Rational Theology and Metaphysics THERE are many approaches to the study of religion. The present work will be confined to a philosophical examination of ...

We examine the reverse mathematics and computability theory of a form of Ramsey's theorem in which the linear n-tuples of a binary tree are colored.

Indian philosophical thought has been deeply metaphysical, and it is no surprise that, faced with the anti-metaphysical thrust of contemporary philosophy, one of the issues uppermost in the minds of Indian thinkers is the question of the possibility of metaphysics. In recent philosophical literature, two tendencies are discernible: an attempt to defend metaphysics in the traditional grand style, and a concern with the idea of descriptive metaphysics as an alternative. For the former, we may turn to Kalidas Bhattacharyya and J. (...) N. Chubb; for the latter to J. N. Mohanty and S. N. Ganguly. (shrink)

Purpose Digital India’s attempts to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. This research examines three questions: What is the educational importance of social media in Indian higher education? What gains and dangers does it pose when used for formal learning? Could informal learning via technology powerfully supplement learning through the formal system? Design/methodology/approach In total, 640 students were contacted through email lists provided by their institutions after these institutions had obtained their consent to participate in the (...) study. The response rate is worked out at 44.84 per cent. Telephone interviews were conducted with 22 “veterans” in the field of higher education in India. All this provided areas of importance on which this study is based. Findings India is no doubt experimenting with more creative methods of learning and teaching. Educational technology is at embryonic stage compared to many of the advanced countries. The results show that even when all facilities are present, students are not fully taking advantage of the benefits technology affords for formal learning. Not only is there a digital divide between generations but also within generations. How the technology is integrated into the learning process is important. The entire learning infrastructure is certainly available in India and it is struggling to meet student expectations and offer a more dynamic and appropriate pedagogy. Practical implications This paper throws light on models explicit to the Indian scene in how students can benefit from social media beyond the classroom. It discusses challenges in its adoption in Indian higher education and ways to meet these challenges. Social implications Technology-led learning brings about a difference and the present generation in India is better equipped to tackle the challenges of the workplace, will be helpful to their employers and would fit well into a global business environment. Originality/value Because of the relative newness of the approach in India and fairly restricted use in the Indian higher education system, the impact of social media on student engagement in the higher education sector in India is not fully known. (shrink)

We establish that for every computably enumerable (c.e.) Turing degree b the upper cone of c.e. Turing degrees determined by b is the degree spectrum of the successor relation of some computable linear ordering. This follows from our main result, that for a large class of linear orderings the degree spectrum of the successor relation is closed upward in the c.e. Turing degrees.

There is a long history of the science of intelligent machines and its potential to provide scientific insights have been debated since the dawn of AI. In particular, there is renewed interest in the role of AI in research and research policy as an enabler of new methods, processes, management and evaluation which is still relatively under-explored. This empirical paper explores interviews with leading scholars on the potential impact of AI on research practice and culture through deductive, thematic analysis to (...) show the issues affecting academics and universities today. Our interviewees identify positive and negative consequences for research and researchers with respect to _collective_ and _individual use_. AI is perceived as helpful with respect to information gathering and other narrow tasks, and in support of impact and interdisciplinarity. However, using AI as a way of ‘speeding up—to keep up’ with bureaucratic and metricised processes, may proliferate negative aspects of academic culture in that the expansion of AI in research should assist and not replace human creativity. Research into the future role of AI in the research process needs to go further to address these challenges, and ask fundamental questions about how AI might assist in providing new tools able to question the values and principles driving institutions and research processes. We argue that to do this an explicit movement of meta-research on the role of AI in research should consider the effects for research and researcher creativity. Anticipatory approaches and engagement of diverse and critical voices at policy level and across disciplines should also be considered. (shrink)

Oppositional constructions of peace and war and simplistic equations of peace with justice obscure the importance of activities primarily geared toward the limitation of harm. The medieval and patristic legacy of thinking with peace restricts peace to variants of a singular concept that dictates the diplomatic and domestic policy of modern states. At the same time, secular political theory has moved away from medieval clerical acknowledgment of compatibilities between turbulence and peace, producing temporally bounded categories of peace and war that (...) facilitate damage or at best allow harm to endure. In this discourse, social disruption must act as signifier for more general violence—but then is repressed on exactly the same terms, making it difficult to arrive at solutions for conflict on the ground without renouncing calls for justice and equity in the long term. (shrink)

Contemporary epistemologists of education have raised concerns about the distorting effects of some of the processes and structures of contemporary academia on the epistemic practice and character of academic researchers. Such concerns have been articulated using the concept of epistemic corruption. In this paper, we lend credibility to these theoretically-motivated concerns using the example of the research impact agenda during the period 2012-2014. Interview data from UK and Australian academics confirms the impact agenda system, at its inception, facilitated the development (...) and exercise of epistemic vices. As well as vindicating theoretically-motivated claims about epistemic corruption, inclusion of empirical methods and material can help us put the concept to work in ongoing critical scrutiny of evolving forms of the research impact agenda. (shrink)

Stories are an important indicator of our vision of the future. In the case of artificial intelligence, dominant stories are polarized between notions of threat and myopic solutionism. The central storytellers—big tech, popular media, and authors of science fiction—represent particular demographics and motivations. Many stories, and storytellers, are missing. This paper details the accounts of missing AI narratives by leading scholars from a range of disciplines interested in AI Futures. Participants focused on the gaps between dominant narratives and the untold (...) stories of the capabilities, issues, and everyday realities of the technology. One participant proposed a “story crisis” in which these narratives compete to shape the public discourse on AI. Our findings indicate that dominant narratives distract and mislead public understandings and conceptions of AI. This suggests a need to pay closer attention to missing AI narratives. It is not simply about telling new stories, it is about listening to existing stories and asking what is wanted from AI. We call for realistic, nuanced, and inclusive stories, working with and for diverse voices, which consider story-teller; genre, and communicative purpose. Such stories can then inspire the next generation of thinkers, technologists, and storytellers. (shrink)

We study the weak truth-table and truth-table degrees of the images of subsets of computable structures under isomorphisms between computable structures. In particular, we show that there is a low c.e. set that is not weak truth-table reducible to any initial segment of any scattered computable linear ordering. Countable $\Pi _{1}^{0}$ subsets of 2ω and Kolmogorov complexity play a major role in the proof.

We study the implications of model completeness of a theory for the effectiveness of presentations of models of that theory. It is immediate that for a computable model A\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathcal {A}$$\end{document} of a computably enumerable, model complete theory, the entire elementary diagram E\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$E$$\end{document} must be decidable. We prove that indeed a c.e. theory T is model complete if and only if there is a (...) uniform procedure that succeeds in deciding E\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$E$$\end{document} from the atomic diagram Δ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\varDelta $$\end{document} for all countable models A\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathcal {A}$$\end{document} of T. Moreover, if every presentation of a single isomorphism type A\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathcal {A}$$\end{document} has this property of relative decidability, then there must be a procedure with succeeds uniformly for all presentations of an expansion \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$$$\end{document} by finitely many new constants. (shrink)

We study the relationship between algebraic structures and their inverse semigroups of partial automorphisms. We consider a variety of classes of natural structures including equivalence structures, orderings, Boolean algebras, and relatively complemented distributive lattices. For certain subsemigroups of these inverse semigroups, isomorphism of the subsemigroups yields isomorphism of the underlying structures. We also prove that for some classes of computable structures, we can reconstruct a computable structure, up to computable isomorphism, from the isomorphism type of its inverse semigroup of computable (...) partial automorphisms. (shrink)

We consider whether given a simple, finite description of a group in the form of an algorithm, it is possible to algorithmically determine if the corresponding group has some specified property or not. When there is such an algorithm, we say the property is recursively recognizable within some class of descriptions. When there is not, we ask how difficult it is to detect the property in an algorithmic sense. We consider descriptions of two sorts: first, recursive presentations in terms of (...) generators and relators, and second, algorithms for computing the group operation. For both classes of descriptions, we show that a large class of natural algebraic properties, Markov properties, are not recursively recognizable, indeed they are \-hard to detect in recursively presented groups and \-hard to detect in computable groups. These theorems suffice to give a sharp complexity measure for the detection problem of a number of typical group properties, for example, being abelian, torsion-free, orderable. Some properties, like being cyclic, nilpotent, or solvable, are much harder to detect, and we give sharp characterizations of the corresponding detection problems from a number of them. We give special attention to orderability properties, as this was a main motivation at the beginning of this project. (shrink)

We report data from an experiment using stimuli designed to differ in their availability for processing by the dorsal visual pathway, but which were equivalent in tasks mediated by the ventral pathway. When movements are made to these stimuli as targets, there are clear effects early in the movement. These effects appear at odds with the planning–control model of Glover.

Исследование посвящено философскому осознанию природы духовности человека. Автор рассматривает духовность внутреннего мира человека как единство высших чувств души и нравственного сознания. Для специалистов в области философии, методологии науки.

The first thorough study in English of the multi-faceted system of Mou Zongsan, this book examines key influences on the New Confucian thinker and introduces his Kantian- and Mahāyāna Fo-inflected moral metaphysical reading of the Lu-Wang Learning of the Mind.

In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" _Star Trek_-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In _How We Became Posthuman,_ N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age. Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost (...) its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman." Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel _Limbo_ by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems. Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, _How We Became Posthuman_ provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here. (shrink)