Technoscientific ambitions for perfecting human-like machines, by advancing state-of-the-art neuromorphic architectures and cognitive computing, may end in ironic regret without pondering the humanness of fallible artificial non-normative personalities. Self-organizing artificial personalities individualize machine performance and identity through fuzzy conscientiousness, emotionality, extraversion/introversion, and other traits, rendering insights into technology-assisted human evolution, robot ethology/pedagogy, and best practices against unwanted autonomous machine behavior.

Emerging cybertechnologies, such as social digibots, bend epistemological conventions of life and culture already complicated by human and animal relationships. Virtually-augmented niches of machines and organic life promise new free-energy-governed selection of intelligent digital life. These provocative eco-evolutionary contexts demand a theory of (natural and artificial) minds to characterize and validate the immersive social phenomena universally-shaping cultural affordances.

Organizational leaders are increasingly emphasizing a stakeholder perspective in order to address concerns about business ethics. This study examined the choices of 94 groups in the context of a business decision-making simulation to determine how specific actions and communications can facilitate the consideration of different stakeholder perspectives. In particular, we examined whether generally framing the business situation as one involving diverse stakeholders versus a primarily profit-driven operation (referred to as framing), and whether specific suggestions that participants consider the concerns of (...) stakeholders versus stockholders in maximizing the value of the firm (referred to as vision priming), would influence group choices and decision outcomes. We tested four experimental conditions against a control in a 2 × 2 experimental design to determine the effects that group choices had on decision outcomes when groups were exposed to stakeholder versus stockholder decision framing and stakeholder versus stockholder vision priming. The results revealed that the consistent conditions outperformed the control condition and that vision priming has a greater impact on decision outcomes than decision framing. (shrink)

Eight scholars answered the call printed in both issues of volume 19 of The Owl to “bone up for Loyola” by attending a week-long seminar devoted to the study of Hegel’s Science of Logic. The seminar was held at Windy Pine, a summer retreat of the Trent University Canadian Studies Program, on Kushog Lake in Ontario’s Haliburton Highlands. A half dozen rustic cabins lining a rocky, wooded cove provided a delightful setting for the exercise of both mind and body. The (...) best of Hegel, along with more empirical events such as enjoying fine food, swimming, canoeing, fishing, hiking, and long evenings of pleasant conversation left all of the participants wishing that Hegel had written a sequel. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractScience and technology consortia provide a viable solution for the recent unsustainable academic growth in biomedical research.

Communication barriers long-associated with ideographs, including combinatorial grapholinguistic complexity, computational encoding–decoding complexity, and technological rendering and deployment, become trivialized through advancements in interoperable smart mobile digital devices. Such technologies impart unprecedented extended-reality user hazards only mitigated by unprecedented colloquial and bureaucratic societal norms. Digital age norms thus influence natural ideographic language origins and evolution in ways novel to human history.

Some neurotropic enteroviruses hijack Trojan horse/raft commensal gut bacteria to render devastating biomimicking cryptic attacks on human/animal hosts. Such virus-microbe interactions manipulate hosts’ gut-brain axes with accompanying infection-cycle-optimizing central nervous system disturbances, including severe neurodevelopmental, neuromotor, and neuropsychiatric conditions. Co-opted bacteria thus indirectly influence host health, development, behavior, and mind as possible “fair-weather-friend” symbionts, switching from commensal to context-dependent pathogen-like strategies benefiting gut-bacteria fitness.

Microbes perfect social interactions with intuitive logics and goal-directed reciprocity. These multilevel, cognition-resembling adaptations in Dictyostelid cellular molds enable individual-to-group viability through public/private bacterial farming and dynamic marketspaces. Like humans and animals, Dictyostelid livestock-ownership depends on environmental sensing, cooperation, and competition. Moreover, social-norm policing of cosmopolitan colonies coordinates farmer decisions, phenotypes, and ownership identities with bacteria herding, privatization, and consumption.