What does it feel like to be a bat? Is conscious experience of echolocation closer to that of vision or audition? Or do bats process echolocation nonconsciously, such that they do not feel anything about echolocation? This famous question of bats' experience, posed by a philosopher Thomas Nagel in 1974, clarifies the difficult nature of the mind–body problem. Why a particular sense, such as vision, has to feel like vision, but not like audition, is totally puzzling. This is especially so (...) given that any conscious experience is supported by neuronal activity. Activity of a single neuron appears fairly uniform across modalities and even similar to those for non-conscious processing. Without any explanation on why a particular sense has to feel the way it does, researchers cannot approach the question of the bats' experience. Is there any theory that gives us a hope for such explanation? Currently, probably none, except for one. Integrated information theory has potential to offer a plausible explanation. IIT essentially claims that any system that is composed of causally interacting mechanisms can have conscious experience. And precisely how the system feels is determined by the way the mechanisms influence each other in a holistic way. In this article, I will give a brief explanation of the essence of IIT. Further, I will briefly provide a potential scientific pathway to approach bats' conscious experience and its philosophical implications. If IIT, or its improved or related versions, is validated enough, the theory will gain credibility. When it matures enough, predictions from the theory, including nature of bats' experience, will have to be accepted. I argue that a seemingly impossible question about bats' consciousness will drive empirical and theoretical consciousness research to make big breakthroughs, in a similar way as an impossible question about the age of the universe has driven modern cosmology. (shrink)

Consciousness and emotion feature prominently in our personal lives, yet remain enigmatic. Recent advances prompt further distinctions that should provide more experimental traction: we argue that emotion consists of an emotion state (functional aspects, including emo- tional response) as well as feelings (the conscious experience of the emotion), and that consciousness consists of level (e.g. coma, vegetative state and wake- fulness) and content (what it is we are conscious of). Not only is consciousness important to aspects of emotion but structures (...) that are important for emotion, such as brainstem nuclei and midline cortices, overlap with structures that regulate the level of consciousness. The intersection of consciousness and emotion is ripe for experimental investigation, and we outline possible examples for future studies. (shrink)

Illusions that produce perceptual suppression despite constant retinal input are used to manipulate visual consciousness. Here we report on a powerful variant of existing techniques, Continuous Flash Suppression. Distinct images flashed successively around 10 Hz into one eye reliably suppress an image presented to the other eye. Compared to binocular rivalry, the duration of perceptual suppression increased more than 10-fold. Using this tool we show that the strength of the negative afterimage of an adaptor was reduced by half when it (...) was perceptually suppressed by input from the other eye. The more likely the adaptor was completely suppressed, the larger the reduction of the afterimage intensity. Paradoxically, trial-to-trial visibility of the adaptor did not correlate with the degree of suppression. Our results imply that formation of afterimages involves neuronal structures that access input from both eyes, but that do not correspond directly to the neuronal correlates of perceptual awareness. (shrink)

Reinforcement Learning (RL) handles policy search problems: searching a mapping from state space to action space. However RL is based on gradient methods and as such, cannot deal with problems with multimodal landscape. In contrast, though Genetic Algorithm (GA) is promising to deal with them, it seems to be unsuitable for policy search problems from the viewpoint of the cost of evaluation. Minimal Generation Gap (MGG), used as a generation-alternation model in GA, generates many offspring from two or more parents (...) selected from a population. Therefore, evaluating policies of generated offspring requires much trial and error (i.e. interaction between an agent and an environment). In this paper, we incorporate importance sampling into the framework of MGG in order to reduce the cost of evaluation on policy search. The proposed techniques are applied to Markov Decision Process (MDP) with multimodal landscape. The experimental results show that these techniques can reduce the number of interaction between an agent and an environment, and also mean that MGG and importance sampling are good for each other. (shrink)

In healthcare, a tension sometimes arises between the injunction to do as much good as possible with scarce resources and the injunction to rescue identifiable individuals in immediate peril, regardless of cost (the “Rule of Rescue”). This tension can generate serious ethical and political difficulties for public policy makers faced with making explicit decisions about the public funding of controversial health technologies, such as costly new cancer drugs. In this paper we explore the appropriate role of the Rule of Rescue (...) in public resource allocation decisions by health technology funding advisory bodies such as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. We consider practical approaches to operationalising the Rule of Rescue from Australia and the UK before examining the relevance of individual moral imperatives to public policy making. We conclude that that whilst public policy makers in a humane society should facilitate exceptional departures from a cost effectiveness norm in clinical decisions about identified individuals, it is not so obvious that they should, as a matter of national public policy, exempt any one group of unidentified individuals within society from the rules of opportunity cost at the expense of all others. (shrink)

Human interaction has two principle functions: building and maintaining relationships with others and exchanging information. The function of building and maintaining relationships with others relates to interpersonal coordination; this behavior pattern is expected to predict the outcome of social relationships, such as between therapists and patients. It is unclear, however, whether the exchange of information is associated with interpersonal coordination. In the present study, we tested a hypothesis of whether body movement synchrony occurs in a natural conversation and whether this (...) synchrony has a positive correlation with the degree of information exchange. Fifty participants were engaged in a conversation task; each had different roles in the conversation. We measured their body movements during this conversation using an optical motion capture system. Similar to methods that can be found in previous research, we calculated body movements and quantified their synchrony applying the methods previously reported that automatically quantified their body movements. Moreover, we determined the participants’ degree of information exchange concerning the conversation using a questionnaire. We observed that the body movement synchrony of pairs who talked with each other was significantly higher than that of pairs who did not talk with each other, and that this synchrony was positively associated with the degree of information exchange. These results suggest that body movement synchrony predicted information exchange. (shrink)

Under what conditions are material objects, such as particles, parts of a whole object? This is the composition question and is a longstanding open question in philosophy. Existing attempts to specify a non-trivial restriction on composition tend to be vague and face serious counterexamples. Consequently, two extreme answers have become mainstream: composition (the forming of a whole by its parts) happens under no or all conditions. In this paper, we provide a self-contained introduction to the integrated information theory of consciousness (...) (IIT). We show that IIT specifies a non-trivial restriction on composition: composition happens when integrated information is maximized. We compare the IIT-restriction to existing proposals and argue that the IIT-restriction has significant advantages, especially in response to the problems of vagueness and counterexamples. An appendix provides an introduction to calculating parts and wholes with a simple system. (shrink)

This study aimed to identify the learning and business incubation processes and their impact on developing the performance of business incubators in Gaza Strip, and the study relied on the descriptive analytical approach, and the study population consisted of all employees working in business incubators in Gaza Strip in addition to experts and consultants in incubators where their total number reached (62) individuals, and the researchers used the questionnaire as a main tool to collect data through the comprehensive survey method, (...) where (55) questionnaires were retrieved with a recovery rate of (88.7%). The results of the study showed that there is a high approval of the variables of the study, where the dimension of incubation operations came with a relative weight (84.89%), followed by the learning dimension which got a relative weight (82.50%), while the performance level of the incubators got a relative weight (80.12%) and as the study results showed There is a positive relationship statistically between the two dimensions of learning and business incubation processes and performance development in business incubators, and the linear regression analysis model showed that the main effect in improving the performance of business incubators is "after business incubation operations" while it showed weak effect after learning. The study came out with several recommendations, the most important of which is that business incubators seek to reinforce the learning process and incubation processes for business, and the need to periodically evaluate their performance, and that a more effective mechanism be designed to follow up with companies after the end of the incubation period and monitor the progress of these companies. (shrink)

Scarce healthcare resources can be allocated in many ways. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in the UK focuses on the size of the benefit relative to costs, yet we know that there is support among clinicians and the general public for reducing inequalities in health. This paper shows how the UK general public trade-off these sometimes competing objectives, and the data we gather allow us to show the weight given to different population groups, for example, 1 extra (...) year of life in full health to someone who would otherwise die at the age of 60 years is worth more than twice as much as an additional year of life to someone who would otherwise die at the age of 70 years. Such data can help inform the rationing decisions faced by all healthcare systems around the world. (shrink)

Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior; definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric classification; and the validity of the DSM's (...) diagnostic categories. The main argument defended by Tsou is that genuine mental disorders are biological kinds with harmful effects. This argument opposes the dogma that mental disorders are necessarily diseases that result from biological dysfunction. Tsou contends that the broader ideal of biological kinds offers a more promising and empirically ascertainable naturalistic standard for assessing the reality of mental disorders and the validity of psychiatric categories. (shrink)

In psychiatry, pharmacological research has played a crucial role in the formulation, revision, and refinement of neurobiological theories of psychopathology. Besides being utilized as potential treatments for various mental disorders, pharmacological drugs play an important epistemic role as experimental instruments that help scientists uncover the neurobiological underpinnings of mental disorders (Tsou, 2012). Interventions with psychiatric patients using pharmacological drugs provide researchers with information about the neurobiological causes of mental disorders that cannot be obtained in other ways. This important source of (...) evidence for the biological causes of mental disorder is often overlooked in philosophical analyses of psychiatry, especially in skeptical analyses that debase the biological aspects of psychopathology (e.g., Szasz, 1960; Scheff, 1963; Laing, 1967). In discussing pharmacological interventions as a form of evidence for the physical basis of mental disorders, this paper aims to clarify the nature, reliability, and limitations of this evidence. In addition, it illustrates the central role that pharmacological findings in applied clinical contexts play in the acquisition of neurobiological knowledge in research contexts. (shrink)

There has recently been some literature on the properties of a Health-Related Social Welfare Function (HRSWF). The aim of this article is to contribute to the analysis of the different properties of a HRSWF, paying particular attention to the monotonicity principle. For monotonicity to be fulfilled, any increase in individual health—other things equal—should result in an increase in social welfare. We elicit public preferences concerning trade-offs between the total level of health (concern for efficiency) and its distribution (concern for equality), (...) under different hypothetical scenarios through face-to-face interviews. Of key interests are: the distinction between non-monotonic preferences and Rawlsian preferences; symmetry of HRSWF; and the extent of inequality neutral preferences. The results indicate strong support for non-monotonic preferences, over Rawlsian preferences. Furthermore, the majority of those surveyed had preferences that were consistent with a symmetric and inequality averse HRSWF. (shrink)

This study explored how congruency between facial mimicry and observed expressions affects the stability of conscious facial expression representations. Focusing on the congruency effect between proprioceptive/sensorimotor signals and visual stimuli for happy expressions, participants underwent a binocular rivalry task displaying neutral and happy faces. Mimicry was either facilitated with a chopstick or left unrestricted. Key metrics included Initial Percept (bias indicator), Onset Resolution Time (time from onset to Initial Percept), and Cumulative Time (content stabilization measure). Results indicated that mimicry manipulation (...) significantly impacted Cumulative Time for happy faces, highlighting the importance of congruent mimicry in stabilizing conscious awareness of facial expressions. This supports embodied cognition models, showing the integration of proprioceptive information significantly biases conscious visual perception of facial expressions. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose an extension of the Minimal Generation Gap (MGG) to reduce the number of fitness evaluation for the real-coded GAs (RCGA). When MGG is applied to actual engineering problems, for example applied to optimization of design parameters, the fitness calculating time is usually huge because MGG generates many children from one pair of parents and the fitness is calculated by repetitive simulation or analysis. The proposed method called Saving MGG reduces the number of fitness evaluation by (...) estimating the promising degrees of children using individual distribution and fitness information of population, and selecting children based on the promising degree before evaluating the fitness. Experimental results show that RCGA with Saving MGG can provide large reducing effects on 20 or 30 dimensional Sphere functions, Rosenbrock functions, ill-scaled Rosenbrock functions, and Rastrigin function. (shrink)

Purpose. The dynamics and pace of social and economic transformations that are characteristic of modern society, lead to an increase in tension and the destruction of habitual stereotypes – ideals, values, norms, patterns of behaviour that unite people. These moments encourage us to rethink the understanding of "security" essence, in particular, psychological, which emphasizes the urgency of its study in the philosophical and sociocultural coordinates. Theoretical basis of the research is based on the philosophical methodology of K. Jaspers, E. Fromm (...) and the A. Maslow’s psychological approach to understanding of a person. Originality. Psychological security is considered at different levels: first and foremost, society is a characteristic of social security, that is an analysis of how today’s social technologies, social changes affect the quality of life of the country’s population; secondly, the social environment – the family, the immediate environment, reference groups, training teams; thirdly, a person is an experience of his own security-insecurity, when it is possible to talk about the manifestations of psychological violence, when certain behavioral acts contribute to the violation of the security of the other or to self-destruction. It is found out that the knowledge of psychological security is closely connected with the socio-historical conditions of being, with the level of development of material and spiritual culture, with the interests and values prevailing in society, which determines its ontological, epistemological and axiological features. The presented issue is considered in the correlation of psychological security with types of scientific rationality – classical, nonclassical and post-nonclassical approaches, within the framework of which various perspectives, aspects, forms and types of psychological security are studied. Conclusions. The concept of security requires a systematic description of its manifestations, types, levels, concepts: security as the absence of dangers ; security as a certain activity to ensure or to prevent any threats or dangers ; security as a conscious necessity, the value of the individual. The study systematizes various ideas about psychological security in accordance with the logic of scientific knowledge: in the mainstream of classical, non-classical and post-nonclassical approaches. (shrink)

We agree with Block's basic hypothesis postulating the existence of phenomenal consciousness without cognitive access. We explain such states in terms of consciousness without top-down, endogenous attention and speculate that their correlates may be a coalition of neurons that are consigned to the back of cortex, without access to working memory and planning in frontal cortex.

Using the corpus of JSTOR articles, we investigate the role of gender in collaboration patterns across the scholarly landscape by analyzing gender-based homophily--the tendency for researchers to co-author with individuals of the same gender. For a nuanced analysis of gender homophily, we develop methodology necessitated by the fact that the data comprises heterogeneous sub-disciplines and that not all authorships are exchangeable. In particular, we distinguish three components of gender homophily in collaborations: a structural component that is due to demographics and (...) non-gendered authorship norms of a scholarly community, a compositional component which is driven by varying gender representation across sub-disciplines, and a behavioral component which we define as the remainder of observed homophily after its structural and compositional components have been taken into account. Using minimal modeling assumptions, we measure and test for behavioral homophily. We find that significant behavioral homophily can be detected across the JSTOR corpus and show that this finding is robust to missing gender indicators in our data. In a secondary analysis, we show that the proportion of female representation in a field is positively associated with significant behavioral homophily. (shrink)

Planteamiento de la naturaleza, de la filosof a y de su raz n hist rica, al contemplar panor micamente la totalidad de su pasado e intentar reconstruir el dram tico suceso de su origen.

Using William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the play-within-the play, The Murder of Gonzago, as a case study, this essay argues that theatrical utterances constitute a special case of language usage not previously elucidated: the utterance of a statement with propositional content in theatre functions as an event. In short, the propositional content of a particular p (e.g. p1, p2, p3 …), whether or not it is true, is only understood—and understood to be true—if p1 is uttered in a particular time, place, (...) and situation (i.e. during a theatrical event); otherwise, the propositional content in those theatrical utterances can either be false or contingently true. (shrink)