The no-free-lunch theorems promote a skeptical conclusion that all possible machine learning algorithms equally lack justification. But how could this leave room for a learning theory, that shows that some algorithms are better than others? Drawing parallels to the philosophy of induction, we point out that the no-free-lunch results presuppose a conception of learning algorithms as purely data-driven. On this conception, every algorithm must have an inherent inductive bias, that wants justification. We argue that many standard learning algorithms should rather (...) be understood as model-dependent: in each application they also require for input a model, representing a bias. Generic algorithms themselves, they can be given a model-relative justification. (shrink)

We compare the elementary theories of Shannon information and Kolmogorov complexity, the extent to which they have a common purpose, and wherethey are fundamentally different. We discuss and relate the basicnotions of both theories: Shannon entropy, Kolmogorov complexity, Shannon mutual informationand Kolmogorov (``algorithmic'') mutual information. We explainhow universal coding may be viewed as a middle ground betweenthe two theories. We consider Shannon's rate distortion theory, whichquantifies useful (in a certain sense) information.We use the communication of information as our guiding motif, (...) and we explain howit relates to sequential question-answer sessions. (shrink)

Due primarily to technological advances over the last decade, quantum research has become a key priority area for science and technology policy all over the world. With this manifesto, we wish to prevent quantum technology from running into fiascos of implementation at the interface of science and society. To this end, we identify key stumbling blocks and propose recommendations.

We are currently witnessing the emergence of a discourse on responsible research and innovation in the field of quantum technology. Working on the assumption that the initial stage of discourse is of particular importance with regard to the ascription of meaning to an emerging field, our point of departure is a small corpus of prominent policy-oriented reports on quantum technology recently published in Europe. With a view to these publications, the article analyses various approaches to RRI and discusses lessons learned (...) in nanotechnology discourse as these may impact on emerging discourse on quantum technology and its stance towards RRI. On the basis of our analyses, we outline a strategy for fostering RRI in this promising field of science and technology. We propose implementing a “strong” RRI approach which entails linking parliamentary or other core policy processes to stakeholder dialogues, decision-supporting public engagement and a wide variety of other public communication activities. At the same time, taking our cue from lessons learned in nanotechnology discourse, we argue that a strong RRI approach to quantum technology should be modest and focused in terms of thematic and societal scope. (shrink)

Since it is now broadly acknowledged that ethics should receive early consideration in discourse on emerging technologies, ethical debates tend to flourish even while new fields of technology are still in their infancy. Such debates often liberally mix existing applications with technologies in the pipeline and far-reaching visions. This paper analyses the problems associated with this use of ethics as “preparatory” research, taking discourse on human enhancement in general and on pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement in particular as an example. The paper (...) will outline and discuss the gap between the scientific and technological state of the art and the ethical debates, pointing out epistemic problems in this context. Furthermore, it will discuss the future role of genuine ethical reflection in discourse on human enhancement, arguing also that such discourse needs to include a technology assessment—in the broad sense of the term—which encompasses, inter alia, anthropological perspectives and aspects of social theory. (shrink)

What kind of relationship do we have with artificial beings (avatars, puppets, robots, etc.)? What does it mean to mirror ourselves in them, to perform them or to play trial identity games with them? Actor & Avatar addresses these questions from artistic and scholarly angles. Contributions on the making of »technical others« and philosophical reflections on artificial alterity are flanked by neuroscientific studies on different ways of perceiving living persons and artificial counterparts. The contributors have achieved a successful artistic-scientific collaboration (...) with extensive visual material. (shrink)

Neurological disorders of body representation have for a long time suggested the importance of multisensory processing of bodily signals for self-consciousness. One such group of disorders – illusory own body perceptions affecting the entire body – has been proposed to be especially relevant in this respect, based on neurological data as well as philosophical considerations. This has recently been tested experimentally in healthy subjects showing that integration of multisensory bodily signals from the entire body with respect to the three aspects: (...) self-location, first-person perspective, and self-location, is crucial for bodily self-consciousness. Here we present clinical and neuroanatomical data of two neurological patients with paroxysmal disorders of full body representation in whom only one of these aspects, self-identification, was abnormal. We distinguish such disorders of global body representation from related but distinct disorders and discuss their relevance for the neurobiology of bodily self-consciousness. (shrink)

In one of the first genetic screens aimed at identifying induced developmental mutants, Nadine Dobrovolskaïa-Zavadskaïa, working at the Pasteur Laboratory in the 1920s, isolated and characterized a mutation affecting Brachyury, a gene that regulates tail and axial development in the mouse. Dobrovolskaïa-Zavadskaïa's analysis of Brachyury and other mutations affecting tail development were among the earliest attempts to link gene action with a tissue-specific developmental process in a vertebrate. Her analyses of genes that interacted with Brachyury led to the discovery of (...) the t-haplotype chromosome of mouse. After 70 years, Brachyury and the multiple genes with which it interacts continue to occupy a prominent focus in developmental biology research. A goal of this review is to identify the contributions that Dobrovolskaïa-Zavadskaïa made to our current thinking about Brachyury and how she helped to shape the dawn of the field of developmental genetics. BioEssays 23:365–371, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

In the wake of the emergence and rapid development of nanoethics there swiftly followed fundamental criticism: nanoethics was said to have become much too involved with speculative developments and was concerning itself too little with actually pending questions of nanotechnology design and applications. If this diagnosis is true, then large parts of nanoethics are misguided. Such fundamental criticism must surely either result in a radical reorientation of nanoethics or be refuted for good reasons. In this paper, I will examine the (...) critics’ central arguments and, building on this scrutiny, formulate an answer to these alternatives. The results lead to conclusions which allow explaining and unfolding the thesis of this paper that instead of speculative nanoethics we should better speak of and develop explorative philosophy of nanotechnology. (shrink)

Parallel to the public discussion on the benefits and risks of nanotechnology, a debate on the ethics of nanotechnology has begun. It has been postulated that a new “nano-ethics” is necessary. In this debate, the — positive as well as negative — visionary and speculative innovations which are brought into connection with nanotechnology stand in the foreground. In this contribution, an attempt is made to discover new ethical aspects of nanotechnology in a more systematic manner than has been the case. (...) It turns out that there are hardly any completely new ethical aspects raised by nanotechnology. It is much rather primarily a case of gradual shifts of emphasis and of relevance in questions which, in principle, are already known and which give reason for ethical discussions on nanotechnology. In a certain manner, structurally novel ethical aspects arise through the important role played by visions in the public discourse. New questions are also posed by the fact that previously separate lines of ethical reflection converge in the field of nanotechnology. The proposal of an independent “nano-ethics”, however, seems exaggerated. (shrink)

The role of ethics in technology development has been often questioned, especially in the early days of societal reflection of technology. However, the situation has changed dramatically. Ethical consideration now is generally declared to be indispensable in shaping technology in a socially acceptable and sustainable way. The expectations of ethics are large; often even a kind of “New Ethics” is postulated. In the present paper an over-estimation of the role of ethics for technology development is rejected. It is argued that (...) ethical reflection is, indeed, indispensable in certain problem areas and situation types; but there is, on the other hand, space for technology development free from the requirement for ethical reflection. The absence of a requirement for ethical reflection, however, always has to be considered relative to some “morale provisoire” (provisional morality) as an accepted normative framework within which technology development may occur without explicit ethical reflection. If this framework, however, is doubted or is shown to be insufficient the situation changes completely. Ethical reflection in this case becomes necessary, to consider this normative framework in order to offer modifications or supplements. (shrink)

There are different possibilities for defining the areas for the application of ethics to engineering. They range from descriptive analysis of engineers’ relationship to moral criteria and extend to normative issues on how engineers should design more “sustainable” technology. In this paper, a frame of reference is proposed, which makes it possible to elaborate in a transparent manner goals for analysis of the scope of ethics in engineering. Its point of departure is marked by two questions: 1) which types of (...) situation in the practice of engineering require ethical reflection? and 2) to what extent are engineers expected to assume moral responsibility in the practice of their profession? The answers to both of these questions presuppose reflection on the societal processes of setting definitions and of making ascriptions. Understanding these processes of societal “construction” of demands for ethical reflection in engineering and of engineers’ moral responsibilities should be an important objective of the analysis of ethics in engineering. (shrink)

Business and Society Review, Volume 127, Issue 1, Page 23-48, Spring 2022.

Handling the impacts and consequences of technology has become a problem of political, social and scientific relevance since the Sixties. The earlier assumption that technological evolution would automatically lead to social and human progress in an emphatic sense can no longer be sustained. The ambivalence of technology has become a standing topic in the public, philosophical and scientific debate .In this situation new challenges to technology policy are emerging. Functions of an `early warning' with respect to the risks or potentials (...) of new technologies or to ways of avoiding or, at least, resolving technology conflicts by compromise have been postulated . Technology policy pursued by parliament or government, therefore, is in need of scientific consultation . Since the Seventies a number of institutions in this field have been founded , either primarily as parliamentary bureaus of knowledge-transfer to the decision-makers , as networks with a low degree of institutionalization or as independent scientific institutes .The scientific discussion on how to acquire and establish orientational knowledge for decision-makers facing the ambivalence of technology is sectoralized into two branches: the ethics of technology and technology assessment . These two branches are based on fundamentally different assumptions concerning how to give orientation to technology policy: the philosophical ethics, of course, emphasizes the normative implications of decisions on technology and the importance of moral conflicts , while technology assessment relies mainly on sociological or economic research .Both approaches have largely been developed and practised without regard to one another. In Germany, at the beginning of the Nineties the conceptual discussion around these questions was initiated. At first, a lot of misunderstandings appeared, both parties fundamentally criticizing each other, often one denying the competence of the other to deal appropriately with technology problems . In this paper the conflict is analyzed by looking at the situation in Germany, summarizing and weighing the main arguments which have been brought up by TA and the ethical approach to technology.As a result it will be shown that both are partly right, whereby the relative weight of both approaches in their capacity to give orientation is dependent on contextual circumstances. A non-reductionistic overall approach must take into account the normative aspects of the ethics of technology when handling moral conflicts as well as the need for operationalization, concreteness and established knowledge about the processes of “managing technology in society” postulated by TA. (shrink)

If the explanatory gap between phenomenal consciousness () and the brain cannot be closed by current naturalistic theories of mind, one might instead try to dissolve the explanatory gap problem. We hold that such a dissolution can start from the notion of consciousness as a social construction. In his target article, however, Block (1995) argues that the thesis that consciousness is a social construction is trivially false if it is construed to be about phenomenal consciousness. He ridicules the idea that (...) the occurrence of p-consciousness requires that the subject of p-consciousness already have the concept of p-consciousness. This idea is not as ridiculous as Block supposes. To see this, one must accept that in a unique sense, p-consciousness is what we as the subjects of consciousness takeit to be. Furthermore, the notion of consciousness as a social construction does not depend on the view that the concept of consciousness somehow precedes the occurrence of consciousness as such. In sum, consciousness can plausibly be seen as a social construction, and this view can promote a dissolution of the explanatory gap problem. (shrink)

An action-oriented theory of embodied memory is favorable for many reasons, but it will not provide a quick yet clean solution to the grounding problem in the way Glenberg (1997t) envisages. Although structural mapping via analogical representations may be an adequate mechanism of cognitive representation, it will not suffice to explain representation as such.

Far-reaching promises made by nanotechnology have raised the question of whether we are on the way to understanding human beings more and more as belonging to the realm of technology. In this paper, an increasing need to understand the technological re-conceptualization of human beings is diagnosed whenever increasingly “technical” interpretations of humans as mechanical entities are disseminated. And this can be observed at present in the framework of nanobiotechnology, a foremost “technical” self-description where a technical language is adopted. The arena (...) in which the decision is made on increasing the use of technological understanding to define mankind will not be found in the surgery room in which one works with implants, nor the NBIC-laboratory, in which “nerve plugs” are supposed to be developed. The thesis of this paper is that such arena is rather related to the manner in which concepts of humanity are associated with it, how we think and talk about ourselves, and which consequences we draw out of it. (shrink)

The role of normative reflection and the possibilities of ethical inquiry in technology assessment have been under discussion in the TA community for several years. As an outcome of this discussion the necessity of explicitly dealing with normativity in TA has widely been acknowledged. However, it is still quite unclear in which way this should be done. This paper is dedicated to the role (and limitations) of ethical expertise in this field, especially in HTA. By methodological analysis an approach is (...) developed to show how entry points for ethical expertise could be identified. The result is that ethical expertise can inform moral debates by uncovering underlying assumptions, by making the normative structure of argumentation transparent, and by weighing the strength of the arguments. In this way moral debates in HTA can become more transparent and opened to argumentative reasoning instead of consisting of bargaining processes determined by power distributions. Ethical reflection, however, does not replace decision-making. (shrink)

Technischer Fortschritt verlangt Verantwortung. Bei der Energieerzeugung, in der Medizin- und Militärtechnik, der Neurotechnik oder in der Raumfahrt Ethikfragen stellen sich in vielen Bereichen, in denen eine rasante technische Entwicklung stattfindet. Ist diese richtig und gut? Um das entscheiden zu können, müssen Chancen und Risiken, Gefahren und Sicherheit, Fortschritt und Verantwortung bedacht und beurteilt werden. Das Handbuch präsentiert die verschiedenen Technikfelder, klärt die zentralen Begriffe und stellt die ethisch-philosophischen Grundlagen der Technikethik vor. Für die 2. Auflage wurde das Handbuch grundlegend (...) aktualisiert und um 19 neue Kapitel, wie z.B. Autonomisiertes Fahren, Big Data, Additive Verfahren und Value Sensitive Design, erweitert. (shrink)

The legitimacy of technology as a whole, of individual fields of technology, and of concrete decisions on technology has become problematic. Traditional methods and elements for the legitimization of technological development and of the application of technology have been increasingly called into question since the 1980s. There are great expectations in participatory procedures to improving the legitimization of technology decisions. Those expectations, however, might not be justified. In the paper, the hypothesis is proposed that legitimacy can be brought about through (...) participation only under conditions that require the fulfillment of a number of preconditions, which often cannot be regarded as fulfilled. The unavoidable separation between internal communication among the participants and external communication with the nonparticipants turns out to be the fundamental structural characteristic hindering naïve expectations of improving legitimacy by participation. (shrink)

The constitutive role of technology in the constructive theory of science. Consequences for the philosophy of technology. Technology plays an important role in the constructivistic reconstructions of the natural sciences. However, there is no indepth view or thorough explication of the term "technology" and its connotations and relations in those exercises. Technology, there, is seen as a more or less evident part of the lifeworld's A priori of the natural sciences. This paper is dedicated to the reconstruction of the function (...) of technology in the argumentations chains and proto-theories which shall, in the constructivistic (methodical) theory of sciences, provide the methodical fundament of the sciences. In a second step, the aspects of technology are identified which are indispensable to fulfil the functions of technology in the argumentation chains mentioned above. Finally, these aspects are related to current debates in the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

The pre-discoursive agreement. Theory of scientific truth and procedural justification. — On basis of the constructive philosophy of science, the attention is focussed to the pre-discoursive elements of discoursive theories of truth. By using a pragmatic approach it is shown that foundation of those pre-discoursive elements, like discourse rules or the basic terminology, is possible though the discourse rules are not available at this level. Propositions which can be shown in the presented theory to be true, always describe a know-how (...) instead of a knowledge about the world. As a result, the relevance of the presented analysis for prototheories of scientific disciplines is investigated. (shrink)

This article explores body constructs along the descending, ascending, and extending body-soteriological pathways, as well as it lays the foundation to identify their potential for transbody and transpersonal transformation. Insights are provided on the nexus of pluralistic body constructs using Jorge Ferrer’s participatory theory juxtaposed with Buddhist Modernism focused on Vajrayāna Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. An exuberant richness of physical and metaphysical bodies has been recognized in both Vajrayāna Buddhism and participatory theory. In Vajrayāna, the body is central to liberation and viewed (...) as the culmination of immanence, transcendence, and expansion. In participatory theory, the body is viewed as equal to vital, heart, mind, and consciousness as part of an integrated larger whole. Embodiment, disembodiment, and body awareness are critically discussed, and special attention is given to the implications of these two contrasting views and the potential of practices from both approaches to ameliorate disembodiment and foster transbody and transpersonal transformation. (shrink)