La función de la educación es difundir las ventajas de vivir en sociedades democráticas, sin embargo, la diáspora de esas ventajas está articulada a intereses políticos y económicos globalizados; su misión: anestesiar a la sociedad para que observe en silencio el desmantelamiento de su proyecto de vida. La educación tradicional no fomenta la habilidad para leer la complejidad de esa realidad democrática. Se enfoca, principalmente, en aleccionar sobre las “ventajas” de la modernidad, donde la mayoría tiene como destino ser masas (...) de asalariados y una minoría, “heredar” la élite. Este documento, propone que para leer esta realidad, la ciudadanía debe ser alfabetizada más allá de la mera técnica que sólo sirva para leer, memorizar y escribir manuales; particularmente la alfabetización debe ser: reflexiva, crítica, basada en el diálogo de saberes y permanente; pero, éticamente coordinada por docentes intelectuales. (shrink)

El siguiente artículo trata de investigar los diferentes tipos de narrativas visuales derivadas de las distorsiones de la posverdad como son la manipulación, la viralidad y el cuerpo humano considerado como documento. Para finalizar hablaremos de un tipo de ilustraciones que fomentan la construcción del pensamiento escéptico. Previamente contextualizaremos la situación actual donde tienen lugar el fenómeno de la posverdad y cómo procede ideológicamente de la forma de pensamiento posmoderno donde se exalta el lado irracional y la intuición.

Turing’s much debated test has turned 70 and is still fairly controversial. His 1950 paper is seen as a complex and multilayered text, and key questions about it remain largely unanswered. Why did Turing select learning from experience as the best approach to achieve machine intelligence? Why did he spend several years working with chess playing as a task to illustrate and test for machine intelligence only to trade it out for conversational question-answering in 1950? Why did Turing refer to (...) gender imitation in a test for machine intelligence? In this article, I shall address these questions by unveiling social, historical and epistemological roots of the so-called Turing test. I will draw attention to a historical fact that has been only scarcely observed in the secondary literature thus far, namely that Turing’s 1950 test emerged out of a controversy over the cognitive capabilities of digital computers, most notably out of debates with physicist and computer pioneer Douglas Hartree, chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, and neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson. Seen in its historical context, Turing’s 1950 paper can be understood as essentially a reply to a series of challenges posed to him by these thinkers arguing against his view that machines can think. Turing did propose gender learning and imitation as one of his various imitation tests for machine intelligence, and I argue here that this was done in response to Jefferson's suggestion that gendered behavior is causally related to the physiology of sex hormones. (shrink)

I propose an idealist ontology that makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism, bottom-up panpsychism, and cosmopsychism. The proposed ontology also offers more explanatory power than these three alternatives, in that it does not fall prey to the hard problem of consciousness, the combination problem, or the decombination problem, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters (...) of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters. (shrink)

Political theory is a field that finds nourishment in others. From economics, history, sociology, psychology, and political science, theorists have drawn a rich repertoire of schemas to parse the social world and make sense of it. With each of these encounters, new subjects are brought into focus as others recede into the background, ushering a change not only in how questions are tackled but also in what questions are thought worth asking.

Este artículo presenta una reflexión sobre aquellas mujeres que siendomadres “optaron” por vincularse a las Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, convirtiéndose la gran mayoría en “obreras de la guerra” para cumplir la función materna de no dejar morir a sus hijos. Son madres combatientesque fueron a la guerra para luchar por sus hijos/as, sacrificando su vida por ese otro que una vez hizo parte de ella. Intento demostrar que dichas madres combatientes, no transgreden las normas de la maternidad hegemónica. Transgreden sí, (...) la visión estereotipada de género, según la cual se considera a la mujer esencialmente “pacífica”. Pero no son efectivamente transgresoras de los ideales asociados a la maternidad vista fundamentalmente como esencia, como un hecho biológico e individual. Finalmente se hace una apuesta por repensar la(s) maternidad(es) en una sociedad en (pos) conflicto como la colombiana. (shrink)

The Turing test has been studied and run as a controlled experiment and found to be underspecified and poorly designed. On the other hand, it has been defended and still attracts interest as a test for true artificial intelligence (AI). Scientists and philosophers regret the test’s current status, acknowledging that the situation is at odds with the intellectual standards of Turing’s works. This article refers to this as the Turing Test Dilemma, following the observation that the test has been under (...) discussion for over seventy years and still is widely seen as either too bad or too good to be a valuable experiment for AI. An argument that solves the dilemma is presented, which relies on reconstructing the Turing test as a thought experiment in the modern scientific tradition. It is argued that Turing’s exposition of the imitation game satisfies Mach’s characterization of the basic method of thought experiments and that Turing’s uses of his test satisfy Popper’s conception of the critical and heuristic uses of thought experiments and Kuhn’s association of thought experiments to conceptual change. It is emphasized how Turing methodically varied the imitation game design to address specific challenges posed to him by other thinkers and how his test illustrates a property of the phenomenon of intelligence and suggests a hypothesis on machine learning. This reconstruction of the Turing test provides a rapprochement to the conflicting views on its value in the literature. (shrink)

Several alternatives vie today for recognition as the most plausible ontology, from physicalism to panpsychism. By and large, these ontologies entail that physical structures circumscribe consciousness by bearing phenomenal properties within their physical boundaries. The ontology of idealism, on the other hand, entails that all physical structures are circumscribed by consciousness in that they exist solely as phenomenality in the first place. Unlike the other alternatives, however, idealism is often considered implausible today, particularly by analytic philosophers. A reason for this (...) is the strong intuition that an objective world transcending phenomenality is a self-evident fact. Other arguments—such as the dependency of phenomenal experience on brain function, the evidence for the existence of the universe before the origin of conscious life, etc.—are also often cited. In this essay, I will argue that these objections against the plausibility of idealism are false. As such, this essay seeks to show that idealism is an entirely plausible ontology. (shrink)

El presente artículo aborda de manera breve la obra Pasado Negro de Rubem Fonseca, escritor y guionista del cine brasileño; partiendo del análisis semiótico y lingüístico de su obra, sin dejar de lado el matiz que ofrece en la narrativa clásica del siglo XX.

The Idea of the World offers a grounded alternative to the frenzy of unrestrained abstractions and unexamined assumptions in philosophy and science today. This book examines what can be learned about the nature of reality based on conceptual parsimony, straightforward logic and empirical evidence from fields as diverse as physics and neuroscience. It compiles an overarching case for idealism - the notion that reality is essentially mental - from ten original articles the author has previously published in leading academic journals. (...) The case begins with an exposition of the logical fallacies and internal contradictions of the reigning physicalist ontology and its popular alternatives, such as bottom-up panpsychism. It then advances a compelling formulation of idealism that elegantly makes sense of - and reconciles - classical and quantum worlds. The main objections to idealism are systematically refuted and empirical evidence is reviewed that corroborates the formulation presented here. The book closes with an analysis of the hidden psychological motivations behind mainstream physicalism and the implications of idealism for the way we relate to the world. (shrink)

I argue for an idealist ontology consistent with empirical observations, which seeks to explain the facts of nature more parsimoniously than physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism. This ontology also attempts to offer more explanatory power than both physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism, in that it does not fall prey to either the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ or the ‘subject combination problem’, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: spatially unbound consciousness is posited to be nature’s sole ontological primitive. We, as well as (...) all other living organisms, are dissociated alters of this unbound consciousness. The universe we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of phenomenality surrounding—but dissociated from—our alter. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters. As such, the challenge to artificially create individualized consciousness becomes synonymous with the challenge to artificially induce abiogenesis. (shrink)

In 2005, an essay was published in Nature asserting that the universe is mental and that we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things. Since then, experiments have confirmed that — as predicted by quantum mechanics — reality is contextual, which contradicts at least intuitive formulations of realism and corroborates the hypothesis of a mental universe. Yet, to give this hypothesis a coherent rendering, one must explain how a mental universe can — at least in principle — accommodate (...) (a) our experience of ourselves as distinct individual minds sharing a world beyond the control of our volition; and (b) the empirical fact that this world is contextual despite being seemingly shared. By combining a modern formulation of the ontology of idealism with the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, the present paper attempts to provide a viable explanatory framework for both points. In the process of doing so, the paper also addresses key philosophical qualms of the relational interpretation. (shrink)

La escritura académica es esencial en la formación universitaria, pero también representa un desafío, ya que los niveles de escritura no siempre son óptimos. Esta investigación describe las percepciones de los estudiantes sobre la escritura académica. Se empleó un enfoque descriptivo no experimental de tipo transversal, aplicando el Cuestionario de Percepción sobre Alfabetización Académica a 295 estudiantes en tres programas universitarios: Educación, Literatura y Lingüística, y Psicología. Los resultados reflejan una apreciación positiva de su competencia comunicativa, considerando que los conocimientos (...) adquiridos han mejorado su proceso de escritura y la identificación de diversos géneros. Al mismo tiempo, reconocen la necesidad de profundizar en las estrategias de escritura. (shrink)

The present framing of the cultural debate in terms of materialism versus religion has allowed materialism to go unchallenged as the only rationally-viable metaphysics. This book seeks to change this. It uncovers the absurd implications of materialism and then, uniquely, presents a hard-nosed non-materialist metaphysics substantiated by skepticism, hard empirical evidence, and clear logical argumentation. It lays out a coherent framework upon which one can interpret and make sense of every natural phenomenon and physical law, as well as the modalities (...) of human consciousness, without materialist assumptions. According to this framework, the brain is merely the image of a self-localization process of mind, analogously to how a whirlpool is the image of a self-localization process of water. The brain doesn’t generate mind in the same way that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water. It is the brain that is in mind, not mind in the brain. Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness. The book closes with a series of educated speculations regarding the afterlife, psychic phenomena, and other related subjects. (shrink)

Abstract The distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual contents clearly has consequences for the configuration of the world of humans as well as for the possibility of attributing thought, in the strict sense, to systems and nonhuman organisms. With the aim of clarifying such a distinction, the following paper poses a basic notion of mental state and, especially, a clear definition of concept, along with the fundamental features of the states in which concepts occur. The conclusion of the paper is that (...) we have good and enough reasons to speak of conceptual and nonconceptual contents instead of more-or-less conceptual concepts. It means that there is a distinction of kind, not of degree, between both contents. -/- . (shrink)

In order to perceive the world, we need more than just raw sensory input: a subliminal paradigm of thought is required to interpret raw sensory data and, thereby, create the objects and events we perceive around ourselves. As such, the world we see reflects our own unexamined, culture-bound assumptions and expectations, which explains why every generation in history has believed that it more or less understood the world. Today, we perceive a world of objects and events outside and independent of (...) mind, which merely reflects our current paradigm of thought. Anomalies that contradict this paradigm have been accumulated by physicists over the past couple of decades, which will eventually force our culture to move to a new paradigm. Under this new paradigm, a form of universal mind will be viewed as nature’s sole fundamental entity. In this paper, I offer a sketch of what the new paradigm may look like. (shrink)

A broad pattern of correlations between mechanisms of brain function impairment and self-transcendence is shown. The pattern includes such mechanisms as cerebral hypoxia, physiological stress, transcranial magnetic stimulation, trance-induced physiological effects, the action of psychoactive substances and even physical trauma to the brain. In all these cases, subjects report self-transcending experiences o en described as ‘mystical’ and ‘awareness-expanding,’ as well as self-transcending skills o en described as ‘savant.’ The idea that these correlations could be rather trivially accounted for on the (...) basis of disruptions to inhibitory neural processes is reviewed and shown to be implausible. Instead, this paper suggests that an as-of-yet unrecognized causal principle underlying the entire pattern might be at work, whose further elucidation through systematic research could hold great promise. (shrink)

Depth psychology finds empirical validation today in a variety of observations that suggest the presence of causally effective mental processes outside conscious experience. I submit that this is due to misinterpretation of the observations: the subset of consciousness called “meta-consciousness” in the literature is often mistaken for consciousness proper, thereby artificially creating space for an “unconscious.” The implied hypothesis is that all mental processes may in fact be conscious, the appearance of unconsciousness arising from our dependence on self-reflective introspection for (...) gauging awareness. After re-interpreting the empirical data according to a philosophically rigorous definition of consciousness, I show that two well-known phenomena corroborate this hypothesis: (a) experiences that, despite being conscious, aren’t re-represented during introspection; and (b) dissociated experiences inaccessible to the executive ego. If consciousness is inherent to all mentation, it may be fundamental in nature, as opposed to a product of particular types of brain function. (shrink)

This book is a multi-faceted exploration and critique of the human condition as it is presently manifested. It addresses science and philosophy, explores the underlying nature of reality, the state of our society and culture, the influence of the mainstream media, the nature of free will and a number of other topics. Each of these examinations contributes an angle to an emerging idea gestalt that challenges present mainstream views and behaviors and offers a sane alternative. The book is organized as (...) a series of short and self-contained essays, most of which can be read in under one hour. (shrink)

ResumoNo início do século xviii, Isaac Newton publicou seu principal trabalho sobre óptica, o Opticks. Impregnado por uma perspectiva indutiva, o livro logo se tornou a principal referência para os estudos sobre a luz e as cores, sendo amplamente popularizado pelos seguidores de Newton. Neste artigo, analisamos como dois importantes livros contribuíram para essa popularização e também qual era a imagem de ciência que tencionavam propagar, o Élements de la philosophie de Newton de Voltaire e o Newtonianismo per le dame (...) de Algarotti. Será possível perceber que ambos os autores distorceram o conteúdo do livro de Newton, no intuito de propagar uma imagem idealizada das ideias newtonianas e da própria filosofia natural.In the beginning of 18th century, Newton published his main work about light and colors, the Opticks. Impregnated by an inductive perspective, the book became the major reference for the studies about light and colors, being widely popularized by Newton's followers. In this article, we analyze how two important works contributed to this process of popularization and also what image of science they intended to propagate: Voltaire's Elements of Newton's philosophie and Algarotti's Sir Isaac Newton's philosophy explain'd for the use of the ladies. We will be notice that both authors distorted the content of the Opticks, in order to propagate an idealized image of Newtonian ideas and natural philosophy itself. (shrink)

Resumen Folil Mapudungun, fruto de doce años de producción y de sistematización de objetivos y contenidos, es un método comunicativo multidimensional de enseñanza-aprendizaje de la lengua mapuche, como segunda lengua, orientado a jóvenes y adultos, en un contexto donde el mapudungun es lengua propia del territorio, lengua heredada y comunitaria. Hasta el momento, el método está integrado por ocho lecciones de estudio, desarrolladas y publicadas. En este artículo se presenta en detalle la organización de contenidos según sus tres ejes: transversal, (...) longitudinal y local. Se concluye que la concurrencia de los ejes definidos permite superar la dicotomía entre contenidos y metodología, a la vez que favorece el desarrollo de las diversas competencias que actúan en la comunicación cotidiana.Folil Mapudungun is a multidimensional method, based on a communicative approach, for teaching and learning Mapuche as a second language. It was designed for adult learners in a context where Mapudungun is a “language specific to the territory”, a heritage language and a community language. It is also the result of twelve years of research aiming to formulate objectives, and produce and systematize contents. At present, the method is constituted by eight lessons, developed and published in a textbook. This paper presents the method content organization according to three axes: transverse organization, longitudinal organization, and local organization. It is claimed that the use of these three axes allows us to overcome the methodology-content dichotomy, and to favor the development of the various communicative competences used in everyday life. (shrink)

Fichte, Johann G. Lecciones de filosofía aplicada: Doctrina del EstadoSalamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 288 p.ISBN 978-84-301-1962-2.

Resumen: El término “utopía” ha sido empleado por diversas corrientes e instituciones, entre ellas, la vida religiosa, para dar cuenta de ideas que movilizan sus proyectos de mundo. La pesquisa humanista y teológica en el continente latinoamericano no ha abordado de manera suficiente la relación entre utopía y vida religiosa. Esta investigación busca determinar una relación textual y contextual del uso del término utopía en las publicaciones entre 1970 y 2000 de la Conferencia de religiosos. Para ello, nos servimos de (...) las propuestas del Análisis Crítico del Discurso y la lexicografía. El análisis realizado permite establecer la dificultad y heterogeneidad de las formulaciones que expresan la utopía, sea por censura institucional o por visiones teológicas y escatológicas opuestas. A pesar de ello, los religiosos expresan una utopía latinoamericana asociada a la utopía cristiana del Reinado de Dios.: The term ‘utopia’ has been used by different tendencies and institutions, also the religious life, to show some ideas that mobilize their world projects. Latin-American theologian and humanist research hasn’t developed enough the relationship between utopia and religious life. Our research tries to determine the textual and contextual relation of the use of utopia as a term, in the “Confederación Latinoamericana de Religiosas y Religiosos” journal between 1970 and 2000. We used the tools proposed by the Critical Discourse Analysis and lexicography. The results show some difficulty and heterogeneity to formulate and express utopia. Censure and profound differences in theological and eschatological issues are some of the reasons for that matter. In spite of that, Latin-American religious life tends to express the presence of utopia associated to Christian Kingdom utopia. (shrink)

> Context • The alleged dichotomy between mind and matter is pervasive. Therefore, the attempt to explain mat- ter in terms of mind (idealism) is often considered a mirror image of that of explaining mind in terms of mat- ter (mainstream physicalism), in the sense of being structurally equivalent despite being reversely arranged. > Problem • I argue that this is an error arising from language artifacts, for dichotomies must reside in the same level of abstraction. > Method • I (...) show that, because matter outside mind is not an empirical observation but rather an explanatory model, the epistemic symmetry between the two is broken. Consequently, matter and mind cannot reside in the same level of abstraction. > Results • It then becomes clear that attempting to explain mind in terms of matter is epistemically more costly than attempting to explain matter in terms of mind. > Implications • The qualities of experience are suggested to be not only epistemically, but also ontologically primary. > Constructivist content • I high- light the primacy of perceptual constructs over explanatory abstraction on both epistemic and ontic levels. > Key words • Idealism, physicalism, pancomputationalism, anti-realism, hard problem of consciousness, epistemic symmetry, explanatory abstraction, levels of abstraction. (shrink)

Recent neuroimaging studies of the psychedelic state, which have commanded great media attention, are reviewed. They show that psychedelic trances are consistently accompanied by broad reductions in brain activity, despite their experiential richness. This result is at least counterintuitive from the perspective of mainstream physicalism, according to which subjective experience is entirely constituted by brain activity. In this brief analysis, the generic implications of physicalism regarding the relationship between the richness of experience and brain activity levels are rigorously examined from (...) an informational perspective, and then made explicit and unambiguous. These implications are then found to be non-trivial to reconcile with the results of said neuroimaging studies, which highlights the significance of such studies for the mind-body problem and philosophy of mind in general. (shrink)

Although Hegel is increasingly recognized as an important figure in the history of political economy, his economic views are never strictly economic. In contrast to other modern thinkers, his primary concern is not the economic efficacy of different practices or institutions but the extent to which they enable and promote the development of human freedom. In this article, I argue that Hegel's pioneering critique of modern liberal economy plays out simultaneously at a more empirical level, corresponding to the properly economic (...) dimension of his analysis, and at a deeper, logical level, which grounds and guides his position. Moreover, I argue that the tendency to favour the first of these levels, found in most of the literature on Hegel's economic thought, reduces the Philosophy of Right's main argument to a more or less vigorous plea for economic interventionism. Against this kind of reading, I show that a renewed focus on the text's logical structure reveals a different and more radical philosophical proposition, which has yet to be fully acknowledged. In particular, I argue that Hegel's dialectical logic leads him beyond the liberalism-interventionism debate, towards a qualitatively different conception of social and economic relations. (shrink)

This paper presents two projects concerned with the application of natural language processing technology for improving communication between Public Administration and citizens. The first project, GIST,is concerned with automatic multilingual generation of instructional texts for form-filling. The second project, TAMIC, aims at providing an interface for interactive access to information, centered on natural language processing and supposed to be used by the clerk but with the active participation of the citizen.

Teoricamente, busca-se expor os pressupostos, quanto às concepções voltadas para o âmbito educacional, de Jacques Derrida. Investiga-se, em seus escritos, se há um liame que permite separar e definir o que faz parte do mundo natural em contrapartida ao mundo cultural e vice-versa, quando nos reportamos ao estudo do homem e de suas ações, porque esta dualidade natureza/cultura é fundamental para saber da possibilidade de modificação do ser humano, pressuposto este, absoluto para a educação. Conclui-se que Derrida, ao defender a (...) não existência da ontologia antropológica, com seus resultados, invalida os seus próprios pressupostos, os quais estão assentados em um sujeito enunciador. (shrink)

Um sistema para a economia -- Uma constituição para Portugal -- Uma organização para o ensino.