To test whether mental activities collected from non-REM sleep are influenced by REM sleep, we suppressed REM sleep using clomipramine 50 mg or placebo in the evening, in a double blind cross-over design, in 11 healthy young men. Subjects were awakened every hour and asked about their mental activity. The marked REM-sleep suppression induced by clomipramine did not substantially affect any aspects of dream recall . Since long, complex and bizarre dreams persist even after suppressing REM sleep either partially or (...) totally, it suggests that the generation of mental activity during sleep is independent of sleep stage. (shrink)

To test if dreams contain remote or never-experienced motor skills, we collected during 6 weeks dream reports from 15 paraplegics and 15 healthy subjects. In 9/10 subjects with spinal cord injury and in 5/5 with congenital paraplegia, voluntary leg movements were reported during dream, including feelings of walking , running , dancing , standing up , bicycling , and practicing sports . Paraplegia patients experienced walking dreams just as often as controls . There was no correlation between the frequency of (...) walking dreams and the duration of paraplegia. In contrast, patients were rarely paraplegic in dreams. Subjects who had never walked or stopped walking 4–64 years prior to this study still experience walking in their dreams, suggesting that a cerebral walking program, either genetic or more probably developed via mirror neurons is reactivated during sleep. (shrink)

La rencontre du beau nous laisse-t-elle indemnes? Sa joie neuve peut-elle s'ouvrir sans briser d'abord en nous ce qui était trop vieux pour elle, de cette blessure que seul sait donner l'invulnérable? Son excès sur tous nos possibles apporte dans la proximité même l'offrande du lointain. Ce qui nous saisit reste insaisissable et, comme autrui, l'est d'autant plus qu'il s'approche. Ainsi Platon fait de l'effroi le premier présent de la beauté, et pour Dostoïevski et Rilke elle n'est que le commencement (...) du terrible. Cette joie douloureuse, démesurée comme tout amour, est la dimension oubliée par l'esthétique, qui la relègue dans le sublime, distingué du beau. Il faut surmonter l'esthétique pour penser la beauté, si elle est le visage même de l'Etre. Les questions qu'elle fait surgir ne sont pas régionales, elles mettent en cause l'être entier de l'homme et les voies selon lesquelles il peut se perdre ou se trouver. La beauté nous éprouve, et cette épreuve décide de tout. Tel est le sens du mythe du Phèdre de Platon, dont Heidegger médita ce qu'il nous donne toujours à penser. La beauté qui se suffit pourtant nous appelle, et nous impose, sans esquive possible, la charge de lui répondre et de lui correspondre. Cette réponse ne saurait résider dans le jugement esthétique, elle peut seulement être l'acte de louer. Elle ne répond à la beauté qu'en la communiquant, et de la blessure qu'elle reçut ne veut pas guérir, mais accroître le chœur de ceux qui souffrent d'elle. L'insupportable du beau ne peut être porté que par le chant, un chant qui devienne existence. (shrink)

Il y a bien eu, dans le refus d'un culte des images en Europe latine, la construction d'un dogme des images portant prescription de leur usage conforme à leur pouvoir d'évocation du passé (un art de mémoire), aux manipulations de figures dans la machinerie des rêves. La théologie et les philosophies en ont fait l'instrument approché de toute connaissance conçue comme la lecture d'un tableau, possible parce que nous en participons par notre nature. Que signifient les formules de la création (...) : l'homme a été fait comme une image? l'homme a été créé selon le mode des images? Dieu a créé l'homme à son image, ou encore, il l'a fabriqué par une image? (shrink)

Et si certaines entités vivantes n'étaient pas matérielles? Potentiellement éternelles, en lutte pour la survie, elles évoluent. Elles constituent ce qui unit les êtres à travers le temps. Elles sont le fil de la vie. Ces entités vivantes immatérielles sont des informations. Elles existent à travers nous, dans nos gènes, dans notre culture, dans nos écosystèmes. La vie produit l'information, lit l'information et se définit par l'information qu'elle porte. Ce livre nous aide à comprendre le monde vivant d'une manière toute (...) nouvelle! Il est le résultat de discussions passionnées entre trois chercheurs qui, chacun à sa manière, étaient parvenus au même questionnement à propos de la nature. Ils nous proposent une nouvelle description du vivant, où la lutte pour l'existence n'est pas celle des êtres, mais des messages qui passent à travers eux et dont ils sont les hôtes éphémères. (shrink)

Véronique Adam : Les neurosciences ne s’intéressent que depuis très récemment à l’olfaction. Pourriez‑vous expliquer pourquoi ce sens est devenu un objet d’étude plus prégnant? Jean-Louis Millot : En fait, l’olfaction demeure encore peu étudiée comparée à d’autres modalités sensorielles. De manière générale, les neurosciences cognitives actuelles, comme d’autres investigations scientifiques chez l’homme par le passé, se focalisent davantage sur les compétences cognitives complexes, telles qu...

Deep learning and other similar machine learning techniques have a huge advantage over other AI methods: they do function when applied to real-world data, ideally from scratch, without human intervention. However, they have several shortcomings that mere quantitative progress is unlikely to overcome. The paper analyses these shortcomings as resulting from the type of compression achieved by these techniques, which is limited to statistical compression. Two directions for qualitative improvement, inspired by comparison with cognitive processes, are proposed here, in the (...) form of two mechanisms: complexity drop and contrast. These mechanisms are supposed to operate dynamically and not through pre-processing as in neural networks. Their introduction may bring the functioning of AI away from mere reflex and closer to reflection. (shrink)

Inλ-calculus, the strategy of leftmost reduction (“call-by-name”) is known to have good mathematical properties; in particular, it always terminates when applied to a normalizable term. On the other hand, with this strategy, the argument of a function is re-evaluated at each time it is used.To avoid this drawback, we define the notion of “storage operator”, for each data type. IfT is a storage operator for integers, for example, let us replace the evaluation, by leftmost reduction, ofϕτ (whereτ is an integer, (...) andϕ anyλ-term) by the evaluation oftτϕ. Then, this computation is the same as the following: first computeτ up to some reduced formτ 0, and then applyϕ toτ 0. So, we have simulated “call-by-value” evaluation within the strategy of leftmost reduction.The main theorem of the paper (Corollary of Theorem 4.1) shows that, in a second orderλ-calculus, using Gödel's translation of classical intuitionistic logic, we can find a very simple type (or specification) for storage operators. Thus, it gives a way to get such operators, which is to prove this type in second order intuitionistic predicate calculus. (shrink)

Issu de la thèse de l'auteur soutenue en 1987, cet ouvrage a pour visée de redéfinir l'anthropologie, en dissipant le malentendu instauré par le modèle galiléen de scientificité appliqué aux sciences sociales afin d'opérer un retour à la fondation historique de la discipline dans l'epistêmê politikê des anciens Grecs. Trois voies d'accès sont parcourues : G. Dumézil, M. Heidegger et G. Guillaume. ©Electre 2018.

, which uses the intuitionistic propositional calculus, with the only connective →. It is very important, because the well known Curry-Howard correspondence between proofs and programs was originally discovered with it, and because it enjoys the normalization property: every typed term is strongly normalizable. It was extended to second order intuitionistic logic, in 1970, by J.-Y. Girard [4], under the name of system F, still with the normalization property.More recently, in 1990, the Curry-Howard correspondence was extended to classical logic, following (...) Felleisen and Griffin [6] who discovered that the law of Peirce corresponds to control instructions in functional programming languages. It is interesting to notice that, as early as 1972, Clint and Hoare [1] had made an analogous remark for the law of excluded middle and controlled jump instructions in imperative languages.There are now many type systems which are based on classical logic; among the best known are the system LC of J.-Y. Girard [5] and the λμ-calculus of M. Parigot [11]. We shall use below a system closely related to the latter, called the λ c -calculus [8, 9]. Both systems use classical second order logic and have the normalization property.In the sequel, we shall extend the λ c -calculus to the Zermelo-Frænkel set theory. The main problem is due to the axiom of extensionality. To overcome this difficulty, we first give the axioms of ZF in a suitable (equivalent) form, which we call ZF ɛ. (shrink)

We describe here a simple method in order to obtain programs from proofs in second-order classical logic. Then we extend to classical logic the results about storage operators proved by Krivine for intuitionistic logic. This work generalizes previous results of Parigot.

Introduction. Il est bien connu que la correspondance de Curry-Howard permet d'associer un programme, sous la forme d'un λ-terme, à toute preuve intuitionniste, formalisée dans le calcul des prédicats du second ordre. Cette correspondance a été étendue, assez récemment, à la logique classique moyennant une extension convenable du λ-calcul. Chaque théorème formalisé en logique du second ordre correspond donc à une spécification de programme.Il se pose alors le problème, en général tout à fait non trivial, de trouver la spécification associée (...) à un théorème donné; autrement dit, de déterminer le comportement opérationnel commun aux λ-termes associés aux diverses démonstrations formelles du théorème considéré.Cette question est résolue ici pour le théorème de complétude de la logique classique.La première étape consiste à formaliser convenablement ce théorème en logique du second ordre. Ce travail est fait complètement dans la section 1. Il a comme sous-produit, peut-être inattendu, de montrer que ce théorème est prouvable en logique intuitionniste du second ordre. Ceci, toutefois, à condition d'introduire une légère variante de la notion de modèle, en admettant un modèle supplémentaire trivial, où toute formule est satisfaite.On notera, à ce sujet, que des preuves intuitionnistes du théorème de complétude de la logique intuitionniste, utilisant des variantes de la notion de modele de Kripke, ont été données par H. Friedman [7] et W. Veldman [8]. On remarquera également qu'un argument de G. Kreisel [2] montre que le théorème de complétude habituel de la logique intuitionniste n'a pas de preuve intuitionniste. (shrink)

Artificial intelligency can bring speed and reliability to drug discovery process. It represents an additional intelligence, which in any case can replace the strategic and logic creative insight of the medicinal chemist who remains the architect and molecule master designer. In terms of drug design, artificial intelligency, deep learning machines, and other revolutionary technologies will match with the medicinal chemist’s natural intelligency, but for sure never go beyond. This manuscript tries to assess the impact of the artificial intelligency on drug (...) discovery today. (shrink)

Aristotle’s Prior Analytics identifies deductions simpliciter with inferential necessity, so that a deduced conclusion is necessarily inferred from some premises. Modern logical reconstructions claim that inferential necessity in Aristotle corresponds to logical validity. However, this logical reconstruction fails on two accounts. First, logical validity does not highlight Aristotle’s distinction between inferential necessity and predicative necessity, meaning that the inferential necessity of a deduction is not of the same kind as the predicative necessity of a non‑deductive argument. Second, logical validity does (...) not explain the relevance of Aristotle’s distinction between complete and incomplete deductions. Logicians speak of complete deduction by adding the term “obvious” or “transparent” to logical validity, and then criticize Aristotle’s view for being unclear. However, Aristotle’s position is not confronted with this difficulty. There is nothing to add to inferential necessity, which already means complete deducibility, as opposed to incomplete deducibility, deemed to be potentially complete. Accordingly, the Prior Analytics reduces the incomplete deductions to the complete deductions in order to prove the potential, inferential necessity of the incomplete deductions. Logical validity would have been faithful to Aristotle’s text, if it had been possible to coin a notion of potential validity, distinct from both validity and invalidity. (shrink)

This paper shows that Aristotle's De Interpretatione does not separate syntax from semantics. Linguistic sentences are not syntactic entities, and non-linguistic meanings are not semantic propositions expressed by linguistic sentences. In fact, Aristotle resorts to a mental conception of meaning, distinguishing linguistic meanings in a given language from non-linguistic mental contents in relation to actual things: while the former are not the same for all, the latter are shared by everyone. Aristotle is not a modern logician, like Boole, Frege, or (...) Russell, in so far as a mental conception of meaning does not reveal an abstract semantics for a syntactic language. (shrink)

Trade in high-value-added toxins for therapeutic and biological use is expanding. These toxins are generally derived from microalgae belonging to the dinoflagellate family. Due to the difficulties to grow these sensitive planktonic species and to the complexity of methods used to synthesize these molecules, which are generally complex chemical structures, biotoxin manufacturers called on artificial intelligence technologies. Manufacturing processes have been greatly improved through the development of specific learning neural networks, applied to each phases of biotoxin production: photo-bioreactors operating at (...) optimal yied; new chemical synthesis research processes; toxin biosynthetic research pathways offering short-cut possibilities. (shrink)

Cinema against Spectacle -- Introduction -- Cinema against Spectacle -- I. Opening the Window? -- II. Inventing the Cinema? -- III. Filming the Disaster? -- IV. Cutting the Figure? -- V. Changing the Spectator? -- Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field -- Introduction -- I. On a Dual Origin -- The ideological place of the "base apparatus" -- Birth = deferral: The invention of the cinema -- II. Depth of Field: The Double Scene -- Bazin's "surplus realism" -- (...) The work of "transparency" -- For a materialist history of the cinema -- "For the first time ..." -- III."Primitive" Depth of Field -- IV. Effacement of Depth/Advent of Speech -- V. Which Speech? (shrink)

When it was first published in French in 1980, The Ordinary Man of Cinema signaled a shift from the French film criticism of the 1960s to a new breed of film philosophy that disregarded the semiotics and post-structuralism of the preceding decades. Schefer describes the schizophrenic subjectivity the cinema offers us: the film as a work projected without memory, viewed by (and thereby lived by) a subject scarred and shaped by memory. The Ordinary Man of Cinema delineates the phenomenology of (...) movie-going and the fleeting, impalpable zone in which an individuals personal memory confronts the cinemas ideological images to create a new way of thinking. It is also a book replete with mummies and vampires, tyrants and prostitutes, murderers and freaksfigures that are fundamental to Schefers conception of the cinema, because the worlds that cinema traverses (our worlds, interior and exterior) are worlds of pain, unconscious desire, decay, repressed violence, and the endless mystery of the body. Fear and pleasure breed monsters, and such are what Schefers emblematic "ordinary man" seeks and encounters when engaging in the disordering of the ordinary that the movie theater offers him. Among other things, Schefer considers "The Gods" in 31 brief essays on film stills and "The Criminal Life" with reflections on spectatorship and autobiography. While Schefers book has long been standard reading in French film scholarship, until now it has been something of a missing link to the field (and more broadly, French theory) in English. It is one of the building blocks of more widely known and read translations of Gilles Deleuze (who cited this book as an influence on his own cinema books) and Jacques Rancière. (shrink)