The basis of science is the hypothetico-deductive method and the recording of experiments in sufficient detail to enable reproducibility. We report the development of Robot Scientist "Adam," which advances the automation of both. Adam has autonomously generated functional genomics hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses by using laboratory automation. We have confirmed Adam's conclusions through manual experiments. To describe Adam's research, we have developed an ontology and logical language. The resulting formalization involves over 10,000 different (...) research units in a nested treelike structure, 10 levels deep, that relates the 6.6 million biomass measurements to their logical description. This formalization describes how a machine contributed to scientific knowledge. (shrink)

Husserl's explication of "self" and "others" occurs within his founding science of pure possibilities or "bracketed" consciousness and experience. His analysis of self and others seeks, in part, to demonstrate that "personal" or "self-experience" is not the only possibility of immanent consciousness but that "other persons" are also given as possibilities. The possibility of others, though in a form of givenness different from that of self, provides a basis for inter-subjectivity. Thus, Husserl's phenomenological analysis can, if it does avoid solipsism (...) and subjective idealism in general, establish inter-subjectivity as coextensive with subjectivity within the deepest possibilities of experience. Husserl's discussion of how the other as an external person or alien ego occurs as a given after all beliefs in an independently existing world are suspended (bracketed) shares some interesting parallels with psychological concepts and also suggests foundational possibilities for research on how the other is constituted as a separate "person" within our consciousness. (shrink)