This volume presents two Leibnizian writings, the Specimen of Philosophical Questions Collected from the Law and the Dissertation on Perplexing Cases. These works, originally published in 1664 and 1666, constitute, respectively, Leibniz's thesis for the title of Master of Philosophy and his doctoral dissertation in law. Besides providing evidence of the earliest development of Leibniz's thought and amazing anticipations of his mature views, they present a genuine intellectual interest, for the freshness and originality of Leibniz's reflections on a striking variety (...) of logico-philosophical puzzles drawn from the law. The Specimen addresses puzzling issues resulting from apparent conflicts between law and philosophy (the latter broadly understood as comprising also mathematics, as well as empirical sciences). The Dissertation addresses cases whose solution is puzzling because of the convoluted logical form of legal dispositions and contractual clauses, or because of conflicting priorities between concurring parties. In each case, Leibniz dissects the problems with the greatest ingenuity, disentangling their different aspects, and proposing solutions always reasonable and sometimes surprising. And he does not refrain from peppering his intellectual acrobatics with some humorous comments. bbbbbb. (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.

In un saggio del 1984 destinato a una certa fortuna interpretativa, lo storico dell’architettura Jean-Louis Cohen presentava la figura dell’architetto-intellettuale come l’esito di condizioni specifiche che avevano permesso ad alcuni architetti italiani – in contrapposizione, per esempio, a quelli francesi – di affiancare alla propria attività professionale e di insegnamento una riflessione approfondita sulle condizioni del proprio operare, rafforzando un’interpretazione dell’architettura com...

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)

Building a civilization of love -- The practice of values in various settings -- The superiority complex of Filipino women -- The value of doing good business -- The value of living the virtues -- The virtues of icons, role models and personalities -- The value of spirituality -- Filipino values, yesterday, today and tomorrow.

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)

Drawing upon a distinction between epistemically and metaphysically motivated notions of a concept, I consider the insurmountable problems of theories that appeal to our epistemic capacities to address the problem of the nature of concepts satisfactorily. Prominent theories of concepts hold that primitive concepts must have internal structure if they are to account for the explanatory functions that cognitive scientists have attributed to such constructs as prototypes, exemplars, and theories. Vindicating the role of non-experimental philosophy in the critical examination of (...) empirical theories, I argue that the explanatory effectiveness of those constructs is orthogonal to an argument concerning the structure of primitive concepts. Conceptual atomism provides an alternative approach to individuating primitive concepts the precise formulation of which has yet to be worked out. Despite its unpopularity, the atomist alternative is still in a better position to face the question of what concepts are than its competitors. (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)

In this paper, I propose a general taxonomy of different forms of eliminativism. In order to do so, I begin by exploring eliminativism from a broad perspective, providing a comparative picture of eliminativist projects in different domains. This exploration shows that eliminativism is a label used for a family of related types of eliminativist arguments and claims. The proposed taxonomy is an attempt to systematise those arguments and claims.

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)

Transformar el Estado implica cambiar todo el modelo de sociedad en aspectos b sicos. Sin embargo, este tema con frecuencia ha sido abordado con extremo simplismo, dogmatismo y bajo visiones maniqueas. Esta obra rompe las perspectivas convencionales al encarar el problema de cambiar el Estado desde la agenda de los temas claves que afligen la vida cotidiana de las grandes mayor as en el mundo.

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)

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)

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)

Edouard Machery has argued that the notion of concept should be eliminated from scientific theorising about cognition on the grounds that what psychologists call concepts do not form a natural kind and that keeping this notion would encumber scientific progress. His view is that the class of concepts really divides into three distinct yet co-referential kinds of bodies of knowledge typically used in distinct cognitive processes. The main purpose of this paper is to challenge Machery’s eliminativist conclusion on the grounds (...) that his alternative to concepts fails to be combined with any prominent account of content determination. As a case of philosophical scrutiny of a psychological proposal, the paper also intends to show how philosophical and psychological interests in concepts can be brought together. (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)

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)

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)

In this paper, the radical view that transparent equipment is the result of an ecological assembly between tool users and physical aspects of the world is critically assessed. According to this perspective, tool users are normally viewed as plastically organized hybrid agents. In this view, such agents are able to interact with tools (artefacts or technologies) in ways that are opportunistic and fully locked to the local task environment. This intimate and flexible interaction would provide grounds for the thesis that (...) cognitive agents and tools constitute literal extended cognitive systems. By contrast, a revised understanding of tool use transparency will be attempted. In this perspective, the interplay between on-line and off-line thinking is understood in terms of a socially reified cognitive delegation that subsumes the advantages normally associated to the so-called ‘open-ended ecological controllers.’ Thus, the notion of transparent technologies can be explored on the basis of a derived or mediated cognitive delegation. This view will be complemented by the notion of communities of practice (CoP). Special sorts of CoP will be proposed as suitable and flexible cognitive environments for the development of tool transparency. (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.

> 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)

Resumo Plotino é um pensador estranho para o filósofo contemporâneo: nas suas Enéadas, ele discute experiência mística e prática filosófica como se fosse uma mesma coisa. De fato, no pensamento plotiniano, o ápice da vida filosófica é a contemplação mística: não pensamento irracional, mas uma forma supra-racional de consciência que é alcançada pela prática ascética e pelo procedimento dialético. Este artigo tenta entender o que é a experiência mística em Plotino. Na verdade, uma leitura atenta dos textos das Enéadas que (...) tratam do assunto mostram que não existe apenas um, mas dois tipos de contemplação mística supra-racional: a experiência da alma humana unida ao Intelecto divino e a experiência da alma humana unida ao Um, o princípio supremo da realidade de acordo com a filosofia plotiniana. Ambos são tipos de intuição intelectual interior, mas, se a experiência mística do Intelecto é a contemplação da totalidade do mundo inteligível, a contemplação do Um é a intuição da identidade pura, além de toda a diferença. Palavras-chave: Plotino; Neoplatonismo; Mística.Plotinus is a strange scholar to the contemporary philosopher: in his Enneads, he discusses mystical experience and philosophical practice as if they were the same thing. Indeed, according to his thoughts, the summit of philosophical life is mystical contemplation: not irrational thinking, but a supra-rational form of consciousness achieved through ascetic practice and dialectical procedure. This paper attempts to understand the mystical experience in Plotinus. In fact, a close reading of the texts of the Enneads on the subject demonstrates that there are not only one, but two kinds of supra-rational mystical contemplation: the experience of the human soul united to the divine Intellect and the experience of the human soul united to the One, the supreme principle of reality according to Plotinus's philosophy. Both are kinds of interior intellectual intuition, but if the mystical experience of the Intellect is the contemplation of the whole of the intelligible world, the contemplation of the One is the intuition of pure identity, beyond all difference. Key words: Plotinus; Neo-Platonism; Mysticism. (shrink)

To make educated guesses about what happens to consciousness upon bodily death, one has to have some understanding of the relationship between body and consciousness during life. This relationship, of course, reflects an ontology. In this brief essay, the tenability of both the physicalist and dualist ontologies will be assessed in view of recent experimental results in physics. The alternative ontology of idealism will then be discussed, which not only can be reconciled with the available empirical evidence, but also overcomes (...) the lack of parsimony and limited explanatory power of physicalism and dualism. Idealism elegantly explains the basic facts of reality, such as (a) the fact that brain activity correlates with experience, (b) the fact that we all seem to share the same world, and (c) the fact that we can’t change the laws of nature at will. If idealism is correct, the implication is that, instead of disappearing, conscious inner life expands upon bodily death, a prediction that finds circumstantial but significant confirmation in reports of near-death experiences and psychedelic trances, both of which can be construed as glimpses into the early stages of the death process. (shrink)