Broadening access to both computational and educational resources is crit- ical to diffusing machine learning (ML) innovation. However, today, most ML resources and experts are siloed in a few countries and organizations. In this article, we describe our pedagogical approach to increasing access to applied ML through a massive open online course (MOOC) on Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML). We suggest that TinyML, applied ML on resource-constrained embedded devices, is an attractive means to widen access because TinyML leverages low-cost and globally (...) accessible hardware and encourages the development of complete, self-contained applications, from data collection to deployment. To this end, a collaboration between academia and industry produced a four part MOOC that provides application-oriented instruction on how to develop solutions using TinyML. The series is openly available on the edX MOOC platform, has no prerequisites beyond basic programming, and is designed for global learners from a variety of backgrounds. It introduces real-world applications, ML algorithms, data-set engineering, and the ethi- cal considerations of these technologies through hands-on programming and deployment of TinyML applications in both the cloud and on their own microcontrollers. To facili- tate continued learning, community building, and collaboration beyond the courses, we launched a standalone website, a forum, a chat, and an optional course-project com- petition. We also open-sourced the course materials, hoping they will inspire the next generation of ML practitioners and educators and further broaden access to cutting-edge ML technologies. (shrink)

'Sliders' are a speculative introspection-enhancing future technology allowing humans with cybernetic brain implants to precisely and voluntarily modulate moods and other mental states that vary along a one-dimensional scale. Such future humans may, for example, use the Sliders interface to temporarily present a COWARDLY–COURAGEOUS 'slider' in their visual field, and with a mere act of will change their level of courage from a 60 to a 65 on the 100-point scale. The present article discusses the implications of such a technology (...) in the form of an epistolary fiction in which the author's future persona warns the reader of the dire consequences and hardearned insights arising from widespread Slider use and abuse. (shrink)

Deviant phenomenal knowledge is knowing what it’s like to have experiences of, e.g., red without actually having had experiences of red. Such a knower is a deviant. Some physicalists have argued and some anti-physicalists have denied that the possibility of deviants undermines anti-physicalism and the Knowledge Argument. The current paper presents new arguments defending the deviant-based attacks on anti-physicalism. Central to my arguments are considerations concerning the psychosemantic underpinnings of deviant phenomenal knowledge. I argue that physicalists are in a superior (...) position to account for the conditions in virtue of which states of deviants constitute representations of phenomenal facts. (shrink)

I argue against a class of philosophical views of color perception, especially insofar as such views posit the existence of color sensations. I argue against the need to posit such nonconceptual mental intermediaries between the stimulus and the eventual conceptualized perceptual judgment. Central to my arguments are considerations of certain color illusions. Such illusions are best explained by reference to high-level, conceptualized knowledge concerning, for example, object identity, likely lighting conditions, and material composition of the distal stimulus. Such explanations obviate (...) the need to appeal to nonconceputal mental links in the causal chains eventuating in conceptualized color discriminations. (shrink)

Computation and philosophy intersect three times in this essay. Computation is considered as an object, as a method, and as a model used in a certain line of philosophical inquiry concerning the relation of mind to matter. As object, the question considered is whether computation and related notions of mental representation constitute the best ways to conceive of how physical systems give rise to mental properties. As method and model, the computational techniques of artificial life and embodied evolutionary connectionism are (...) used to conduct prosthetically enhanced thought experiments concerning the evolvability of mental representations. Central to this essay is a discussion of the computer simulation and evolution of three‐dimensional synthetic animals with neural network controllers. The minimally cognitive behavior of finding food by exhibiting positive chemotaxis is simulated with swimming and walking creatures. These simulations form the basis of a discussion of the evolutionary and neurocomputational bases of the incremental emergence of more complex forms of cognition. Other related work has been used to attack computational and representational theories of cognition. In contrast, I argue that the proper understanding of the evolutionary emergence of minimally cognitive behaviors is computational and representational through and through. (shrink)

Neurophilosophical appeals to neuroscience involve explicit and detailed use of contemporary neuroscientific literature. Neurophilosophy is not to be distinguished from other forms of naturalism by the philosophical conclusions that might be reached but by the role that contemporary neuroscience plays in the premises of the arguments for those conclusions. This chapter examines the neurophilosophical theories, and these theories will be useful to look at a small sample of some of the relevant neuroscience. Vision is one of the most important and (...) best understood senses. Accordingly, most of the fruitful progress in combining philosophy and neuroscience has occurred in the domain of visual consciousness. The question arises of how best to apply the concepts of consciousness of interest to philosophers, state consciousness, transitive consciousness, and phenomenal character, in the context of a neuroscientific understanding of visual perception. (shrink)

Making Things Up By BennettKarenOxford University Press, 2018. xii + 260 pp.

Landauer's principle, often regarded as the basic principle of the thermodynamics of information processing, holds that any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy increase in non-information-bearing degrees of freedom of the information-processing apparatus or its environment. Conversely, it is generally accepted that any logically reversible transformation of information can in principle be accomplished by an appropriate physical mechanism operating in a (...) thermodynamically reversible fashion. These notions have sometimes been criticized either as being false, or as being trivial and obvious, and therefore unhelpful for purposes such as explaining why Maxwell's Demon cannot violate the second law of thermodynamics. Here I attempt to refute some of the arguments against Landauer's principle, while arguing that although in a sense it is indeed a straightforward consequence or restatement of the Second Law, it still has considerable pedagogic and explanatory power, especially in the context of other influential ideas in nineteenth and twentieth century physics. Similar arguments have been given by Jeffrey Bub. (shrink)

Though largely neglected by philosophers, the concept of ineffability is integral to the Christian mystical tradition, and has been part of almost every philosophical discussion of religious experience since the early twentieth century. After a brief introduction, this article surveys the most important discussions of divine ineffability, observing that the literature presents two mutually reinforcing obstacles to a coherent account of the concept, creating the impression that philosophical reflection on the subject had reached an impasse. The article goes on to (...) survey some more recent work, which draws on the conceptual resources of existential phenomenology, pragmatism, and the later Wittgenstein. It shows that this work has made possible a new philosophical account of divine ineffability that surmounts the obstacles, overcomes the impasse and makes divine ineffability, once again, a live option in philosophy of religion. The article concludes with some brief remarks on how this alternative approach reflects recent trends in the discipline as a whole and has the potential to make a valuable contribution to live research questions in epistemology of religion. (shrink)

In Section I, I clarify turning point issues in the Phillips and Block debate about whether there is unconscious perception. These include questions about whether uptake of certain visual information is an individual or person level accomplishment, as required for genuine unconscious _perceiving_. Section II takes up a recent reorientation proposed in Block ( 2017 ) towards the question of whether there is unconscious perceiving, where we are to look for the pervasive role of unconscious perceiving in, perhaps especially, the (...) online control of everyday reaching and grasping. I point out that while this may well be a helpfully different approach to explore, it does not evade the central questions and challenges familiar from the prior debate between Phillips and Block. Section III reviews an approach summarized in Dehaene ( 2014 ), drawing from a range of measures of neural activity. Dehaene provides evidence of quite rich non-conscious perceptual system responses, some arguably individual or person level. But in a fairly thin or fragile way, absent taking up, in higher level assessment, the information encoded in initial visual response. Or that is the interpretation I argue for, in relating the Dehaene account to the Phillips and Block debate, in a way that illuminates the Phillips and Block discussions. An Appendix provides an overview of debates in the literature about the Goodale and Milner Two Visual Systems Hypothesis, that Block ( 2017 ) makes central appeal to. (shrink)

In the Spring of 1944, an informal discussion took place in Cambridge between Mr. R. S. Whipple, Professor Allan Ferguson and Mr. F. H. C. Butler, concerning the formation of a national Society for the History of Science. This is the opening sentence of the inaugural issue of the Bulletin of the British Society for the History of Science, the Society's first official publication. Butler himself was the author of this outline account of the subsequent approach to the Royal Society, (...) the parallel moves to establish a National Committee of the International Academy of the History of Science, the formation of a provisional committee to prepare a draft constitution for a national society, and the proceedings of the first Annual General Meeting in May 1947. Whipple had been in Cambridge to discuss his offer to present his collection of old scientific instruments to the University and the possible foundation of a new museum, and Butler, as Secretary of the History of Science Committee in Cambridge, was the chief mover in both this development and an initiative coupled with it to establish a department of the history of science. (shrink)

Nevil Maskelyne, the Cambridge-trained mathematician and later Astronomer Royal, was appointed by the Royal Society to observe the 1761 transit of Venus from the Atlantic island of St Helena, assisted by the mathematical practitioner Robert Waddington. Both had experience of measurement and computation within astronomy and they decided to put their outward and return voyages to a further use by trying out the method of finding longitude at sea by lunar distances. The manuscript and printed records they generated in this (...) activity are complemented by the traditional logs and journals kept by the ships’ officers. Together these records show how the mathematicians came to engage with the navigational practices that were already part of shipboard routine and how their experience affected the development of the methods that Maskelyne and Waddington would separately promote on their return. The expedition to St Helena, in particular the part played by Maskelyne, has long been regarded as pivotal to the introduction of the lunar method to British seamen and to the establishment of theNautical Almanac. This study enriches our understanding of the episode by pointing to the significant role played by the established navigational competence among officers of the East India Company. (shrink)

Deleuze and Guattari’s manner of distinguishing science from philosophy in their last collaboration What is Philosophy? seems to imply a hierarchy, according to which philosophy is more adequate to the reality of virtual events than science is. This suggests, in turn, that philosophy has a better claim than science to truth. This paper clarifies Deleuze‘s views about truth throughout his career. Deleuze equivocates over the term, using it in an “originary” and a “derived” sense, probably under the influence of Henri (...) Bergson, who does similarly. Moreover, William James and pragmatism were to Bergson what the early analytic philosophers Frege and Russell are to Deleuze: excessively scientistic foils whose confusions about truth arise as a result of failing to distinguish science from philosophy. By situating Deleuze’s conception of truth in relation to the early Heidegger’s, which it to some extent resembles, the paper concludes by suggesting that, surprisingly, neither kind of truth Deleuze licenses applies to science, while both apply to philosophy. Science is indifferent to truth in the way that some of Deleuze‘s readers have incorrectly wanted to say that he thinks philosophy is. (shrink)

The topic of the democratic public's limited competence has preoccupied students of democracy for centuries. Anecdotal concerns about the problem reached their peak of sophistication in the writings of Walter Lippmann and Joseph Schumpeter. Not until Philip E. Converse's “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics” did statistical research overwhelmingly confirm the worst fears of such democratic skeptics. Subsequent work has tended to confirm Converse's picture of a tiny stratum of well‐informed ideological elites whose passionate political debates find little (...) echo, or even awareness, in the mass public. While a great deal of attention has been devoted to “saving” democratic legitimacy from such findings, the Converse‐inspired work of John Zaller (1992) shows how fruitful Converse's basic ideas can be not only in analyzing real‐world political events, but in pulling together and stimulating new lines of research into what moves the “creative synthesizers” of belief systems; into the factors that affect the small numbers of people who grasp such systems and attempt to transmit them to the public; and into the long‐term psychological or cultural sources of the predispositions with which members of the mass public confront the resulting political messages. (shrink)

Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

I argue against the idea of basic desert. I claim that the supposed normative force of desert considerations is better understood in terms of dissociation. The starting point is to note that an important strategy in spelling out the apparent normative force of desert considerations appeals to the idea of complicity. I argue that the idea of basic desert cannot give a good explanation of this connection. I propose that it is rather dissociation that is explanatorily basic. I further argue (...) that dissociation is an expressive action. Dissociation from wrongdoing—expressed as distancing from the wrongdoer—is an expressive attempt to do justice to the significance of wrongdoing in a way analogous to the expressive attempt to thank someone adequately for doing you a favor. I draw on the idea of dissociation as an expressive action to explain why it should be that a failure to dissociate is a source of complicity. (shrink)

Port of Culture is a showcase of the images from a three year photographic project undertaken by photographer Pete Carr to capture the city of Liverpool in a different light. Award-winning photographer Carr is a specialist in HDR a technique that enables photographers to record a greater range of tonal detail than any camera could capture in a single photo, producing a 'painting-like' quality to the image. The end result is an incredible dynamic range of images capturing the many (...) moods of the city - from scenes of protests at the arrival of Condoleezza Rice, to local architecture old and new. Visually stunning, Port of Culture reveals the astonishing creativity of this young photographer while providing a wholly refreshing and entrancing take on a city evolving in front of our eyes. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Epicurean atomism, and explicates his claim that it represents a problematic idea, similar to the idea exemplified in early, “barbaric” accounts of the differential calculus. Deleuzian problematic ideas are characterized by a mechanism through whose activity the components of the idea become determinate in relating reciprocally to one another, rather than in being determined exclusively in relation to an extrinsic paradigm or framework. In Epicurean atomism, as Deleuze reads it, such a mechanism of (...) determination can be found in the famous atomic “swerve”. It is necessary to bear this interpretation of Epicurean atomism in mind when understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s promulgation of a new image of thought in What is Philosophy? , which has an explicitly Epicurean inspiration. The paper argues that this inspiration is particularly evident to the extent that Deleuze and Guattari identify the sub-representative feature that lies at the heart of their new image of thought with “chaos”, defined as “infinite speed”. I claim that infinite speed, this otherwise puzzling feature of What is Philosophy? , ought to be understood in the light of Deleuze’s interpretation of Epicurus. Moreover, the Epicurean distinctions between different speeds must be read together with Deleuze’s appropriation of the metaphysics of the ancient Stoics, who, although widely recognized as Deleuze’s Hellenistic counterparts, lack important theoretical resources that the Epicureans provide for Deleuze. (shrink)

An empirically based view of size and distance perceptual content and phenomenology is introduced, in which perceivers measure worldly size and distance against their bodies. Central principles of the formal, representational theory of the measurement of extensive magnitudes are then applied in framing the account in a precise way. The question of whether spatial-perceptual experience is “unit-free” is clarified. The framework is used to assess Dennis Proffitt's proposal that spatial setting is perceived in various “units,” “scales,” or “rulers”, some of (...) them non-spatial—distance in terms of calories burned to traverse and the like. The debate between Proffitt and Firestone about the commensurability of differing measurement scales held by Proffitt to be relied on by perceivers is then clarified and resolved. Finally, the measurement theory framed account of size and distance perception is used to illuminate Gibson’s famous but elusive contrasts between “geometrical optics” and “ecological optics” and between the “physical world” and the “animal environment”. (shrink)

Managers often have discretion in interpreting their ethical requirements, and they should seek democratic guidance in doing so. The undemocratic nature of managerial ethical discretion is shown to be a recurring problem in business ethics. Joseph Heath’s market failures approach (MFA) is introduced as a theory better positioned to deal with this problem than other views. However, due to epistemic uncertainty and conceptual indeterminacy, the MFA is shown to allow a much wider range of managerial discretion than initially appears. The (...) paper explores how this range can be narrowed down with democratic input, comparing models based on formal state institutions and on the informal public sphere. A case study from the pharmaceutical industry illustrates the merits of the informal public sphere approach. (shrink)

If making/allowing lacks basic moral significance, morality seems to be terribly demanding. It could be demanding in either of two ways: by answering too many practical questions, leaving too few to be resolved on non‐moral grounds, or by thwarting too many of our natural, non‐moral desires. The former is irrelevant to making/allowing but the ‘thwarting’ kind of demandingness is not, and attempts by Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick to fend off the threat are failures. The ‘thwarting’ threat might be countered by (...) adopting a morality that requires or permits more attention to one's own interests than to others’, but when that is combined with the moral neutrality of making/allowing, the result is requirement or permission for behaviour that no decent person would agree to. (shrink)

Deleuze and Evolutionary Theory gathers together contributions by many of the central theorists in Deleuze studies who have led the way in breaking down the boundaries between philosophical and biological research. They focus on the significance of Deleuze and Guattari’s engagements with evolutionary theory across the full range of their work, from the interpretation of Darwin in Difference and Repetition to the symbiotic alliances of wasp and orchid in A Thousand Plateaus. In this way, they explore the anthropological, social and (...) biopolitical significance of the convergences and divergences between philosophy and evolutionary science. (shrink)

The parametrized Duffin–Kemmer–Petiau wave equation is formulated for many relativistic particles of spin-0 or spin-1. The first-quantized formulation lacks the fields of creation and annihilation operators which satisfy commutation relations subject to causality conditions, and which are essential to the Quantum Field Theoretic proof of the spin-statistics connection. It is instead proved that the wavefunctions for identical particles must be symmetric by extension of the nonrelativistic argument of Jabs. The causal commutators of Quantum Field Theory restrict entanglement to separations of (...) the order of the Compton wavelength \. The entanglement manifest in the symmetric Duffin–Kemmer–Petiau wavefunctions is unrestricted. (shrink)

_Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies_ Edited by David Bordwell and Noel Carroll Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996 ISBN: 0299149447 564 pp.

This book is mainly concerned with first‐order morality as distinct from second‐order morality. It is argued here that the agent's state of mind has nothing to do with the rightness/wrongness of his conduct, though the latter is affected by what the agent could know at the time of acting. At a deeper level, it depends on what consequences the behaviour in question makes probable. When some horrible consequence ensues through bad luck, we may have emotions that feel like blame, but (...) they are really something different. (shrink)

The making/allowing distinction tends to be accompanied by three other considerations that do have moral significance: ease of avoidance, motive, and knowability of consequences. Much discussion of making/allowing is based on intuitions about contrasted pairs of cases—a procedure that has dangers against which this chapter warns. Any thesis to the effect that making/allowing sometimes makes a moral difference is a sign of uncompleted work; the result is not interesting until we know the differentia.

The massive expansion of information from the seventeenth century placed considerable demands on mental capacity, and individual scholars responded with strategies of memory training and note?taking that prompted, relieved or replaced memory. It has been acknowledged how cowpox inoculation (vaccination) and smallpox inoculation (variolation) stimulated new forms of record keeping and the standardization and tabulation of medical data for scientific analysis and to inform public policy. Yet the key figure in these developments, Edward Jenner, while a careful observer who thought (...) hard about the patterns he discerned, did not take good notes either from his reading or of his observations. He depended a great deal on his memory, especially a remarkable visual memory, consolidating his recollections and refining his thinking more through conversation and familiar letters than careful note?taking and writing. It was rather in the work of the practitioners who took up Jenners? writings, including some laymen and women, that we find the keeping of records of their vaccinations, in order to provide patient records and to report the results to friends, colleagues and a wider public. (shrink)