In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Complexities of Aesthetic Experience:Response to JohnstonRichard J. ShustermanI am grateful for this opportunity to clarify my views on aesthetic experience and somaesthetics that Scott Johnston discusses. Combining two very vague and contested ideas ("experience" and "the aesthetic"), the concept of aesthetic experience is an extremely ambiguous notion some of whose principal different conceptions I have carefully tried to outline.1 It is therefore rash for Johnston to presume that (...) what I mean by aesthetic experience is simply "the [Deweyan] sort of experience that connotes an immediate, qualitative whole" that is "consummatory." Though I deeply appreciate John Dewey's view, I have also criticized it on several counts. I insist, for example, on the existence and value of aesthetic experiences of fragmentation and rupture that have neither the unity of coherence nor that of completion that Dewey demands. In fact, as I have often pointed out, part of my interest in rap music was connected to its aesthetic of fragmentation.2Dewey and I both affirm (in sometimes different ways) some sort of primacy of the immediate in aesthetic experience. But primacy and immediacy are polysemic notions whose meaning is very context-dependent and shifting. Insufficient attention to these multiple meanings and contexts seems to confuse some of Johnston's discussion and leads to his puzzlement about how I can emphasize both immediacy and reflection and whether I consistently accord primacy to the former. The first step toward clarifying matters is to note that affirming immediacy in aesthetic experience is not to deny two important dimensions in which aesthetic experience is importantly mediated. First, aesthetic experiences are rarely, if ever, immediate in the sense of being instantaneous; they require some time of processing. Even with allegedly nontemporal arts such as painting (and even with paintings that do not demand complex decoding), there is, in aesthetic experience, a process of focusing on the work, of reacting to it, and of deepening appreciation or absorption. Second, at least in the arts, an aesthetic experience should be mediated by some prior (typically extensive) training in what is necessary to understand and appreciate such art. My aesthetic experience of French poetry required a sustained training in French language, literature, and culture, a training that required reflective thinking.However, despite these crucial mediations, aesthetic experience is usefully characterized as distinctively immediate in that its meanings and values are perceived and savored directly in our experience of the work rather than being only revealed, understood, or appreciated at a later time. I appreciate [End Page 109] the poetry of Baudelaire as I hear or read it, and not only after it is explained to me or after I subsequently reflect on or recollect this poetic experience. Aesthetic experience is immediate in the sense of being immediately enjoyed and valued rather than being an experience in which gratification and appreciation is deferred to a later time. An aesthetic experience of climbing a mountain (which obviously takes time and requires some training) means enjoying the climb while one is climbing, not when one's enjoyment is postponed till one has reached the summit and enjoys its view. When I emphasize the immediacy of aesthetic experience, I am celebrating this character of direct, undeferred, imminent appreciation or sense of value, which is what makes such experience enjoyed or valued for its own sake.3 Such immediate enjoyment is all that is usefully meant by saying that aesthetic experience is appreciated intrinsically or as an end in itself rather than a mere means to some further end, even though there are obviously many good ends to which aesthetic experience can usefully serve as means.This sense of immediacy — of direct, undeferred appreciation of meaning, enjoyment, and value — does not deny a role for reflection. Not only can prior reflection prepare the way for immediate enjoyment but reflection itself offers its own aesthetic pleasures of immediacy. We can enjoy the process of reasoning, speculating, interpreting in a direct or immediate way without postponing our satisfaction to a subsequent appreciation of the results of our reflective process, that is, when we (meta-)reflect, at a later time, on what that initial reflective experience has engendered. Moreover, subsequent reflection on an... (shrink)

The debate around ethical consumption is often characterised by discussion of its numerous failures arising from complexity in perceived trade-offs. In response, this paper advances a pragmatist understanding of the role and nature of trade-offs in ethical consumption. In doing so, it draws on the central roles of values and value in consumption and pragmatist philosophical thought, and proposes a critique of the ethical consumer as rational maximiser and the cognitive and utilitarian discourse of individual trade-offs to understand how (...) sustainable consumption practices are established and maintained. An in-depth qualitative study is conducted employing phenomenological interviews and hermeneutic analysis to explore the consumption stories of a group of ethically minded consumers. The research uncovers the location of value within a fluid, yet habitual, plurality of patterns, preferences, morals, identities and relationships. Its contribution is to propose that consumer perception of value in moral judgements is represented by an overall form of aggregate personal advantage, which lacks conscious reflection and delivers a phenomenological form of value rooted in habits, reflecting a pragmatist representation of value unified as a ‘consummatory experience’. (shrink)

A motivational system approach to avoidance behavior is presented. According to this approach, a motivational state increases the probability of relevant response patterns and establishes the appropriate or “ideal” consummatory stimuli as positive reinforcers. In the case of feeding motivation, for example, hungry rats are likely to explore and gnaw, and to learn to persist in activities correlated with the reception of consummatory stimuli produced by ingestion of palatable substances. In the case of defense motivation, fearful rats (...) are likely to flee or freeze, and to learn to persist in activities correlated with consummatory stimuli produced by flight from a dangerous place. Defense system activation is distinct from alarm reactions. The latter prepare the animal for probable noxious events, involve relatively intense negative affect and extinguish rapidly in situations where the noxious event no longer occurs. In contrast, defense system activation potentiates innate and modified defense reactions, thus preparing the animal for possible, but not necessarily probable, noxious events; it involves little or no negative affect and extinguishes very slowly when the noxious event no longer occurs. With these assumptions and the resulting model we attempt to resolve several long-standing problems in avoidance learning, including the low correlation between negative affect and avoidance performance, differential rates of extinction for avoidance performance and conditioned emotional responses, and evidence that some avoidance responses are much more easily learned than others. In addition, the model has implications for the study of parallels between appetitive and aversive motivation, sign tracking in aversive conditioning, and orientation of flight responses. Historical antecedents and alternative approaches are discussed. (shrink)

Primordial emotions are the subjective element of the instincts which are the genetically programmed behaviour patterns which contrive homeostasis. They include thirst, hunger for air, hunger for food, pain and hunger for specific minerals etc.There are two constituents of a primordial emotion—the specific sensation which when severe may be imperious, and the compelling intention for gratification by a consummatory act. They may dominate the stream of consciousness, and can have plenipotentiary power over behaviour.It is hypothesized that early in animal (...) evolution complex reflex mechanisms in the basal brain subserving homeostatic responses, in concert with elements of the reticular activating system subserving arousal, melded functionally with regions embodied in the progressive rostral development of the telencephalon. This included the emergent limbic and paralimbic areas, and the insula. This phylogenetically ancient organization subserved the origin of consciousness as the primordial emotion, which signalled that the organisms existence was immediately threatened. Neuroimaging confirms major activations in regions of the basal brain during primordial emotions in humans. The behaviour of decorticate humans and animals is discussed in relation to the possible existence of primitive awareness.Neuroimaging of the primordial emotions reveals that rapid gratification of intention by a consummatory act such as ingestion causes precipitate decline of both the initiating sensation and the intention. There is contemporaneous rapid disappearance of particular regions of brain activation which suggests they may be part of the jointly sufficient and severally necessary activations and deactivations which correlate with consciousness [Crick, F. & Koch, C. . A framework for consciousness. NatureNeuroscience,6, 119–126]. (shrink)

Dewey’s view of art “as experience” takes the art object proper to be distinct from the physical artifact. The "work of art" is a label for a set of perceptual procedures in relation to a complex "situation" – one that is pregnant with vitality and saturated with “pervasive quality.” This qualitative trait is organic rather than merely mechanical in that the informed percipient’s sensibilities have already been sufficiently “funded” with a repertoire of emotionally imbued responses that culminate in a distinctive (...) “consummatory” experience. This account intends to combine classic notions of intrinsicality and instrumentality into a general story about art, which gets elevated into an honorific trait of human life generally -- all within a naturalistic framework. (shrink)

While much of contemporary psychology preserves the legacy of behaviorism and consummatory drive-reductionism, this paper by contrast grounds itself in an "enactivist" approach to emotion and motivation, and goes on to consider the implications of this view for the psychology of inspiration, especially as applied to love and religion. Emotions are not responses to stimuli, but expressions of an active system. The tendency of complex systems is to prefer higher-energy basins of attraction rather than settle into satiation and dull (...) comfort. Given this understanding of the emotions in complex animals, there is a fundamental need for inspiration to fuel the self-initiated activation of the system; lack of this basic inspiration is depression. In sophisticated conscious beings, the need for inspiration is exacerbated by awareness of the problems of finitude; love, the arts and religion are meant to address this heightened need for inspiration. Fundamentalist approaches, however, contend with the problem of finitude in an inauthentic way-by simply denying them. This fundamentalist approach leads to corresponding distortions of ethical and political attitudes. (shrink)

In order to improve our understanding of the components that reflect functionally important processes during reward anticipation and consumption, we used principle components analyses (PCA) to separate and quantify averaged ERP data obtained from each stage of a modified monetary incentive delay (MID) task. Although a small number of recent ERP studies have reported that reward and loss cues potentiate ERPs during anticipation, action preparation, and consummatory stages of reward processing, these findings are inconsistent due to temporal and spatial (...) overlap between the relevant electrophysiological components. Our results show three components following cue presentation are sensitive to incentive cues (N1, P3a, P3b). In contrast to previous research, reward‐related enhancement occurred only in the P3b, with earlier components more sensitive to break‐even and loss cues. During feedback anticipation, we observed a lateralized centroparietal negativity that was sensitive to response hand but not cue type. We also show that use of PCA on ERPs reflecting reward consumption successfully separates the reward positivity from the independently modulated feedback‐P3. Last, we observe for the first time a new reward consumption component: a late negativity distributed over the left frontal pole. This component appears to be sensitive to response hand, especially in the context of monetary gain. These results illustrate that the time course and sensitivities of electrophysiological activity that follows incentive cues do not follow a simple heuristic in which reward incentive cues produce enhanced activity at all stages and substages. (shrink)

Exploratory behavior is considered under the following categories: (1) extrinsic exploration in which the animal seeks information about conventional reinforcers such as food, (2) intrinsic exploration which is directed toward stimuli which may have no biological significance, further divided into inspective and inquisitive exploration. In the former the animal inspects a particular object; in the latter, the animal performs behavior to make a change in its environment, rather than merely responding to a change. Extrinsic exploration is synonymous with the ethological (...) term, appetitive behavior. It is shown that much of the behavior indicative of frustration reported in intensively housed animals occurs when the appetitive component of a drive rather than the consummatory component, is prevented. Consideration of inspective exploration is necessary for good husbandry practice, for fear is an important competing response. Inquisitive exploration has not been widely investigated in infraprimate species, but the authors present several possible examples in the species of common agricultural animals. However, they suggest that the propensity to show this type of exploration may vary between closely related species. In environments barren to the extent of stifling exploration, animals may develop apathy, and its relevance to animal welfare is discussed. (shrink)

This article examines whether the charitable giving amount and likelihood of firm response to catastrophic events relate to firms’ ownership type using a unique dataset of listed firms in China, where state ownership is still prevalent. Based on the data of Chinese firms’ response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, we find that the extent of corporate contributions for state-owned firms following this disaster is less than that for private firms. State-owned firms are also less likely to respond in␣this (...) disaster compared to private firms. The results also␣reveal that firm size, profitability, geography, cash resource available, and leverage affect firms’ philanthropic disaster response behavior in China. (shrink)

This paper replies to the contributors to a symposium on the book Bad Beliefs. It groups the criticisms and concerns of the contributors under the headings “Gaps and Holes”, “Rationality”, “Epistemic Virtue”, “Agency and Control” and “Nudges”. It defends the view that bad belief formation and maintenance is very importantly rational, though it also acknowledges gaps, limitations and unanswered questions.

The food security of more than half of the world’s population depends on rice production which is one of the key objectives of precision agriculture. The traditional rice almanac used astronomical and climate factors to estimate yield response. However, this research integrated meteorological, agro-chemical, and soil physiographic factors for yield response prediction. Besides, the impact of those factors on the production of three major rice ecotypes has also been studied in this research. Moreover, this study found a different (...) set of those factors with respect to the yield response of different rice ecotypes. Machine learning algorithms named Extreme Gradient Boosting and Support Vector Regression have been used for predicting the yield response. The SVR shows better results than XGBoost for predicting the yield of the Aus rice ecotype, whereas XGBoost performs better for forecasting the yield of the Aman and Boro rice ecotypes. The result shows that the root mean squared error of three different ecotypes are in between 9.38% and 24.37% and that of R-squared values are between 89.74% and 99.13% on two different machine learning algorithms. Moreover, the explainability of the models is also shown in this study with the help of the explainable artificial intelligence model called Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations. (shrink)

Recently, I proposed a theory of ontology for the God–world relation that draws inspiration from: Deacon's emergent dynamics where absence plays a role in causal work; dispositionalism as the most suitable philosophical tradition for accommodating absence as a mode of being; and Palamism as the most suitable theological framework for articulating the absence of God as presence. Dumsday's “Palamism and Dispositionalism” in the present issue of Zygon is a cogent breakdown of that thesis, exposing philosophical and theological worries that touch (...) on pan-dispositionalism, bundle theory, Platonism, divine essence, created–uncreated distinction, God–world synergy, and more. This response article engages with the landscape of ideas that Dumsday surveys in an attempt to clarify and extend the proposed thesis that nature's powers are God's energies. (shrink)

Adam Kolber argues against retributivist theories of punishment, based on considerations of moral uncertainty. In this reply, I suggest that Kolber’s argument will not have the implications he supposes, in part because, if it’s able to raise difficulties for retributivism, similar problems will arise for a wide variety of other approaches to punishment.