A concise but informative overview of AI ethics and policy. -/- Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, has generated a staggering amount of hype in the past several years. Is it the game-changer it's been cracked up to be? If so, how is it changing the game? How is it likely to affect us as customers, tenants, aspiring homeowners, students, educators, patients, clients, prison inmates, members of ethnic and sexual minorities, and voters in liberal democracies? Authored by experts in fields (...) ranging from computer science and law to philosophy and cognitive science, this book offers a concise overview of moral, political, legal and economic implications of AI. It covers the basics of AI's latest permutation, machine learning, and considers issues such as transparency, bias, liability, privacy, and regulation. -/- Both business and government have integrated algorithmic decision support systems into their daily operations, and the book explores the implications for our lives as citizens. For example, do we take it on faith that a machine knows best in approving a patient's health insurance claim or a defendant's request for bail? What is the potential for manipulation by targeted political ads? How can the processes behind these technically sophisticated tools ever be transparent? The book discusses such issues as statistical definitions of fairness, legal and moral responsibility, the role of humans in machine learning decision systems, “nudging” algorithms and anonymized data, the effect of automation on the workplace, and AI as both regulatory tool and target. (shrink)
A repackaged edition of the revered author’s spiritual memoir, in which he recounts the story of his divine journey and eventual conversion to Christianity. C. S. Lewis—the great British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and bestselling author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many other beloved classics—takes readers on a spiritual journey through his early life and eventual embrace of the Christian faith. Lewis begins with his childhood in Belfast, surveys (...) his boarding school years and his youthful atheism in England, reflects on his experience in World War I, and ends at Oxford, where he became "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." As he recounts his lifelong search for joy, Lewis demonstrates its role in guiding him to find God. (shrink)
For three decades, Angela Y. Davis has written on liberation theory and democratic praxis. Challenging the foundations of mainstream discourse, her analyses of culture, gender, capital, and race have profoundly influenced democratic theory, antiracist feminism, critical studies and political struggles. Even for readers who primarily know her as a revolutionary of the late 1960s and early 1970s she has greatly expanded the scope and range of social philosophy and political theory. Expanding critical theory, contemporary progressive theorists - engaged in justice (...) struggles - will find their thought influenced by the liberation praxis of Angela Y. Davis. _The Angela Y. Davis Reader_ presents eighteen essays from her writings and interviews which have appeared in _If They Come in the Morning, Women, Race, and Class, Women, Culture, and Politics,_ and _Black Women and the Blues_ as well as articles published in women's, ethnic/black studies and communist journals, and cultural studies anthologies. In four parts - "Prisons, Repression, and Resistance", "Marxism, Anti-Racism, and Feminism", "Aesthetics and Culture", and recent interviews - Davis examines revolutionary politics and intellectualism. Davis's discourse chronicles progressive political movements and social philosophy. It is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary political philosophy, critical race theory, social theory, ethnic studies, American studies, African American studies, cultural theory, feminist philosophy, gender studies. (shrink)
In conversation analysis, prediction, in the form of the projectability of turn constructional units, is a central feature of the ways in which talk is structured in interaction. As such, prediction is an important part of what recipients do when listening to talk in progress. This article will examine a number of instances of collaborative talk in English and French in which both participants produce similar talk at roughly the same time. It will be shown that prediction is being exercised (...) in these utterances to determine not only the form of the next lexical item but also to identify larger syntactic structures. The article will also assess the nature of the resources that participants in interaction draw on in order to be able to make their predictions about their interlocutor’s talk. (shrink)
The Joy of Philosophy is a return to some of the perennial questions of philosophy--questions about the meaning of life; about death and tragedy; about the respective roles of rationality and passion in the good life; about love, compassion, and revenge; about honesty, deception, and betrayal; and about who we are and how we think about who we are. Recapturing the heart-felt confusion and excitement that originally brings us all to philosophy, internationally renowned teacher and lecturer Robert C. Solomon offers (...) both a critique of contemporary philosophy and an invitation to engage in philosophy in a different way. He attempts to save philosophy from itself and its self-imposed diet of thin arguments and logical analysis to recover the richness and complexity of life in thought. Solomon defends the passionate life in contrast to the life of thoughtful contemplation idealized by so many philosophers, attempting to recapture the kind of philosophy that Nietzsche celebrated as a "joyful wisdom.". (shrink)
It is hard to imagine a threat to international security or a tension within U.S. foreign policy that does not involve the imposition of economic sanctions. The United Nations Security Council has fourteen sanctions regimes currently in place, and all member states of the United Nations are obligated to participate in their enforcement. The United States has some thirty sanctions programs, which target a range of countries, companies, organizations, and individuals, and many of these are autonomous sanctions that are independent (...) of the measures required by the United Nations. Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and others also have autonomous sanctions regimes, spanning a broad range of contexts and purpose. Most well-known are those concerning weapons proliferation, terrorism, and human rights violations; but sanctions are also imposed in such contexts as money laundering, corruption, and drug trafficking. States may also impose sanctions as a means to achieve foreign policy goals: to pressure a foreign state to bend to the sanctioner's will, to punish those who represent a threat to the sanctioner's economic or political interests, or to seek the end of a political regime toward which the sanctioner is hostile, to give but a few examples. (shrink)
Few people will easily admit to taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others. But who doesn't enjoy it when an arrogant but untalented contestant is humiliated on American Idol, or when the embarrassing vice of a self-righteous politician is exposed, or even when an envied friend suffers a small setback? The truth is that joy in someone else's pain--known by the German word schadenfreude--permeates our society. In The Joy of Pain, psychologist Richard Smith, one of the world's foremost authorities on (...) envy and shame, sheds much light on a feeling we dare not admit. Smith argues that schadenfreude is a natural human emotion, one worth taking a closer look at, as it reveals much about who we are as human beings. We have a passion for justice. Sometimes, schadenfreude can feel like getting one's revenge, when the suffering person has previously harmed us. But most of us are also motivated to feel good about ourselves, Smith notes, and look for ways to maintain a positive sense of self. One common way to do this is to compare ourselves to others and find areas where we are better. Similarly, the downfall of others--especially when they have seemed superior to us--can lead to a boost in our self-esteem, a lessening of feelings of inferiority. This is often at the root of schadenfreude. As the author points out, most instances of schadenfreude are harmless, on par with the pleasures of light gossip. Yet we must also be mindful that envy can motivate, without full awareness, the engineering of the misfortune we delight in. And envy-induced aggression can take us into dark territory indeed, as Smith shows as he examines the role of envy and schadenfreude in the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Filled with engaging examples of schadenfreude, from popular reality shows to the Duke-Kentucky basketball rivalry, The Joy of Pain provides an intriguing glimpse into a hidden corner of the human psyche. (shrink)
Andrew Youpa offers an original reading of Spinoza's moral philosophy, arguing it is fundamentally an ethics of joy. Unlike approaches to moral philosophy that center on praiseworthiness or blameworthiness, Youpa maintains that Spinoza's moral philosophy is about how to live lovingly and joyously. His reading expands to examinations of the centrality of education and friendship to Spinoza's moral framework, his theory of emotions, and the metaphysical foundation of his moral philosophy.
The intersection of Foucault and Hadot's work in the philosophy of antiquity is a dense and fruitful meeting. Not only do each of the philosophers offer competing interpretations of antiquity, their differences also reflect on their opposing assessments of the contemporary situation and the continuing philosophical debate between the universal and the relative. Unpacking these two philosophers’ disagreements on antiquity sheds light on how Hadot’s commitment to the Universal and Foucault’s commitment to an aesthetics of existence stem from their diagnoses (...) of the present and the persistent philosophical issue of universalism. This line of analysis is especially productive to pursue in relation to Hadot and Foucault because of the rigor of their thought, the lack of polemics in its debate, and the importance of both thinkers to philosophy generally. (shrink)
We sometimes experience pleasures and displeasures simultaneously: whenever we eat sfogliatelle while having a headache, whenever we feel pain fading away, whenever we feel guilty pleasure while enjoying listening to Barbara Streisand, whenever we are savouring a particularly hot curry, whenever we enjoy physical endurance in sport, whenever we are touched upon receiving a hideous gift, whenever we are proud of withstanding acute pain, etc. These are examples of what we call " mixed feelings ". Mixed feelings are cases in (...) which one and the same person experiences pleasure and displeasure at the same time. Mixed feelings raise two questions: If pleasure and displeasure are contraries, how can mixed feelings be possible? Does the excess of pleasure that we feel when experiencing mixed feelings itself constitute a new feeling, that results from the co-occurrence of the first two? I will argue that mixed feelings are possible and that their existence does not threaten the contrariety of pleasure and displeasure, and that there are no resultant feelings: having a lot of pleasure and a little displeasure does not result in having additional mild pleasure. Finally, I will suggest that although both false, scepticism towards the existence of mixed feelings, as well as the idea according to which resultant feelings exist, are inspired from a single and correct idea: that pleasure and displeasure do fuse in some cases. (shrink)
Joy is often mentioned in discussion of theories of hedonism, happiness, desire, or religion, but is rarely considered in itself. Consequently, much about the nature of joy remains unclear. Is it, for example, a distinctive state? A feeling? An emotion? Why is it experienced? Does it have a functional role? Through discussion of joy's nature, role, and importance, it will be demonstrated that joy can indeed be defined: as an intense, positively-valenced emotion, whose inherent connection to the desire for self-preservation (...) renders it inappropriate for providing the basis for theories of morality. (shrink)
Economic sanctions are emerging as one of the major tools of international governance in the post-Cold War era. Gordon considers the issue of sanctions within three ethical frameworks: just war doctrine, deontological ethics, and utilitarianism.
In the context of EPR-Bohm type experiments and spin detections confined to spacelike hypersurfaces, a local, deterministic and realistic model within a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetime with a constant spatial curvature (S^3 ) is presented that describes simultaneous measurements of the spins of two fermions emerging in a singlet state from the decay of a spinless boson. Exact agreement with the probabilistic predictions of quantum theory is achieved in the model without data rejection, remote contextuality, superdeterminism or backward causation. A singularity-free Clifford-algebraic (...) representation of S^3 with vanishing spatial curvature and non-vanishing torsion is then employed to transform the model in a more elegant form. Several event-by-event numerical simulations of the model are presented, which confirm our analytical results with the accuracy of 4 parts in 10^4 . Possible implications of our results for practical applications such as quantum security protocols and quantum computing are briefly discussed. (shrink)
This paper is an initial effort preparatory for a more thorough “theology of joys.” I distinguish joys from other kinds of pleasure and argue that joy can be seen as the form of all the so-called positive emotions. So joy is properly treated in the plural: joys come in a variety of kinds. I distinguish canonical from non-canonical joys. The worthiness of joys is primarily a function of their objects—what the joys are about. I look at a few examples of (...) joys that appear in the New Testament and sketch the relation of joys to happiness. (shrink)
The exceptional Lie group E_8 plays a prominent role both in mathematics and theoretical physics. It is the largest symmetry group connected to the most general possible normed division algebra, that of the non-associative real octonions, which — thanks to their non-associativity — form the only possible closed set of spinors that can parallelize the 7-sphere. By contrast, here we show how a similar 7-sphere also arises naturally from the algebraic interplay of the graded Euclidean primitives, such as points, lines, (...) planes and volumes, characterizing the three-dimensional conformal geometry of the physical space, set within its eight-dimensional Clifford-algebraic representation. Remarkably, the resulting algebra remains associative, and allows us to understand the origins and strengths of all quantum correlations locally, in terms of the geometry of the compactified physical space, namely that of a quaternionic 3-sphere, S^3, with S^7 being the corresponding algebraic representation space. Every quantum correlation can thus be understood as a correlation among a set of points of this S^7, computed using manifestly local spinors in S^3, thereby setting the geometrical upper bound of 2√2 on the strengths of all quantifiable correlations. We demonstrate this by first proving a comprehensive theorem about the geometrical origins of the correlations predicted by any arbitrary quantum state, and then explicitly reproducing the strong correlations predicted by the EPR-Bohm and GHZ states. The raison d'etre of strong correlations turns out to be the twist in the Hopf bundle of S^3 within S^7. (shrink)
Paul Ricoeur's theory of narrative has implications for a wide spectrum of contemporary thought. This collection of essays explores many of the areas to which his narrative strategies can be fruitfully applied, including architecture, psychology, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, ethics, sociology, medieval and contemporary literature, and religious studies. The book provides an introduction to the creative and productive resources of Ricoeur's narrative theory and offers a helpful survey of many of his key concepts for those who may be unfamiliar with Ricoeur's (...) work. (shrink)
Reviewing works by James Alison, Alistair McFadyen, Andrew Sung Park, Ted Peters, and Solomon Schimmel, the author suggests that the status and function of the discourse/doctrine of sin highlight tensions between theology and ethics in ways that suggest the character, limits, and promise of religious ethics. This literature commends attention to sin-talk because it helps religious ethicists to render more adequately the dynamics of human agency, sociality, and culture and because it raises questions about the nature and task of theology, (...) faith, and morality. Yet these volumes also indicate that religious ethics should pay more attention to particular sins. (shrink)
In this work, Robert Solomon tries to put the fun back in philosophy, recapturing the heart-felt confusion and excitement that originally brings us all into philosophy. It is not a critique of comtemporary philosophy so much as it is an attempt to engage in philosophy in a different kind of way, beginning with a re-evaluation of Socrates and the nature of philosophy and defending the passionate life in contrast to the calm life of thoughtful contemplation so often held up as (...) an ideal by traditional philosophers. In short, it is an attempt to recapture the kind of philosophy that Nietzsche celebrated as a "joyful wisdom". The author tries to break down the walls between academic philosophy and its lost audience, between thin logic and thick rhetoric, between philosophical reason and philosophical passion, between 'analytic' and 'continental' philosophy, between philosophy and life. (shrink)
Is it particularly human to feel coerced into fulfilling moral obligations, or is it particularly human to enjoy them? I argue for the importance of taking into account how culture promotes prosocial behavior, discussing how Confucian heritage culture enhances the satisfaction of meeting one's obligations.
Literary racial impersonation occurs when a narrative work fails to express the perspective of a minority ethnic or racial group. Interestingly, even when these works express moral themes congenial to promoting empathetic responses towards these groups, they can be met with public outrage if the group’s perspective is portrayed inaccurately. My goal in this paper is to vindicate the intuition that failure to express the perspective of a minority group well renders the work defective, both aesthetically and morally. I argue (...) that available frameworks exploring the connections between aesthetic and moral realms of value are inadequate to analyzing this phenomenon and propose a novel connection between aesthetic and moral values. Specifically, I demonstrate that the primary defect of literary racial impersonation is aesthetic and contingently constitutes a moral defect in our current social context. (shrink)
In this paper I examine the relation between modern transhumanism and Nietzsche’s philosophy of the superhuman. Following Loeb, I argue that transhumanists cannot claim affinity to Nietzsche’s philosophy until they incorporate the doctrine of eternal recurrence to their project of technological enhancement. This doctrine liberates us from resentment against time by teaching us reconciliation with time and something higher than all reconciliation. Unlike Loeb, however, I claim that this “something higher” is not a new skill (prospective memory), but rather a (...) love for the past in the form of loving that aspect of it that is still with us, namely, the will to power itself, which is the engine of all life. Love of the past is thus equivalent to love of life. Since human beings are conscious incarnations of the will to power, in our case, love of life manifests itself as love of our humanity or love for that aspect of ourselves that connects us to each other, for we recognize it to be the same in all of us. Thus, learning this kind of love enables us to joyfully coordinate our wills in the pursuit of Zarathustra’s superhuman ideal without turning it into a destructive mockery of itself. While learning this kind of love would facilitate a joyful version of transhumanism, I conclude by suggesting that it is unlikely to be achieved through technological interventions of the sort envisioned by transhumanists. Instead, it requires the kind of participatory pedagogical program that Nietzsche thought his Zarathustra would fulfill. (shrink)
Bell inequalities are usually derived by assuming locality and realism, and therefore violations of the Bell-CHSH inequality are usually taken to imply violations of either locality or realism, or both. But, after reviewing an oversight by Bell, in the Corollary below we derive the Bell-CHSH inequality by assuming only that Bob can measure along vectors b and b' simultaneously while Alice measures along either a or a', and likewise Alice can measure along vectors a and a' simultaneously while Bob measures (...) along either b or b', without assuming locality. The violations of the Bell-CHSH inequality therefore only mean impossibility of measuring along b and b' simultaneously. (shrink)
Forlagets beskrivelse: Informative, analytical and stimulating, this book examines the relationship between professional knowledge and clinical practice.Biography.
Although the neural systems that underlie spoken language are well-known, how they adapt to evolving social cues during natural conversations remains an unanswered question. In this work we investigate the neural correlates of face-to-face conversations between two individuals using functional near infrared spectroscopy and acoustical analyses of concurrent audio recordings. Nineteen pairs of healthy adults engaged in live discussions on two controversial topics where their opinions were either in agreement or disagreement. Participants were matched according to their a priori opinions (...) on these topics as assessed by questionnaire. Acoustic measures of the recorded speech including the fundamental frequency range, median fundamental frequency, syllable rate, and acoustic energy were elevated during disagreement relative to agreement. Consistent with both the a priori opinion ratings and the acoustic findings, neural activity associated with long-range functional networks, rather than the canonical language areas, was also differentiated by the two conditions. Specifically, the frontoparietal system including bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, left supramarginal gyrus, angular gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus showed increased activity while talking during disagreement. In contrast, talking during agreement was characterized by increased activity in a social and attention network including right supramarginal gyrus, bilateral frontal eye-fields, and left frontopolar regions. Further, these social and visual attention networks were more synchronous across brains during agreement than disagreement. Rather than localized modulation of the canonical language system, these findings are most consistent with a model of distributed and adaptive language-related processes including cross-brain neural coupling that serves dynamic verbal exchanges. (shrink)
It is shown that Bell's theorem fails for the Clifford algebra valued local realistic variables. This is made evident by exactly reproducing quantum mechanical expectation value for the EPR-Bohm type spin correlations observable by means of a local, deterministic, Clifford algebra valued variable, without necessitating either remote contextuality or backward causation. Since Clifford product of multivector variables is non-commutative in general, the spin correlations derived within our locally causal model violate the CHSH inequality just as strongly as their quantum mechanical (...) counterparts. (shrink)
This book examines the multiple ways that wisdom grounded in life experience, science and theoretical knowledge can contribute to positive local and global futures.
Many misappropriations and exclusions have arisen from the Western tendency to reduce and manipulate the ideas and values of non- Western religions and philosophies to fit within Western concepts and categories. How might comparative philosophy and religion change if the concepts and categories of non-Western philosophies and religions were taken as primary? This volume explores this question through Western analytic and phenomenological approaches of eminent scholars from both fields, infused with fresh strategies and modalities derived from or inspired by non-Western (...) traditions. A truly groundbreaking collection,_ After Appropriation_ inaugurates an entirely new integrative discipline of comparative religion and philosophy. (shrink)
A local, deterministic, and realistic model within a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetime with constant spatial curvature is presented which describes simultaneous measurements of the spins of two fermions emerging in a singlet state from the decay of a spinless boson. Exact agreement with the probabilistic predictions of quantum theory is achieved in the model without data rejection, remote contextuality, superdeterminism, or backward causation. An event-by-event numerical simulation of the model is presented, which confirms our analytical results with the accuracy of 4 in (...) 10,000 parts. (shrink)
Is consciousness all in the head, or might the minimal physical substrate for some forms of conscious experience include the goings on in the (rest of the) body and the world? Such a view might be dubbed (by analogy with Clark and Chalmers’s ( 1998 ) claims concerning ‘the extended mind’) ‘the extended conscious mind’. In this article, I review a variety of arguments for the extended conscious mind, and find them flawed. Arguments for extended cognition, I conclude, do not (...) generalize to arguments for an extended conscious mind. (shrink)
We illustrate an explicit counterexample to Bell's theorem by constructing a pair of dichotomic variables that exactly reproduce the EPR-Bohm correlations in a manifestly local-realistic manner.
This book combines two shorter works by Rosset, Le Principe de Cruaute and La Force Majeure, dating respectively from 1983 and 1988. The two works provide essential and highly topical illustrations of Rosset's central thesis of acceptance of the real. Rosset formulates a philosophical practice that refuses to turn away from the world and thus accepts a confrontation with reality (termed "the real") whose immediacy comprises equal parts of violence and of "joy," or approbation of the real. Beginning with this (...) notion of joy, Rosset offers a reinterpretation of Nietzsche that, rather than treating the philosopher as a nihilist, underscores his quest for experience without illusion. (shrink)
This paper provides a new interpretation of the three natures theory of Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda thought by means of an examination of the path theory associated with it, which has not been previously examined in scholarly literature. The paper first examines this path theory in a number of foundational texts to show that the widely accepted pivotal model is not in fact the three natures model that predominates in foundational Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda literature. Second, the paper offers a new interpretation of the three natures (...) theory as providing a new causal model of the arising of suffering, and a corresponding theory of its cessation. This new causal model both makes possible the continued use of the kind of dharma analysis that Abhidharma thought employs to provide a causal analysis of the arising of suffering, and also couches such dharma analysis within the Mahāyāna framework of the emptiness of dharmas. (shrink)
In this paper, I argue that if we understand Levinas’s Desire of the Other as gift, we can understand it as joyful—that is, as celebratory. After presenting Levinas’s conception of Desire, I consider his claim, found in Otherwise than Being, that the self is a hostage to the Other, and I contend that, paradoxical as it may seem, being a hostage to the Other is actually liberating. Then, drawing on insights Richard Kearney offers in Reimagining the Sacred, I argue for (...) understanding Desire as a gift that is the condition of possibility for joy. If I offer hospitality to the Other, I thereby accept the gift that makes joy possible, and this joy is not egoistic but is the proper response to the gift. Finally, I ask whether Desire can be joyful in practice, given that the pure gift is an originary condition and never a historical one, and I conclude that imperfect joy remains possible. Moreover, this imperfect joy is better than any solitary enjoyment I might experience in the total absence of the Other. (shrink)
