In his classic paper On Computable Numbers Turing analyzed what can be done by a human computor in a routine, “mechanical” way. He argued that mechanical op-erations obey locality conditions and are carried out on configurations satisfying boundedness conditions. Processes meeting these restrictive conditions can be shown to be computable by a Turing machine. Turing viewed memory limitations of computors as the ultimate reason for the restrictive conditions. In contrast, Gandy analyzed in his paper Church’s Thesis and Principles for Mechanisms (...) what can be done by “discrete deterministic mechanical devices” and appealed to physical considerations to motivate restrictive principles. These devices include, crucially, ones that carry out parallel processes, e.g., cellular automata. Following Turing’s methodological ways and guided by Conway’s “Game of Life” as a paradigm, Gandy formulated four restrictive principles and proved that devices satisfying them are computationally equivalent to Turing machines. (shrink)

The hydrogen economy has received increasing attention recently. Common reasons cited for investigating hydrogen energy options are improved energy security, reduced environmental impacts, and its contribution to a transition to sustainable energy sources. In anticipation of these benefits, national and local initiatives have been launched in the United States, creating pilot “roadmaps” and technology partnerships to explore hydrogen economy platforms. Although hydrogen can provide several positive improvements over a carbon- or uranium-based energy system, several problems are also likely. As well, (...) competitive technologies (e.g., hybrid vehicles) may offer comparatively greater economic and/or environmental advantages. Before policies to advance a hydrogen energy economy proceed, it is vital that all aspects of hydrogen be compared with other available alternatives. Important questions to ask in this regard are whether a hydrogen economy can fulfill key energy needs and whether there are appropriate roles for hydrogen to play in a sustainable energy future. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3.2 (1996) 139-142 Concurrent Contents: Recent and Classic References at the Interface of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology Articles Abramowitz, S., C. Abramowitz, C. Jackson et al. 1973. The politics of clinical judgment. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 41: 385-391.Audi, R. N. 1972. Psychoanalytic explanation and the concept of rational action. The Monist 56: 444- 464.Barondess, J. A. 1979. Disease and illness--a crucial distinction. American (...) Journal of Medicine 66: 375-376.Barrett, R. J. 1988. Interpretations of schizophrenia. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 12: 357-388.Bechtel, W. 1993. The case for connectionism. Philosophical Studies 7: 119-154.Belzen, J. A. 1995. The impact of phenomenology on classical psychiatry: Rümke's position between Jaspers and Kraepelin. History of Psychiatry 6: 349-385.Benda, C. E. 1967. Neuroses of conscience. Journal of Existentialism 7: 425-442.Binns, P. 1995. Commentary on "Contentless consciousness." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2: 61-63.Blankenburg, W. 1980. Phenomenology and psychopathology. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 11: 50-78.Bloomfield, T. M. 1979. Psychoanalysis: A human science? Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 9: 271-287.Blumenfeld, D. 1972. Free action and unconscious motivation. The Monist 56: 426-443.Boudreaux, G. 1977. Freud on the nature of unconscious mental processes. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 7: 1-32.Bracken, P. J. 1995. Beyond liberation: Michael Foucault and the notion of a critical psychiatry. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 1: 1-13.Brazier, M. 1995. Commentary on "Who should be committable?." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 1: 49-50.Bursztajn, J., and A. Brodsky. 1995. Authenticity and autonomy in the managed-care era: Forensic psychiatric perspectives. Journal of Clinical Ethics 5, no. 3: 237-242.Byrnes, J. F. 1979. Suggestions on writing the history of psychological data. History and Theory 16: 297-305.Campbell, E. J., J. G. Scadding, and R. J. Roberts. 1979. The concept of disease. British Medical Journal 2: 757-762.Carveth, D. 1988. In reply to Eagle's reply on "The epistemological foundations of psychoanalysis." Philosophy of the Social Sciences 18: 377-378.Chadwick, R. F. 1995. Commentary on "Karl Jaspers and Edmund Husserl." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 1: 83-84.Christiansen, B. 1964. The scientific status of psychoanalytic clinical evidence (III). Inquiry 7: 47-79.Davis, M. 1987. Realistic utilitarianism and the social conditions of cognitive psychotherapy. Social Theory & Practice 13: 237-259.Dega, W., et al. 1978. Ethics and mental health: Discussion. Dialectics and Humanism 5: 219-235.Dingle, H. 1949. The logical status of psycho-analysis. Analysis 9: 63-66.Dupeau, J. 1977. Freud and degeneracy. Diogenes Spring: 43-64.Eagle, M. 1988. A reply to Carveth's "The epistemological foundations of psychoanalysis. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 18: 371-375.Elevitch, B. 1974-75. Reasons, motives and psychoanalysis. Philosophical Forum (Boston) 6: 143- 162.Elliot, P. 1995. Policies, identity, and social change: Contested grounds in psychoanalytic feminism. Hypatia 10: 41-55.Fabrega Jr, H. 1980. The position of psychiatric illness in biomedical theory: A cultural analysis. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 5: 145-168.Fisk, G. 1993. Accreditation of psychotherapists. British Journal of Hospital Medicine 50: 437-438.Flynn, B. G. 1985. Reading Habermas reading Freud. Human Studies 8: 57-76.Forrow, L., R. M. Arnold, and J. Frader. 1991. Teaching clinical ethics in the residency years--preparing competent professionals. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 16: 93-112.Friedman, M. 1982. Philosophical anthropology and psychotherapy. Philosophical Context 12: 9-19.Galdston, I. 1969. The ontologic foundations of morality. Existential Psychiatry 7: 69-75.Gardner, S. 1995a. Commentary on "Irrationality and the dynamic unconscious." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 2: 175-176.Gardner, S. 1995b. Psychoanalysis, science, and commonsense. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 2: 93-113.Handelsman, M. M. et al. 1995. Does legally mandated consent to psychotherapy ensure ethical appropriateness? The Colorado experience. Ethics and Behavior 5, no. 2: 119-129.Hanlon, M. D. 1977. Commentary on Dunham's "Psychiatry, Sociology and Civil Liberties." Values and Ethics in Health Care 2: 275-278.Heaton, J. M. 1972. Insight in... (shrink)

According to a popular doctrine known as "intentionalism," two experiences must have different representational contents if they have different phenomenological contents, in other words, what they represent must differ if what they feel like differs. Were this position correct, the representational significance of a given affect (or 'quale'---plural 'qualia'--to use the preferred term), e.g. a tickle, would be fixed: what it represented would not be a function of the subject's beliefs, past experiences, or other facts about his past or present (...) psychological condition. To be sure, many a quale has a significance; but it is never a quale's intrinsic properties that assign it that significance, it being quale-external facts about the subject's psychological composition that do so. (An example of such a fact would be a belief on the subject's part to the effect that relevantly similar qualia are consistent with arthritis.). (shrink)

This book shines bright light into the dim recesses of quantum theory, where the mysteries of entanglement, nonlocality, and wave collapse have motivated some to conjure up multiple universes, and others to adopt a "shut up and calculate" mentality. After an extensive and accessible introduction to quantum mechanics and its history, the author turns attention to his transactional model. Using a quantum handshake between normal and time-reversed waves, this model provides a clear visual picture explaining the baffling experimental results that (...) flow daily from the quantum physics laboratories of the world. To demonstrate its powerful simplicity, the transactional model is applied to a collection of counter-intuitive experiments and conceptual problems. (shrink)

Talks collected from lectures given by Bennett with Gurdjieff's approval, to help people understand All and Everything: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. Bennett regarded Gurdjieff's All and Everything as a work of superhuman genius.

Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics deals with these problems is reviewed. A new interpretation of the formalism of quantum mechanics, the transactional interpretation, is presented. The basic element of this interpretation is the transaction describing a quantum event as an exchange of advanced and retarded waves, as implied by the work of Wheeler and Feynman, Dirac, and others. The transactional interpretation is explicitly nonlocal and thereby consistent with recent tests of the Bell inequality, yet is relativistically invariant and fully causal. (...) A detailed comparison of the transactional and Copenhagen interpretations is made in the context of well-known quantum-mechanical Gedankenexperimenre and "paradoxes." The transactional interpretation permits quantum-mechanical wave functions to be interpreted as real waves physically present in space rather than as "mathematical representations of knowledge" as in the Copenhagen interpretation. The transactional interpretation is shown to provide insight into the complex character of the quantum-mechanical state vector and the mechanism associated with its "collapse." It also leads in a natural way to justification of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the Born probability law (P = ii iij*), basic elements of the Copenhagen interpretation. (shrink)

This book is an exploration of the relationship between philosophy and political inquiry. John G. Gunnell is seeking to explain certain dimensions of how philosophy has influenced political science and political theory but also how these latter fields have understood and deployed philosophy. When social scientists and social theorists turn to the work of philosophers for intellectual authority what they extract is often selective and in the service of some prior agenda. The philosophers whose work he discusses have all (...) in various degrees been objects of the conversation of political theory, but close acquaintance with that work is often limited and derivative. Gunnell's goal is to initiate a more genuine "conversation" with certain philosophers and political theorists. (shrink)

Japanese constructions of whiteness have been shaped by mainstream media and popular culture, which both reproduces and localizes the western discourse of whiteness. At the same time, the growth of the internet, social media, and online culture have exposed Japan to contentious debates in the United States (and elsewhere) concerning racial representation, race-switching, and diversity, as well as providing a platform for Japanese to reexamine contemporary Japanese racial attitudes. This chapter explores the impact that the discourse of representation and diversity (...) in the United States, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and demographic changes, particularly the growth of diasporic African communities in Japan since the 1980s, have had on Japanese perceptions of “whiteness,” “blackness,” and “Japaneseness.”. (shrink)

The relation between mind and matter is considered in terms of recent ideas from both phenomenology and brain science. Phenomenology is used to give clues to help bridge the brain-mind gap by providing constraints on any underlying neural architecture suggested from brain science. A tentative reduction of mind to matter is suggested and used to explain various features of phenomenological experience and of ownership of conscious experience. The crucial mechanism is the extended duration of the corollary discharge of attention movement, (...) with its gating of activity for related content. Aspects of experience considered in terms of the model are the discontinuous nature of consciousness, immunity to error through misidentification, and the state of 'pure' consciousness as experienced through meditation. Corollary discharge of attention movement is proposed as the key idea bringing together basic features of meditation, consciousness and neuroscience, and helping to bridge the gap between mind and matter. (shrink)

EPR experiments demonstrate that standard quantum mechanics exhibits the property of nonlocality , the enforcement of correlations between separated parts of an entangled quantum systems across spacelike separations. Nonlocality will be clarified using the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the possibility of superluminal effects (e.g., faster-than-light communication) from nonlocality and non-linear quantum mechanics will be examined.

The realism grounding St. Thomas Aquinas’s pre-modern natural science defends the reception of similitudes of the forms of things known by abstraction. Modern natural science challenges this abstractio- nist account by recasting «form» in the leading role of principle of intelligibility—instead of forms, modern science discovers laws. Thomistic realism is prima facie incompatible with this account. Following Charles De Koninck, this essay outlines a rapprochement between the epistemology of pre-modern, Thomistic natural science and its modern successor. I argue that natural (...) forms are noetic limits towards which physical laws tend, and our grasp of this tendency uses a mode of knowledge comparable to what St. Thomas termed universal in repraesentando. (shrink)

The plane of the present is a concept that is useful for discussing the various paradigms of time. Here by ‘plane of the present’ we mean the temporal interface that represents the present instant and that forms the boundary between the past and the future. We use the geometrical term ‘plane’ to indicate an extended surface in the space-time continuum, as opposed to a ‘point’ on some time axis. This point/plane dichotomy is intended to raise issues of extension and simultaneity (...) and to examine the degree to which these are meaningful concepts from various physical viewpoints. We will show by example in the present work that the plane of the present is a pivotal concept that offers considerable power in differentiating between various views of the nature of time. The concept of time within the main stream of physics thinking has followed a rather convoluted path over the past three millennia. Anticipating the modern motion picture, Zeno of Elea (c.490-c.430 B.C) questioned whether time should appropriately be viewed as a continuously flowing river, or should more properly be considered as a rapid sequence of stop-motion ‘freeze-frames’, in effect rendering geometrical each instant as a separate infinitesimal point on the line of time. Adopting this view, he asked how physical motion could occur. He argued paradoxically that motion is not possible, since it appears to happen only between the frozen frames of time instants.1 From the viewpoint of Zeno, the plane of the present would be simply the last and most recent in this sequence of freeze-frames. It would be that frozen instant, spanning the universe, which changes progressively as the instant we call ‘now’ becomes the frozen past and future possibility freezes into the ‘now’ of present reality. We note that the plane of the present as a concept does not resolve the arrow paradox that Zeno raised. It only provides a way of thinking about it. (shrink)

What is the place of vulnerability in our lives? The current debate about the ethics of enhancement technologies provides a context in which to think about this question. In my view, the current debate is likely to be fruitless, largely because we bring the wrong ethical resources to bear on its questions. In this article, I recall an important, but currently neglected, role that moral concepts play in our thinking, a role they should especially play in relation to the introduction (...) of new technologies. I call this the ‘contemplative role of moral concepts’. I then contrast two approaches to the contemplative role of moral concepts which are found in the current literature, and show why it is important to keep in mind both of these approaches when thinking about human vulnerability. (shrink)

This column is a milestone. In 1983, while I was on a one year sabbatical at the Hahn Meitner Institute for Nuclear Physics in what was then West Berlin, I received a letter from Stan Schmidt informing me that Jerry Pournelle had decided that he no longer wished to be an Alternate View columnist for Analog and asking if I was interested in taking over as the AV columnist and “alternating” with G. Harry Stine.

There are now various approaches to understand where and how in the brain consciousness arises from neural activity, none of which is universally accepted. Difficulties among these approaches are reviewed, and a missing ingredient is proposed here to help adjudicate between them, that of ''perspectivalness.'' In addition to a suitable temporal duration and information content of the relevant bound brain activity, this extra component is posited as being a further important ingredient for the creation of consciousness from neural activity. It (...) guides the development of what is termed the ''Central Representation,'' which is supposed to be present in all mammals and extended in humans to support self-consciousness as well as phenomenal consciousness. Experimental evidence and a theoretical framework for the existence of the central representation are presented, which relates the extra component to specific buffer working memory sites in the inferior parietal lobes, acting as attentional coordinators on the spatial maps making up the central representation. The article closes with a discussion of various open questions. (shrink)

Two years ago, astrophysicists studying Type Ia supernovas discovered that our universe is a much stranger place than we had imagined, with invisible vacuum energy accelerating its expansion. (See my column about this in the May-1999 Analog.) However, new astrophysical observations from the BOOMERanG experiment (Balloon Observations Of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geomagnetics), a balloon-borne cryogenic microwave telescope measurement that flew at an altitude of about 24 miles over the Antarctic, indicate that our universe is also rather ordinary, in that (...) its space is maximally flat. The term “flat” as used here means that the space of our universe is neither positively curved like a ball or negatively curved like a potato chip. It appears that in our universe, the tendencies of space toward positive curvature from gravitational attraction and towards negative curvature from expansion kinetic energy are precisely in balance, leaving space on the average completely free of curvature. (shrink)

In the December-1989 issue of Analog, I wrote an AV Column entitled “Cold Fusion, Pro-fusion, and Con-fusion” that described and gave my opinions about the recently announced “discovery of cold fusion” by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann. These University of Utah electro-chemists claimed that by electrolyzing D2O on a tabletop, they had produced the nuclear fusion of deuterium nuclei.

With an emphasis on psychoanalytic theory, Business, Ethics and Society: Key Concepts, Current Debates and Contemporary Innovations provides a clear, concise introduction to the field of business ethics, while addressing contemporary issues and debates around the impacts of artificial intelligence, social media, the gig economy and populist politics on business and society. The book features mini-case studies from a variety of contexts and companies, including Gillette, Nike, Dove, British Airways and Microsoft, as well as thought-provoking questions throughout. Also included are: (...) - Learning objectives - Chapter summaries - Recommended reading Business, Ethics and Society: Key Concepts, Current Debates and Contemporary Innovations serves as an ideal introductory text for students of undergraduate business ethics-related courses. Lecturers can access a range of online resources for use in their teaching, including an instructor's manual, PowerPoint slides and SAGE Business Cases. (shrink)

Americans have long prided themselves on living in a country that serves as a beacon of democracy to the world, but from the time of the founding they have also engaged in debates over what the criteria for democracy are as they seek to validate their faith in the United States as a democratic regime. In this book John Gunnell shows how the academic discipline of political science has contributed in a major way to this ongoing dialogue, thereby playing (...) a significant role in political education and the formulation of popular conceptions of American democracy. Using the distinctive “internalist” approach he has developed for writing intellectual history, Gunnell traces the dynamics of conceptual change and continuity as American political science evolved from a focus in the nineteenth century on the idea of the state, through the emergence of a pluralist theory of democracy in the 1920s and its transfiguration into liberalism in the mid-1930s, up to the rearticulation of pluralist theory in the 1950s and its resurgence, yet again, in the 1990s. Along the way he explores how political scientists have grappled with a fundamental question about popular sovereignty: Does democracy require a people and a national democratic community, or can the requisites of democracy be achieved through fortuitous social configurations coupled with the design of certain institutional mechanisms? (shrink)

The present paper examines the arguments and data presented by Nisbett and Wilson relevant to their thesis that subjects do not have access to their own cognitive processes. It is concluded that their review of previous research is selective and incomplete and that the data they present in behalf of their thesis does not withstand a demand characteristics analysis. Furthermore, their use of observer-subject similarity as evidence of subjects' inability to access cognitive processes makes tests of their hypothesis confounded and, (...) at the same time, reveals limitations in the application of the pre-inquiry quasi-control to research on social behavior. Problems with postexperiment questionnaires, such as the demand characteristics of the inquiry procedure are also considered. Although there are difficulties in assessing subjects' cognitive processes, many of these may be overcome through the application of novel techniques and research conducted on more traditional methods. In contrast to the view that subjects have limited access to cognitive processes and that their verbal reports are not valid, it is concluded that subjects' verbalizations are a rich source of psychological data which must be pursued if we are to tap their cognitive processes and are to gain an adequate understanding of human behavior. (shrink)

This AV Column is about the Universal Solvent of modern physics which we call antimatter, and about a bottle in which it can be and has been kept. However, before getting to the hardware I want to talk about antimatter as it relates to the fundamental symmetries of the universe.

Last Saturday I made my first journey into virtual reality . I walked with giant strides around a city called Seattle. I leaped the Columbia Center, the tallest building in the city, with a single bound. I dove beneath the surface of Puget Sound and watched a pod of whales heading north toward Canada. I hovered above the Space Needle, then dropped inside to enjoy its panoramic view and to examine its structural details. I raced a Washington State ferry across (...) the Sound from Seattle to Bremerton. I caught up with it just as it approached the Bremerton dock and was able to watch the docking operation from a perch on the roof of the bridge. Then I flew back across the Sound and peered down into the Kingdome, looking in vain for a winning team. Finally, I pointed my magic glove across the Sound to the Olympic Peninsula, flew there, and examined a group of towering snow-capped peaks from all angles. I did all of this without leaving a small building on the campus of the University of Washington. (shrink)

In October-2010 the headlines of the science press were dominated by the announcement of the discovery of a “Goldilocks Planetâ€, Gleise 581g, which has a mass not too different from that of the Earth and has an orbit squarely in the middle of the habitable zone of its parent star. It was supposed to be not too hot, not too cold, but just right for the evolution of life. Steven Vogt of UC Santa Cruz, the lead author of the paper, (...) was quoted (out of context) as saying, “The chances of life on the planet are 100%.†Now that some of the dust has settled concerning this reported discovery, I’d like to have a look at the work behind the announcement and consider its present status. (shrink)

My previous Alternate View column (ANALOG 9/84) described the widely accepted "inflationary scenario" of modern cosmology in which our Universe is just one among very many "bubble universes", all popping out of the general medium of the Big Bang like bubbles forming in a glass of beer. Somewhere perhaps there are many universes more or less like ours, some very similar to and others radically different from the universe we call "home".