other aspects of the designed and the natural worlds—or relative to the possibilities of ‘extra-human’ extensions to the ethical community. In the course of the discussion, a number of key issues emerge concerning the relation between technology and ethics, (...) and the nature of what it is to have moral status. Some radical challenges to certain technological presuppositions and ramifications of the infocentric approach will be discussed. Notwithstanding the obvious tensions between the infocentric perspective on one side and the biocentric and ecocentric perspectives on the other, we will see that there are also striking parallels in the way that each of these three approaches generates challenges to an anthropocentric ethical hegemony, and possible scope for some degree of convergence. (shrink)

Quillen [17] introduced model categories as an abstract framework for homotopy theory which would apply to a wide range of mathematical settings. By all accounts this program has been a success and—as, e.g., the work of Voevodsky on the homotopy theory of schemes [15] or the work of Joyal [11, 12] and Lurie [13] on quasicategories seem to indicate—it will likely continue to facilitate mathematical advances. In this paper we present a novel connection between model categories and mathematical logic, inspired (...) by the groupoid model of (intensional) Martin–Löf type theory [14] due to Hofmann and Streicher [9]. In particular, we show that a form of Martin–Löf type theory can be soundly modelled in any model category. This result indicates moreover that any model category has an associated “internal language” which is itself a form of Martin-Löf type theory. This suggests applications both to type theory and to homotopy theory. Because Martin–Löf type theory is, in one form or another, the theoretical basis for many of the computer proof assistants currently in use, such as Coq and Agda (cf. [3] and [5]), this promise of applications is of a practical, as well as theoretical, nature. This paper provides a precise indication of this connection between homotopy theory and logic; a more detailed discussion of these and further results will be given in [20]. (shrink)

Social persons routinely tell themselves and others richly elaborated autobiographical stories filled with details about deeds, plans, roles, motivations, values, and character. Saul, let us imagine, is someone who once sailed the world as a young adventurer, going from port to port and living a gypsy existence. In telling his new acquaintance, Jess, of his former exotic life, he shines a light on his present character and this may guide to some extent their interaction here and now. Perhaps Jess also (...) spent time at one of these port locations; perhaps their paths might even have crossed. They might be drawn into recounting some common events that indeed do establish a common link. Did they visit a certain famous landmark? Did they meet up at the same bars? And so on. When we open up to friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and close others through the stories we tell them, we do so by revealing bits of ourselves. (shrink)

The present paper shows that the clearest formulation of J. M. E. McTaggart's antipassage argument, that of D. H. Mellor in _Real Time II, is unsound when its premises are interpreted so that it is valid. This argument need mislead us no longer. The crucial item in the interpretation of the premises is the copula 'is', as in 'E is past'. The copula may be either tensed or tenseless. While this ambiguity of the copula has been noted before, its implications (...) for McTaggart's argument had not been adequately exploited. This paper does that job. (shrink)

This paper is the second in a two-part series in which we discuss several notions of completeness for systems of mathematical axioms, with special focus on their interrelations and historical origins in the development of the axiomatic method. We argue that, both from historical and logical points of view, higher-order logic is an appropriate framework for considering such notions, and we consider some open questions in higher-order axiomatics. In addition, we indicate how one can fruitfully extend the usual set-theoretic semantics (...) so as to shed new light on the relevant strengths and limits of higher-order logic. (shrink)

In the last decade, many arguments have emerged for encouraging public participation in environmental policy making and management While some have argued that, in democratic societies, people simply have a right to a participatory role, others base arguments for public participation on the idea that lay people may have access to knowledge which is unknown to officially sanctioned experts. Local people may count as experts about aspects of their neighbourhood or they may have insights into the behaviour of plant operators (...) that is thought to give rise to pollution. This paper reports on a novel empirical approach to analysing and capturing such 'lay' understandings. This technique, developed in ESRC-funded work in the UK, uses community mapping exercises in urban centres to produce spatial representations of local knowledges about air pollution and related problems of noise and odour. In the paper the technique is outlined, presenting data from the three-city case study. The paper concludes by assessing the ways in which participatory modelling can contribute to the local governance of air quality. (shrink)

In this paper the machinery and results developed in [Awodey et al, 2004] are extended to the study of constructive set theories. Specifically, we introduce two constructive set theories BCST and CST and prove that they are sound and complete with respect to models in categories with certain structure. Specifically, basic categories of classes and categories of classes are axiomatized and shown to provide models of the aforementioned set theories. Finally, models of these theories are constructed in the category of (...) ideals. (shrink)

We show how to interpret the language of first-order set theory in an elementary topos endowed with, as extra structure, a directed structural system of inclusions . As our main result, we obtain a complete axiomatization of the intuitionistic set theory validated by all such interpretations. Since every elementary topos is equivalent to one carrying a dssi, we thus obtain a first-order set theory whose associated categories of sets are exactly the elementary toposes. In addition, we show that the full (...) axiom of Separation is validated whenever the dssi is superdirected. This gives a uniform explanation for the known facts that cocomplete and realizability toposes provide models for Intuitionistic Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. (shrink)

We will analyze the concept of anonymity, along with cognate notions, and their relation to privacy, with a view to developing an understanding of how we control our identity in public and why such control is important in developing and maintaining our social selves. We will take anonymity to be representative of a suite of techniques of nonidentifiability that persons use to manage and protect their privacy. At the core of these techniques is the aim of being untrackable; this means (...) that others lack the information they would need either to intrude physically upon me or to discover some private facts about me. Anonymity often enough goes together with privacy, but not always. Consider a person walking down a foreign street. It is not a physically private situation but no one there knows who you are. On the other hand, when I cast a postal vote, this act is both private and anonymous. Privacy and anonymity seem to go together because of the way each protects something importantly personal, but their coming apart suggests a difference both in what they mean and in our purposes for securing them. A lot has been written about privacy, and deservedly so; there is reason to think anonymity, and its cognates, important as well. (shrink)

In this short note we give a glimpse of homotopy type theory, a new field of mathematics at the intersection of algebraic topology and mathematical logic, and we explain Vladimir Voevodsky’s univalent interpretation of it. This interpretation has given rise to the univalent foundations program, which is the topic of the current special year at the Institute for Advanced Study.

As McKinsey and Tarski showed, the Stone representation theorem for Boolean algebras extends to algebras with operators to give topological semantics for propositional modal logic, in which the “necessity” operation is modeled by taking the interior of an arbitrary subset of a topological space. In this article, the topological interpretation is extended in a natural way to arbitrary theories of full first-order logic. The resulting system of S4 first-order modal logic is complete with respect to such topological semantics.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 10, Page 39-41, October 2012.

Kant’s body offered a constant target for his own remarks, both in correspondence and during his lunchtime conversations. Several good descriptions of Kant’s body have come down to us over the centuries, as well as a number of visual representations, but these are remarkably limited, given his stature in the world of ideas. A new description of Kant, written by a novelist who visited Kant while passing through Königsberg, has recently come to light. It is reproduced here — in English (...) translation as well as the original German — and earlier descriptions of Kant are briefly recounted. (shrink)

In this investigation of the Japanese film Kairo, I contemplate how the horrors present in the film relate to the issue of self, by examining a number of interlocking motifs. These include thematic foci on disease and technology which are more intimately and inwardly focused that the film's conclusion first appears to suggest. The true horror here, I argue, is ontological: centred on the self and its divorcing from the exterior world, especially founded in an increased use of and reliance (...) on communicative technologies. I contend that these concerns are manifested in Kairo by presenting the spread of technology as disease-like, infecting the city and the individuals who are isolated and imprisoned by their urban environment. Finally, I investigate the meanings of the apocalypse, expounding how it may be read as hopeful for the future rather than indicative of failure or doom. (shrink)

Sunohara Yuuri and Akita Masami’s series of six seppuku films (1990) are solely constituted by images of fictionalized death, revolving around the prolonged self-torture of a lone figure committing harakiri. I contend that the protagonist’s auto-immolation mirrors a formal death, each frame ‘killing’ the moment it represents. My analysis aims to explore how the solipsistic nature of selfhood is appositely symbolized by the isolation of the on-screen figures and the insistence with which the six films repeat the same scenario of (...) protracted agony across the cycle. The centralization of suffering, I argue, parallels the distance between viewer and image with the isolating nature of embodied existence. Thus, this article seeks to probe the relationship between form and content, asking what the image of death reveals about the death of the image. -/- . (shrink)

We show how to interpret the language of first-order set theory in an elementary topos endowed with, as extra structure, a directed structural system of inclusions (dssi). As our main result, we obtain a complete axiomatization of the intuitionistic set theory validated by all such interpretations. Since every elementary topos is equivalent to one carrying a dssi, we thus obtain a first-order set theory whose associated categories of sets are exactly the elementary toposes. In addition, we show that the full (...) axiom of Separation is validated whenever the dssi is superdirected. This gives a uniform explanation for the known facts that cocomplete and realizability toposes provide models for Intuitionistic Zermelo—Fraenkel set theory (IZF). (shrink)

Although overshadowed by its filmic adaptations (Hideo Nakata, 1998 and Gore Verbinski, 2002), Koji Suzuki’s novel Ring (1991) is at the heart of the international explosion of interest in Japanese horror. This article seeks to explore Suzuki’s overlooked text. Unlike the film versions, the novel is more explicitly focused on the line between self-preservation and self-sacrifice, critiquing the ease with which the former is privileged over the latter. In the novel then, the horror of Sadako’s curse raises questions about the (...) terrors of moral obligation: the lead protagonist (Asakawa) projects the guilt he feels over his self-interested actions, envisaging them as an all-consuming apocalypse. (shrink)

Both the slasher movie and its more recent counterpart the "torture porn" film centralize graphic depictions of violence. This article inspects the nature of these portrayals by examining a motif commonly found in the cinema of homicide, dubbed here the "pure moment of murder": that is, the moment in which two characters’ bodies adjoin onscreen in an instance of graphic violence. By exploring a number of these incidents (and their various modes of representation) in American horror films ranging from Psycho (...) (1960) to Saw VI (2009), the article aims to expound how these images of slaughter demonstrate (albeit in an augmented, hyperbolic manner) a number of long-standing problems surrounding selfhood that continue to fuel philosophical discussion. The article argues that the visual adjoining of victim and killer onscreen echoes the conundrum that in order to attain identity, the individual requires and yet simultaneously repudiates the Other that constitutes unique subjectivity. (shrink)

We define the notion of a model of higher-order modal logic in an arbitrary elementary topos E. In contrast to the well-known interpretation of higher-order logic, the type of propositions is not interpreted by the subobject classifier ΩE, but rather by a suitable complete Heyting algebra H. The canonical map relating H and ΩE both serves to interpret equality and provides a modal operator on H in the form of a comonad. Examples of such structures arise from surjective geometric morphisms (...) f : F → E, where H = f∗ΩF. The logic differs from non-modal higher-order logic in that the principles of functional and propositional extensionality are not longer valid but may be replaced by modalized versions. The usual Kripke, neighborhood, and sheaf semantics for propositional and first-order modal logic are subsumed by this notion. (shrink)

Horror film sequels have not received as much serious critical attention as they deserve – this is especially true of the Saw franchise, which has suffered a general dismissal under the derogatory banner ‘Torture Porn’. In this article I use detailed textual analysis of the Saw series to expound how film sequels employ and complicate expected temporal and spatial relations – in particular, I investigate how the Saw sequels tie space and time into their narrative, methodological and moral sensibilities. Far (...) from being a gimmick or a means of ensuring loyalty to the franchise (one has to be familiar with the events of previous episodes to ascertain what is happening), it is my contention that the Saw cycle directly requests that we examine the nature of space and time, in terms of both cinematic technique and our lived, off-screen temporal/spatial orientations. -/- . (shrink)

Oliver Cromwells historical reputation underwent significant change during the nineteenth century. Writers such as Thomas Carlyle were prominent in this reassessment, creating a Cromwell that found particular support among Nonconformists in the north of England. Projects to memorialize Cromwell included the raising of public statues. This article traces the history of the Manchester statue, the first major outdoor statue of Cromwell to be unveiled in the country. The project originated among Manchester radical Liberal Nonconformists in the early 1860s but was (...) not realized until 1875. It was the gift of Elizabeth Heywood; the sculptor was Matthew Noble. The project, including its intended site in Manchesters new Town Hall, was contentious, exposing political and religious divisions within the community, reinforcing the view that the reassessment of Cromwells place in the making of modern Britain was far from settled. (shrink)

Dementia is now a leading cause of both mortality and morbidity, particularly in western nations, and current projections for rates of dementia suggest this will worsen. More than ever, cost effective and creative non-pharmacological therapies are needed to ensure we have an adequate system of care and supervision. Music therapy is one such measure, yet to date statements of what music therapy is supposed to bring about in ethical terms have been limited to fairly vague and under-developed claims about an (...) improvement in well-being. This article identifies the relevant sense of wellbeing at stake in the question of dementia therapies of this type. In broad terms the idea is that this kind of therapy has a restorative effect on social agency. To the extent that music arouses a person through its rhythms and memory-inducing effects, particularly in communal settings, it may give rise to the recovery of one's narrative agency, and in turn allow for both carer and patient to participate in a more meaningful and mutually engaging social connection. (shrink)

Soofi1 aims to develop an account of dignity in dementia care based on Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. He does this by drawing on the Kitwood and Bredin2 list of well-being indicators, in order to fill out her account of human flourishing to cover aspects such as practical reasoning that appear beyond the reach of those with relatively severe dementia. As Soofi points out, Nussbaum’s claim that such lost abilities can be compensated through guardianship measures is implausible. He asserts in response that (...) his account of dignity is sufficient to address the desiderata he sets out at the start, including especially the problem of exclusionary implications any putative account should address. So far, so good, but an objection Soofi raises for his own account is that it seems unable to cover cases of severe late-stage dementia. His response is, > …that there is insufficient factual evidence to suggest that people at the very advanced stages of dementia lose all capabilities. But for the sake of argument, let’s suppose that this is true. This, however, still does not undermine the conceptual rigour of the modified version of Nussbaum’s account. This is because the list of the dementia-specific capabilities that I …. (shrink)

This work is a step toward the development of a logic for types and computation that includes not only the usual spaces of mathematics and constructions, but also spaces from logic and domain theory. Using realizability, we investigate a configuration of three toposes that we regard as describing a notion of relative computability. Attention is focussed on a certain local map of toposes, which we first study axiomatically, and then by deriving a modal calculus as its internal logic. The resulting (...) framework is intended as a setting for the logical and categorical study of relative computability. (shrink)

This is a discussion and transcription of a “lose Blatt” of Immanuel Kant’s that was recently located in the Dibner Library of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. It briefly comments on (1) religious delusion [Andachtswahn], (2) Kant’s pedagogical aims, (3) virtue and the general will, and (4) perceptual relativism of magnitude. The sheet may have belonged to a group stemming from Kant’s copy of his Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), and its provenance can be traced to Rudolf (...) Reicke, the Königsberg librarian and Kant scholar of the late 19th century. (shrink)

Why are U.S. academics, even after tenure and promotion, so timid in their exercise of academic freedom? Part of the problem is institutional – academics are subject to a long probationary period under tight collegial control – but part of the problem is ideological. A hybrid of seventeenth-century British and nineteenth-century German ideals, U.S. academia – and the nation more generally – remains ambivalent toward the value of academic freedom, ultimately inhibiting an unequivocal endorsement. (Published Online February 8 2007).

This paper constructs models of intuitionistic set theory in suitable categories. First, a Basic Intuitionistic Set Theory (BIST) is stated, and the categorical semantics are given. Second, we give a notion of an ideal over a category, using which one can build a model of BIST in which a given topos occurs as the sets. And third, a sheaf model is given of a Basic Intuitionistic Class Theory conservatively extending BIST. The paper extends the results in [2] by introducing a (...) new and perhaps more natural notion of ideal, and in the class theory of part three. (shrink)

A traditional distinction is made in scholarship on Japanese Buddhism between two means for attaining enlightenment: jiriki 自力, or "self power," and tariki 他力, or "other power." Dōgen's Sōtō Zen is the paradigmatic example of a jiriki school: according to Dōgen, one attains enlightenment through strenuous zazen and rigorous ascetic practices. Shinran's Jōdo Shin Buddhism is the paradigmatic example of a tariki school: according to Shinran, human beings are incapable of self-salvation, but by chanting the nembutsu they can invoke the (...) compassionate power of Amida to save them. But the jiriki-tariki distinction is arguably a false one, with no place within Buddhism's nondualistic framework. If the basic Buddhist intuition toward nondualism is correct, then jiriki and tariki cannot be opposed at all, but must rather be two sides of the same coin. In fact, both Dōgen and Shinran are fully in agreement on abandoning the ego (ātman), and on abandoning the artificial self-other distinction that accompanies the ātman. Dōgen had deep faith in the path of the Buddhist patriarchs, and in the power of the sangha; hetaught that both were necessary means for attaining enlightenment. And Shinran firmly believed in incorporating the nembutsu in every facet of one's life, a feat for which supreme self-cultivation is required. Thus Dōgen and Shinran both preach tariki and jiriki; moreover, this is to be expected, for unless jiriki and tariki are one, their approaches to Buddhism would be dualistic. Dōgen and Shinran should be taken as model cases for understanding the unity of jiriki and tariki in all of Japanese Buddhism. (shrink)

This paper is the second of two articles arising from a study of the association between pupil mobility and attainment in national tests and examinations in an inner London borough. Our first article examined the association of pupil mobility with attainment and progress during primary school. It concluded that pupil mobility had little impact on performance in national tests at age 11, once pupils? prior attainment at age 7 and other pupil background factors such as age, sex, special educational needs, (...) stage of fluency in English and socio?economic disadvantage were taken into account. The present paper reports the results for secondary schools (age 11?16). The results indicate that pupil mobility continues to have a significant negative association with performance in public examinations at age 16, even after including statistical controls for prior attainment at age 11 and other pupil background factors. Possible reasons for the contrasting results across school phases are explored. The implications for policy and further research are discussed. (shrink)

Marc Lewis argues that addiction is not a disease, it is instead a dysfunctional outcome of what plastic brains ordinarily do, given the adaptive processes of learning and development within environments where people are seeking happiness, or relief, or escape. They come to obsessively desire substances or activities that they believe will deliver happiness and so on, but this comes to corrupt the normal process of development when it escalates beyond a point of functionality. Such ‘deep learning’ emerges from consumptive (...) habits, or ‘motivated repetition’, and although addiction is bad, it ferments out of the ordinary stuff underpinning any neural habit. Lewis gives us a convincing story about the process that leads from ordinary controlled consumption through to quite heavy addictive consumption, but I claim that in some extreme cases the eventual state of deep learning tips over into clinically significant impairment and disorder. Addiction is an elastic concept, and although it develops through mild and moderate forms, the impairment we see in severe cases needs to be acknowledged. This impairment, I argue, consists in the chronic automatic consumption present in late stage addiction. In this condition, the desiring self largely drops out the picture, as the addicted individual begins to mindlessly consume. This impairment is clinically significant because the machinery of motivated rationality has become corrupted. To bolster this claim I compare what is going on in these extreme cases with what goes on in people who dissociate in cases of depersonalization disorder. (shrink)

The failed criterion of logical truth proposed by Carnap in the Logical Syntax of Language was based on the determinateness of all logical and mathematical statements. It is related to a conception which is independent of the specifics of the system of the Syntax, hints of which occur elsewhere in Carnap’s writings, and those of others. What is essential is the idea that the logical terms are invariant under reinterpretation of the empirical terms, and are therefore semantically determinate. A certain (...) objection to Carnap’s version of the invariance conception has been repeated several times in the literature. It is based on Gödel incompleteness, which is puzzling, since Carnap’s Syntax is otherwise quite careful to take account of Gödel. We show here that, in fact, the objection is invalid and is based on a confusion about determinacy. Sorting this out is worthwhile not only for the purpose of better understanding Carnap’s thinking in the Syntax, though. The invariance conception is also related to recent work in the philosophy of logic regarding “logicality”—the characterization of logical concepts—following a proposal of Tarski’s. It is even connected to some very recent developments in the foundations of mathematics. (shrink)