Uno de los principales retos del transhumanismo lo encontramos en su antropología. Nos encontramos ante un reduccionismo en el que el cuerpo aparece despojado de su dignidad y el espíritu no existe. El ejemplo que más me llama la atención de esto es el de la endogénesis: no se valora el hecho de que el ser humano sea gestado dentro del vientre de otro ser humano; para ellos sería preferible tener una máquina que pudiese hacer la misma misión, en lugar (...) de que el embarazo sea un acto de amor que tiene impacto en toda la vida de la persona. Creo que este es el mayor obstáculo en el que nos encontraremos al valorar el transhumanismo, y es especialmente importante: la persona es un edificio de múltiples dimensiones inextricablemente ligadas. Es necesario reconocer la dignidad de nuestro cuerpo, que va más allá de ser sustrato material de nuestra consciencia. El cuerpo forma parte de nuestra naturaleza, en la que cuerpo, emoción, pensamiento y espíritu son dimensiones que están íntimamente ligadas. No podemos renunciar a nuestro cuerpo. Además, me gustaría proponer que dentro del cuerpo existen portales ante la trascendencia. no es lo mismo ser que parecer. Muchos defienden que pronto tendremos robots que estarán dotados de consciencia. Que podrán pasar el test de Turing. Además, la Inteligencia Artificial permite generar mensajes de manera sintética. En algunos casos, estos mensajes son relativamente simples, pero en otros casos, como los chatbots, resultan muy interesantes. Algunos autores estiman que, dentro de poco, estos chatbots podrían llegar a pasar el test de Turing. Una vez tengamos máquinas que pasen el test de Turing, ¿podremos decir que son conscientes? ¿Es lo mismo una máquina que pase el Test de Turing que una máquina consciente? Para algunos, la respuesta es «es indiferente». Yo digo que no, que no es lo mismo. (shrink)

Automated decision-making takes up an increasingly significant place in the administrative state. This article presents a conception of discretion that is helpful for evaluating the proper place of algorithms in public decision-making. I argue that the algorithm itself is not a site of discretion. The threat is that automated decision-making alters the relationships between traditional actors in a way that can cut down discretion and human commitment. Algorithmic decision-makers can serve to fetter the discretion that the legislature and the populace (...) expect to be exercised. We must strive to maintain discretion, moral agency, deliberative ideals, and human commitment through the system that surrounds the use of an algorithm and to develop a new expertise that can retain and exercise the expected discretion. Backing this argument are traditional legal constraints, public expectations, and administrative law principles, tied together through the organizing principle of discretion. (shrink)

This paper examines folk theories of algorithmic recommendations on Spotify in order to make visible the cultural specificities of data assemblages in the global South. The study was conducted in Costa Rica and draws on triangulated data from 30 interviews, 4 focus groups with 22 users, and the study of “rich pictures” made by individuals to graphically represent their understanding of algorithmic recommendations. We found two main folk theories: one that personifies Spotify and another one that envisions it as a (...) system full of resources. Whereas the first theory emphasizes local conceptions of social relations to make sense of algorithms, the second one stresses the role of algorithms in providing a global experience of music and technology. We analyze why people espouse either one of these theories and how these theories provide users with resources to enact different modalities of power and resistance in relation to recommendation algorithms. We argue that folk theories thus offer a productive way to broaden understanding of what agency means in relation to algorithms. (shrink)

This paper addresses the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep, locating it within a long-standing tradition of animal breeding research in Edinburgh. Far from being an end in itself, the cell-nuclear transfer experiment from which Dolly was born should be seen as a step in an investigative pathway that sought the production of medically relevant transgenic animals. By historicising Dolly, I illustrate how the birth of this sheep captures a dramatic redefinition of the life sciences, when in the 1970s and (...) 1980s the rise of neo-liberal governments and the emergence of the biotechnology market pushed research institutions to show tangible applications of their work. Through this broader interpretative framework, the Dolly story emerges as a case study of the deep transformations of agricultural experimentation during the last third of the twentieth century. The reorganisation of laboratory practice, human resources and institutional settings required by the production of transgenic animals had unanticipated consequences. One of these unanticipated effects was that the boundaries between animal and human health became blurred. As a result of this, new professional spaces emerged and the identity of Dolly the sheep was reconfigured, from an instrument for livestock improvement in the farm to a more universal symbol of the new cloning age. -/- . (shrink)

Recently, there has been increasing theoretical and experimental interest in Popper's gedanken experiment. We calculate in this paper, using the path integral approach, the diffraction patterns predicted by quantum mechanics for this arrangement. The calculations confirm the narrowing of the width of the pattern in absence of the slit obtained experimentally by Kim and Shih (Y. Kim and Y. Shih, Found. Phys. 29, 1849 (1999)).

This work aims to show, in the first place, that the ratiovitalism of Jose Ortega y Gasset is one of the possible lines of the hermeneutic transformation process of contemporary thinking. Nietzsche’s hermeneutical mark on the development of Ortega’s thinking is clear in some very relevant aspects, such as the importance of the body and the innovative notion of life, both of which are decisive issues to understand sport. Secondly, an attempt is made to tap into the rich reflections of (...) Ortega y Gasset on sport, which have a considerable impact on the entire human life, based on the claim of a notion of living body and of a new notion of life. Sport forms part of a vital horizon that is not reduced by the narrow utilitarian perspective, but which announces the superior form of human existence, opening up to a festival and creative meaning of life. This requires a discipline that is not merely satisfied with correctly complying with some standards, but which encourages indefinite improvement. The attribute of sport is creative vitality, a new way of understanding life. Because, based on this new vital perspective, homo oeconomicus can no longer be used as a model, but rather, the vital phenomenon understood in a sporting manner is festival, joyful, creative, agonal and Olympic, freely vigorous, a meaningful source of energy. Life is, in principle, creation, a creative experiment, as in the Nietzschean conception. (shrink)

Fred Sanger, the inventor of the first protein, RNA and DNA sequencing methods, has traditionally been seen as a technical scientist, engaged in laboratory bench work and not interested at all in intellectual debates in biology. In his autobiography and commentaries by fellow researchers, he is portrayed as having a trajectory exclusively dependent on technological progress. The scarce historical scholarship on Sanger partially challenges these accounts by highlighting the importance of professional contacts, institutional and disciplinary moves in his career, spanning (...) from 1940 to 1983. This paper will complement such literature by focusing, for the first time, on the transition of Sanger’s sequencing strategies from degrading to copying the target molecule, which occurred in the late 1960s as he was shifting from protein and RNA to DNA sequencing, shortly after his move from the Department of Biochemistry to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, both based in Cambridge (UK). Through a reinterpretation of Sanger’s papers and retrospective accounts and a pioneering investigation of his laboratory notebooks, I will claim that sequencing shifted from the working procedures of organic chemistry to those of the emergent molecular biology. I will also argue that sequencing deserves a history in its own right as a practice and not as a technique subordinated to the development of molecular biology or genomics. My proposed history of sequencing leads to a reappraisal of current STS debates on bioinformatics, biotechnology and biomedicine. (shrink)

Virtue ethics has often been regarded as complementary or laissez-faire ethics in solving business problems. This paper seeks conceptual and methodological improvements by developing a virtue character scale that will enable assessment of the link between organizational level virtue and organizational performance, financial or non-financial. Based upon three theoretical assumptions, multiple studies were conducted; the content analysis of 158 Fortune Global 500 firms ethical values and a survey of 2548 customers and employees. Six dimensions of organizational virtue (Integrity, Empathy, Warmth, (...) Courage, Conscientiousness and Zeal) are identified through confirmatory factor analysis, and validated against satisfaction measure. Strategic implications of virtue characters are discussed. (shrink)

Se presenta el descubrimiento de un zócalo pintado con almagra, decorado con motivos geométricos de lacería. El muro en que aparece pertenece a un salón alargado en el que se abrirían dos alcobas a cada extremo. El diseño está organizado en cuatro paños, enmarcados por trenza de lazos. Esta composición destaca por la conservación del trazo regulador, y también por el uso de filigranas que ocupan los espacios libres. La cronología de la pintura se establece al pertenecer a las estructuras (...) de una vivienda demolida en el año 1172 para construir la Aljama. Existen varios paralelos, como el ejemplar del patio del Yeso del Alcázar de Sevilla y el aparecido en la calle Imperial. (shrink)

On 26 June 2000, during the presentation of the Human Genome Project's first draft, Bill Clinton, then President of the United States, claimed that "today we are learning the language in which God created life".1 Behind his remarks lay a story of more than half a century involving the understanding of DNA as information. This paper analyses that story, discussing the origins of the informational view of our genes during the early 1950s, how such a view affected the research on (...) the genetic code (1950s and '60s) and the transformation of the information idea in the context of DNA sequencing and bioinformatics ('80s and '90s). I suggest that the concept of DNA as information reached a climax with the proposal of the Human Genome Project (HGP), but is currently facing a crisis coinciding with the questioning of the information society. Finally, I discuss the emergence of systems biology as an alternative paradigm. (shrink)

While the concept of adaptive preferences is an important tool for criticizing injustice, it is often claimed that using the concept involves showing disrespect for persons judged to have adaptive preferences. In this paper, I propose an account of adaptive preferences that does the relevant political work while still showing persons two centrally important kinds of respect. My account is based in what I call an indirect substantive account of autonomy, which places substantive requirements on the options available to a (...) person, rather than on the option that she ultimately prefers. This allows us to pinpoint cases in which a person's circumstances have rendered her insufficiently autonomous, without saying that any conception of the good must be non-autonomous tout court. (shrink)

Among the passages which are suggestive of a philosophy of language in Kant’s writings are his remarks and arguments on appropriate terminology for philosophical concepts. I ask what it is for Kant that makes some words more suitable than others. I reconstruct the arguments from the Inquiry concerning the distinctness of the principles of natural theology and morality (1764) and the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787) that defend that there is no such thing as a proper, real definition for philosophical (...) concepts (only nominal definition and exposition); in addition, philosophical concepts are only represented by terms in abstracto, not in concreto. On these grounds, in the Inquiry, Kant sustains that the reference of a term to a philosophical concept is ultimately sanctioned by the term’s ‘linguistic usage’ (Redegebrauch). I argue that this is the basis for Kant’s criterion in the Critique of Pure Reason of employing traditional terminology, words from ordinary language, or even words from extinct languages, to refer to philosophical concepts, and for his rejection of coining new terms – even for distinctly new philosophical thoughts. (shrink)

Considering the "current" as a living, effective and revitalizing presence, and the "tradition" as that which we historically remains, this article studies the presence of scholastic thought in contemporary philosophy, through the work of Ortega, Zubiri and Habermas. In this sense, from the admiration and esteem for the scholastic tradition, but far from identifying himself with it, José Ortega y Gasset pays special attention to the doctrine of transcendentals, and to the concepts of evidence, conscience and, very especially, actuality. Xavier (...) Zubiri, who was trained for obvious reasons in this tradition, recognizes the powerful influence of Suárez, the "richness and precision" of the scholastic vocabulary and his "intellectual rigour", but if he exposes the scholastic doctrines, he discusses and updates them permanently. Talk about the substance, the essence, the transcendental and, very especially, the intelligence. All this has a radical importance in his reflection on God. Last but not least is the case of Habermas. His latest work constitutes a genealogy of philosophical reason in Western culture. In it, Habermas is interested in the validity of the reflections of not a few scholastic authors, in the relationship between faith and knowledge, and in the controversy over the Hellenization of Christianity. (shrink)

This paper presents the discovery of a skirting board panel decorated with knotted fretwork painted in red iron oxide. It was discovered during the recent excavations in the Cathedral of Seville. The design is organized in four sections divided by twisted ribbons. The free spaces in the design are filled with eight-pointed stars. Parallels in the Patio del Yeso in the Reales Alcázares and in a site in the CaUe Imperial in Seville show that the design dates to the mid-twelfth (...) century. The skirting board must have pertained to a house demolished in 1172 to build the Almohad Congregational mosque. (shrink)

Recensión: Solanes Corella, Ángeles; Derechos y culturas. Los retos de la diversidad en el espacio público y privado. Tirant lo Blanch. Alternativa, Valencia, 2018, 488pp.

How do engineers respond to ethical dilemmas that occur in practice? How do they view their individual and collective responsibilities? How do they make decisions before all the facts are in? Using the space shuttle programme as the framework, this book examines the role of ethical decision making in the practice of engineering. In particular, the book considers the design and development of the main engines of the space shuttle as a paradigm for how individual engineers perceive, articulate, and resolve (...) ethical dilemmas in a large, complex organisation. A series of in-depth case studies show engineers at work on various stages of the project as they balance budgets, deadlines and risks. By documenting the historical development of a single system, the book provides a unique opportunity to explore the complex interactions between political, organisational and technical pressures and engineering and management decisions. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the counter-intuitive conclusion that the same adaptive preference can be both prudentially good and prudentially bad for its holder: that is, it can be prudentially objectionable from one temporal perspective, but prudentially unobjectionable from another. Given the possibility of transformative experiences, there is an important sense in which even worrisome adaptive preferences can be prudentially good for us. That is, if transformative experiences lead us to develop adaptive preferences, then their objects can become prudentially (...) better for our actual selves than the objects of their non-adaptive alternatives would now be. I also argue, however, that the same worrisome adaptive preferences might still be prospectively prudentially objectionable: that is, our pre-transformation selves might be prudentially better off undergoing a non-adaptive alternative transformative experience instead. I argue that both claims hold across the range of the most broadly-defended accounts of well-being in the literature. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente artículo propone que la 31ª Bienal de Sao Paulo entraña un afán emancipador para los "sin tierra" - errantes, migrantes y viajeros. Para ello se conforma como un cuerpo sin órganos, que despliega estrategias liberadoras promoviendo: desarticulación, experimentación, vagabundeo y tránsito de sujetos y pueblos. Esta Bienal, en tanto CsO, mueve intensidades como flujos sensibles por los intersticios de los proyectos artísticos dispuestos en organismo. Acá el CsO es un conjunto de prácticas reservadas a desterritorializar los estratos (...) del "organismo social" y hacer estallar los órganos estructurados en dichos sistemas.: This article shows that the 31st Sao Paulo Biennial has an emancipatory affinity for the landless - wanderers, migrants, and travelers. As such it becomes a Body without Organs that displays liberating strategies, promoting disarticulation, experimentation, wandering, and the transit of subjects and peoples. This Biennial, as a BwO, moves intensities as sensible flows through the interstices of the artistic projects inside the organism. Here, the BwO becomes a set of practices that deterritorialize the strata of the "social organism", making the structured organs in these systems explode. (shrink)

This study compares the different emphases on virtuous characters presented in their values, across global firms considering country and industry of origin. It presents a content analysis of the 122 codes of conduct statements from Fortune Global 500 firms, drawn from four sectors and using correspondence analysis. American firms tend to emphasize courage, while European firms emphasize integrity and empathy, surprisingly with Asian firms being closer to European ones. Retailers and pharmaceutical firms emphasize empathy, while banks and petroleum emphasize courage. (...) This study extends the newly emerging strategic paradigm of organizational virtue, by introducing an empirical study of ethical values. Implications for multinational companies are then discussed. (shrink)

The significance of critical phenomenology for psychiatric praxis has yet to be expounded. In this paper, I argue that the adoption of a critical phenomenological stance can remedy localised instances of hermeneutical injustice, which may arise in the encounter between clinicians and patients with psychosis. In this context, what is communicated is often deemed to lack meaning or to be difficult to understand. While a degree of un-shareability is inherent to subjective life, I argue that issues of unintelligibility can be (...) addressed by shifting from individualistic conceptions of understanding to an interactionist view. This takes into account the contextual, historical and relational background within which meaning is co-constituted. I conclude by providing a corrective for hermeneutical injustice, which entails a specific attentiveness towards the person’s subjectivity, a careful sensitivity to contingent meaning-generating structures, and a degree of hermeneutical flexibility as an attitude of openness towards alternative horizons of possibility. (shrink)

RESUMEN La investigación científica constituye uno de los principios en los cuales se respalda la formación integral de los estudiantes de las ciencias médicas, por lo que los autores del presente texto se propusieron como objetivo exponer elementos de un plan de acciones establecido para reforzar los valores en los estudiantes de ciencias médicas centrado en la investigación científica utilizando un estudio de correlación en la facultad de Medicina de la Universidad de Ciencias Médicas, de Santiago de Cuba en el (...) periodo de septiembre 2016 a abril 2017. Los principales resultaron arrojaron que el 100 % de los estudiantes reforzaron valores como humanismo, responsabilidad y sinceridad principalmente, a partir del cumplimiento de las tareas asignadas durante las investigaciones que realizaron a diferentes instancias, por lo que se concluye que este accionar podría constituir un eje integrador en el proceso de formación profesional. ABSTRACT Scientific research is one of the main principles which supports students’ all-round medical sciences training, therefore, the authors of this paper aim to present elements of an action plan which is established to strengthen values in medical sciences students through scientific research by means of a correlation study in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Medical Sciences in Santiago de Cuba from September 2016 to April 2017. The main results showed that 100 % of students strengthened values such as humanism, responsibility and honesty from the carrying out of allocated tasks during researches done in different institutions. It is concluded that this method could become an all-round core in professionals training process. (shrink)

This article shows part of the results of a research project: The Impact of Social Change in Higher Education Staff Professional Life and Work (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, SEJ2006-01876). The main aim of this project was to explore and understand how scholars establish a dialogue, resist, adapt themselves or adopt changes, in the process of constructing their professional identities. As the members of the research team were scholars ourselves, teaching and carrying out research in Spanish universities, we started (...) this research by writing our own autoethnographies. As a result, we developed nine autoethnographies which give a complex and in-depth account of senior and junior scholars' journeys into their process of constructing their professional identity and working lives in a rapidly changing world. This article starts by giving a context to the research project and arguing the need for conducting autoethnographies. It goes on to discuss the process itself of writing autoethnographies in the context of a given research project. We then refer to the topics which have a bearing on how we have learnt to become scholars: our experience as university students, the beginning of the academic career, relationships with others, and the consequences of the mark of gender. We conclude with the lessons learnt around the dilemmas on writing autoethnographies. (shrink)

The brain is often taken to be a paradigmatic example of a signaling system with semantic and representational properties, in which neurons are senders and receivers of information carried in action potentials. A closer look at this picture shows that it is not as appealing as it might initially seem in explaining the function of the brain. Working from several sender-receiver models within the teleosemantic framework, I will first argue that two requirements must be met for a system to support (...) genuine semantic information: 1. The receiver must be competent —that is, it must be able to extract rewards from its environment on the basis of the signals that it receives. 2. The receiver must have some flexibility of response relative to the signal received. In the second part of the paper, this initial framework will be applied to neural processes, pointing to the surprising conclusion that signaling at the single-neuron level is only weakly semantic at best. Contrary to received views, neurons will have little or no access to semantic information (though their patterns of activity may carry plenty of quantitative, correlational information) about the world outside the organism. Genuine representation of the world requires an organism - level receiver of semantic information, to which any particular set of neurons makes only a small contribution. (shrink)

In this article, I first propose four guidelines that follow from understanding the project of assigning victims duties to resist oppression as an ameliorative project. That is, if we understand the project to be motivated by the urgent aim of ending or mitigating the harm that oppression imposes on the oppressed, I argue that we should focus on developing and assigning duties that satisfy what I call the ability, weighting, fairness, and overdemandingness guidelines. Second, I develop the duty to be (...) a non-normative individual, which satisfies all four guidelines. (shrink)

Are there representations in the brain? It depends on what you mean by representations, and it depends on what you want them to do for you—both in terms of the causal role they play in the system, and in terms of their explanatory value. But ideally, we would like an account of representation that allows us to assign a representational role and content to the appropriate mechanistic precursors of behavior that in fact play that role and conversely, search for the (...) mechanistic realizers of representational roles that are posited by our models of behavior and cognition. Such an account would be methodologically valuable in neuroscience. Lately, people have started asking similar questions about deep neural networks. What representations do they learn and use, and what is the relation between those representations and the sometimes impressive capacities these networks exhibit? More philosophically puzzling, perhaps, is the question of why the internal activities or dispositions labeled as such in neuroscience and AI research should count as representations at all. I think we can give a unified answer to both sets of questions, in the form of a kind of representational pragmatism. What makes something a representation just is that we can identify and re-identify it as such, and moreover, that we can manipulate it effectively to do whatever it is that we think representations ought to do for us in that particular context. For the first condition, the idea is that so long as we have some probe that allows us to pick out the relevant causally effective candidate, we should consider that to be a candidate representation-relative-to-that-probe. The second condition can be understood as a kind of anti-gerrymandering constraint: one ought to be able to intervene on the candidate, and see effects of that intervention consistent with the functional role the representation is supposed to play. Naturally the details need to be spelled out for different contexts—and I will articulate them for a few illustrative cases—which effectively allows for a kind of pluralism about representation depending on the setting and the kinds of questions being asked. With the extra components filled in, representational pragmatism can make sense of existing practices in neuroscience and AI, as well as their relationship to naturalistic theories of representation in philosophy. (shrink)

En torno a la simplificación que liga el término "postmodernidad" con el final histórico, cronológico, de la Modernidad se concitan dos posiciones opuestas: la de quienes (en la estela de Habermas) denuncian el talante conservador y apocalíptico, anti-moderno, de buena parte de los filósofos del siglo XX, especialmente en sus últimas décadas, y la de quienes (por ejemplo, Lyotard) celebran la caída de los referentes clásicos. Lejos de tal dicotomía, se trata de realizar del ambiguo "post" una lectura atenta no (...) a la noción de tiempo sino a la de lugar o espacio semántico: la postmodernidad no vendría a finalizar nada, antes al contrario, se trataría de una perspectiva práctica desde la que entender los problemas aún vigentes de la Modernidad, de la que el "post" antepuesto sería modulación radical, extremo Kunstwollen, voluntad crítica basada siempre en la descreencia última en toda trascendencia, incluida la propia de la lógica moderna del progreso y la emancipación. (shrink)

Philosophical proponents of predictive processing cast the novelty of predictive models of perception in terms of differences in the functional role and information content of neural signals. However, they fail to provide constraints on how the crucial semantic mapping from signals to their informational contents is determined. Beyond a novel interpretative gloss on neural signals, they have little new to say about the causal structure of the system, or even what statistical information is carried by the signals. That means that (...) the predictive framework for perception can be relabeled in traditional, non-predictive terms, with no empirical consequences relevant to existing or future data. To the extent that neuroscientific research based on predictive processing is both innovative and productive, it will be due to the framework’s suggestive heuristic effects, or perhaps auxiliary empirical claims about implementation, rather than a difference in the information-processing structure that it describes. (shrink)

Industrial pollution is of both national and international concern in the context where one country's emissions contribute to the problem of global warming. Existing studies have focused on government and regulations rather than on employees. The context of this study is in respect of 472 workers in seven Chinese energy companies in Shanxi province in China, one of the biggest coal mining regions and a region most responsible for environmental pollution. The key findings are two-fold: first, employees' values were positively (...) correlated with attitudes toward the environment, which also correlates with perceived corporate citizenship; second, the ownership type of the firm had a significant influence on corporate citizenship, employee values and their attitudes toward environment. Contrary to existing beliefs, Stateowned enterprises in China have much poorer ratings on all the three constructs compared to privately owned companies. The results highlight the role of the government and policy makers in shaping employees' attitudes toward the environment, and in turn the corporate citizenship of the Chinese energy industry. (shrink)