As we look beyond our terrestrial boundary to a multi-planetary future for humankind, it becomes paramount to anticipate the challenges of various human factors on the most likely scenario for this future: permanent human settlement of Mars. Even if technical hurdles are circumvented to provide adequate resources for basic physiological and psychological needs, Homo sapiens will not survive on an alien planet if a dysfunctional psyche prohibits the utilization of these resources. No matter how far we soar into the stars, (...) our psychologies for future generations will be forever tethered to the totality of our surroundings. By shaping our environment toward survival and welfare during the voyage to Mars and in a Martian colony, we indirectly shape our psyches and prepare them for a mission of unprecedented alienation and duration. Once on Mars, human factors such as leadership structure, social organization and code of conduct, group size, gender balance, developmental cycle, mobility, length of stay and the ecological settings and type and manner of subsistence, will create a novel Martian culture. The degree that settlers are severed from the Earth will affect how radically foreign this culture will be when compared with cultures on Earth. (shrink)

Approaching the settlement of our Moon from a practical perspective, this book is well suited for space program planners. It addresses a variety of human factor topics involved in colonizing Earth's Moon, including: history, philosophy, science, engineering, agriculture, medicine, politics & policy, sociology, and anthropology. Each chapter identifies the complex, interdisciplinary issues of the human factor that arise in the early phases of settlement on the Moon. Besides practical issues, there is some emphasis placed on preserving, protecting, and experiencing the (...) lunar environment across a broad range of occupations, from scientists to soldiers and engineers to construction workers. The book identifies utilitarian and visionary factors that shape human lives on the Moon. It offers recommendations for program planners in the government and commercial sectors and serves as a helpful resource for academic researchers. Together, the coauthors ask and attempt to answer: “How will lunar society be different?”. (shrink)

Meet the Metaorganism is a web‐based learning app that combines three fundamental biological concepts (coevolution, community dynamics, and immune system) with latest scientific findings using the metaorganism as a central case study. In a transdisciplinary team of scientists, information designers, programmers, science communicators, and educators, we conceptualized and developed the app according to the latest didactic and scientific findings and aimed at setting new standards in visual design, digital knowledge transfer, and online education. A content management system allows continuous integration (...) of new findings, which enables us to expand the app with the dynamics of the research field. Students can thus gain a close insight and connection to current research, and at the same time learn that knowledge is not static but grows dynamically. Especially in the realm of the easily accessible metaorganism research, visualization plays an essential role to keep complex processes understandable and memorable. Meet the Metaorganism is freely available online and can be accessed here: www.metaorganism.app. (shrink)

Environmental ethicists typically consider Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action to exclude moral consideration for nonhuman animals. Habermas's early work indeed limits relationships with nature to instrumental ones. Yet, interspersed throughout Habermas's writings are clear indications that nonhuman life deserves moral consideration, and that humans can enter into communicative relationships with nonhumans, however asymmetrical. Habermas’s anthropocentric theoretical foundations can achieve a revised, reflective equilibrium congruent with his persistent intuitions that nonhumans also possess powers of communication (but not discourse) that would (...) grant them moral consideration, perhaps allowing us to enter into non-linguistic interspecies communicative activity. Habermasians can incorporate non-instrumental relationships with nature into discourse ethics’ set of applications without ignoring the special role of language in communication. Rather than holding that the differencia specifica between humans and nonhumans exists in communication, it makes more sense instead to displace this distinction between communicative action as a general category and the special case of discourse. Doing so permits intuitions of nonhuman moral considerability and communicative possibility without altering the discursive core of Habermas’s theory. (shrink)

Many systems neuroscientists want to understand neurons in terms of mediation; we want to understand how neurons are involved in the causal chain from stimulus to behavior. Unfortunately, most tools are inappropriate for that while our language takes mediation for granted. Here we discuss the contrast between our conceptual drive toward mediation and the difficulty of obtaining meaningful evidence.

Der Wertnihilismus in der Rechtsphilosophie. Bemerkungen zu Ingemar Hedenius: Oni rätt och moral (Über Recht und Moral), Stockholm, Tidens fölag, 1941, von Konrad Mlar c‐Wogau.

Der Wertnihilismus in der Rechtsphilosophie. Bemerkungen zu Ingemar Hedenius: Oni rätt och moral (Über Recht und Moral), Stockholm, Tidens fölag, 1941, von Konrad Mlar c‐Wogau.

Prof. Wójcicki calls his position ‘radically pragmatist’. I will argue, however, that it is not nearly pragmatic enough. In particular, I will argue that his view is not pragmatist enough in three vital respects - even though it greatly improves upon how these issues have been traditionally dealt with.

I will put forward a short, simple argument for a pair of realist claims: metaphysical realism and what I will refer to as epistemological realism. The argument will rely upon nothing more than our apparent memories. Having presented the argument, I will go on to consider possible objections to it, of which there will be a number but none of which will do more than complicate the matter. The argument I present borrows from Peirce’s view that the world’s capacity to (...) surprise us plays a vital role in guiding us toward truth, and from the argument to the best explanation. However, it combines the two views in a way I have not seen done previously. (shrink)

To account for a perceived distinction it is necessary to postulate a real distinction. Our process of experiencing the world is one of, mostly unconscious, interpretation of observed distinctions to provide us with a partial world-picture that is sufficient to guide action. The distinctions, themselves, are acorrigible (they do not have a truth value), directly perceived, structured, and capable of being interpreted. Interpreted experience is corrigible, representational and capable of guiding action. Since interpretation is carried out mostly unconsciously and in (...) real time, the two aspects are present in experience together so that it is difficult to separate them out. (shrink)

Famously, Pascal described human beings as ‘thinking reeds’, weak in flesh but magnificent in mind. While it is a poetic image, it is also an ambivalent one and may suggest an inappropriately dualist view of human nature. It is important to realise that not only are we thinking reeds but that we are thinking because we are reeds. In fact – while being every bit the marvel that Pascal wondered at – rationality is reed-like itself, very much of a kind (...) with the rest of human nature. (shrink)

Pascal described human beings as ‘thinking reeds’, weak in flesh but magnificent in mind. While it is a poetic image, it is also an ambivalent one and may suggest an inappropriately dualist view of human nature. It is important to realise that not only are we thinking reeds but that we are thinking because we are reeds. In fact, rationality is reed-like itself, very much of a kind with the rest of human nature. It is now more than two and (...) half centuries since David Hume first pointed out the lack of an argument that would fully justify claims about matters of fact. Being neither made evident by our observations nor arising out of the mere considera-tion of relations of ideas, claims such as that the turkey will be fed dinner tomo-rrow – rather than being had for dinner have remained problematic ever since. Many attempts have been made to show that something of the beauty and certainty of reasoning about relations of ideas could be recaptured in our dealings with matters of fact, but all attempts have remained mere shadows of what we tried to grasp. Hume’s argument stands. An infinite being might watch countless sun-sets and yet should witness each new sun-rise with surprise, always withholding its judgement regarding what will follow. (shrink)

Sellars’ argument against The Given has set the scene for much of the discussion of the role of experience in justification. Susan Haack tries to avoid the objection presented by Sellars and to give experience a role in the justification of beliefs. Her approach is to put forward a double aspect theory of justification consisting of a logical/evaluative aspect and a causal aspect. Like other double aspect theories, her approach is led astray by the possibility of deviant causal chains. Her (...) argument’s shortcomings, however, only help to underscore the false assumption behind Sellars’ original argument – that justification is purely logical in character. But, rather than arguing that justification is logical and causal, we are led toward to a view that the character of justification, while essentially normative, is much richer than can be modelled by logic. (shrink)

Communication is an essentially cooperative activity. However, cooperation only makes sense in a particular kind of environment – one in which cooperation leads to shared benefits. This can be seen once we take Grice’s Cooperative Principle and consider its implications in the general context of game theory. The effect is that something like metaphysical realism underpins normal human discourse, such discourse becoming impossible without that presumption.

Proceedings of a conference held Dec. 4-5, 1998 at the Universit'at G'ottingen.

The goal of this pilot study is to investigate expressions of the collective disquiet of people in the first months of Covid-19 pandemic, and to try to understand how they manage covert risk, especially with religion and magic. Four co-authors living in early hot spots of the pandemic speculate on the roles of science, religion, and magic, in the latest global catastrophe. They delve into the consolidation that should be occurring worldwide because of a common, viral enemy, but find little (...) evidence for it. They draw parallels to biblical works, finding evidence of a connection between plague and “social strife.” They explore changes in the purviews of science, religion, and magic, and how and why they have changed, as three systems of covert risk management. They speculate on the coming wave of grief when the world populations finally decide that too many people have died, and they envision cultural changes on the other side of the pandemic, to lifestyles, travel, reverse urbanization, and living and working in smaller communities. Using an unusual approach named “crowd-sourced ethnography”, they conduct un-traditional ethnography and speculate on management of covert risk in their native countries. (shrink)

Alexander Rosenberg has played a large role in creating the philosophy of economics as a distinct area of philosophy. But since the publication of Microeconomic Laws in 1976, Professor Rosenberg's thinking about economics has been casting the subject in an increasingly uncomplimentary light. This development is reflected in Rosenberg's new book Economics–Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns? In this stimulating work Rosenberg endorses the view that economics does not constitute scientific empirical knowledge. He says.

The authors present an evolutionary model for the biological emergence of religious capacity as an advanced neurocognitive trait. Using their model for the stages leading to the evolutionary emergence of religious capacity in Homo sapiens, they analyze the mechanisms that can fail, leading to unbelief (atheism or agnosticism). The analysis identifies some, but not all types of atheists and agnostics, so they turn their question around and, using the same evolutionary model, ask what keeps religion going. Why does its development (...) not fail in one social group after another, worldwide? Their final analysis searches for reasons in important evolutionary changes in the senses of hearing, vision, and general sensitivity on the hominin line, which together interact with both intellectual and emotional brain networks to achieve, often in human groups, variously altered states of consciousness, especially a numinous state enabled in part by a brain organ, the precuneus. An inability to experience the numinous, consider it important, or believe in its supernatural nature, may cleave the human population into those with belief and those with unbelief. (shrink)