In his article ‘God and Probability’, 1 Hugh Mellor introduced the notion of the ‘bridge-hand fallacy’, allegedly committed by those who think they can appeal to probabilities in arguments for design. I should like to give this notion another airing, partly because of its recent criticism in two interesting books - R. G. Swinburne' The Existence of God and D. J. Bartholomew's God of Chance - and partly because it seems worth asking how it fares in relation to the most (...) recent examples of design argument, namely those which appeal to the so-called ‘anthropic principle’ in cosmology. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmotional distractors can impair perception of subsequently presented targets, a phenomenon called emotion-induced blindness. Do emotional distractors lose their power to disrupt perception when appearing with increased frequency, perhaps due to desensitisation or enhanced recruitment of proactive control? Non-emotional tasks, such as the Stroop, have revealed that high frequency distractors or conflict lead to reduced interference, and distractor frequency appears to modulate attentional capture by emotional distractors in spatial attention tasks. But emotion-induced blindness is thought to reflect perceptual competition between (...) targets and emotional distractors, and it is unclear whether high frequency emotional stimuli cause less disruption at this relatively early stage of processing. In four experiments, participants searched streams of images for a rotated target image. A negative or neutral distractor appeared before the target, and their relative frequency was manipulated. Across all exper... (shrink)

B L Curtis; Learning and Intentionality, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 5, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 105–121, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.

B L Curtis; Learning and Intentionality, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 5, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 105–121, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.

The greatest contemporary challenge in the arena of cognitive neuroscience concerns the relation between consciousness and the brain. Over recent years the focus of work in this area has switched from the analysis of diverse spatial regions of the brain to that of the timing of neural events. It appears that two conditions are necessary in order for neural events to become correlated with conscious experience. First, the firing of assemblies of neurones must achieve a degree of coherence, and, second, (...) reflexive (i.e. top-down, or reentrant) neural pathways must be activated. It does not, of course, follow that such neural activity causes consciousness; it may be, for example, that the neural activity formats the brain to interact with consciousness. The latter possibility is suggested by analysis of mystical texts suggesting that coherence and reflexivity constitute the conditions for the influx of “spirit.” Kabbalistic sources, for example, describe a hierarchy of “brains” in the human and divine realms through which the principles of coherence and reflexivity operate. Whilst the ontological assumptions of such a scheme place it beyond the realm of psychology, parallels with the picture deriving from the contemporary cognitive neuroscience of consciousness are striking. (shrink)

Gravitational decoherence (GD) refers to the effects of gravity in actuating the classical appearance of a quantum system. Because the underlying processes involve issues in general relativity (GR), quantum field theory (QFT), and quantum information, GD has fundamental theoretical significance. There is a great variety of GD models, many of them involving physics that diverge from GR and/or QFT. This overview has two specific goals along with one central theme:(i) present theories of GD based on GR and QFT and explore (...) their experimental predictions;(ii) place other theories of GD under the scrutiny of GR and QFT, and point out their theoretical differences. We also describe how GD experiments in space in the coming decades can provide evidence at two levels:(a) discriminate alternative quantum theories and non-GR theories;(b) discern whether gravity is a fundamental or an effective theory. (shrink)

Does the recent success of Podemos and Syriza herald a new era of inclusive, egalitarian left populism? Because leaders of both parties are former students of Ernesto Laclau and cite his account of populism as guiding their political practice, this essay considers whether his theory supports hope for a new kind of populism. For Laclau, the essence of populism is an “empty signifier” that provides a means by which anyone can identify with the people as a whole. However, the concept (...) of the empty signifier is not as neutral as he assumes. As I show by analyzing the role of race in his theory, some subjects are constituted in a way that prevents their unmediated identification with the people. Consequently, Laclau’s view should be read as symptomatic of the problems with populist logic if its adherents are to avoid reproducing its exclusions and practice a more inclusive politics. (shrink)