In this provocative book, Fred Dretske argues that to achieve an understanding of the mind it is not enough to understand the biological machinery by means of...

This collection of essays by eminent philosopher Fred Dretske brings together work on the theory of knowledge and philosophy of mind spanning thirty years. The two areas combine to lay the groundwork for a naturalistic philosophy of mind. The fifteen essays focus on perception, knowledge, and consciousness. Together, they show the interconnectedness of Dretske's work in epistemology and his more contemporary ideas on philosophy of mind, shedding light on the links which can be made between the two. The first (...) section of the book argues the point that knowledge consists of beliefs with the right objective connection to facts; two essays discuss this conception of knowledge's implications for naturalism. The next section articulates a view of perception, attempting to distinguish conceptual states from phenomenal states. A naturalized philosophy of mind, and thus a naturalized epistemology, is articulated in the third section. This collection will be a valuable resource for a wide range of philosophers and their students, and will also be of interest to cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of biology. (shrink)

Space tourism is an emerging field where few people have direct experience. However, considering the potential in the near future, it is beneficial to better understand how related information influences people’s attitudes about this new form of tourism. Employing information-processing-based Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics on a dataset of 361 respondents consuming content related to space tourism on Chinese social media, we found that induced happiness and impression are positively associated with willingness to try space tourism. Information authenticity positively moderates (...) these two associations. Our findings emphasize three aspects of information during the processes of reception and filtering: meaning, intensity, and trust. Since promotional materials for space tourism rely heavily on mental simulations rather than objective feedback, creative uses of digital technology are advantageous. However, precautions must be taken to prevent exploitation, such as false advertising, exaggeration, and emotional manipulation. (shrink)

Extant literature suggests a positive correlation between social trust (also called generalized trust) and life satisfaction. However, the psychological pathways underlying this relationship can be complex. Using the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF), we examined the influence of social trust in a high-violence environment. Employing Bayesian analysis on a sample of 1237 adults in Cali, Colombia, we found that in a linear relationship, generalized trust is positively associated with life satisfaction. However, in a model including the interactions between trust and education (...) level as well as between trust and socioeconomic status, generalized trust is found to be negatively associated with life satisfaction. In this non-linear relationship, both education level and socioeconomic status have moderating effects against the negative association between generalized trust and life satisfaction. In other words, less educated people living in worse socioeconomic conditions are more likely to have lower life satisfaction when they have higher levels of social trust. In contrast, highly educated people living in better socioeconomic conditions are more likely to have higher life satisfaction when they have higher levels of social trust. Due to the facilitating function of trust in information processing, lowering the rigor of the filtering system in a high-violence social environment will likely put an individual at risk. Based on our findings, we suggest that policymakers should consider the impacts of social contexts when advocating for increasing social trust. We also recommend that researchers carefully examine the psychological mechanism underlying an observed association before making suggestions for policymaking. (shrink)

Explores some steps toward non-assimilative encounters in the "global village.".

Cheating is widely considered a condemnable behavior in society and a big problem in the educational system. In this study, we employ the information-processing-based Bayesian Mindsponge Framework to explore deeper the subjective cost-benefit evaluation involving the perceived value of cheating. Conducting Bayesian analysis on 493 university students from Germany, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and Japan, we found that students who have more positive attitudes toward cheating are more likely to cheat. However, a higher capability of cognitive reflection acts as a moderator (...) that negates the above effect. Re-evaluation of prior thoughts allows for more accurate assessments of the associated risks and possible costs, which help reduce the probability of carrying out cheating behavior. As rapid technological advancement may introduce new and efficient cheating methods, a better understanding of the psychology of cheating in students can help schools prepare better countermeasures. (shrink)

In this article Mr Tam Dalyell mp uses extracts from the speech1 he made in the House of Commons on 11 December 1974 to reiterate his reasons for persisting in his attempts to have formulated in law the right of hospitals to take such organs from a dead person as might be useful unless before death potential donors (all of us) had stated that they did not consent. Details of those objecting would be registered on a central computer.

Extant literature suggests a positive correlation between social trust (also called generalized trust) and life satisfaction. However, the psychological pathways underlying this relationship can be complex. Using the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF), we examined the influence of social trust in a high-violence environment. Employing Bayesian analysis on a sample of 1237 adults in Cali, Colombia, we found that in a linear relationship, generalized trust is positively associated with life satisfaction. However, in a model including the interactions between trust and education (...) level as well as between trust and socioeconomic status, generalized trust is found to be negatively associated with life satisfaction. In this non-linear relationship, both education level and socioeconomic status have moderating effects against the negative association between generalized trust and life satisfaction. In other words, less educated people living in worse socioeconomic conditions are more likely to have lower life satisfaction when they have higher levels of social trust. In contrast, highly educated people living in better socioeconomic conditions are more likely to have higher life satisfaction when they have higher levels of social trust. Due to the facilitating function of trust in information processing, lowering the rigor of the filtering system in a high-violence social environment will likely put an individual at risk. Based on our findings, we suggest that policymakers should consider the impacts of social contexts when advocating for increasing social trust. We also recommend that researchers carefully examine the psychological mechanism underlying an observed association before making suggestions for policymaking. (shrink)

In the trust-health relationship, how trusting other people in society may promote good health is a topic often examined. However, the other direction of influence – how health may affect trust – has not been well explored. In order to investigate this possible effect, we employed Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics to go deeper into the information processing mechanisms underlying the expressions of trust. Conducting Bayesian analysis on a dataset of 1237 residents from Cali, Colombia, we found that general health (...) status is positively associated with generalized trust, but recent experiences of illnesses/injuries have a negative moderating effect. Personalized trust is largely unchanged across different general health conditions, but the trust level becomes higher with recent experiences of illnesses/injuries. Psychophysiological mechanisms of increasing information filtering intensity toward unfamiliar sources during a vulnerable state of health is a plausible explanation of found patterns in generalized trust. Because established personal relationships are reinforced information channels, personalized trust is not affected as much. Rather, the results suggest that people may rely even more on loved ones when they are in bad health conditions. This exploratory study shows that the trust-health relationship can be examined from a different angle that may provide new insights. (shrink)

Comparative political theory is at best an embryonic and marginalized endeavor. As practiced in most Western universities, the study of political theory generally involves a rehearsal of the canon of Western political thought from Plato to Marx. Only rarely are practitioners of political thought willing (and professionally encouraged) to transgress the canon and thereby the cultural boundaries of North America and Europe in the direction of genuine comparative investigation. Border Crossings presents an effort to remedy this situation, fully launching a (...) new era in political theory. Thirteen scholars from around the world examine the various political traditions of West, South, and East Asia and engage in a reflective cross-cultural discussion that belies the assumptions of an Asian "essence" and of an unbridgeable gulf between West and non-West. The denial of essential differences does not, however, amount to an endorsement of essential sameness. As viewed and as practiced by contributors to this ground-breaking volume, comparative political theorizing must steer a course between uniformity and radical separation--this is the path of "border crossings.". (shrink)

"This anthology of writings by prominent black thinkers from antiquity to the present makes the case for a central tradition of black philosophy, rooted in Africa and distinct from the intellectual heritage of the West."--From publisher description.

The disagreement over whether Aristotle recognized rights in some form unavoidably involves disagreement over what rights are, and the theory of rights itself is still highly contested. There is no consensus concerning how " right'? is to be defined, how rights are to be theoretically grounded, or how rights theory is to be applied in particular circumstances. This is not, however, a good reason to dismiss the issue of whether there are rights in Aristotle: for Aristotle, like modern rights theorists, (...) is concerned about the moral and legal status of the individual within the community, and he expresses this in terms of claims of justice. The issue is worthy of study not only because it can lead to a deeper understanding of Aristotle's conceptions of justice and the common good, but also because it may shed valuable light on the theoretical foundations of human rights, since he offers a theory of political justice which is based on a metaphysical theory of human nature. (shrink)

Some Generalizations of Categorical Grammars Emmon Bach 0. INTRODUCTION The last decade of work in syntax has seen a marked demotion in the importance of ...

Ethnic cleansing and other methods of political and social exclusion continue to thrive in our globalized world, complicating the idea that unity and diversity can exist in the same society. When we emphasize unity, we sacrifice heterogeneity, yet when we stress diversity, we create a plurality of individuals connected only by tenuous circumstance. As long as we remain tethered to these binaries, as long as we are unable to imagine the sort of society we want in an age of diversity, (...) we cannot achieve an enduring solution to conflicts that continue unabated despite our increasing proximity to one another. By envisioning the public as a multivoiced body, Fred Evans offers a solution to the dilemma of diversity. The multivoiced body is both one and many: heterogeneous voices that at once separate and bind themselves together through their continuous and creative interplay. By focusing on this traditionally undervalued or overlooked notion of voice, Evans shows how we can valorize simultaneously the solidarity, diversity, and richness of society. Moreover, recognition of society as a multivoiced body helps resists the pervasive countertendency to raise a chosen discourse to the level of "one true God," "pure race," or some other "oracle" that eliminates the dynamism of contesting voices. To support these views, Evans taps the major figures and themes of analytic and continental philosophy as well as modernist, postmodernist, postcolonial, and feminist thought. He also turns to sources outside of philosophy to address the implications of his views for justice, citizenship, democracy, and collective as well as individual rights. Through the seemingly simple conceit of a multivoiced body, Evans straddles both philosophy and political practice, confronting issues of subjectivity, language, communication, and identity. For anyone interested in moving toward a just society and politics, _The Multivoiced Body_ offers an innovative approach to the problems of human diversity and ethical plurality. (shrink)

Precognition is an anomaly in information transmission and interpretation. Extant literature suggests that paranormal beliefs and gender may have significant influences on this unknown information process. This study examines the effects of these two factors, including their interactions, on precognition performance by employing the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics. Using Bayesian analysis on secondary data of 60 participants, we found that men may have higher chances to score a hit in a precognition task compared to women. Interestingly, stronger beliefs in (...) the paranormal may decrease the success probability in performing precognition tasks. Considering the interactions between the two factors, the effect of paranormal beliefs on precognition task performance is stronger in men than women. Using mindsponge-based reasoning, we argue that paranormal beliefs may increase the interference of imagination in the reception of hypothetical precognitive information. Women tend to rely more on intuition, which may lessen the interference effect of imagination on hypothetical psi reception. Based on the findings, we suggest that researchers should be careful when assessing participants’ psi potential for experiments. We also demonstrate some advantages of utilizing the BMF in parapsychological research. (shrink)

Passages in Leibniz which have been understood to contain his statement of Leibniz law do not in fact contain any statement of that principle. Some of these passages contain a statement of the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, While others contain a statement of a principle about concept identity. The latter principle states that a concept, A, Is identical with a concept, B, If and only if a can be substituted for b in any proposition without change of truth (...) value. (shrink)

Patients with serious illnesses or injuries may decide to quit their medical treatment if they think paying the fees will put their families into destitution. Without treatment, it is likely that fatal outcomes will soon follow. We call this phenomenon “near-suicide”. This study attempted to explore this phenomenon by examining how the seriousness of the patient’s illness or injury and the subjective evaluation of the patient’s and family’s financial situation after paying treatment fees affect the final decision on the treatment (...) process. Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics were employed to analyze a dataset of 1042 Vietnamese patients. We found that the more serious the illnesses or injuries of patients were, the more likely they were to choose to quit treatment if they perceived that paying the treatment fees heavily affected their families’ financial status. Particularly, only one in four patients with the most serious health issues who thought that continuing the treatment would push themselves and their families into destitution would decide to continue the treatment. Considering the information-filtering mechanism using subjective cost–benefit judgments, these patients likely chose the financial well-being and future of their family members over their individual suffering and inevitable death. Our study also demonstrates that mindsponge-based reasoning and BMF analytics can be effective in designing and processing health data for studying extreme psychosocial phenomena. Moreover, we suggest that policymakers implement and adjust their policies (e.g., health insurance) following scientific evidence to mitigate patients’ likelihood of making “near-suicide” decisions and improve social equality in the healthcare system. (shrink)

The most successful theory in all of science--and the basis of one third of our economy--says the strangest things about the world and about us. Can you believe that physical reality is created by our observation of it? Physicists were forced to this conclusion, the quantum enigma, by what they observed in their laboratories. Trying to understand the atom, physicists built quantum mechanics and found, to their embarrassment, that their theory intimately connects consciousness with the physical world. Quantum Enigma explores (...) what that implies and why some founders of the theory became the foremost objectors to it. Schrodinger showed that it "absurdly" allowed a cat to be in a "superposition" simultaneously dead and alive. Einstein derided the theory's "spooky interactions." With Bell's Theorem, we now know Schrodinger's superpositions and Einstein's spooky interactions indeed exist. Authors Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner explain all of this in non-technical terms with help from some fanciful stories and bits about the theory's developers. They present the quantum mystery honestly, with an emphasis on what is and what is not speculation. Physics' encounter with consciousness is its skeleton in the closet. Because the authors open the closet and examine the skeleton, theirs is a controversial book. Quantum Enigma's description of the experimental quantum facts, and the quantum theory explaining them, is undisputed. Interpreting what it all means, however, is controversial. Every interpretation of quantum physics encounters consciousness. Rosenblum and Kuttner therefore turn to exploring consciousness itself--and encounter quantum physics. Free will and anthropic principles become crucial issues, and the connection of consciousness with the cosmos suggested by some leading quantum cosmologists is mind-blowing. Readers are brought to a boundary where the particular expertise of physicists is no longer a sure guide. They will find, instead, the facts and hints provided by quantum mechanics and the ability to speculate for themselves. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:L'autorité d'un canon philosophique. Le cas Descartes by Delphine Antoine-MahutFred AblondiDelphine Antoine-Mahut. L'autorité d'un canon philosophique. Le cas Descartes. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2021. Pp. 356. Paperback, €13.00.Henri Gouhier once asked, "Après le mort de Descartes, qu'est-ce que le cartésianisme?" to which he replied, "C'est la philosophie de Descartes vue par ses disciples" (La vocation de Malebranche [Paris: J. Vrin, 1926], 80). In L'autorité d'un canon philosophique, (...) Delphine Antoine-Mahut asks a similar question about who controls in just what a philosophical '-ism' consists, and she offers a nuanced and thoughtful answer. While "l'auctorialité du nom en question" is one part, she adds that we must also consider "l'auctorialité de celui ou de celle qui raconte cette histoire, dans un contexte et avec des enjeux très différent de ceux de l'individu d'origine auquel cette histoire est attachée" (10–11). The end result is that "un canon philosophique n'a rien de philosophiquement pur" (12). With this larger question in mind, she documents, as something of a case study, the genesis and development of the "impure" canon cartésien.The battle for authority over the content of canonical Cartesianism starts with the story of Descartes and his one-time devoted pupil and later disavowed outcast, Henricus Regius. Their relationship began in 1638, when Regius, a professor of theoretical medicine and botany at the University of Utrecht, wrote a letter of appreciation to Descartes. Over the next few years, Descartes offered both corrections to Regius's written work and advice on how best to handle the controversies that arose as a result of those writings. In 1645, however, Regius published his Fundamenta physices, in which he claimed that reason alone is not sufficient to prove either the existence of God or the real distinction between the human mind and body. In fact, he went on to speculate that the human mind is merely a mode of the body. [End Page 322] He also denied that we possess innate ideas, and the existence in us of a pure intellect. At the bottom of Regius's break with Descartes was his belief that Cartesian metaphysics is not needed to ground Cartesian physics. For Regius, consistency with empirical findings and simplicity are all that is required.At this point, as Antoine-Mahut puts it, "le sillon est creusé" (41). Descartes responded angrily, both in private letters and in his preface to the 1647 French edition of his Principles of Philosophy. He accused Regius of plagiarizing from his unpublished work and of confusing his views. Following the appearance of a broadsheet summarizing Regius's disagreements with Descartes (written by Regius's student, Peter Wassenaer), Descartes wrote Notae in programma quoddam, in which he reiterated his arguments for both God's existence and the real distinction. Regius and Wassenaer replied with their Brevis explicatio mentis humanae (1648). All of this is laid out clearly and in detail by Antoine-Mahut in part 1 of her book.Part 2 picks up with Descartes's literary executor Claude Clerselier and his campaign to disassociate Regius from what he believed to be "true" Cartesianism. In the preface to the publication of the first volume of Descartes's letters (1657), Clerselier revived the charge of plagiarism against Regius, who responded by publishing a second edition of the Brevis explicatio. This included a preface that attacked Clerselier for publishing Regius's private correspondence without his permission—in fact, because Regius had not made Descartes's letters to him available, Clerselier had had to reconstruct them from Descartes's notes— and claimed it was Descartes who plagiarized Regius. In Antoine-Mahut's narrative of these events, this "disassociation" was followed by a "combining" (her terms) of Cartesian thought with empiricist natural philosophy in the work of Louis de la Forge, for whom "le cartésianisme se spécifie comme une psychologie empiriste dans laquelle l'activité de l'âme joue un rôle essentiel" (175). There was then a subsequent "incorporating" (again borrowing Antoine-Mahut's terminology) by Nicolas Malebranche, who, she says, "occupe une place... (shrink)

Patients with serious illnesses or injuries may decide to quit their medical treatment if they think paying the fees will put their families into destitution. Without treatment, it is likely that fatal outcomes will soon follow. We call this phenomenon “near-suicide”. This study attempted to explore this phenomenon by examining how the seriousness of the patient’s illness or injury and the subjective evaluation of the patient’s and family’s financial situation after paying treatment fees affect the final decision on the treatment (...) process. Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics were employed to analyze a dataset of 1042 Vietnamese patients. We found that the more serious the illnesses or injuries of patients were, the more likely they were to choose to quit treatment if they perceived that paying the treatment fees heavily affected their families’ financial status. Particularly, only one in four patients with the most serious health issues who thought that continuing the treatment would push themselves and their families into destitution would decide to continue the treatment. Considering the information-filtering mechanism using subjective cost–benefit judgments, these patients likely chose the financial well-being and future of their family members over their individual suffering and inevitable death. Our study also demonstrates that mindsponge-based reasoning and BMF analytics can be effective in designing and processing health data for studying extreme psychosocial phenomena. Moreover, we suggest that policymakers implement and adjust their policies (e.g., health insurance) following scientific evidence to mitigate patients’ likelihood of making “near-suicide” decisions and improve social equality in the healthcare system. (shrink)

Ethnic cleansing and other methods of political and social exclusion continue to thrive in our globalized world, complicating the idea that unity and diversity can exist in the same society. When we emphasize unity, we sacrifice heterogeneity, yet when we stress diversity, we create a plurality of individuals connected only by tenuous circumstance. As long as we remain tethered to these binaries, as long as we are unable to imagine the sort of society we want in an age of diversity, (...) we cannot achieve an enduring solution to conflicts that continue unabated despite our increasing proximity to one another. By envisioning the public as a multivoiced body, Fred Evans offers a solution to the dilemma of diversity. The multivoiced body is both one and many: heterogeneous voices that at once separate and bind themselves together through their continuous and creative interplay. By focusing on this traditionally undervalued or overlooked notion of voice, Evans shows how we can valorize simultaneously the solidarity, diversity, and richness of society. Moreover, recognition of society as a multivoiced body helps resists the pervasive countertendency to raise a chosen discourse to the level of "one true God," "pure race," or some other "oracle" that eliminates the dynamism of contesting voices. To support these views, Evans taps the major figures and themes of analytic and continental philosophy as well as modernist, postmodernist, postcolonial, and feminist thought. He also turns to sources outside of philosophy to address the implications of his views for justice, citizenship, democracy, and collective as well as individual rights. Through the seemingly simple conceit of a multivoiced body, Evans straddles both philosophy and political practice, confronting issues of subjectivity, language, communication, and identity. For anyone interested in moving toward a just society and politics, _The Multivoiced Body_ offers an innovative approach to the problems of human diversity and ethical plurality. (shrink)

After employing the mindsponge mechanism and 3D information process of creativity to explain the serendipity process in previous chapters, we realize that it may be helpful to delve into the relations between serendipity and the formulation of new values and information connections through non-linear processes. Thus, this chapter summarizes some preliminary attempts to use non-linear information processes to explain serendipity. We also briefly mention the benefits of information exchange among members of social groups and explain this approach.

An elegant introduction to Bataille's major concepts and concerns, "Bataille: A Critical Reader" underlines the powerful impact his work has had, in different ...

Our study examines how a company’s engagement in corporate social responsibility influences word of mouth about the company on Twitter, particularly during a service delay. We use the airline industry as the study context. On the popular social medium Twitter, people post tweets about airline services and raise concerns about service delays when flights are delayed, canceled, or diverted. Drawing on the literature on legitimacy and the halo effect, we argue that a company’s CSR engagement enhances its corporate image, which (...) in turn, influences WOM about the company on Twitter. We predict and find that airlines with better CSR engagement receive more positive word of mouth and less negative word of mouth on Twitter. We also find that service delays reduce PWOM and increase NWOM, with the additional finding that the positive relationship between service delays and NWOM is less strong for airlines with better CSR engagement. We conduct additional analyses to investigate the effects of environmental, social, and governance CSR on PWOM and NWOM. Our study has practical implications in informing companies about the benefits of CSR engagement in relation to public opinion during service delays. (shrink)

A new approach to the 'hard problem'of consciousness, the eons-old mind-body problem, is proposed, inspired by Whitehead, Schopenhauer, Griffin, and others. I define a 'simple subject' as the fundamental unit of matter and of consciousness. Simple subjects are inherently experiential, albeit in a highly rudimentary manner compared to human consciousness. With this re-framing, the 'physical' realm includes the 'mental' realm; they are two aspects of the same thing, the outside and inside of each real thing. This view is known as (...) panpsychism or panexperientialism and is in itself a partial solution to the hard problem. The secondary but more interesting question may be framed as: what is a 'complex subject'? How do simple subjects combine to form complex subjects like bats and human beings? This is more generally known as the 'combination problem'or the 'boundary problem', and is the key problem facing both materialist and panpsychist approaches to consciousness. I suggest a new approach for resolving this component of the hard problem, a 'general theory of complex subjects' that includes 'psychophysical laws' in the form of a simple mathematical framework. I present three steps for characterizing complex subjects, with the physical nature of time key to this new understanding. Viewing time as fundamentally quantized is important. I also suggest, as a second-order conceptualization, that 'information' and 'experience' may be considered identical concepts and that there is no double-aspect to information. Rather, there is a single aspect to information and it is inherently experiential. Tononi's, Chalmers', and Freeman's similar theories are compared and contrasted. (shrink)

Where is consciousness? Neurobiological theories of consciousness look primarily to synaptic firing and “spike codes” as the physical substrate of consciousness, although the specific mechanisms of consciousness remain unknown. Synaptic firing results from electrochemical processes in neuron axons and dendrites. All neurons also produce electromagnetic (EM) fields due to various mechanisms, including the electric potential created by transmembrane ion flows, known as “local field potentials,” but there are also more meso-scale and macro-scale EM fields present in the brain. The functional (...) role of these EM fields has long been a source of debate. We suggest that these fields, in both their local and global forms, may be the primary seat of consciousness, working as a gestalt with synaptic firing and other aspects of neuroanatomy to produce the marvelous complexity of minds. We call this assertion the “electromagnetic field hypothesis.” The neuroanatomy of the brain produces the local and global EM fields but these fields are not identical with the anatomy of the brain. These fields are produced by, but not identical with, the brain, in the same manner that twigs and leaves are produced by a tree’s branches and trunk but are not the same as the branches and trunk. As such, the EM fields represent the more granular, both spatially and temporally, aspects of the brain’s structure and functioning than the neuroanatomy of the brain. The brain’s various EM fields seem to be more sensitive to small changes than the neuroanatomy of the brain. We discuss issues with the spike code approach as well as the various lines of evidence supporting our argument that the brain’s EM fields may be the primary seat of consciousness. This evidence (which occupies most of the paper) suggests that oscillating neural EM fields may make firing in neural circuits oscillate, and these oscillating circuits. may help unify and guide conscious cognition. (shrink)