We show how interest in “human enhancement” and "optimization” is rooted in a broader social phenomenon – the medicalization of life – and argue that the push to enhance and optimize human beings has a distinctively neoliberal character. Indeed, human enhancement and optimization practices reflect a growing tendency to apply market concepts and logic to individuals, who increasingly conceive of themselves as performative subjects. The Quantified Self is, we suggest, the Marketized Self. Moreover, the Quantified (...) class='Hi'>Self is not merely a symptom of the marketization of individuals but serves also to perpetuate that marketization: the Quantified Self threatens to become that concept which defines who the individual “really” is. We argue that this metaphysically weighty idea affects how we think about what is good for human beings. (shrink)

The phenomenon of the quantified self, which is especially addressed by sociology and medical humanities, is still quite disregarded by philosophy. Yet, the philosophical issues it raises are various and meaningful, from the realm of epistemology to the realm of ethics. Moreover, it may be read as a key symptom to investigate the complex technological era in which we live, starting from the meaning of contemporary technology itself from a philosophical perspective. I shall focus on one of the (...) epistemological issues raised by the phenomenon of the quantified self by arguing that it may be read in terms of epistemological anarchism, which also leads to other epistemological issues, such as a possibly detectable crisis of the notions of knowledge in general and science in particular as founded on the relationship between particularity and universality, as well as between reality and ideality. I shall select cases that are peculiarly representative of the founding epistemological stance I shall focus on. Yet, the reason why they deserve special attention is that they are also representative of an increasingly widespread attitude characterising not only the community of the quantified self but also, at least to some extent, anyone of us who may happen to use technologies to try to self-diagnose. (shrink)

Self-tracking devices point to a future in which individuals will be more involved in the management of their health and will generate data that will benefit clinical decision making and research. They have thus attracted enthusiasm from medical and public health professionals as key players in the move toward participatory and personalized healthcare. Critics, however, have begun to articulate a number of broader societal and ethical concerns regarding self-tracking, foregrounding their disciplining, and disempowering effects. This paper has two (...) aims: first, to analyze some of the key promises and concerns that inform this polarized debate. I argue that far from being solely about health outcomes, this debate is very much about fundamental values that are at stake in the move toward personalized healthcare, namely, the values of autonomy, solidarity, and authenticity. The second aim is to provide a framework within which an alternative approach to self-tracking for health can be developed. I suggest that a practice-based approach, which studies how values are enacted in specific practices, can open the way for a new set of theoretical questions. In the last part of the paper, I sketch out how this can work by describing various enactments of autonomy, solidarity, and authenticity among self-trackers in the Quantified Self community. These examples show that shifting attention to practices can render visible alternative and sometimes unexpected enactments of values. Insofar as these may challenge both the promises and concerns in the debate on self-tracking for health, they can lay the groundwork for new conceptual interventions in future research. (shrink)

The notion of je ne sais quoi, whose rise characterises the decades in which the first scientific revolution marks a turning point in Western culture, tries to identify the human capacity for grasping what exceeds knowledge resulting from logos. But the further steps of the triumph of logos, starting from the second scientific revolution and its further developments, increasingly determine its fall. Moreover, th e recent history of Western culture may be read as follows: we have been increasingly entrusting our (...) understanding of what is and our prediction of what will be to an even more restricted form of rationality coinciding with logos, first, by progressively restricting logos to computation and, second, by progressively externalising computation from our minds to technologies, specifically algorithmic technologies. As such, should we think that computation is increasingly occupying the realm of je ne sais quoi by increasingly reckoning the unreckonable? The answer seems affirmative. In what follows, I shall critically focus on a promising case in point to try to understand the radical move from je ne sais quoi to computation: the case of the quantified self, which is addressed by medical humanities and sociology, but quite disregarded by philosophy – alternatively, I shall at least try to introduce the reasons why the case of the quantified self deserves a specifically philosophical study, starting from aesthetics and epistemology. (shrink)

While the Quantified Self has often been described as a contemporary iteration of Taylorism, this article argues that a more accurate comparison is to be made with what Anson Rabinbach has termed the “European Science of Work.” The European Science of Work sought to modify Taylor’s rigid and schematic understanding of the laboring body through the incorporation of insights drawn from the rich European tradition of physiological studies. This “softening” of Taylorist methods had the effect of producing a (...) greater “isorhythmia” or synchronicity between the bodily rhythms of workers and those of the mode of production itself and was embraced by employers as a way to dampen worker militancy. Through a discursive analysis of the promotion of sensor analytics by management consultants VoloMetrix and Humanyze, I argue that the contemporary quantification of the workplace represents a similar project of “soft domination,” as the intimate, bottom-up mode of surveillance it fosters seeks to more closely mold workers’ physiological and social rhythms to the structure of the workplace and the working day. (shrink)

This article presents the results of a discourse analysis of press coverage on the Quantified Self (QS) movement in the German and British (online) press between 2007 and 2018. The analysis is driven by two questions: What discursive patterns can be discerned within this coverage? And, what characterizes the translation of the experimental practices and imaginaries of this pioneer community into an overall societal reflection of deep mediatization? In essence, the article shows that the QS movement becomes a (...) ‘general signifier’ for a dystopian view of deep mediatization. So, while the QS movement itself understands its practices and community as self-empowering, self-reasoning, and experimental, the constructions of the QS movement in public discourse suggest the opposite. Paradoxically, however, another basic imaginary of the pioneer community is adopted and confirmed, namely that of the (simple) mutability of society as a consequence of digital media technologies. (shrink)

Bainbridge’s well known “Ironies of Automation” Analysis, design and evaluation of man–machine systems. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp 129–135, 1983. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-029348-6.50026-9) laid out a set of fundamental criticisms surrounding the promises of automation that, even 30 years later, remain both relevant and, in many cases, intractable. Similarly, a set of ironies in technologies for sensor driven self-quantification is laid out here, spanning from instrumental problems in human factors design to much broader social problems. As with automation, these ironies stand in the (...) way of many of the promised benefits of these wearable technologies. It is argued here that without addressing these ironies now, the promises of wearables may not come to fruition, and instead users may experience outcomes that are opposite to those which the designers seek to afford, or, at the very least, those which consumers believe they are being offered. This paper describes four key ironies of sensor driven self-quantification: know more, know better versus no more, no better; greater self-control versus greater social control; well-being versus never being well enough; more choice versus erosion of choice. (shrink)

Remote monitoring of implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) patients links patients wirelessly to the clinic via a box in their bedroom. The box transmits data from the ICD to a remote database accessible to clinicians without patient involvement. Data travel across time and space; clinicians can monitor patients from a distance and instantly know about cardiac events. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two Danish hospitals, this article explores the configuration of the wireless ICD patient by following a number of patients through (...) hospitalisation, implantation, in-clinic follow-up, and remote monitoring. Wireless therapy, we argue, scripts the patient as data. In high-tech clinical encounters, data are enacted as extensions and copies of the patient, and even proxies that, in patients’ experiences, may turn into identity thieves. In illuminating the multiple positions that data take in such clinical encounters and in patients’ experiences we discuss the ambiguities that arise when patients go wireless. (shrink)

We characterize the generalized quantifiers Q which satisfy the scheme $QxQy\phi \leftrightarrow QyQx\phi$ , the so-called self-commuting quantifiers, or quantifiers with the Fubini property.

The growth of self-tracking and personal surveillance has given rise to the Quantified Self movement. Members of this movement seek to enhance their personal well-being, productivity, and self-actualization through the tracking and gamification of personal data. The technologies that make this possible can also track and gamify aspects of our interpersonal, romantic relationships. Several authors have begun to challenge the ethical and normative implications of this development. In this article, we build upon this work to provide (...) a detailed ethical analysis of the Quantified Relationship. We identify eight core objections to the QR and subject them to critical scrutiny. We argue that although critics raise legitimate concerns, there are ways in which tracking technologies can be used to support and facilitate good relationships. We thus adopt a stance of cautious openness toward this technology and advocate the development of a research agenda for the positive use of QR technologies. (shrink)

We investigate how short and long-range word length correlations evolve in Chinese narrative texts. The results show that, for short-range word length correlations, no significant linear evolutionary trend was found. But for long-range correlations, there are two opposite tendencies for two different regimes: the Hurst exponent of small-scale word length correlations decreases over time, and the exponent of large-scale shows an increasing tendency. The increase of word length is corroborated as an essential regularity of word evolution in written Chinese. Further (...) analyses show that a significant correlation coefficient is obtained between Hurst exponents from the small-scale correlations and mean word length across time. These indicate that word length correlation evolution possesses different self-adaptive mechanisms in terms of different scales of distances between words. We speculate that the increase of word length and sentence length in written Chinese may account for this phenomenon, in terms of both the social-cultural aspects and the self-adapting properties of language structures. (shrink)

This paper presents a literature review on the ethics of self-tracking technologies which are utilized by users to monitor parameters related to their activity and bodily parameters. By examining a total of 65 works extracted through a systematic database search and backwards snowballing, the authors of this review discuss three categories of opportunities and ten categories of concerns currently associated with self-tracking. The former include empowerment and well-being, contribution to health goals, and solidarity. The latter are social harms, (...) privacy and surveillance, ownership control and commodification of data, autonomy, data-facilitated harm, datafication and interpretability of data, negative impact on relation to self and others, shortcomings of design, negative impact on health perception, and regulation and enforcement of rules. The review concludes with a critical analysis of the existing literature and an overview of a future research agenda that could complement the current work on ethics of self-tracking. (shrink)

The conceptual promise of relational values, theorized as the principles and virtues of human relationships (with other humans and nature), to motivate sustainability may be observed in its rapid uptake in theoretical and policy domains. Both relying on and impacting nature, agriculture has garnered attention among efforts to apply relational values. However, quantitative measures have received little focus in efforts to operationalize relational values. Guided by the assertion that sustainable agriculture is embedded with both relational and instrumental values (i.e., (...) class='Hi'>self-interested ends), this study considers theoretical and methodological challenges and offers a pathway to quantitatively measuring relational values within agriculture, focusing specifically on seeds—an agricultural input embedded with plural values. Drawing on 151 survey responses from seed growers in Vermont, this study assesses how relational and instrumental values are reflected among commercial and non-commercial seed growers and are associated with the presence of crop diversity in their farms and gardens. The findings show that those who sell seeds for income have significantly higher relational values, instrumental values, and crop diversity than those who do not sell seeds. Should these findings be confirmed in future studies, potential exists for policy initiatives encouraging market behavior and its governance to express a range of values beyond instrumental ones exclusively. This paper concludes by arguing that all economic exchange is likely embedded with both relational and instrumental values, meaning that policies and programs that activate a range of values will most likely maximize the impacts of the myriad initiatives pursuing sustainable agriculture. (shrink)

The growth of self-tracking and personal surveillance has given rise to the Quantified Self movement. Members of this movement seek to enhance their personal well-being, productivity, and self-actualization through the tracking and gamification of personal data. The technologies that make this possible can also track and gamify aspects of our interpersonal, romantic relationships. Several authors have begun to challenge the ethical and normative implications of this development. In this article, we build upon this work to provide (...) a detailed ethical analysis of the Quantified Relationship. We identify eight core objections to the QR and subject them to critical scrutiny. We argue that although critics raise legitimate concerns, there are ways in which tracking technologies can be used to support and facilitate good relationships. We thus adopt a stance of cautious openness toward this technology and advocate the development of a research agenda for the positive use of QR technologies. (shrink)

We study the structure of families of theories in the language of arithmetic extended to allow these families to refer to one another and to themselves. If a theory contains schemata expressing its own truth and expressing a specific Turing index for itself, and contains some other mild axioms, then that theory is untrue. We exhibit some families of true self-referential theories that barely avoid this forbidden pattern.

Against the easy presupposition that such a thing as ‘democratic taxation’ not only exists but is also practicable, this paper points to the dilemma posed by what I call ‘quantifiable action.’ The essay develops an approach to theorizing the place of taxation in political theory that counters trends in fiscal sociology, political science, and liberal theory by highlighting how taxation presumably violates the requirement that self-government includes an absence of instrumental rationality on the part of democratic citizens. For this (...) reason, taxation presents a persistent problem for any concept of self-government, and may usefully be regarded as a technology of the self, conventional with democracy but at most ambiguous in its capability to be genuinely democratic, both theoretically and practically. (shrink)

Against the easy presupposition that such a thing as ‘democratic taxation’ not only exists but is also practicable, this paper points to the dilemma posed by what I call ‘quantifiable action.’ The essay develops an approach to theorizing the place of taxation in political theory that counters trends in fiscal sociology, political science, and liberal theory by highlighting how taxation presumably violates the requirement that self-government includes an absence of instrumental rationality on the part of democratic citizens. For this (...) reason, taxation presents a persistent problem for any concept of self-government, and may usefully be regarded as a technology of the self, conventional with democracy but at most ambiguous in its capability to be genuinely democratic, both theoretically and practically. (shrink)

Purpose This paper aims to fill this gap by providing a conceptual framework for discussing “technologies of the self and other,” by showing that, in most cases, self-tracking also involves other-tracking. Design/methodology/approach In so doing, we draw upon Foucault’s “technologies of the self” and present-day literature on self-tracking technologies. We elaborate on two cases and practical domains to illustrate and discuss this mutual process: first, the quantified workplace; and second, quantification by wearables in a non-clinical (...) and self-initiated context. Findings The main conclusion is that these shapings are never neutral and have ethical implications, such as regarding “quantified otherness,” a notion we propose to point at the risk that the other could become an object of examination and competition. Originality/value Although there is ample literature on the quantified self, considerably less attention is given to how the relation with the other is being shaped by self-tracking technologies that allow data sharing. (shrink)

Fitness apps on mobile devices are gaining popularity, as more people are engaging in self-tracking activities to record their status of fitness and exercise routines. These technologies also evolved from simply recording steps and offering exercise suggestions to an integrated lifestyle guide for physical wellbeing, thus exemplify a new era of "quantified self" in the context of health as individual responsibility. There is a considerable amount of literature in science, technology and society (STS) studies looking at this (...) phenomenon from different perspectives, linking it with the sociology of self-surveillance and neoliberal regimes of health. However, the human-technology interface, through which the micro- (behavioral) and macro- (social) aspects converge, still calls for extensive examination. This paper approaches this topic from the postphenomenological perspective, in combination with empirical studies of design analysis and interviews of fitness apps, to reveal the human-technology link between the design elements and people's perception through the direct experiences and interpretations of technology. It argues that the intentionality of self-tracking fitness app designs mediates the human-technology relations by "guiding" people into a quantified knowledge regime. It shapes the perceptions of fitness and health with representations of meanings about a "good life" of individual success and management. This paper also gives a critique of current individual, performance-oriented fitness app designs and offers the possibility of seeking alternatives through the multistable nature of human-technology relations—how altering interpretation and meaning of the design with a cultural or social context could change the form of technological embodiment. (shrink)

Pervasive though it is in modern life, the concept of self‐esteem is often viewed with distrust. This paper departs from an idea that was recently aired by Richard Smith: that we might be better off without this concept. The meaning of self‐esteem is explored within four ‘homes’: the self‐help industry, social science, therapy and education. It is suggested that the first two use a ‘simple’ concept of self‐esteem that indeed we are better off without. This concept (...) eliminates the distinction between truthfulness and delusion, and relies on a chimera of quantifiability. The much richer concept of situated self‐esteem is explored, and it is argued that low self‐esteem in children should command the attention of educators. Teachers should address this through education and communication, and reject the idea of boosting self‐esteem through a content‐free curriculum. (shrink)

Pervasive though it is in modern life, the concept of self-esteem is often viewed with distrust. This paper departs from an idea that was recently aired by Richard Smith: that we might be better off without this concept. The meaning of self-esteem is explored within four ‘homes’: the self-help industry, social science, therapy and education. It is suggested that the first two use a ‘simple’ concept of self-esteem that indeed we are better off without. This concept (...) eliminates the distinction between truthfulness and delusion, and relies on a chimera of quantifiability. The much richer concept of situated self-esteem is explored, and it is argued that low self-esteem in children (often narcissistically disguised) should command the attention of educators. Teachers should address this through education and communication, and reject the idea (prevalent in the USA) of boosting self-esteem through a content-free curriculum. (shrink)

Percus & Sauerland (2003) use quantified belief reports of the form 'Only Peter thinks he's...' to argue for dedicated de se LFs. The argument is targeted against any reductionist account that sees de se as merely a particular subtype of de re, viz. a de re belief about oneself from a first person perspective, requiring nothing but an account of de re attitudes. My acquaintance resolution framework is an attempt at just such a reduction and in this paper I (...) extend that theory with a projection mechanism to allow local accommodation of acquaintance relations. With this extension we can account for their data, as well as for some related data involving quantified belief reports familiar from arguments in the de se literature. Note: the embedded video of Peter's mistaken self-identity is urlhttp://ncs.ruhosting.nl/emar/dese.mpgavailable in .mpg here. (shrink)

We divide the class of infinite computable trees into three types. For the first and second types, 0' computes a nontrivial self-embedding while for the third type 0'' computes a nontrivial self-embedding. These results are optimal and we obtain partial results concerning the complexity of nontrivial self-embeddings of infinite computable trees considered up to isomorphism. We show that every infinite computable tree must have either an infinite computable chain or an infinite Π01 antichain. This result is optimal (...) and has connections to the program of reverse mathematics. (shrink)

Pervasive though it is in modern life, the concept of self-esteem is often viewed with distrust. This paper departs from an idea that was recently aired by Richard Smith: that we might be better off without this concept. The meaning of self-esteem is explored within four ‘homes’: the self-help industry, social science, therapy and education. It is suggested that the first two use a ‘simple’ concept of self-esteem that indeed we are better off without. This concept (...) eliminates the distinction between truthfulness and delusion, and relies on a chimera of quantifiability. The much richer concept of situated self-esteem is explored, and it is argued that low self-esteem in children (often narcissistically disguised) should command the attention of educators. Teachers should address this through education and communication, and reject the idea (prevalent in the USA) of boosting self-esteem through a content-free curriculum. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to take a critical look at some of the assumptions and theories found in economics and management and discuss their implications for the practices found in the management of business and in public management. Two sets of assumptions are of interest here. First and foremost, the assumption that economic agents are only actuated by self-interest, accompanied by assumptions about the motivating effect of pecuniary incentives and assumptions about the regulation of behaviour through rules, (...) controls and sanctions; secondly, assumptions about “scientificness” and objectivity, accompanied by demands for mathematical formalism, clear goals, quantifiable models and measurements. The assertion is that unrealistic assumptions of economics have become taken for granted and tacitly included into theories and models of management. Guiding management to behave in a fashion that apparently makes these assumptions become “true”. Cases and illustrative examples are used to show how this influences the practice of decision makers and managers. (shrink)

Although it was traditionally thought that self-reference is a crucial ingredient of semantic paradoxes, Yablo (1993, 2004) showed that this was not so by displaying an infinite series of sentences none of which is self-referential but which, taken together, are paradoxical. Yablo's paradox consists of a countable series of linearly ordered sentences s(0), s(1), s(2),... , where each s(i) says: For each k > i, s(k) is false (or equivalently: For no k > i is s(k) true). We (...) generalize Yablo's results along two dimensions. First, we study the behavior of generalized Yablo-series in which each sentence s(i) has the form: For Q k > i, s(k) is true, where Q is a generalized quantifier (e.g., no, every, infinitely many, etc). We show that under broad conditions all the sentences in the series must have the same truth value, and we derive a characterization of those values of Q for which the series is paradoxical. Second, we show that in the Strong Kleene trivalent logic Yablo's results are a special case of a more general fact: under certain conditions, any semantic phenomenon that involves self-reference can be emulated without self-reference. Various translation procedures that eliminate self-reference from a non-quantificational language are defined and characterized. An Appendix sketches an extension to quantificational languages, as well as a new argument that Yablo's paradox and the translations we offer do not involve self-reference. (shrink)

In Knowledge and Belief Jaakko Hintikka presents a fairly detailed system of epistemic logic and tries to show its philosophical importance by bringing it to bear upon such problems as what goes wrong in saying “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it.” In setting up the system, Hintikka presents a way of symbolizing certain locutions containing expressions like ‘knows that’, ‘know who’, and ‘believes that’; he introduces certain notions which are analogous to the standard logical concepts consistency, validity, entailment, and (...) logical equivalence; and he sets up certain criteria which determine when these analogues of consistency, validity, etc. apply to epistemic and doxastic sentences and schemata-i.e., to sentences and schemata which contain, in their symbolic renditions, one or more of the so-called epistemic operators: ‘K’, ‘B’, ‘P’, and ‘C’. The analogue of logical consistency which Hintikka introduces is called “defensibility.” Intuitively, a sentence is defensible provided that it is true in at least one of the “most knowledgeable of possible worlds” -i.e., provided it is true in at least one of the possible worlds which have the feature that each inhabitant which is capable of knowing and/or believing things knows all the logical consequences of every proposition it knows and believes all the logical consequences of every proposition it believes. The remaining notions are defined by reference to defensibility in just the way validity, entailment, and logical equivalence are often defined by reference to consistency. Thus self-sustenance, the epistemic analogue of validity, is defined thus. (shrink)

We have, in the 21st century, moved into a new series of fascinations with biosensing, where our autonomic systems or an autonomic ‘self’, largely out of bounds for our own knowledge and understanding before now, are available. ‘Autonomic’ refers to the nervous system of a physiological self, but the extent of our autonomic selves would not otherwise be knowable or known but through sensory tracking devices now available to us. Biosensing, biohacking, biometrics and biopower are all part of (...) a contemporary movement of intimate and intensified measure and are terms that Dawn Nafus's collection Quantified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life deals with. The book discusses questions of measurement and tracking with the use of sensory technology and methods. This review considers where this collection sits in the literature and theoretical debates. (shrink)

Digital hyperconnectivity is a defining fact of our time. In addition to recasting social interaction, culture, economics, and politics, it has profoundly transformed the self. It has created new ways of being and constructing a self, but also new ways of being constructed as a self from the outside, new ways of being configured, represented, and governed as a self by sociotechnical systems. Rather than analyze theories of the self, I focus on practices of the (...) self, using this expression in a looser, more general sense than that used by Foucault. I begin by considering and reformulating two early lines of argument about the web as a medium for exploring and emancipating the self. Subsequent sections show how digital hyperconnectivity has engendered new ways of objectifying, quantifying, producing, and regulating the self—considered both as active, reflexive practices and as systemic, data- and algorithm-driven processes. I conclude by reflecting on the broader implications of contemporary modes of governing the self and by underscoring the ways in which hyperconnectivity has colonized the territories of the self, conscripting the self into the service of techno-social systems. (shrink)

The complex organization of syntax in hierarchical structures is one of the core design features of human language. Duality of patterning refers, for instance, to the organization of the meaningful elements in a language at two distinct levels: a combinatorial level, where meaningless forms are combined into meaningful forms; and a compositional level, where meaningful forms are composed into larger lexical units. The question remains wide open regarding how such structures could have emerged. The aim of this paper is to (...) address these two aspects in a self-consistent way. First, we introduce suitable measures to quantify the level of combinatoriality and compositionality in a language, and we present a framework to estimate these observables in human natural languages. Second, we show that a recently introduced multi-agent modeling scheme, namely the Blending Game, provides a mathematical framework to address the problem of how a population of individuals can bootstrap combinatoriality and compositionality. Theoretical predictions based on this model turn out to be in good agreement with empirical data. It is remarkable that the two sides of duality of patterning emerge simultaneously as a consequence of a pure cultural dynamics in a simulated environment that contains meaningful relations, provided a simple constraint on message transmission fidelity is also considered. (shrink)

Will we, by 2050, be able to feed a rapidly growing population with healthy and sustainably grown food in a world threatened by systemic environmental crises? There are too many uncertainties for us to predict the long-term evolution of the global agri-food system, but we can explore a wide range of futures to inform policymaking and public debate on the future of food. This is typically done by creating scenarios and quantifying them with computer simulation models to get numerical estimates (...) of how different aspects of the global agri-food system might evolve under different hypotheses. Among the many scenarios produced over the last twenty years, one would expect to see the future advocated by the food sovereignty movement, which claims to represent roughly two hundred million self-described “peasants” worldwide. This movement defends a vision of the future based on relocalized, sustainable, and just agri-food systems, self-governed through direct and participatory democratic processes. Yet, food sovereignty is conspicuously absent from quantified scenarios of global food futures. As part of the roundtable, “Ethics and the Future of the Global Food System,” this essay identifies seven obstacles that undermine the creation of food sovereignty scenarios by examining two attempts at crafting such scenarios. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of the nature of creativity in high-energy physics experiments through an integrated historical and philosophical study of the current and planned attempts to measure the self-coupling of the Higgs boson by two experimental collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider and the planned High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider. A notion of creativity is first identified broadly as an increase in the epistemic value of a measurement outcome from an unexpected transformation, and narrowly as a condition (...) for knowledge of the measurement of the self-coupling of the Higgs. Drawing upon Tal’s model-based epistemology of measurement this paper shows how without change to ‘readings’ a transformation to the model of the measurement process can increase the epistemic value of the measurement outcome. Such transformations are attributed to the creativity of the experimental collaboration. Creativity, in this context, is both a product, a creative and improved model, and the distributed collaborative process of transformation to the model of the measurement process. For the case of the planned measurements at the HL-LHC, where models of the measurement process perform the epistemic function of prediction, creativity is included in the models of the measurement process, both as projected quantified creativity and as an assumed property of the future collaborations. (shrink)

This article discusses the manipulation and measurement of levels of situational self-focus, which is generally labeled ''self-awareness.'' A new scale was developed to quantify levels of public and private self-awareness. Five studies were conducted to assess the psychometric properties, reliability, and validity of the Situational Self-Awareness Scale (SSAS). The SSAS was found to have a reliable factor structure, to detect differences in public and private self-awareness produced by laboratory manipulations, and to be sensitive to changes (...) in self-awareness within individuals over time and across situations. The SSAS can be used as a manipulation check of laboratory self-awareness manipulations and as a means of assessing naturally occurring fluctuations in public and private self-awareness in order to clarify the relation between self-awareness and other variables (e.g., mood and memory). (shrink)

Deficits in the ability to read the emotions of others have been demonstrated in mental disorders, such as dissociation and schizophrenia, which involve a distorted sense of self. This study examined whether weakened self-referential source memory, being unable to remember whether a piece of information has been processed with reference to oneself, is linked to ineffective emotion recognition. In two samples from a college and community, we quantified the participants’ ability to remember the self-generated versus non- (...) class='Hi'>self-generated origins of sentences they had previously read or partially generated. We also measured their ability to read others’ emotions accurately when viewing photos of people in affect-charged situations. Multinomial processing tree modelling was applied to obtain a measure of self-referential source memory that was not biased by non-mnemonic factors. Our first experiment with college participants revealed a positive correlation between correctly remembering the origins of sentences and accurately recognising the emotions of others. This correlation was successfully replicated in the second experiment with community participants. The current study offers evidence of a link between self-referential source memory and emotion recognition. (shrink)

A prefrontal control system that is less mature than the limbic reward system in adolescence is thought to impede self-regulatory abilities, which could contribute to poor dietary choices and obesity. We, therefore, aimed to examine whether structural morphology of the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are associated with dietary decisions and obesity in children and adolescents. Seventy-one individuals between the ages of 8–22 years participated in this study; each participant completed a computer-based food choice task and a T1- and (...) T2-weighted structural brain scans. Two indices of obesity were assessed, including age- and sex-specific body mass index and waist-to-height ratio. The behavioral task included rating 60 food stimuli for tastiness, healthiness, and liking. Based on each participant’s self-ratings, 100 binary food choices were then made utilizing a computer mouse. Dietary “self-control” was calculated as the proportion of trials where the individual chose the healthier food item over the total number of trials. Cortical thickness and amygdala subnuclei volumes were quantified using FreeSurfer 6.0 and CIT168 atlas, respectively. We found that WHtR was negatively associated with the thickness of bilateral superior frontal, left superior temporal, right insula, and right inferior temporal regions. We also found WHtR to be positively associated with the volume of the central nucleus region of the amygdala, after adjusting for the hemisphere, age, sex, and intracranial volumes. A similar data pattern was observed when BMIz was used. Moreover, we found that across all participants, thinner right superior frontal cortex and larger left CEN volumes predicted lower dietary self-control. These results suggest that differential development of the PFC and amygdala relate to obesity and dietary self-control. Further longitudinal studies are merited to determine causal relationships among altered PFC to amygdala neural circuitry, dietary self-control, and obesity. (shrink)

Nonverbal interpersonal synchronization has been established as an important factor in therapeutic relationships, and the differentiation of who leads the interaction appears to provide further important information. We investigated nonverbal synchrony – quantified as the coordination of body movement between patient and therapist. This was observed in music therapy dyads, while engaged in verbal interaction before and after a music intervention in the session. We further examined associations with patients’ self-reported therapy readiness at the beginning of the session. (...) Eleven neurological in-patients participated in this study. Our results showed an increase in both nonverbal synchrony and patient leading after the music intervention. A significant negative correlation was found between self-reported therapy readiness and nonverbal synchrony after the music intervention. These findings point to the empathic ability of the music therapist to sense patients’ therapy readiness. Higher patient leading in nonverbal synchrony after the music intervention may thus indicate that the music intervention may have allowed dyadic entrainment to take place, potentially increasing self-regulation and thus empowering patients. (shrink)

There is no immediate knowledge, neither empirical nor conceptual. Hegel shows this in his Phenomenology of Spirit. He develops this most important insight in his writings on logic. Science is the project of developing situation-independent generic sentences – which are not to be confused with universally quantified empirical statements. Rather, the sentences articulate law sor rules of default inference and proper judgment in a generic way. They are set as “conceptually valid” not only on merely verbal or conventional grounds, (...) but are “material” in their world-relation. In other words, science develops “the concept” which, in turn, enables us to understand, i.e. to use languages and to think about reality and possibilities more or less correctly. “The concept” is, therefore, the system of generic conditions of all “meaning” and “truth” and is, as such, presupposed in empirical judgments of the category of singularity. “Reason” is the subjective side of “spirit”, which, in turn, is nothing but our practice of scientific development. If we look at this practice from within, spirit is the “self-development” of conceptual contents. Moreover, any causal explanation and any appeal to forces or dispositions rest on conceptual constructions of generic models. This is the core claim of Hegel’s idealism with respect to causes and grounds by which we “explain” appearances: The underlying “Wirklichkeit” is our own scientific construction suited to our joint experiences. (shrink)

Contemporary data practices are inducing a convergent saturation point wherein every human action, reaction, interaction, transaction, thought or desire is quantified, reified, recorded and used. Physical or virtual, all is recorded, known or unknown, seen or unseen, until data permeates every facet of our shared human existence. The implications of this eventuality are potentially so far reaching that the very notion or concept of who we are might be fundamentally altered, resulting in new ontologies of the self in (...) a world of Total Data. This polemic paper reflects on the implications that Total Data has for the ontological self in a range of individual and shared contexts, and considers the potential it has to ultimately be symbiotic or assimilatory. It suggests that the current trajectory for Total Data is more assimilatory than symbiotic, demonstrating more potential to collectively monitor and control people than to emancipate and empower them. In response, it calls for an authentic debate and reassessment of current data practices, and for an urgent reprioritisation of core and enduring human-centred values and symbiosis in technological systems development to emancipate and empower people living in a Total Data world. (shrink)

En este artículo, me propongo exponer algunas dificultades relacionadas con la posibilidad de que la Teoría de Modelos pueda constituirse en una Teoría General de la Interpretación. Específicamente la idea que sostengo es que lo que nos muestra la Paradoja de Orayen es que las interpretaciones no pueden ser ni conjuntos ni objetos. Por eso, una elucidación del concepto intuitivo de interpretación, que apele a este tipo de entidades, está condenada al fracaso. De manera secundaria, muestro que no hay algún (...) supuesto conjuntista que sea imprescindible para que surja la mencionada paradoja: sólo se necesita que las interpretaciones sean objetos. Voy a argumentar que si las interpretaciones son objetos, tal como lo supone la posibilidad de cuantificar sobre las mismas para poder dar una caracterización satisfactoria de consecuencia lógica, la au-toaplicación (como un caso de aplicación de los recursos semánticos de la teoría de modelos para encontrar una interpretación con máxima generalidad) es imposible. Finalmente, discuto cada una de las dos soluciones que el propio Orayen imaginó frente a su paradoja, y muestro que cada una posee diferentes dificultades.In this paper, I intend to present some problems to construe the Model Theory as a Theory of Interpretation. Specifically, I am going to defend that, according to the Paradox of Orayen, interpretations can not be neither set nor object. Thus, an explication of the intuitive concept of interpretation that appeals to these types of entities will be condemned to failure. Secondary, I will show that there is not any like-set assumption indispensable to get rise to that paradox: only all is needed is the assumption that interpretations are objects. I am going to argue that if interpretations are objects, as it is assumed by the possibility of quantifying over interpretations in order to offer an satisfactory characterization of logical consequence, self-application (as a case of application of semantics resources of the Model Theory for finding a interpretation with absolute generality) is not possible. Eventually, I will discuss both of the solutions provided by Orayen to his paradox and I will support that both have different difficulties. (shrink)

En este artículo, me propongo exponer algunas dificultades relacionadas con la posibilidad de que la Teoría de Modelos pueda constituirse en una Teoría General de la Interpretación. Específicamente la idea que sostengo es que lo que nos muestra la Paradoja de Orayen es que las interpretaciones no pueden ser ni conjuntos ni objetos. Por eso, una elucidación del concepto intuitivo de interpretación, que apele a este tipo de entidades, está condenada al fracaso. De manera secundaria, muestro que no hay algún (...) supuesto conjuntista que sea imprescindible para que surja la mencionada paradoja: sólo se necesita que las interpretaciones sean objetos. Voy a argumentar que si las interpretaciones son objetos, tal como lo supone la posibilidad de cuantificar sobre las mismas para poder dar una caracterización satisfactoria de consecuencia lógica, la au-toaplicación (como un caso de aplicación de los recursos semánticos de la teoría de modelos para encontrar una interpretación con máxima generalidad) es imposible. Finalmente, discuto cada una de las dos soluciones que el propio Orayen imaginó frente a su paradoja, y muestro que cada una posee diferentes dificultades.In this paper, I intend to present some problems to construe the Model Theory as a Theory of Interpretation. Specifically, I am going to defend that, according to the Paradox of Orayen, interpretations can not be neither set nor object. Thus, an explication of the intuitive concept of interpretation that appeals to these types of entities will be condemned to failure. Secondary, I will show that there is not any like-set assumption indispensable to get rise to that paradox: only all is needed is the assumption that interpretations are objects. I am going to argue that if interpretations are objects, as it is assumed by the possibility of quantifying over interpretations in order to offer an satisfactory characterization of logical consequence, self-application (as a case of application of semantics resources of the Model Theory for finding a interpretation with absolute generality) is not possible. Eventually, I will discuss both of the solutions provided by Orayen to his paradox and I will support that both have different difficulties. (shrink)

We motivate the desire for self-driving and explain its potential and limitations, and explore the need for—and potential implementation of—morals, ethics, and other value systems as complementary “capabilities” to the Deep Technologies behind self-driving. We consider how the incorporation of such systems may drive or slow adoption of high automation within vehicles. First, we explore the role for morals, ethics, and other value systems in self-driving through a representative hypothetical dilemma faced by a self-driving car. Through (...) the lens of engineering, we explain in simple terms common moral and ethical frameworks including utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics before characterizing their relationship to the fundamental algorithms enabling self-driving. The concepts of behavior cloning, state-based modeling, and reinforcement learning are introduced, with some algorithms being more suitable for the implementation of value systems than others. We touch upon the contemporary cross-disciplinary landscape of morals and ethics in self-driving systems from a joint philosophical and technical perspective, and close with considerations for practitioners and the public, particularly as individuals may not appreciate the nuance and complexity of using imperfect information to navigate diverse scenarios and tough-to-quantify value systems, while “typical” software development reduces complex problems to black and white decision-making. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 129 Miriam Kienle Dear Data: Feminist Information Design’s Resistance to Self-Quantification Every Sunday for one year, information designers Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec sent each other a hand-drawn postcard that featured a data visualization of their week as it pertained to a single aspect of their daily lives: doors opened, clocks checks, sounds heard, smells perceived, and (...) so on (figs. 1–4). With this series of postcards exchanged between Brooklyn and London, Lupi and Posavec gained intimate knowledge of one another through their small/slow data, and at the same time, they produced a critical examination of the capture, interpretation, and visualization of their daily data from a uniquely feminist perspective. Although the field of information design prizes clear, efficient, and seamless presentations of quantified activity, Lupi and Posavec’s Dear Data (2015) is comprised of visualizations that underscore complexity over clarity, present questions rather simply display information, and expose the instability of data itself.1 Against the quantification of embodied experience into seemingly objective and all-encompassing datasets, Dear Data instead looks at data from a feminist perspective, as tied to concrete bodies, localities, and temporalities and visualized in a manner 1. The approach to infographics that prioritizes efficiency, accuracy, and elegance, and thus suppresses the constructed and interpretative nature of both data and its visualization, is perhaps most attributed to Edward Tufte. For Tufte’s aims and methods, see Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2001). 130 Miriam Kienle that is incomplete, contingent, and constructed.2 This paper will analyze Lupi and Posavec’s designs as providing a model for a feminist approach to data visualization—a model imperative in an age in which the quantitative information (much like a binary understanding of gender) is too often treated as a self-evident fact rather than what feminist philosopher Donna Haraway famously called “situated knowledges.”3 Recently acquired by MoMA’s architecture and design collection, the Dear Data project not only stands out in the collection as the product of two female designers working in the male-dominated fields of technology and design, but also as a project that stresses feminist knowledge production by underscoring how data voids shape datasets and debunking the myth that the world is data that can be captured and visualized with neutral, distanced, and all-encompassing technologies of vision. As Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein describe in Data Feminism, data visualization from a feminist perspective understands that “bar charts might seem neutral and objective, but are in fact the result of very human and necessarily imperfect design processes.”4 Such a perspective is evident across Dear Data. Take, for example, “Week 42: A week of laughter” (fig. 5). On the key in Posavec’s visualization, she notes: “I tried to capture my laughs which was really hard + got in the way of the enjoying life, hence the data voids. / For a card about laughter I am sad about how this card turned out.”5 This willingness to show the gaps in her data, the complexities of her process, and the imperfections of her visualizations contrasts with the seamless and straightforward displays of information 2. For a feminist approach to data visualization, see Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), ebook; Catherine D’Ignazio, “What Would Feminist Data Visualization Look Like?” Center for Civic Media. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (blog), December 20, 2015, https://civic.mit.edu/feminist-data-visualization; and Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 3. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. 4. D’Ignazio and Klein, introduction to their Data Feminism. 5. Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, Dear Data (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2016), 231. Miriam Kienle 131 or what infographic guru Edward Tufte describes as “Designs so good that they are invisible.”6 Counter to the invisible and seemingly objective visualizations of our personal data to which we have become accustomed (on calorie counters, credit card statements, etc... (shrink)