Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Based on an experiential dream series this consciousness study shapes a theory that the fragmentary nature of dreams seeks wholeness deriving from the Collective Unconscious. As dreams evolve from a microscopic-personal worldview to a macroscopic-transpersonal dimension, concern for survival of self is augmented with concern for survival of the species. Entangled dream imagery provides cues to quantum functions actualized through the tutelage of departed scientific luminaries. The intentionality, specificity, and information input (...) experienced in the communications imply that the collective unconscious and quantum cognition are an integrated structure revealing an underlying methodology. (shrink)

Ethical issues in physician-industry and academia-industry relationships have focused largely on the financial nature of these relationships. It took very little time after solutions to transparenc...

The meaningful consideration of cultural practices, values and beliefs is a necessary component in the effective translation of advancements in neuroscience to clinical practice and public discourse. Society’s immense investment in biomedical science and technology, in conjunction with an increasingly diverse socio-cultural landscape, necessitates the study of how potential discoveries in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer disease are perceived and utilized across cultures. Building on the work of neuroscientists, ethicists and philosophers, we argue that the growing field of neuroethics provides (...) a pragmatic and constructive pathway to guide advancements in neuroscience in a manner that is culturally nuanced and relevant. Here we review a case study of one issue in culturally oriented neuroscience research where it is evident that traditional research ethics must be broadened and the values and needs of diverse populations considered for meaningful and relevant research practices. A global approach to neuroethics has the potential to furnish critical engagement with cultural considerations of advancements in neuroscience. (shrink)

Business and society researchers, as well as practitioners, have been critiqued for ignoring those with less voice and power often referred to as “fringe stakeholders.” Existing methods used in B&S research often fail to address issues of meaningful participation, voice and power, especially in developing countries. In this article, we stress the utility of visual participatory research methods in B&S research to fill this gap. Through a case study on engaging Ghanaian cocoa farmers on gender inequality issues, we explore how (...) VPR methods may be used by researchers to achieve more inclusive, and thus more credible, stakeholder research that can improve decision making within businesses. Furthermore, we argue that ingrained social and environmental problems tackled by B&S research and the unique context in which they occur may open up new opportunities to develop participatory visual methods for social change. (shrink)

DBS Think Tank IX was held on August 25–27, 2021 in Orlando FL with US based participants largely in person and overseas participants joining by video conferencing technology. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 and provides an open platform where clinicians, engineers and researchers can freely discuss current and emerging deep brain stimulation technologies as well as the logistical and ethical issues facing the field. The consensus among the DBS Think Tank IX speakers was that DBS expanded in (...) its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. After collectively sharing our experiences, it was estimated that globally more than 230,000 DBS devices have been implanted for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. As such, this year’s meeting was focused on advances in the following areas: neuromodulation in Europe, Asia and Australia; cutting-edge technologies, neuroethics, interventional psychiatry, adaptive DBS, neuromodulation for pain, network neuromodulation for epilepsy and neuromodulation for traumatic brain injury. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on the debate that surrounds “pragmatic” interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein. By this, I mean the debate between those who read Wittgenstein as a pragmatist or as having pragmatic affinities and those who object to this reading.In particular, drawing on Hilary Putnam’s lecture “Was Wittgenstein a Pragmatist?” and Stanley Cavell’s response “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?,” I will spell out the similarities seen between Wittgenstein and pragmatism as well as the divergences emphasized between (...) the two. I will argue that the teasing out of the similarities and the teasing out of the differences is important to a) having a clearer understanding of both Wittgenstein and pragmatism; b) showing elements that make twentieth century philosophy unique; and c) shedding light on where philosophy is now, what issues and questions are being raised, and what possible solutions and answers are being offered. (shrink)

Women’s health activists laid the groundwork for passage of the law that created the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1906. The pharmaceutical and food industries fought regulatory reforms then and continue to do so now. We examine public health activism in the Progressive Era, the postwar era and the present day. The women’s health movement began in the 1960s, and criticized both the pharmaceutical industry and the medical establishment. In the 1990s, patient advocacy groups began accepting industry funds; thousands (...) of commercially-funded groups now dominate the advocacy landscape. As pharma funding became normalized, concerns arose regarding a) the lack of transparency and public accountability regarding funding, b) the distortion of groups’ agendas, and c) the ability of pharma-funded groups to dominate the discourse and override less well-resourced patient and health advocacy groups. Although industry-funded groups argue that funding allows them to provide useful services, the trade-off in health risks, exorbitant prices and distorted information is far too high. Sincerity is beside the point; patients and the industry have differing interests when it comes to drug safety and efficacy, drug information and drug prices. A growing resistance movement is asserting the values of its activist predecessors and opposing the prevailing culture of pharma-funded advocacy. (shrink)

Learning about a scientific concept often occurs in the context of unfamiliar examples. Mutual alignment analogy ? a type of analogical comparison in which the analogues are only partially understood ? has been shown to facilitate learning from unfamiliar examples . In the present study, we examined the role of mutual alignment analogy in the abstraction and transfer of a complex scientific concept from examples presented in expository texts. Our results provide evidence that (a) promoting comparison between two examples and (...) (b) orienting the learner toward relational commonalities result in greater abstraction and transfer. These findings suggest that mutual alignment analogy is an effective means of promoting abstraction and transfer of complex scientific concepts, and may thus be used in the classroom to promote learning from unfamiliar examples. (shrink)

OBJECTIVE: To describe the issues faced, and how they were addressed, by the University of Toronto Critical Care Medicine Program/Joint Centre for Bioethics Task Force on Appropriate Use of Life-Sustaining Treatment. The clinical problem addressed by the Task Force was dealing with requests by patients or substitute decision makers for life-sustaining treatment that their healthcare providers believe is inappropriate. DESIGN: Case study. SETTING: The University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics/Critical Care Medicine Program Task Force on Appropriate Use of Life-Sustaining (...) Treatment. PARTICIPANTS: The 24-member Task Force included physician and nursing leaders from five critical care units, bioethicists, a legal scholar, a health administration expert, a social worker, and a hospital public relations professional. INTERVENTIONS: None. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Our specific lessons learned include a) a policy focus on process; b) use of a negotiation and mediation model, rather than a hospital ethics committee model, for this process; and c) the policy development process is itself a negotiation, so we recommend equal involvement of interested groups including patients, families, and the public. CONCLUSIONS: This article describes the key issues faced by the Task Force while developing its policy. It will provide a useful starting point for other groups developing policy on appropriate use of life-sustaining treatment. (shrink)

Van Fraassen's Judy Benjamin problem asks how one ought to update one's credence in A upon receiving evidence of the sort ``A may or may not obtain, but B is k times likelier than C'', where {A,B,C} is a partition. Van Fraassen's solution, in the limiting case of increasing k, recommends a posterior converging to the probability of A conditional on A union B, where P is one's prior probability function. Grove and Halpern, and more recently Douven and Romeijn, (...) have argued that one ought to leave credence in A unchanged, i.e. fixed at P(A). We argue that while the former approach is superior, it brings about a Reflection violation due in part to neglect of a ``regression to the mean'' phenomenon, whereby when C is eliminated by random evidence that leaves A and B alive, the ratio P(A):P(B) ought to drift in the direction of 1:1. (shrink)

Bridging the gap between the world of science and the realm of the spiritual, B. Alan Wallace introduces a natural theory of human consciousness that has its roots in contemporary physics and Buddhism. Wallace's "special theory of ontological relativity" suggests that mental phenomena are _conditioned_ by the brain, but do not _emerge_ from it. Rather, the entire natural world of mind and matter, subjects and objects, arises from a unitary dimension of reality that is more fundamental than these dualities, as (...) proposed by Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung. To test his hypothesis, Wallace employs the Buddhist meditative practice of _samatha_, refining one's attention and metacognition, to create a kind of telescope to examine the space of the mind. Drawing on the work of the physicist John Wheeler, he then proposes a more general theory in which the participatory nature of reality is envisioned as a self-excited circuit. In comparing these ideas to the Buddhist theory known as the Middle Way philosophy, Wallace explores further aspects of his "general theory of ontological relativity," which can be investigated by means of _vipasyana_, or insight, meditation. Wallace then focuses on the theme of symmetry in reference to quantum cosmology and the "problem of frozen time," relating these issues to the theory and practices of the Great Perfection school of Tibetan Buddhism. He concludes with a discussion of the general theme of complementarity as it relates to science and religion. The theories of relativity and quantum mechanics were major achievements in the physical sciences, and the theory of evolution has had an equally deep impact on the life sciences. However, rigorous scientific methods do not yet exist to observe mental phenomena, and naturalism has its limits for shedding light on the workings of the mind. A pioneer of modern consciousness research, Wallace offers a practical and revolutionary method for exploring the mind that combines the keenest insights of contemporary physicists and philosophers with the time-honored meditative traditions of Buddhism. (shrink)

Despite All Critique (2014) -- World Politics and Western Reason (1980) -- The Doubled Outsides of the Modern International (2005) -- The Subject of Security (1995) -- The Protection of Nature and the Nature of Protection (2005) -- Social Movements/World Politics (1994) -- Europe is Not Where It is Supposed to Be (2000) -- They Seek it Here, They Seek it There : Looking for Politics in Clayoquot Sound (2003) -- Violence, Modernity, Silence : From Weber to International Relations (1993) (...) -- Hobbes, Origins, Limits (2011) -- War, Terror, Judgement (2002) -- International, Imperial, Exceptional (2005) -- Which Democracy for Which Demos? (2013) -- The Political Theory of Boundaries and the Boundaries of Political Theory : Interview With Raia Prokhovnik (2012). (shrink)

Bringing together Deleuze, Blanchot, and Foucault, this book provides a detailed and original exploration of the ideas that influenced Deleuze's thought leading up to and throughout his cinema volumes and, as a result, proposes a new definition of art. Examining Blanchot's suggestion that art and dream are "outside" of power, as imagination has neither reality nor truth, and Foucault's theory that power forms knowledge by valuing life, Eugene Brent Young relates these to both Deleuze's philosophy of time and his work (...) with Guattari on art. In doing so, he uses case studies from literature and popular film, including Kafka's Castle, Villeneuve's Arrival, and Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Providing important new insights for those working in literary and cinematic studies, this book advances a new definition of art as that which reverses the realities and truths of power to express obscure ideas and values beyond both our exterior and interior worlds. (shrink)

On September 1, 2023, Texas made important revisions to it its decades‐old statute granting legal safe harbor immunity to physicians who withhold or withdraw life‐sustaining treatment over the objection of critically ill patients’ surrogate decision‐makers. However, lawmakers left untouched glaring flaws in a key safeguard for patients—the transfer option. The transfer option is ethically important because, when no hospital is willing to accept the patient in transfer, that fact is taken as strong evidence that the surrogates’ treatment requests fall outside (...) accepted medical practice. But there are serious shortcomings in how the transfer option is carried out in Texas and many other states, which undermines the ethical usefulness of the process. We identify these shortcomings and recommend revisions to state statutes and professional guidelines to overcome them. (shrink)

Complex constraints like conditionals ('If A, then B') and probabilistic constraints ('The probability that A is p') pose problems for Bayesian theories of learning. Since these propositions do not express constraints on outcomes, agents cannot simply conditionalize on the new information. Furthermore, a natural extension of conditionalization, relative information minimization, leads to many counterintuitive predictions, evidenced by the sundowners problem and the Judy Benjamin problem. Building on the notion of a `paradigm shift' and empirical research in psychology and economics, (...) I argue that the model of hypothesis testing can explain how people learn complex, theory-laden propositions like conditionals and probability constraints. Theories are formalized as probability distributions over a set of possible outcomes and theory change is triggered by a constraint which is incompatible with the initial theory. This leads agents to consult a higher order probability function, or a 'prior over priors,' to choose the most likely alternative theory which satisfies the constraint. The hypothesis testing model is applied to three examples: learning a simple probabilistic constraint involving coin bias, the sundowners problem for conditional learning, and the Judy Benjamin problem for learning conditional probability constraints. (shrink)

Dialogues generated over a year of weekly meetings with 8 children at a school in Edinburgh. The author and the children attempted to craft stories reflecting philosophical problems.

Movies have a striking aesthetic power: they can draw us in and induce a peculiar mode of involvement in their images – they absorb us. While absorbed in a movie, we lose track both of the passage of time and of the fact that we are sitting in a dark room with other people watching the play of light upon a screen. What is the source of the power of movies? Noël Carroll, who cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty as an influence on (...) his account of the power of movies, agrees with Merleau-Ponty that our perceptual experience of movies draws on many of the capacities at work in our perceptual experience of everyday situations. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception shows that Carroll’s emphasis on intellectual inference and the entertaining of unasserted thoughts is a distortion of the phenomenology of cinematic absorption. According to Merleau-Ponty, such intellectual operations come into play in cases of breakdown but should not be read back into the primary absorbed experience as being implicitly operative all along. After presenting and criticizing Carroll’s view, I interpret and expand upon Merleau-Ponty’s position, showing that his version of the analogy between cinematic perception and everyday perception is more convincing than Carroll’s. (shrink)

The major contributions of operationism have been negative, largely because operationists failed to distinguish logical theories of reference from empirical accounts of language. Behaviorism never finished an adequate formulation of verbal reports and therefore could not convincingly embrace subjective terms. But verbal responses to private stimuli can arise as social products through the contingencies of reinforcement arranged by verbal communities.

In this paper we describe the objectives of teaching medical ethics to undergraduates and the teaching methods used. We describe a workshop used in the University of Liverpool Department of Psychiatry, designed to enhance ethical sensitivity in psychiatry. The workshop reviews significant historical and current errors in the ethical practice of psychiatry and doctors' defence mechanisms against accepting responsibility for deficiencies in ethical practice. The workshop explores the student doctors' own group ethos in response to ethical dilemmas, and demonstrates how (...) the individual contributes to and is responsible for the group ethos through participation and also through nonparticipation. The student feedback about the workshop is reviewed. The Toronto Ethical Sensitivity Instrument was used to assess whether or not the workshop altered sensitivity. Compared to a control group the attenders' sensitivity was significantly increased (on Student's t-test p equals or is less than 0.002). (shrink)

In this book, David B. Wong defends an ambitious and important new version of moral relativism. He does not espouse the type of relativism that says anything goes, but he does start with a relativist stance against alternative theories such that there need not be only one universal truth. Wong proposes that there can be a plurality of true moralities existing across different traditions and cultures, all with one core human question as to how we can all live together.

_The purpose_ of the article is to comprehend the Husserlian model of constituting temporal modes through the ability of intentional "retentional-protentional" consciousness, as well as to clarify the possibility of interpreting its positions in the reconstruction of the concept of anthropic time. _Theoretical basis._ The theoretical framework of the research includes: 1) the interpretation of the phenomenological reflection of "time-consciousness" by E. Husserl in the context of solving the problem of phased-differentiation of this form of temporality; 2) the concept of (...) anthropic time (V. Khanzhy). _Originality._ For the first time in research literature, the possibilities of applying the ideas of Husserl to the reconstruction of the concept of anthropic time are considered through the interpretation of the phenomenological solution to the problem of temporality, proposed and specified in Husserl’s "time-consciousness" concept. _Conclusions._ The comprehension of the Husserlian model of intentionality of consciousness through the "grasping-from-now" and the constitution of phases of phenomenological time through the component of "exiting-from-now" showed that solving the problem of phased-differentiation of phenomenological time leads to the observation of the impossibility of isolating the modes of past, present, and future as self-sufficient and unconditional. More accurate indications, based on the constitutive intentionality of consciousness on the "grasping-from-now" phases of time (as conventional), are as follows: a) the abilities of retention and recollection are the foundation for the constitution of the past and its connections to the present; b) the perception establishes the basis for the phase of the present itself; c) the possibilities of protention and anticipation (as forms of imagination) constitute the future and its connections to the present. By the concept of retention, Husserl fixes a certain primary memory (the present "now" of a past interval), which enables retaining the past in the present. The category of recollection or secondary memory is used by the philosopher to refer to the self-sufficient reproduction of past experiences (without being joined to present perception). The fundamental difference between recollection and retention is that the former _re-_presents a temporal interval, grasping its content and reproducing it as it was in the past, while in the latter, the perceived duration is presented as a fragment of time that has just passed. According to the German philosopher, the "grasping" of the present phase is performed by perception. Through the constitutive intentionality of consciousness, perception synthesizes the results of primary-actual activity and retentional holding of duration. The second part of the article will present solutions to the following research tasks: 1) analysis of the possibilities of protention and anticipation in constituting the future and its connections with the present; 2) understanding the possibility of using interpreted forms of Husser’s ideas in reconstructing the concept of anthropic time. (shrink)