Humanist sociologists are activists rooted in the reality of history and change and guided by a concern for the 'real life' problems of equality, peace, and social justice. They view people as active shapers of social life, capable of creating societies in which everyone's potential can unfold. Alfred McClung Lee introduces this volume with 'Sociology: Humanist and Scientific' and develops the theme that a sociology that is humanist is also scientific. The other nine selections are grouped into four parts: 'The (...) Individual and Social Life;' 'Social Institutions: Technology, Science, and Formal Organization;' 'Political Structures: Issues of Justice and Equality;' and 'Methodological Critiques and Counterproposals.'. (shrink)

Special Issue “Risks of artificial general intelligence”, Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 26/3 (2014), ed. Vincent C. Müller. http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/teta20/26/3# - Risks of general artificial intelligence, Vincent C. Müller, pages 297-301 - Autonomous technology and the greater human good - Steve Omohundro - pages 303-315 - - - The errors, insights and lessons of famous AI predictions – and what they mean for the future - Stuart Armstrong, Kaj Sotala & Seán S. Ó hÉigeartaigh - pages 317-342 - - (...) - The path to more general artificial intelligence - Ted Goertzel - pages 343-354 - - - Limitations and risks of machine ethics - Miles Brundage - pages 355-372 - - - Utility function security in artificially intelligent agents - Roman V. Yampolskiy - pages 373-389 - - - GOLEM: towards an AGI meta-architecture enabling both goal preservation and radical self-improvement - Ben Goertzel - pages 391-403 - - - Universal empathy and ethical bias for artificial general intelligence - Alexey Potapov & Sergey Rodionov - pages 405-416 - - - Bounding the impact of AGI - András Kornai - pages 417-438 - - - Ethics of brain emulations - Anders Sandberg - pages 439-457. (shrink)

Papers from the conference on AI Risk (published in JETAI), supplemented by additional work. --- If the intelligence of artificial systems were to surpass that of humans, humanity would face significant risks. The time has come to consider these issues, and this consideration must include progress in artificial intelligence (AI) as much as insights from AI theory. -- Featuring contributions from leading experts and thinkers in artificial intelligence, Risks of Artificial Intelligence is the first volume of collected chapters dedicated to (...) examining the risks of AI. The book evaluates predictions of the future of AI, proposes ways to ensure that AI systems will be beneficial to humans, and then critically evaluates such proposals. 1 Vincent C. Müller, Editorial: Risks of Artificial Intelligence - 2 Steve Omohundro, Autonomous Technology and the Greater Human Good - 3 Stuart Armstrong, Kaj Sotala and Sean O’Heigeartaigh, The Errors, Insights and Lessons of Famous AI Predictions - and What they Mean for the Future - 4 Ted Goertzel, The Path to More General Artificial Intelligence - 5 Miles Brundage, Limitations and Risks of Machine Ethics - 6 Roman Yampolskiy, Utility Function Security in Artificially Intelligent Agents - 7 Ben Goertzel, GOLEM: Toward an AGI Meta-Architecture Enabling Both Goal Preservation and Radical Self-Improvement - 8 Alexey Potapov and Sergey Rodionov, Universal Empathy and Ethical Bias for Artificial General Intelligence - 9 András Kornai, Bounding the Impact of AGI - 10 Anders Sandberg, Ethics and Impact of Brain Emulations 11 Daniel Dewey, Long-Term Strategies for Ending Existential Risk from Fast Takeoff - 12 Mark Bishop, The Singularity, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI -. (shrink)

This is the first work to apply complex systems science to the psychological interplay of order and chaos. The author draws on thought from a wide range of disciplines-both conventional and unorthodox-to address such questions as the nature of consciousness, the relation between mind and reality, and the justification of belief systems. The material should provoke thought among systems scientists, theoretical psychologists, artificial intelligence researchers, and philosophers.

“Only a small community has concentratedon general intelligence. No one has tried to make a thinking machine... The bottom line is that we really haven’t progressed too far toward a truly intelligent machine. We have collections of dumb specialists in small domains; the true majesty of general intelligence still awaits our attack.... We have got to get back to the deepest questions of AI and general intelligence... ” –MarvinMinsky as interviewed in Hal’s Legacy, edited by David Stork, 2000. Our goal (...) in creating this edited volume has been to?ll an apparent gap in the scienti?c literature, by providing a coherent presentation of a body of contemporary research that, in spite of its integral importance, has hitherto kept a very low pro?le within the scienti?c and intellectual community. This body of work has not been given a name before; in this book we christen it “Arti?cial General Intelligence”. What distinguishes AGI work from run-of-the-mill “arti?cial intelligence” research is that it is explicitly focused on engineering general intelligence in the short term. We have been active researchers in the AGI?eld for many years, and it has been a pleasure to gather together papers from our colleagues working on related ideas from their own perspectives. In the Introduction we give a conceptual overview of the AGI?eld, and also summarize and interrelate the key ideas of the papers in the subsequent chapters. (shrink)

Hallucination: the perception of an impossible image. That which can never appear suddenly does so anyways - a private world that appears only to the eye of the one imagining it... until now. Ted Serios, psychic photographer, claimed he could project images directly from his mind onto photographic film. Under the sign of the psychic photograph, “Hallucinating Ted Serios” is a theorization of the dominant forms of uncertainty that persist in postmodern evaluations of representation, interpretation and identity. The central thesis (...) of this paper is that the imaginary and the real have collapsed into the spectral hallucination of one another, rendering impossible the rhetorical separation of hallucination from image. With the collapse of the boundary between the fictive and the real, the world of representation becomes intelligible only as an imaginary phenomenon; with the collapse between the object and the observer, interpretation is rendered deceptively magical; and, with the collapse between the self and its anonymous double, identity itself is relegated to a state of impossibility. Consequently, under the persisting signs of the imaginary, the magical and the impossible, “Hallucinating Ted Serios” asserts that in our contemporary world there no longer exists the possibility of failed performativity – psychic, imaginary or otherwise. (shrink)

Chalmers suggests that, if a Singularity fails to occur in the next few centuries, the most likely reason will be 'motivational defeaters' i.e. at some point humanity or human-level AI may abandon the effort to create dramatically superhuman artificial general intelligence. Here I explore one plausible way in which that might happen: the deliberate human creation of an 'AI Nanny' with mildly superhuman intelligence and surveillance powers, designed either to forestall Singularity eternally, or to delay the Singularity until humanity more (...) fully understands how to execute a Singularity in a positive way. It is suggested that as technology progresses, humanity may find the creation of an AI Nanny desirable as a means of protecting against the destructive potential of various advanced technologies such as AI, nanotechnology and synthetic biology. (shrink)

Ted T. Aoki, the most prominent curriculum scholar of his generation in Canada, has influenced numerous scholars around the world. Curriculum in a New Key brings together his work, over a 30-year span, gathered here under the themes of reconceptualizing curriculum; language, culture, and curriculum; and narrative. Aoki's oeuvre is utterly unique--a complex interdisciplinary configuration of phenomenology, post-structuralism, and multiculturalism that is both theoretically and pedagogically sophisticated and speaks directly to teachers, practicing and prospective. Curriculum in a New Key: The (...) Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki is an invaluable resource for graduate students, professors, and researchers in curriculum studies, and for students, faculty, and scholars of education generally. (shrink)

In this book, Ted Peters explores the fallacies of the "gene myth" and presents a resounding array of arguments against this kind of all-encompassing genetic determinism. On the scientific side, he correctly points out that genetic influences on behavior are in most instances relatively modest. Does anyone deny that identical twins are still able to practice individual free will? After dispatching some of the sweepingly deterministic conclusions of the "science" of evolutionary psychology with a particularly effective set of rebuttals, Peters (...) arrives at the conclusion that the nature of humanness is an interaction of three things- not one, not two, but three: genetics, environment, and free will. Neglecting any one of these three leads down a path of fuzzy thinking and dangerous consequences. (shrink)

A novel theory of reflective consciousness, will and self is presented, based on modeling each of these entities using self-referential mathematical structures called hypersets. Pattern theory is used to argue that these exotic mathematical structures may meaningfully be considered as parts of the minds of physical systems, even finite computational systems. The hyperset models presented are hypothesized to occur as patterns within the "moving bubble of attention" of the human brain and any roughly human-mind-like AI system. These ideas appear to (...) be compatible with both panpsychist and materialist views of consciousness, and probably other views as well. Their relationship with the CogPrime AI design and its implementation in the OpenCog software framework is elucidated in detail. (shrink)

In this challenging book, Ted Benton takes recent debates about the moral status of animals as a basis for reviewing the discourse of “human rights.” Liberal-individualist views of human rights and advocates of animal rights tend to think of individuals, whether human or animals, in isolation from their social position. This makes them vulnerable to criticisms from the left which emphasize the importance of social relationships to individual well-being. Benton’s argument supports the important assumption, underpinning the cause for human rights, (...) that humans and other species of animal have much in common, both in the conditions for their well-being and their vulnerability to harm. Both liberal rights theory and its socialist critique fail adequately to theorize these aspects of human vulnerability. Nevertheless, it is argued that, enriched by feminist and ecological insights, a socialist view of rights has much to offer. Lucid and wide-ranging in its argument, Natural Relations enables the outline of an ecological socialist view of rights and justice to begin to take shape. (shrink)

Two theses are proposed; regarding the future evolution of the value systems of advanced AGI systems. The Value Learning Thesis is a semi-formalized version of the idea that; if an AGI system is taught human values in an interactive and experiential way as its intelligence increases toward human level; it will likely adopt these human values in a genuine way. The Value Evolution Thesis is a semi-formalized version of the idea that if an AGI system begins with human-like values; and (...) then iteratively modifies itself; it will end up in roughly the same future states as a population of human beings engaged with progressively increasing their own intelligence. Taken together; these theses suggest a worldview in which raising young AGIs to have human-like values is a sensible thing to do; and likely to produce a future that is generally desirable in a human sense. While these two theses are far from definitively proven; I argue that they are more solid and more relevant to the actual future of AGI than Bostrom’s “Instrumental Convergence Thesis” and “Orthogonality Thesis” which are core to the basis of his argument for fearing ongoing AGI development and placing AGI R&D under strict governmental control. In the context of fleshing out this argument; previous publications and discussions by Richard Loosemore and Kaj Sotala are discussed in some detail. (shrink)

We are often uncertain how to behave morally in complex situations. In this controversial study, Ted Lockhart contends that moral philosophy has failed to address how we make such moral decisions. Adapting decision theory to the task of decision-making under moral uncertainly, he proposes that we should not always act how we feel we ought to act, and that sometimes we should act against what we feel to be morally right. Lockhart also discusses abortion extensively and proposes new ways to (...) deal with the ethical and moral issues which surround it. (shrink)

In Thinking of Others, Ted Cohen argues that the ability to imagine oneself as another person is an indispensable human capacity--as essential to moral awareness as it is to literary appreciation--and that this talent for identification is the same as the talent for metaphor. To be able to see oneself as someone else, whether the someone else is a real person or a fictional character, is to exercise the ability to deal with metaphor and other figurative language. The underlying faculty, (...) Cohen argues, is the same--simply the ability to think of one thing as another when it plainly is not. In an engaging style, Cohen explores this idea by examining various occasions for identifying with others, including reading fiction, enjoying sports, making moral arguments, estimating one's future self, and imagining how one appears to others. Using many literary examples, Cohen argues that we can engage with fictional characters just as intensely as we do with real people, and he looks at some of the ways literature itself takes up the question of interpersonal identification and understanding. An original meditation on the necessity of imagination to moral and aesthetic life, Thinking of Others is an important contribution to philosophy and literary theory. (shrink)

Ted Sider’s paper “Hell and Vagueness” challenges a certain conception of Hell by arguing that it is inconsistent with God’s justice. Sider’s inconsistencyargument works only when supplemented by additional premises. Key to Sider’s case is a premise that the properties upon which eternal destinies superveneare “a smear,” i.e., they are distributed continuously among individuals in the world. We question this premise and provide reasons to doubt it. The doubts come from two sources. The first is based on evidential considerations borrowed (...) from skeptical theism. A related but separate consideration is that supposing it would be an insurmountable problem for God to make just (and therefore non-arbitrary) distinctions in morally smeared world, God thereby has sufficient motivation not to actualize such worlds. Yet God also clearly has motivation only to actualize some member of the subset of non-smeared worlds which don’t appear non-smeared. For if it was obvious who was morally fit for Heaven and who wasn’t, a new arena of great injustice is opened up. The result is that if there is a God, then he has the motivation and the ability to actualize from just that set of worlds which are not smeared but which are indiscernible from smeared worlds. (shrink)

What will be the next huge leap in humanity's progress? We cannot know for sure, but I am reasonably confident that it will involve the radical extension of technology into the domain of thought. Ray Kurzweil (2000, 2005) has eloquently summarized the arguments in favor of this position.

This paper investigates links between social capital and symbolic capital and responsible entrepreneurship in the context of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The source of the primary data was 144 ‘Business Profiles’, written by the owner-managers of small businesses in application for a Small Business Awards competition in 2005. Included in each of these narratives were claims relating to the firms’ contributions to wider society, relationships with customers, employees and stakeholders. These narratives were coded and classified in a framework drawn (...) from Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s (1998, Academy of Management Review 23(2), 242–266) categorisation of social capital. The analysis revealed a range of strategic orientations towards the development of social and symbolic capital, along a conceptual continuum ranging from being responsible for oneself to being responsible for others. Overall, the evidence demonstrates the significance of the power inherent in the social relations of SMEs as a force for ethical behaviour, and suggests that normative theories of the development of social capital may provide ‘competitive advantage’ through responsible behaviour for small business in the global economy. (shrink)

North by Northwest -- Metaphor and the cultivation of intimacy -- Notes on metaphor -- What's special about photography? -- Sports and art -- Clay for contemplation -- There are no ties at first base -- A driving examination -- Objects of appreciation -- And what if they don't laugh? -- Liking what's good: why should we? -- Language games -- Ethics class -- Kings and salesmen -- One way to think about popular art -- Caring -- The idea of (...) absolute gin -- Playing by the rules -- Freedom from rules. (shrink)

In our time, Ted Toadvine observes, the philosophical question of nature is almost entirely forgotten—obscured in part by a myopic focus on solving "environmental problems" without asking how these problems are framed. But an "environmental crisis," existing as it does in the human world of value and significance, is at heart a philosophical crisis. In this book, Toadvine demonstrates how Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology has a special power to address such a crisis—a philosophical power far better suited to the questions than (...) other modern approaches, with their over-reliance on assumptions drawn from the natural sciences. The book examines key moments in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature while roughly following the historical sequence of his major works. Toadvine begins by setting out an ontology of nature proposed in Merleau-Ponty’s first book, _The Structure of Behavior. _He takes up the theme of the expressive role of reflection in _Phenomenology of Perception, _as it negotiates the area between nature’s own "self-unfolding" and human subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of "intertwining" and his account of space provide a transition to Toadvine’s study of the philosopher’s later work—in which the concept of "chiasm," the crossing or intertwining of sense and the sensible, forms the key to Merleau-Ponty’s mature ontology—and ultimately to the relationship between humans and nature. (shrink)

Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom; in his recent and celebrated book Superintelligence; argues that advanced AI poses a potentially major existential risk to humanity; and that advanced AI development should be heavily regulated and perhaps even restricted to a small set of government-approved researchers. Bostrom’s ideas and arguments are reviewed and explored in detail; and compared with the thinking of three other current thinkers on the nature and implications of AI: Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute ; and David (...) Weinbaum and Viktoras Veitas of the Global Brain Institute. Relevant portions of Yudkowsky’s book Rationality: From AI to Zombies are briefly reviewed; and it is found that nearly all the core ideas of Bostrom’s work appeared previously or concurrently in Yudkowsky’s thinking. However; Yudkowsky often presents these shared ideas in a more plain-spoken and extreme form; making clearer the essence of what is being claimed. For instance; the elitist strain of thinking that one sees in the background in Bostrom is plainly and openly articulated in Yudkowsky; with many of the same practical conclusions. Bostrom and Yudkowsky view intelligent systems through the lens of reinforcement learning – they view them as “reward-maximizers” and worry about what happens when a very powerful and intelligent reward-maximizer is paired with a goal system that gives rewards for achieving foolish goals like tiling the universe with paperclips. Weinbaum and Veitas’s recent paper “Open-Ended Intelligence” presents a starkly alternative perspective on intelligence; viewing it as centered not on reward maximization; but rather on complex self-organization and self-transcending development that occurs in close coupling with a complex environment that is also ongoingly self-organizing; in only partially knowable ways. It is concluded that Bostrom and Yudkowsky’s arguments for existential risk have some logical foundation; but are often presented in an exaggerated way. For instance; formal arguments whose implication is that the “worst case scenarios” for advanced AI development are extremely dire; are often informally discussed as if they demonstrated the likelihood; rather than just the possibility; of highly negative outcomes. And potential dangers of reward-maximizing AI are taken as problems with AI in general; rather than just as problems of the reward-maximization paradigm as an approach to building superintelligence. If one views past; current; and future intelligence as “open-ended;” in the vernacular of Weaver and Veitas; the potential dangers no longer appear to loom so large; and one sees a future that is wide-open; complex and uncertain; just as it has always been. (shrink)

The current dominant perspective on addiction as a brain disease has been challenged recently by Marc Lewis, who argued that the brain-changes related to addiction are similar to everyday changes of the brain. From this alternative perspective, addictions are bad habits that can be broken, provided that people are motivated to change. In that case, autonomous choice or “free will” can overcome bad influences from genes and or environments and brain-changes related to addiction. Even though we concur with Lewis that (...) there are issues with the brain disease perspective, we also argue that pointing to black swans can be important, that is: there can be severe cases where addiction indeed tips over into the category of brain disease, but obviously that does not prove that every case of addiction falls into the disease category, that all swans are black. We argue that, for example, people suffering from Korsakoff’s syndrome, can be described as having a brain disease, often caused by alcohol addiction. Moreover, the brain changes occurring with addiction are related to choice-behaviour, habit formation and insight, hence essential mental abilities to break the addiction. We argue for a more graded perspective, where both black swans and white swans are rare, and most cases of addiction come as geese in different shades of gray. (shrink)

Intellectualism about knowledge-how is the view that practical knowledge is a species of propositional knowledge. I argue that this view is undermined by a difference in properties between knowledge-how and both knowledge-that and knowledge-wh. More specifically, I argue that both knowledge-that and knowledge-wh are easily transmitted via testimony while knowledge-how is not easily transmitted by testimony. This points to a crucial difference in states of knowledge. I also consider Jason Stanley's attempt to subsume knowledge-how under an account of de se (...) knowledge. I argue that there are crucial differences between de se knowledge and knowledge-how. Thus, this paper advances both the discussion of intellectualism and the literature on the nature of de se knowledge. (shrink)

Do you know who you are? If the question seems unclear, it might owe to the notion of ‘knowing-wh’ (knowing-who, knowing-what, knowing-when, etc.). Such knowledge contrasts with ‘knowing-that’, the more familiar topic of epistemologists. But these days, knowing-wh is receiving more attention than ever, and here we will survey three current debates on the nature of knowing-wh. These debates concern, respectively, (1) whether all knowing-wh is reducible to knowing-that (‘generalized intellectualism’), (2) whether all knowing-wh is relativized to a contrast proposition (...) (‘contrastivism about knowing-wh’), and (3) whether the context-sensitivity of knowing-wh is a semantic or purely pragmatic phenomenon (‘contextualism vs. invariantism about knowing-wh’). (shrink)

While it seems unlikely that any method of guaranteeing human-friendliness on the part of advanced Artificial General Intelligence systems will be possible, this doesn’t mean the only alternatives are throttling AGI development to safeguard humanity, or plunging recklessly into the complete unknown. Without denying the presence of a certain irreducible uncertainty in such matters, it is still sensible to explore ways of biasing the odds in a favorable way, such that newly created AI systems are significantly more likely than not (...) to be Friendly. Several potential methods of effecting such biasing are explored here, with a particular but non-exclusive focus on those that are relevant to open-source AGI projects, and with illustrative examples drawn from the OpenCog open-source AGI project. Issues regarding the relative safety of open versus closed approaches to AGI are discussed and then nine techniques for biasing AGIs in favor of Friendliness are presented: 1. Engineer the capability to acquire integrated ethical knowledge.2. Provide rich ethical interaction and instruction, respecting developmental stages.3. Develop stable, hierarchical goal systems.4. Ensure that the early stages of recursive self-improvement occur relatively slowly and with rich human involvement.5. Tightly link AGI with the Global Brain.6. Foster deep, consensus-building interactions between divergent viewpoints.7. Create a mutually supportive community of AGIs.8. Encourage measured co-advancement of AGI software and AGI ethics theory.9. Develop advanced AGI sooner not later. In conclusion, and related to the final point, we advise the serious co-evolution of functional AGI systems and AGI-related ethical theory as soon as possible, before we have so much technical infrastructure that parties relatively unconcerned with ethics are able to rush ahead with brute force approaches to AGI development. (shrink)

Abe and his friend Sol are out for a walk together in a part of town they haven't been in before. Passing a Christian church, they notice a curious sign in front that says "$1,000 to anyone who will convert." "I wonder what that's about," says Abe. "I think I'll go in and have a look. I'll be back in a minute; just wait for me." Sol sits on the sidewalk bench and waits patiently for nearly half an hour. Finally, (...) Abe reappears. "Well," asks Sol, "what are they up to? Who are they trying to convert? Why do they care? Did you get the $1,000?" Indignantly Abe replies, "Money. That's all you people care about." Ted Cohen thinks that's not a bad joke. But he also doesn't think it's an easy joke. For a listener or reader to laugh at Abe's conversion, a complicated set of conditions must be met. First, a listener has to recognize that Abe and Sol are Jewish names. Second, that listener has to be familiar with the widespread idea that Jews are more interested in money than anything else. And finally, the listener needs to know this information in advance of the joke, and without anyone telling him or her. Jokes, in short, are complicated transactions in which communities are forged, intimacy is offered, and otherwise offensive stereotypes and cliches lose their sting—at least sometimes. _Jokes_ is a book of jokes and a book about them. Cohen loves a good laugh, but as a philosopher, he is also interested in how jokes work, why they work, and when they don't. The delight at the end of a joke is the result of a complex set of conditions and processes, and Cohen takes us through these conditions in a philosophical exploration of humor. He considers questions of audience, selection of joke topics, the ethnic character of jokes, and their morality, all with plenty of examples that will make you either chuckle or wince. _Jokes:_ more humorous than other philosophy books, more philosophical than other humor books. "Befitting its subject, this study of jokes is... light, funny, and thought-provoking.... [T]he method fits the material, allowing the author to pepper the book with a diversity of jokes without flattening their humor as a steamroller theory might. Such a book is only as good as its jokes, and most of his are good.... [E]ntertainment and ideas in one gossamer package."—_Kirkus Reviews_ "One of the many triumphs of Ted Cohen's Jokes-apart from the not incidental fact that the jokes are so good that he doesn't bother to compete with them-is that it never tries to sound more profound than the jokes it tells.... [H]e makes you feel he is doing an unusual kind of philosophy. As though he has managed to turn J. L. Austin into one of the Marx Brothers.... Reading Jokes makes you feel that being genial is the most profound thing we ever do-which is something jokes also make us feel-and that doing philosophy is as natural as being amused."—Adam Phillips, _London Review of Books_ "[A] lucid and jargon-free study of the remarkable fact that we divert each other with stories meant to make us laugh.... An illuminating study, replete with killer jokes."—Kevin McCardle, _The Herald_ "Cohen is an ardent joke-maker, keen to offer us a glimpse of how jokes are crafted and to have us dwell rather longer on their effects."—Barry C. Smith, _Times Literary Supplement_ "Because Ted Cohen loves jokes, we come to appreciate them more, and perhaps think further about the quality of good humor and the appropriateness of laughter in our lives."—Steve Carlson, _Christian Science Monitor_. (shrink)

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

What might a Christian Transhumanism or, better, a Transhumanist Christianity, look like? Might conscientious Christians today absorb transhumanist zeal and enhancement technology into holy goals of enriching the individual soul and transforming the social fabric? As stewards of human creativity, public theologians and cybertheologians are provided an opportunity by their transhumanist friends to contribute to wider human flourishing and global wellbeing. Yet, realism regarding original sin heightens the challenge to discern what is good while avoiding the pitfalls of messianic hubris.

This paper seeks to establish closer connections and spur dialogue between philosophers working on 4E cognition and aestheticians. In part, the aim is to offer a critical overview of the ways 4E research might inform our understandings of the arts. Yet it is also partly to flag some potential art-specific challenges to some of the theses found within the 4E literature. I start by examining the strongest extant claims regarding art and active externalism, and argue that it is hard to (...) see either how active externalism could square with our actual appreciative practices or that its explanatory value could be sufficient to pressure us to revise radically those practices. Furthermore, I argue, rejecting active externalism seems necessary to acknowledge adequately the important ways in which artistic creation often involves the application of embodied know-how or the execution of embodied skills. For this reason, I argue, embodied approaches to cognition are better positioned to complement and inform the humanistic methods traditionally employed in philosophical aesthetics and art theory. However, I conclude on a moderately sceptical note: the challenge still outstanding for these approaches is to yield new understandings of our artistic practices that have not been gleaned through traditional humanistic inquiry. (shrink)

This paper develops and defends a coherentist account of reasons. I develop three core ideas for this defense: a distinction between basic reasons and noninferential justification, the plausibility of the neglected argument against first philosophy, and an emergent account of reasons. These three ideas form the backbone for a credible coherentist view of reasons. I work toward this account by formulating and explaining the basic reasons dilemma. This dilemma reveals a wavering attitude that coherentists have had toward basic reasons. More (...) importantly, the basic reasons dilemma focuses our attention on the central problems that afflict coherentist views of basic beliefs. By reflecting on the basic reasons dilemma, I formulate three desiderata that any viable coherentist account of basic beliefs must satisfy. I argue that the account on offer satisfies these desiderata. (shrink)

Images of mindis an exciting book, well-written and wellorganized, but many of the connections the authors draw between PET scan results and more general psychological issues are somewhat strained.

The Conference on Artificial General Intelligence is the only major conference series devoted wholly and specifically to the creation of AI systems possessing general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond. Its second installation, AGI-09, in Arlington, Virginia, March 6-9, 2009, attracted 67 paper submissions, which is a substantial increase from the previous year. Of these submissions, 33 (i.e., 49%) were accepted as full papers for presentation at the conference. Additional 13 papers were included as position papers. The program (...) also included a keynote address by Juergen Schmidhuber on 'The New AI', a post-conference workshop on 'The Future of AI', and a number of pre-conference tutorials on various topics related to AGI. (shrink)

Ideas from random graph theory are used to give an heuristic argument that associative memory structure depends discontinuously on pattern recognition ability. This argument suggests that there may be a certain minimal size for intelligent systems.

This article seeks to clarify the relation between consciousness and quantum physics. It is argued that, in order to be consistent with quantum theory, one must never assert that conscious action has caused a given event to occur. Rather, consciousness must be identified with "measurement" or, more concretely, with an increase in the entropy of the probability distribution of possible events. It is suggested that the feeling of self-awareness may be associated with the exchange of entropy between groups of quantum (...) systems which are so tightly coupled as to be, for all practical purposes, an indivisible unit. Such groups of systems may be understood to measure themselves. Two interpretations of the quantum theory of consciousness are distinguished: one in which consciousness is defined as quantum measurement; and one in which this measurement is hypothesized to correlate with a certain biological phenomenon called consciousness. (shrink)

Science’s theory of evolution purports to explain life and its historical dynamics in a physics/material-only fashion. But this entails a broad reliance on DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) for inheritance (and thus blueprints), which appears to be implausible for a number of unusual innate behaviors. The immediate unfolding challenge, though, is that the inheritance role is conveniently testable via searches for the DNA origins of a number of human behavioral and health tendencies, and despite enormous efforts those searches have thus far largely (...) failed (i.e., the “absolutely beyond belief” missing heritability problem). This existing case for DNA’s inadequacies will be briefly reviewed herein. The subsequent main analysis considers some big challenges facing DNA associated with some evolutionary dynamics—the acquisition of color vision in primates; instinctive behaviors including the egg-laying practices of emerald jewel wasps; kin selection; and our natural religious beliefs. Together these challenges strongly suggest that the acceptance of DNA as the (complete) language of life was premature. The haphazard and ambiguous nature of DNA/genetic specifications is very unlikely to have provided a vehicle for the exacting blueprints required for the many instinctive behaviors or capacities. Life appears to be more complex than biologists believe. Two possible alternative explanations are briefly considered in the wake of these discussions. Finally, does anyone—beginning with academics—care about this unfolding foundational failure? (shrink)

The debate in the Oxford Union on 29 January 2010 was on the motion "This House believes that in politics, money talks loudest". Ted Honderich's speech in support of the motion was followed by those of Stuart Wheeler, known for his contribution of £5,000,000 to the Conservative Party, and of Hugo Rifkind, a columnist for The Times and The Spectator . The motion was opposed by Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute, Lord Oakeshott the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, and (...) Dr. Evan Harris, Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon. In the vote at the end, the motion was carried. The debate took place the evening of the day when Tony Blair appeared to defend himself in the Chilcott inquiry into the Iraq war. (shrink)