In this chapter we extend earlier work (Vinuesa et al., Nat Commun 11, 2020) on the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed by the United Nations (UN) for the 2030 Agenda. The present contribution focuses on three SDGs related to healthy and sustainable societies, i.e., SDG 3 (on good health), SDG 11 (on sustainable cities), and SDG 13 (on climate action). This chapter extends the previous study within those three goals and goes (...) beyond the 2030 targets. These SDGs are selected because they are closely related to the coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic and also to crises like climate change, which constitute important challenges to our society. (shrink)

Abstract Philosophical discussion of Alan Turing’s writings on intelligence has mostly revolved around a single point made in a paper published in the journal Mind in 1950. This is unfortunate, for Turing’s reflections on machine (artificial) intelligence, human intelligence, and the relation between them were more extensive and sophisticated. They are seen to be extremely well-considered and sound in retrospect. Recently, IBM developed a question-answering computer (Watson) that could compete against humans on the game show Jeopardy! There are hopes it (...) can be adapted to other contexts besides that game show, in the role of a collaborator of, rather than a competitor to, humans. Another, different, research project --- an artificial intelligence program put into operation in 2010 --- is the machine learning program NELL (Never Ending Language Learning), which continuously ‘learns’ by ‘reading’ massive amounts of material on millions of web pages. Both of these recent endeavors in artificial intelligence rely to some extent on the integration of human guidance and feedback at various points in the machine’s learning process. In this paper, I examine Turing’s remarks on the development of intelligence used in various kinds of search, in light of the experience gained to date on these projects. (shrink)

Twenty years ago in "Turing's Two Tests for Intelligence" I distinguished two distinct tests to be found in Alan Turing's 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence": one by then very well-known, the other neglected. I also explained the significance of the neglected test. This paper revisits some of the points in that paper and explains why they are even more relevant today. It also discusses the value of tests for machine intelligence based on games humans play, giving an analysis of (...) some twentieth century TV game shows and how they relate to the tests for machine intelligence in Turing's paper and in some other tests for machine intelligence that have been proposed since. Their value in distinguishing between 'wise' and simply ‘clever’ AI is discussed. (shrink)

One of the most important theoretical and ideological tasks of Marxist philosophy is the critical study of the philosophical thought of the West. In the second half of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, the ideological struggle on the international arena entered a new stage. It was characterized by the turn of the forces of imperialist reaction away from the politics of detente to the politics of the "cold war," to the active opposition to the forces of peace, democracy, (...) and socialism. The struggle of ideas has swung back and forth in the context of, on the one hand, a resurgence of reactionary anticommunist tendencies, and the stimulation and expansion of antimilitary movements and the struggles of the peoples for peace and socialism on the other. (shrink)

Издание содержит: познание в контексте культуры; эпистемология социально-гуманитарного знания; история философии: опыт познания культуры и др.

In the Vocation of Man, Fichte makes the striking claim that life is eternal, rational, our true being, and the final cause of nature in general and of death in particular. How can we make sense of this claim? I argue that the public lectures that compose the Vocation are a popular expression of Fichte’s pre-existing commitment to what I call immortalism, the view that life is the unconditioned condition of intelligibility. Casting the I as an absolutely self-active or living (...) power enables his philosophical account of both the intelligibility of objects and of what it means to die. This explains his characterization of the Wissenschaftslehre as a system in which ‘all is act, movement, and life’. In Sect. 1, I explain the context of Jacobi’s use of ‘caput mortuum’ as a term for the thing in itself. In Sects. 2 and 3, I reconstruct two immortalist arguments from Fichte’s Jena period. The first is that the I’s self-activity rules out the existence of the thing in itself and thereby vanquishes ‘death’s head’. The second is that, insofar as the I charges us with the moral perfection of nature, it is the final cause of our entire life, including its end. This is to say that the I puts our every moment into question, even our last. In Sect. 4, I use these immortalist arguments to interpret the striking claim from the Vocation. (shrink)

Throughout his career, Schelling assigns knowledge of the absolute first principle of philosophy to intellectual intuition. Schelling's doctrine of intellectual intuition raises two important questions for interpreters. First, given that his doctrine undergoes several changes before and after his identity philosophy, to what extent can he be said to “hold onto” the same “sense” of it by the 1830s, as he claims? Second, given that his doctrine of intellectual intuition restricts absolute idealism to what he calls a “science of reason”, (...) which he says cannot prove the absolute’s existence, what other doctrine does he require in order to prove this? I will answer these questions by tracing the shifts in Schelling’s doctrine of intellectual intuition from the 1790s to the 1830s and drawing out its evolving methodological role within his science of intelligibility. (shrink)

In the Freedom essay, Schelling charges that (1) idealism fails to grasp human freedom’s distinctiveness and that (2) this failure undermines idealism's attempt to refute pantheism, as exemplified by Spinoza. This raises two questions, which I will answer in turn: what, for Schelling, is distinctive of human freedom; and how does the idealists’ failure to grasp it render them unable to refute pantheism? To answer these questions, I will reconstruct Schelling’s argument that freedom has the distinctness of being the unconditioned (...) condition of the world’s intelligibility. My reconstruction will illustrate how Schelling’s notion of freedom as primal will grounds the alleged primacy of practical reason as Kant and Fichte conceive it. I will then consider three objections to Schelling’s argument. Throughout, I will develop the Schellingian idea that freedom is enacted in an unprethinkable decision that cannot be anticipated by any law or principle. (shrink)

Microbiologists are transitioning from the study and characterization of individual strains or species to the profiling of whole microbiomes and microbial ecology. Equipped with high-throughput methods for studying the taxonomic and functional characteristics of diverse samples, they are just beginning to encounter the conceptual, theoretical, and experimental problems of comparing taxonomy to function, and extracting useful measures from such comparisons. Although still unresolved, these problems are well studied in macro-ecology and are reiterated here as an historical precautionary for microbial ecologists. (...) Beyond expected and unresolved terminological vagueness, we argue that assessments and comparisons of taxonomic and functional profiles in micro-ecology suffer from theoretically unresolvable arbitrariness and ambiguities. We divide these into problems of scale, individuation, and commensurability. We argue that there is no technically/theoretically “correct” scale, individuation, or comparison of taxonomy and function, but there are nonetheless better and worse methodologies for profiling. (shrink)

In his 1841-2 Berlin lectures, Schelling critiques German idealism’s negative method of regressing from existence to its first principle, which is supposed to be intelligible without remainder. He sees existence as precisely its remainder since there could be nothing that exists. To solve this, Schelling enlists the positive method of progressing from the fact of existence to a proof of this principle’s reality. Since this proof faces the absurdity that there is anything rather than nothing, he concludes that this fact’s (...) constitution and this principle’s proof are mutually dependent, non-dischargeable tasks. I trace this reciprocal relation to one Kant establishes between the constitutive categories of experience and the experience that proves their applicability and argue that it adheres to Kant’s threefold criterion of proof. I do so by uncovering the Maimonian skeptical motivation—specifically, the need to answer what I call the question quid indicii—behind the qualified return to Kant on which Schelling’s critique of idealism relies. (shrink)

The study reveals the feature of determining the limitations of human existence, which affects moral and ethical beliefs and views. It is noted that the philosopher N. Abbagnano saw the need to adjust the philosophy of existentialism, reducing pessimistic tones that could interfere with the development of existential thinking. The aim of the article was to determine the moral capabilities of man in the situations of measuring existence in the positive context of philosophy N. Abbagnano. Accordingly, the study makes an (...) understanding of the role of existentialism as a philosophical current of the twentieth century; the role of death and freedom in human existence is determined; the problem of moral capabilities of a person in situations of limitation is highlighted.Attention is drawn to the key differences between the philosophy of existentialism and romanticism according to the views of the philosopher, from which follows the problem of the specificity of freedom and finiteness of man, as well as the importance of a sense of human life, taking into account his considerations about his finiteness. It is noted that the analysis of the views of existentialist philosophers prompted the philosopher to the idea of determining the positivity of human existence in situations of limitation. The moral responsibility of man is bound, according to N. Abbagnano, with the adoption of responsibility to themselves and society on its own mission, the definition of the limitation of freedom not only the moral principles of the environment, but also their own purpose of life.A special emphasis in the problem of human limitation is given to the theme of death in the philosophy of N. Abbagnano. Death is defined not simply as the fact of a person’s limb or death, but as the possibility of possibility. Death is a situation that no one can get around, and even predict. Therefore, death can interrupt the mission of human life at any time, and a person has no access to the secret of his own death, at least until its occurrence. It is the possibility of death that leads to the moral horizons of man and is prescribed in the moral and ethical environment of co-existence. It is indicated that the possibility has a similar nature to death, because its mystery is revealed when the possibility ceases to be only an opportunity, and therefore it is always beyond human understanding.Nature has a possible total definition of good and evil, which in the philosophy of N. Abbagnano not separated and are not opposed. Freedom Kok rent on both options simultaneously, and multiplied under the influence of freedom in a situation koeksisters. Attention is drawn to the definition of permanent affiliation to cocsistent of existence that begins with birth and does not end until death. And it is through co-existence that the possibility is possible. The moral horizons of koekzistentsii are limited not only by death, as a break in the ties of existence, violations of bindings, but also by the constant existence of good and evil, as inseparable parts of life. Through the creation of morality, man seeks being, seeks that enchanting state of rightness and truth, the finding of which should bring peace of certainty in situations of possibility. The conclusion is made that the limitation of a person to the possibility of the possible, his own finiteness is the positivity of human existence. (shrink)

On a literal reading of `Computing Machinery and Intelligence'', Alan Turing presented not one, but two, practical tests to replace the question `Can machines think?'' He presented them as equivalent. I show here that the first test described in that much-discussed paper is in fact not equivalent to the second one, which has since become known as `the Turing Test''. The two tests can yield different results; it is the first, neglected test that provides the more appropriate indication of intelligence. (...) This is because the features of intelligence upon which it relies are resourcefulness and a critical attitude to one''s habitual responses; thus the test''s applicablity is not restricted to any particular species, nor does it presume any particular capacities. This is more appropriate because the question under consideration is what would count as machine intelligence. The first test realizes a possibility that philosophers have overlooked: a test that uses a human''s linguistic performance in setting an empirical test of intelligence, but does not make behavioral similarity to that performance the criterion of intelligence. Consequently, the first test is immune to many of the philosophical criticisms on the basis of which the (so-called) `Turing Test'' has been dismissed. (shrink)

‘Facticity’ is a concept that classical phenomenologists like Heidegger use to denote the radically contingent or underivably brute conditions of intelligibility. Yet Fichte coins the term, to which he gives the opposing use of denoting unacceptably brute conditions of intelligibility. For him, radical contingency is a problem to be solved by deriving such conditions from reason. Heidegger rejects Fichte's recoil from facticity with his hermeneutics of facticity, supplanting Fichte's metaphor of our always being in reason's hand with the metaphor of (...) our always having been thrown. How does Heidegger inherit and diametrically repurpose Fichte's neologism? Whence the reversed meaning of ‘facticity’ in post-Kantian thought? The answer is Lask's doctoral thesis, which exerts an acknowledged impact on Heidegger's habilitation thesis. Lask interprets ‘facticity’ as Fichte's term for the individuality problem, that is, the resistance of the material particularity of individuals to explanation by the categories genetically deduced from reason. On his interpretation, ‘facticity’ denotes radical contingency in the guise of haecceity, that is, the brute uniqueness of individuals. Lask credits Fichte with registering the problem of individuality, which highlights the world's irreducibly precategorial character. But how is ‘facticity’ transmitted from Lask to Heidegger, given their opposing interpretations of how Fichte understands its meaning? I argue that (1) Lask misreads Fichte as a proponent of facticity, that is, one whose accommodation of radical contingency deflates the Wissenschaftslehre's systematic ambitions, and (2) Lask's misreading, without deceiving Heidegger regarding the sincerity of Fichte's ambitions, encourages Heidegger's own hermeneutics of facticity. (shrink)

SummaryThis study evaluated the prevalence of overweight and obesity in the male Sardinian population, and verifies that it has increased over the last 30 years. Data were collected during 2003–2004 from military registers in the Archive of the Military District of Cagliari for the years 1969 and 1998. A total of 22,345 forms were analysed from all Sardinia. The conscripts were classified on the basis of their place of residence and socioeconomic status. The overall prevalence of overweight and obesity in (...) Sardinia were 4.33% and 0.55%, respectively, for the conscripts of 1969 and 9.8% and 3% for 1998. Olbia-Tempio was the province with the highest incidence of overweight and obesity in 1969, and Nuoro had the highest incidence in 1998. Distribution of body mass index, overweight and obesity across the island showed a statistically significant heterogeneity that strongly decreased from 1969 to 1998. Among the conscripts of 1969, the incidence of overweight and obesity were higher in rural than in urban regions. An opposite trend was observed for the 1998 prevalence, it being more frequent in urban than rural regions. Comparison with other Italian regions was made. The percentages of overweight and obese individuals in Sardinia have markedly increased during the last 30 years, but their low incidence with respect to other Italian populations could be explained by the genetic peculiarity of the island. The change in the internal distribution of obesity clearly reflects socioeconomic changes. (shrink)

This chapter intervenes in recent debates in Kant scholarship about the possibility of a general logical alien. Such an alien is a thinker whose laws of thinking violate ours. She is third-personal as she is radically unlike us. Proponents of the constitutive reading of Kant’s conception of general logic accordingly suggest that Kant rules out the possibility of such an alien as unthinkable. I add to this an often-overlooked element in Kant’s thinking: there is reason to think that he grants—and (...) in fact presupposes—the possibility of a transcendental logical alien. Such an alien is a knower whose laws of experience purport to violate ours. She is first-personal as she is radically like us. In other words, she is us, insofar as we are alienated from ourselves and our experience. I go on to draw an analogy between her, a dogmatist, and another transcendental alien, an evil agent. Just as a dogmatist is alienated from her (our) experiential laws, an evil agent is alienated from her (our) moral law. These forms of theoretical and practical self-conceit require self-knowledge in the form of a critique of speculative or practical reason. In bringing this point out, I aim to shift from the question of whether logical laws constitute our thinking to the question of whether grasping our experiential and moral laws as our laws constitutes our reason. (shrink)

Introduction to Sexology [Vvedenie v seksologiiu] by I. S. Kon has finally been published after having made the rounds of publishing houses for many years. This is the first Soviet publication devoted to a description and an analysis of the genesis, development, and state of a new branch of scientific knowledge about man-sexology-which affects every one of us. To be sure, General Sexual Pathology [Obshchaia seksopatologiia], a textbook for physicians edited by G. S. Vasil'chenko, which came out in 1977, has (...) an extensive introductory chapter on sexology, but it is limited to medical problems. Kon's book is an example of an interdisciplinary approach that provides an idea of the most essential components of sexology; it is thus addressed not only to the medical profession, but also to sociologists, philosophers of culture, psychologists, pedagogues, etc. The book takes into account the latest publications in this area of science. (shrink)

Feature selection is a widely studied technique whose goal is to reduce the dimensionality of the problem by removing irrelevant features. It has multiple benefits, such as improved efficacy, efficiency and interpretability of almost any type of machine learning model. Feature selection techniques may be divided into three main categories, depending on the process used to remove the features known as Filter, Wrapper and Embedded. Embedded methods are usually the preferred feature selection method that efficiently obtains a selection of the (...) most relevant features of the model. However, not all models support an embedded feature selection that forces the use of a different method, reducing the efficiency and reliability of the selection. Neural networks are an example of a model that does not support embedded feature selection. As neural networks have shown to provide remarkable results in multiple scenarios such as classification and regression, sometimes in an ensemble with a model that includes an embedded feature selection, we attempt to embed a feature selection process with a general-purpose methodology. In this work, we propose a novel general-purpose layer for neural networks that removes the influence of irrelevant features. The Feature-Aware Drop Layer is included at the top of the neural network and trained during the backpropagation process without any additional parameters. Our methodology is tested with 17 datasets for classification and regression tasks, including data from different fields such as Health, Economic and Environment, among others. The results show remarkable improvements compared to three different feature selection approaches, with reliable, efficient and effective results. (shrink)