In this transdisciplinary article which stems from philosophical considerations (that depart from phenomenology—after Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Rosen—and Hegelian dialectics), we develop a conception based on topological (the Moebius surface and the Klein bottle) and geometrical considerations (based on torsion and non-orientability of manifolds), and multivalued logics which we develop into a unified world conception that surmounts the Cartesian cut and Aristotelian logic. The role of torsion appears in a self-referential construction of space and time, which will be further related to (...) the commutator of the True and False operators of matrix logic, still with a quantum superposed state related to a Moebius surface, and as the physical field at the basis of Spencer-Brown’s primitive distinction in the protologic of the calculus of distinction. In this setting, paradox, self-reference, depth, time and space, higher-order non-dual logic, perception, spin and a time operator, the Klein bottle, hypernumbers due to Musès which include non-trivial square roots of ±1 and in particular non-trivial nilpotents, quantum field operators, the transformation of cognition to spin for two-state quantum systems, are found to be keenly interwoven in a world conception compatible with the philosophical approach taken for basis of this article. The Klein bottle is found not only to be the topological in-formation for self-reference and paradox whose logical counterpart in the calculus of indications are the paradoxical imaginary time waves, but also a classical-quantum transformer (Hadamard’s gate in quantum computation) which is indispensable to be able to obtain a complete multivalued logical system, and still to generate the matrix extension of classical connective Boolean logic. We further find that the multivalued logic that stems from considering the paradoxical equation in the calculus of distinctions, and in particular, the imaginary solutions to this equation, generates the matrix logic which supersedes the classical logic of connectives and which has for particular subtheories fuzzy and quantum logics. Thus, from a primitive distinction in the vacuum plane and the axioms of the calculus of distinction, we can derive by incorporating paradox, the world conception succinctly described above. (shrink)

At least 177 scales are available to researchers who want to measure religiosity, but questions exist as to exactly what these scales are measuring and in whom they are measuring it. A review of these scales found a lack items designed to measure ethical action in society or the world as a prophetic response to the experience of the divine. Instead, the vast majority of scales focus on internal experiences and beliefs or institutional relationships. A review of scale norm groups (...) found that norm groups often are not fully described, particularly in the area of race/ethnicity, and when they are described, they reveal an over-reliance on convenience samples of college students and an under-representation of racial/ethnic minority groups. Examples of scales with more fully described and more representative norm groups are given, and recommendations are offered for researchers using and developing religiosity scales. (shrink)

Hollywood movies can be deeply engaging and easy to understand. To succeed in this manner, feature-length movies employ many editing techniques with strong psychological underpinnings. We explore the origins and development of one of these, the reaction shot. This shot typically shows a single, unspeaking character with modest facial expression in response to an event or to the behavior or speech of another character. In a sample of movies from 1940 to 2010, we show that the prevalence of one type (...) of these shots—which we call the cryptic reaction shot—has grown dramatically. These shots are designed to enhance viewers’ emotional involvement with characters. They depict a facial gesture that reflects a slightly negative and slightly aroused emotional state. Their use at the end of conversations, and typically at the end of scenes, helps to leave viewers in a state of speculation about what the character is thinking and what her thoughts may mean for the ongoing narrative. (shrink)

Psychopathology is the study of the signs and symptoms of psychiatric disorders - delusions, hallucinations, phobias, depression, for example. This book gives an account of the terms currently in use and attempts an in-depth analysis of the nature of each. The matter is examined both from a philosophical perspective and from the point of view of what is known about the function of the hemispheres of the brain.

Hannah Arendt's early biography of Rahel Varnhagen, an eighteenth-century German-Jew, provides a revolutionary feminist component to her political theory. In it, Arendt grapples with the theoretical constitution of a female subject and relates Jewish alterity, identity, and history to feminist politics. Because she understood the "female condition" of difference as belonging to the political subject rather than an autonomous self, her theory entails a "politics of alterity" with applications for feminist practice.

Hannah Arendt's early biography of Rahel Varnhagen, an eighteenth-century German-Jew, provides a revolutionary feminist component to her political theory. In it, Arendt grapples with the theoretical constitution of a female subject and relates Jewish alterity, identity, and history to feminist politics. Because she understood the "female condition" of difference as belonging to the political subject rather than an autonomous self, her theory entails a "politics of alterity" with applications for feminist practice.

At least 177 scales are available to researchers who want to measure religiosity, but questions exist as to exactly what these scales are measuring and in whom they are measuring it. A review of these scales found a lack items designed to measure ethical action in society or the world as a prophetic response to the experience of the divine. Instead, the vast majority of scales focus on internal experiences and beliefs or institutional relationships. A review of scale norm groups (...) found that norm groups often are not fully described, particularly in the area of race/ethnicity, and when they are described, they reveal an over-reliance on convenience samples of college students and an under-representation of racial/ethnic minority groups. Examples of scales with more fully described and more representative norm groups are given, and recommendations are offered for researchers using and developing religiosity scales. (shrink)

Popular movies present chunk-like events that promote episodic, serial updating of viewers’ representations of the ongoing narrative. Event-indexing theory would suggest that the beginnings of new scenes trigger these updates, which in turn require more cognitive processing. Typically, a new movie event is signaled by an establishing shot, one providing more background information and a longer look than the average shot. Our analysis of 24 films reconfirms this. More important, we show that, when returning to a previously shown location, the (...) re-establishing shot reduces both context and duration while remaining greater than the average shot. In general, location shifts dominate character and time shifts in event segmentation of movies. In addition, over the last 70 years re-establishing shots have become more like the noninitial shots of a scene. Establishing shots have also approached noninitial shot scales, but not their durations. Such results suggest that film form is evolving, perhaps to suit more rapid encoding of narrative events. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Joanne Cutting-Gray HANNAH ARENDT'S RAHEL VARNHAGEN Hannah Arendt fled Nazi Germany in 1933, a year she called the end of Jewish history. She was 27 years old at the time and carried with her a manuscript that was later to become the peculiar biography of an eighteenth-century German-Jewish "pariah," Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1833). The Life of a fewish Woman, subtitle of the biography by Arendt, distills the largely unpublished Varnhagen (...) correspondence and marks the impact of that life upon German-Jewish history.1 Published more than "half a lifetime" later in 1957, it assays the politics of form in a highly unusual manner. By expunging all detail in order to analyze Varnhagen's introspection, Arendt implicitly questions selfhood as the form for identity and as the appropriate form for biography. She reveals that seeking to preserve the self determines the blank dumbness of an unnarratable life. Rahel Levin (Antonie Friederike Robert) Varnhagen, or simply "Rahel " as Arendt calls her, lived a life as complicated as her many names. The tortured relation she had to her identity, her insatiable preoccupation with self, reflects an effort to eradicate herJewishness by baptism and marriage and becomes a paradigm of a story about a woman lost to a sense of others and herself. Neither rich, cultivated, nor beautiful, Rahel lived her unhappiness fervently, with an ecstasy that made her appear to others as startlingly original. This helps to explain how she came to preside over the most important intellectual salon in Germany during the late eighteenth century. Princes, intellectuals, and artists flocked to her attic apartment, attracted by the impenetrable spectacle of her despair. Rahel's intensity pulled others into her orbit—including, one-hundred years later, the intense and self-absorbed Arendt at the beginning Philosophy and Literature, © 1991, 15: 229-245 230Philosophy and Literature of her university education.2 Each woman suffered the private failure of a love affair complicated by the broader, historical issue of racial identity that connected their lives. Prewar Nazi Germany taught Arendt what Varnhagen learned during the period of German-Jewish assimilation in the nineteenth century—"one does not escape Jewishness."3 It is no wonder that, in analogous moments of personal and civic upheaval, Rahel Varnhagen and Hannah Arendt "corresponded," the one by writing letters about her life, the other by giving that life to a world. Like Arendt, Varnhagen was unclassifiably exotic, an unattached, Jewish female seemingly without a history, aligned with no one and nothing. If"Jewishness" meant letting life "rain upon" her, Rahel Varnhagen let it strike her "like a storm without an umbrella." And like Arendt, she refused to hide the traits and talents of her personality under cover of morality and convention. Her letters are not self-congratulatory, for she never wittingly chose notoriety. Indeed, she spent much of her life trying to escape the stigma ofJewishness that marked her destiny. Notwithstanding the milieu of nineteenth-century German romanticism that drew the biographer toward her subject, various events surrounding the text make more compelling narratives than Varnhagen 's life: how the manuscript survived World War II, Arendt's emigration to the United States, and, especially, the public and private influence of Martin Heidegger.4 At the age of 18 (1925), Arendt had discovered Varnhagen during her brief love-affair with the 35-year-old philosophy professor at the University of Marburg. Though Heidegger would later call Arendt the "passion of his life" and inspiration for his work—he was writing Being and Time during that period—his brush with Nazism precipitated their breach. Since the Heidegger-Arendt correspondence remains closed, much about their youthful relationship and life-long intellectual affair remains a mystery open only to speculation. From Arendt's biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, we know that Varnhagen's story became a consolation to her in her sorrow, a means ofgiving significance to the ambiguities of a private relationship as it was caught up in public history.5 Certainly Heidegger's retreat from political events for the sake of thinking was as strong an influence on Arendt's political development as was Varnhagen's retreat from her Jewish destiny. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to expect... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 337-338 [Access article in PDF] On Kimura's Écrits de psychopathologie phénomenologique John Cutting This book is a French translation of six articles that the Japanese psychiatrist, Kimura Bin, wrote in the 1970s and 1980s. There is the usual long introduction in such books by the translator. There is also the mandatory explanation of the whole matter as a postface by philosopher Henry Maldiney (...) as if the meaning of anything these days has to be in the form of a sandwich.The first article by Kimura Bin deals with the meaning of certain Japanese words pertaining to self and inter-subjectivity. The critical Japanese word is aida, which means something like interpersonal bonding and is that primordial state of the human being that founds both everyday sociality and the individual self, the latter both in its external and internal composition and orientation: "From time immemorial, the Japanese understood interpersonal social existence, the being between, life in the aida of itself and of others, as the essential trait of an individual human. The interpersonal aida is in some sense the quintessence of known individuality." Schizophrenia, for Kimura, stems from a disturbance in this aida at the most fundamental level, and all its manifestations follow from this.The second article is entitled "Time and Anxiety (Angoisse)." This sets out his major psychopathological thesis—judging from these six articles—which is that schizophrenia and depressive illness differ fundamentally in their temporality. In schizophrenia the subject is geared toward the future: "Subjects with a schizophrenic tendency give sufficient proof in their daily life of a marked inclination to imagine future possibilities or ideas whose feasibility is impossible or implausible." In depressive illness there is a preoccupation with the past: "The lived time of the melancholic type of person has a preponderance towards the past, or, more precisely, towards lived being up to the present."The third article, entitled "Schizophrenic Temporality," amplifies this thesis and introduces his terminology for these, respectively, as the Latin terms, ante festum and post festum. The French translation gives the meaning of the latter as "apres la fête" and "trop tard"—after the holiday, too late. (I shall deal with the potpourri of languages involved below.) This article is the most elaborate, and in it Kimura attempts to derive the core characteristics of the two nosological entities from these two underlying anomalous temporalities.The fourth article is about borderline states, a nosological entity that I have no sympathy for, and I shall not discuss it.The fifth article is entitled "Reflection and Self in Schizophrenia." Again, it concerns a fundamental difference between the mode of reflection in schizophrenia and that in depressive illness, but I cannot say, despite numerous readings, [End Page 337] that I understand it. The reason for this may be my poor French, an inadequate translation, or a confused formulation in the first place, or all three. The gist of it seems to be that in schizophrenia the "other" is a "stranger" projected by the thinking self, whereas in depressive illness the "other" is a "familiar" inhabitant of the sociality adherent to this condition.The sixth article, "Pathology of Immediateness," is an attempt to seek philosophical, theoretical, psychopathological, and even nosological and biological backing for what Kimura has set out earlier, particularly in the third article. Hegel, Lacan, Bergson, Heidegger, Derrida, and Husserl are brought in as philosophical support. Blankenburg and Binswanger provide psychopathological backing. A third prong is the nosological tradition, prevalent in Germany and Japan in the twentieth century, of promoting the concept of an atypical or third type of psychosis with a biological resemblance to epileptic psychosis. All this is then brought together and complicated by a discussion of language and 'mediation' to support the notion that there is a third psychopathological principle—in addition to the ante festum pertaining to schizophrenia and the post festum pertaining to depressive illness—which is that of an intra festum: a preoccupation with the now, characteristic of atypical psychoses with an epileptic basis.These articles tax one's linguistic and conceptual repertoire to the... (shrink)

The concepts of invariants and cues are useful, as are those of dorsal and ventral streams, but Norman overgeneralizes when interweaving them. Cues are not confined to identification tasks, invariants not to action, and both can be learned.

Pickering & Garrod (P&G) argue that contemporary models of language use are inadequate. This has resulted largely because of an experimental focus on monologue rather than dialogue. I agree with the need for increased experimentation that focuses on the interplay between production and comprehension. However, I have some concerns about the Interactive Alignment model that the authors propose.

Nijhawan argues that neural compensation is necessary to account for couplings of perception and action. Although perhaps true in some cases, computational tolerance for asynchronously arriving continuous information is of more importance. Moreover, some of the everyday venues Nijhawan uses to argue for the relevance of prediction and compensation can be better ascribed to skill.

Primary, or basic, colors have been discussed for centuries. Over time, three criteria have emerged on their behalf: (a) their physical mixture yielding all other spectral colors, (b) the physiological attunement of receptors or pathways to particular wavelengths, and (c) the etymological history of the color term. These criteria can be applied usefully to taste to clarify issues.

Who am I? How do I live a good life? What is reality? Such perennial questions may seem remote from the pleasures of playing videogames for entertainment and fantasy. yet gamers too, in the midst of having fun, are potentially embarked upon a quest for understanding and for meaning. Missions for thoughtful gamers presents a sequence of 40 challenges, ranging from thought experiments to design exercises, each one inviting players to become more creatively curious and self-aware."--Back cover.

In this paper, we reconsider the context of Barbara Carper'salternative ways of knowing,a prominent discourse in modern nursing theory in North America. We explore this relative to the concepts ofrealism, non‐realismandnominalism, and investigate the philosophical divisions behind the original typology, particularly in relationship to modern scientific enquiry. We examine forms of knowledge relative to realist and nominalist positions and make an argument ad absurdum against relativistic interpretations of knowledge using the example of Borge's Chinese Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. We propose (...) a contentious postpositivist practical classification for nursing knowledge that demonstrates and supports the idea that knowledge has both individual and subjective components. This classification supports the practical application of nursing knowledge within the paradigm of realist postpositivist science. (shrink)

Menninghaus et al. pose two open-ended questions: To what extent do formal elements of art elicit negative affect, and do artists try to elicit this response in a theory-based or intuitive manner? For popular movies, we argue that the consideration of their construction is prior to the consideration of the experience that they evoke.

In three studies, we explored the retention and transfer of tool-making knowledge, learnt from an adult demonstration, to other temporal and task contexts. All studies used a variation of a task in which children had to make a hook tool to retrieve a bucket from a tall transparent tube. Children who failed to innovate the hook tool independently saw a demonstration. In Study 1, we tested children aged 4 to 6 years (N = 53) who had seen the original demonstration (...) 3 months earlier. Performance was excellent at the second time, indicating that children’s knowledge was retained over the 3 month period. In Studies 2 and 3 we explored transfer of the new knowledge to other tasks. In Study 2, children were given two variants of the apparatus that differed in surface characteristics (e.g. shape and colour). Participants generalised their knowledge to these new apparatuses even though the new pipecleaner also differed in size and colour. Five- to 6-year-olds (n = 22) almost always transferred their knowledge to problems where the same tool had to be made. Younger, 3- to 5-year-olds’ (n = 46), performance was more variable. In Study 3, 4- to 7-year-olds (N = 146) saw a demonstration of hook making with a pipecleaner, but then had to make a tool by combining pieces of wooden dowel (or vice versa: original training on dowel, transfer to pipecleaner). Children did not transfer their tool-making knowledge to the new material. Children retained tool-making knowledge over time and transferred their knowledge to new situations in which they needed to make a similar tool from similar materials, but not different materials. We concluded that children’s ability to use tool-making knowledge in novel situations is likely to depend on memory and analogical reasoning, with the latter continuing to develop during middle childhood. (shrink)

The essays range from Hegel and Modernism to Marcel Duchamp and the Avant-Garde, postmodern poetics, boredom and Proust, the romance of Arendt and Heidegger, ...

Recent studies have provided evidence of associations between neurochemistry and reading (dis)ability (Pugh et al., 2014). Based on a long history of studies indicating that fluent reading entails the automatic convergence of the written and spoken forms of language and our recently proposed Neural Noise Hypothesis (Hancock et al., 2017), we hypothesized that individual differences in cross-modal integration would mediate, at least partially, the relationship between neurochemical concentrations and reading. Cross-modal integration was measured in 231 children using a two-alternative forced (...) choice cross-modal matching task with three language conditions (letters, words, and pseudowords) and two levels of difficulty within each language condition. Neurometabolite concentrations of Choline (Cho), Glutamate (Glu), gamma-Aminobutyric (GABA), and N- acetyl-aspartate (NAA) were then measured in a subset of this sample (n = 70) with Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS). A structural equation mediation model revealed that the effect of cross-modal word matching mediated the relationship between increased Glu (which has been proposed to be an index of neural noise) and poorer reading ability. In addition, the effect of cross-modal word matching fully mediated a relationship between increased Cho and poorer reading ability. Multilevel mixed effects models confirmed that lower Cho predicted faster cross-modal matching reaction time, specifically in the hard word condition. These Cho... (shrink)

Recent data show that human children (up to 8 years old) perform poorly when required to innovate tools. Our tool-rich culture may be more reliant on social learning and more limited by domain-general constraints such as ill-structured problem solving than otherwise thought.

PURPOSE:To report the localization of a gene causing drusen and macular degeneration in a previously undescribed North American family. METHODS:Genetic mapping studies were performed using linkage analysis in a single family with drusen and atrophic macular degeneration. RESULTS:The clinical manifestations in this family ranged from fine macular drusen in asymptomatic middle-aged individuals to atrophic macular lesions in two children and two elderly patients. We mapped the gene to chromosome 6q14 between markers D6S2258 and D6S1644. CONCLUSIONS:In a family with autosomal dominant (...) drusen and atrophic macular degeneration, the gene maps to a 3.2-cM region on chromosome 6q14. This locus appears to be distinct from, but adjacent to, the loci for cone-rod dystrophy 7 (CORD7) and North Carolina macular dystrophy (MCDR1). Future identification of the gene responsible for the disease in this family will provide a better understanding of macular degeneration. (shrink)

The current study aimed to investigate the extent to which familial history of reading and math difficulties have an impact on children’s academic outcomes within a 3-year longitudinal study, which evaluated their core reading and math skills after first and second grades, as well as performance on complex academic tasks after second and third grades. At baseline, parents were asked to complete the Adult Reading History Questionnaire and its adaption, Adult Math History Questionnaire, to index familial history of reading and (...) math difficulties, respectively. Preliminary findings established the psychometric properties of the AMHQ, suggesting that it is a reliable and valid scale. Correlation analyses indicated that the ARHQ was negatively associated with children’s reading skills, whereas the AMHQ was negatively related to math outcomes. Path results revealed that the ARHQ predicted children’s performance on complex reading tasks indirectly via their core reading skills, and the AMHQ was linked to complex math outcomes indirectly via core math abilities. The ARHQ was also found to be negatively correlated with measures of children’s math performance, with path findings suggesting that these relations were indirectly explained by differences in their core reading skills. These results suggest that assessing familial risk for academic difficulties may be crucial to understanding comorbid etiological and developmental associations between reading and math differences. (shrink)

What are the ethics of child genital cutting? In a recent issue of the journal, Duivenbode and Padela (2019) called for a renewed discussion of this question. Noting that modern health care systems...

This book from the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity provides a faith-based evaluation of recent technologies and trends in bioethics--including the current debate surrounding stem cell research. Fifteen noted scholars and medical practitioners discuss some of today's new and controversial work in biomedicine--xenotransplantation, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and more--and evaluate from a Christian perspective both the science and the ethical questions it raises. Designed to orient general readers to the current state of biomedical research, Cutting-Edge Bioethics is must reading for (...) anyone wishing to confront and wrestle with the challenging moral issues posed by this ever-advancing field. (shrink)

Exactly how do the sign/symbol/token systems of endo- and exo-biosemiosis differ from those of cognitive semiosis? Do the biological messages that integrate metabolism have conceptual meaning? Semantic information has two subsets: Descriptive and Prescriptive. Prescriptive information instructs or directly produces nontrivial function. In cognitive semiosis, prescriptive information requires anticipation and “choice with intent” at bona fide decision nodes. Prescriptive information either tells us what choices to make, or it is a recordation of wise choices already made. Symbol systems allow recordation (...) of deliberate choices and the transmission of linear digital prescriptive information. Formal symbol selection can be instantiated into physicality using physical symbol vehicles (tokens). Material symbol systems (MSS) formally assign representational meaning to physical objects. Even verbal semiosis instantiates meaning into physical sound waves using an MSS. Formal function can also be incorporated into physicality through the use of dynamically-inert (dynamically-incoherent or -decoupled) configurable switch-settings in conceptual circuits. This paper examines the degree to which biosemiosis conforms to the essential formal criteria of prescriptive semiosis and cybernetic management. (shrink)

A uniform construction for sequent calculi for finite-valued first-order logics with distribution quantifiers is exhibited. Completeness, cut-elimination and midsequent theorems are established. As an application, an analog of Herbrand’s theorem for the four-valued knowledge-representation logic of Belnap and Ginsberg is presented. It is indicated how this theorem can be used for reasoning about knowledge bases with incomplete and inconsistent information.

Following the traces of Margaret Mead’s statement that emphasized that the first photographic images of the Earth from space presented notions of fragility, the article contextualizes the recent critique of the dominant representation of the Earth as a globe that emerged in conjunction with the discourse on the Anthropocene. It analyses the globe as an image and the sentiments that accompanied it since the first photographs of our planet from space were published in 1968. The article outlines how the cultural (...) meaning of the whole Earth representation changed in parallel with the appropriation of the image by the large technological enterprises that emerged from America’s counterculture. It returns to the possibility of a coexistence of ‘views from within’ and ‘views from without’ following a detour with Gregory Bateson via Bali and proposes a Cybernetics of Grace as a practice of resistance against pure exteriority. The article concludes by linking the Cybernetics of Grace with the second-order conversations of Gordon Pask. (shrink)

The article analyzes the technological shifts which took place in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and predict the main shifts in the next half a century. On the basis of the analysis of the latest achievements in medicine, bio- and nanotechnologies, robotics, ICT and other technological directions and also on the basis of the opportunities provided by the theory of production revolutions the authors present a detailed analysis of the latest production revolution which is denoted (...) as ‘Cybernetic’. There are given some forecasts about its development in the nearest five decades and up to the end of twenty-first century. It is shown that the development of various self-regulating systems will be the main trend of this revolution. The article gives a detailed analysis of the future breakthroughs in medicine, and also in bio- and nanotechnologies in terms of the development of self-regulating systems with their growing ability to select optimal modes of functioning as well as of other characteristics of the Cybernetic Revolution (resources and energy saving, miniaturization, and individualization). (shrink)

This article aims to draw a portrait of the influence of cybernetics on soft science. To this end, structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy will be successively analyzed in a perspective based on importing concepts stemming from the cybernetic paradigm. By focusing more specifically on the American postwar context, we intend to remind the audience that many soft science specialists were involved in the elaboration of this ‘new science’. We will then retrace the influence of the cybernetic paradigm on (...) structuralism. Starting with the historic meeting between Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, we will illustrate that structural phonology is directly inspired by discoveries stemming from the informational model. In the same perspective, the conceptual borrowings of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan from cybernetics will be identified and analyzed. Then, we will address the matter of the relationship between postmodern theories and the cybernetic paradigm. The philosophical movement towards deconstruction, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, will be analyzed based on how they relate to this paradigm. We will also insist on the fact that the philosophy of Jean- François Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne is fully in line with the epistemological revolution launched by cybernetics. (shrink)

The monograph presents the ideas about the main changes that occurred in the development of technologies from the emergence of Homo sapiens till present time and outlines the prospects of their development in the next 30–60 years and in some respect until the end of the twenty-first century. What determines the transition of a society from one level of development to another? One of the most fundamental causes is the global technological transformations. Among all major technological breakthroughs in history the (...) most important are three production revolutions: 1) the Agrarian Revolution; 2) the Industrial Revolution; and 3) the Cybernetic one. The book introduces the theory of production revolutions which is a new valuable explanatory paradigm that analyzes causes and trends of dramatic shifts in historical process. The authors describe the course of technological transformations in history and demonstrate a possible application of the theory to explain the present and forthcoming technological changes. They analyze the technological shifts which took place in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and forecast the main shifts in the next half a century. On this basis the authors present a detailed analysis of the latest production revolution which is denoted as ‘Сybernetic’. They make some predictions about its development in the nearest five decades and up to the end of the twenty-first century and show that the development of various self-regulating systems will be the main trend of this revolution. The authors argue that the transition to the starting final phase of the Cybernetic Revolution (in the 2030–2040s) will first occur in the field of medicine (in some its innovative branches). In future we will deal with the started convergence of innovative technologies which will form the system of MANBRIC-technologies (i.e. the technological paradigm based on medicine, additive, nano- and bio- technologies, robotics, IT and cognitive technologies). The monograph gives an outline of the future breakthroughs in medicine and some other technologies (between the 2010s and 2070s). (shrink)

In recent work, Mark Johnson has argued that a scientifically updated version of John Dewey’s pragmatism affords human beings the opportunity to feel at home in the world. This feeling at home, however, is not fully problematized, nor explored, nor resolved by Johnson. Rather, Johnson and his collaborators, Don Tucker (2021) and Jay Schulkin (2023), defend this updated pragmatism within the historical development of the sciences of life and mind from the twentieth century to the present day. A central theme (...) in this defense is the affinity pragmatism has with neurophenomenology, especially the enactivism seen in 4E cognition. Another theme is the future orientation of pragmatism, especially as it is focused on developments in cybernetics and artificial intelligence. Given Johnson’s previous work on expanding the number of E’s to 7, and other pragmatist suggestions for more, I argue that neuropragmatism’s development of Dewey’s conception of experience as organism-environment transaction (symbolized by the diphthong, Œ) is critical for understanding what Johnson and Tucker call the cybernetic revolution as an enchanting and welcoming future instead of a disenchanting and alienating one. (shrink)

This article argues that the mid-1960s saw a dramatic shift in how ‘brainwashing’ was popularly imagined, reflecting Anglo-American developments in the sciences of mind as well as shifts in mass media culture. The 1965 British film The Ipcress File provides a rich case for exploring these interconnections between mind control, mind science and media, as it exemplifies the era’s innovations for depicting ‘brainwashing’ on screen: the film’s protagonist is subjected to flashing lights and electronic music, pulsating to the ‘rhythm of (...) brainwaves’. This article describes the making of The Ipcress File’s brainwashing sequence and shows how its quest for cinematic spectacle drew on developments in cybernetic science, multimedia design and modernist architecture. I argue that often interposed between the disparate endeavours of 1960s mind control, psychological science and media was a vision of the human mind as a ‘cybernetic spectator’: a subject who scrutinizes how media and other demands on her sensory perception can affect consciousness, and seeks to consciously participate in this mental conditioning and guide its effects. (shrink)

… in which we pass through eleven episodes in the history of cybernetics, each episode focusing on one of its perspectives on learning. We end with a coda where we define ‘cybersocial systems’ and...

The idea that cybernetics can throw light on problems connected with thinking and learning is now a familiar one. Psychologists who are concerned with these problems often make use of cybernetic analogies, and some cyberneticians claim that their science provides an answer to philosophical problems about the nature of thought. On this last topic a great deal has been written recently; but it is comparatively seldom that it is suggested that cybernetics can be applied to problems of aesthetics. On (...) the face of it, the mere idea of such an application might well seem absurd. Cybernetics, it will be said, is by definition the study of certain types of machines, and what light can possibly be thrown by such a study on questions which concern the nature of art? But even the strangest-sounding questions can prove enlightening, and in a recent broadcast talk Dr. F. H.George thought it worth while to ask whether a machine could create a work of art. This paper isdevoted to the development, and criticism, of some of the points which he made. (shrink)

This contribution offers the author’s personal experience with a project that took place 25 years ago in Latin America. This was about Second Order Auditing in Colombia during the second part of the 1990s. This project was carried out at the Country’s National Auditing Office, and was an application of the Viable System Model and the Viplan Methodology to a National Context. It was an innovative project at the CGR, focused on Second Order Auditing, to improve communications within the fabric (...) of the Colombian government. Its emphasis was building responsible trust between public enterprises, ministries and political agencies. Its emphasis was building communications between ministries and public entities, with the aim of increasing their effectiveness. At its core were methodological and epistemological developments. Key questions it attempted to answer were how to model the complexity of the enterprises and how to transform the auditors’ views of their relations with people in public entities, from one focused on requesting information, to one focused on communications. Structural changes were proposed for the National Audit Office and state enterprises, and hundreds of auditors were trained, through epistemological methodological workshops, in second order auditing and the reports of their auditing were debated extensively in government and beyond. This paper finishes with a short discussion of these transformations in the light of organisational cybernetics and in particular of the Viable System Model. (shrink)

In a series of works, Pablo Cobreros, Paul Égré, David Ripley and Robert van Rooij have proposed a nontransitive system (call it ‘_K__3__L__P_’) as a basis for a solution to the semantic paradoxes. I critically consider that proposal at three levels. At the level of the background logic, I present a conception of classical logic on which _K__3__L__P_ fails to vindicate classical logic not only in terms of structural principles, but also in terms of operational ones. At the level of (...) the theory of truth, I raise a cluster of philosophical difficulties for a _K__3__L__P_-based system of naive truth, all variously related to the fact that such a system proves things that would seem already by themselves repugnant, even in the absence of transitivity. At the level of the theory of validity, I consider an extension of the _K__3__L__P_-based system of naive validity that is supposed to certify that validity in that system does not fall short of naive validity, argue that such an extension is untenable in that its nontriviality depends on the inadmissibility of a certain irresistible instance of transitivity (whence the advertised “final cut”) and conclude on this basis that the _K__3__L__P_-based system of naive validity cannot coherently be adopted either. At all these levels, a crucial role is played by certain metaentailments and by the extra strength they afford over the corresponding entailments: on the one hand, such strength derives from considerations that would seem just as compelling in a general nontransitive framework, but, on the other hand, such strength wreaks havoc in the particular setting of _K__3__L__P_. (shrink)