A target question for the scientific study of consciousness is how dimensions of consciousness, such as the ability to feel pain and pleasure or reflect on one’s own experience, vary in different states and animal species. Considering the tight link between consciousness and moral status, answers to these questions have implications for law and ethics. Here we point out that given this link, the scientific community studying consciousness may face implicit pressure to carry out certain research programs or interpret results (...) in ways that justify current norms rather than challenge them. We show that because consciousness largely determines moral status, the use of nonhuman animals in the scientific study of consciousness introduces a direct conflict between scientific relevance and ethics—the more scientifically valuable an animal model is for studying consciousness, the more difficult it becomes to ethically justify compromises to its well-being for consciousness research. Finally, in light of these considerations, we call for a discussion of the immediate ethical corollaries of the body of knowledge that has accumulated and for a more explicit consideration of the role of ideology and ethics in the scientific study of consciousness. (shrink)

The division of cognitive labor is fundamental to all cultures. Adults have a strong sense of how knowledge is clustered in the world around them and use that sense to access additional information, defer to relevant experts, and ground their own incomplete understandings. One prominent way of clustering knowledge is by disciplines similar to those that comprise the natural and social sciences. Seven studies explored an emerging sense of these discipline‐based ways of clustering of knowledge. Even 5‐year‐olds could cluster knowledge (...) in a manner roughly corresponding to the departments of natural and social sciences in a university, doing so without any explicit awareness of those academic disciplines. But this awareness is fragile early on and competes with other ways of clustering knowledge. Over the next few years, children come to see discipline‐based clusters as having a privileged status, one that may be linked to increasingly sophisticated assumptions about essences for natural kinds. Possible mechanisms for this developmental shift are examined. (shrink)

Advances in artificial intelligence, as well as its increased presence in everyday life, have brought the emergence of many new phenomena, including an intriguing appearance of what seems to be a variant of body dysmorphic disorder, coined “Snapchat dysmorphia”. Body dysmorphic disorder is a DSM-5 psychiatric disorder defined as a preoccupation with one or more perceived defects or flaws in physical appearance that are not observable or appear slight to others. Snapchat dysmorphia is fueled by automated selfie filters that reflect (...) unrealistic sociocultural standard. In this paper, we discuss how body dysmorphic disorder and related body image distortions could arise, using the conceptual resources provided by the active inference framework. We suggest that these disorders involve dysfunctional self-modelling which entails maladaptive internalization of sociocultural preferences during adolescent identity formation. Identity formation is hereby described as cycles of interpersonal active inference that arbitrate between identity exploration and commitment. We propose that impaired self-modelling is unable to reduce interpersonal uncertainty during identity exploration, which, over time, degenerates into uncontrollable epistemic habits that isolate the body image from corrective sensory evidence. In light of these insights, we subsequently explore some of the consequences of image-centered social media platforms on the identity formation process. We conclude that heightened interpersonal uncertainty in this novel context could precipitate the onset of body dysmorphic disorder and related body image distortions, particularly when selfie filters are involved. (shrink)

Advances in artificial intelligence, as well as its increased presence in everyday life, have brought the emergence of many new phenomena, including an intriguing appearance of what seems to be a variant of body dysmorphic disorder, coined “Snapchat dysmorphia”. Body dysmorphic disorder is a DSM-5 psychiatric disorder defined as a preoccupation with one or more perceived defects or flaws in physical appearance that are not observable or appear slight to others. Snapchat dysmorphia is fueled by automated selfie filters that reflect (...) unrealistic sociocultural standard. In this paper, we discuss how body dysmorphic disorder and related body image distortions could arise, using the conceptual resources provided by the active inference framework. We suggest that these disorders involve dysfunctional self-modelling which entails maladaptive internalization of sociocultural preferences during adolescent identity formation. Identity formation is hereby described as cycles of interpersonal active inference that arbitrate between identity exploration and commitment. We propose that impaired self-modelling is unable to reduce interpersonal uncertainty during identity exploration, which, over time, degenerates into uncontrollable epistemic habits that isolate the body image from corrective sensory evidence. In light of these insights, we subsequently explore some of the consequences of image-centered social media platforms on the identity formation process. We conclude that heightened interpersonal uncertainty in this novel context could precipitate the onset of body dysmorphic disorder and related body image distortions, particularly when selfie filters are involved. (shrink)

CHAPTER Emotional Cognition An introduction Simon C. Moore and Mike Oaksford There has been a marked shift in the perceived role of emotion in human ...

Many environmental ills derive from humanity’s unsustainable fondness for meat, a fondness that often pushes (and sometimes breaks) environmental limits and reveals unsustainable patriarchal ideologies. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Ang Li’s The Butcher’s Wife each, in very different ways, expose the strands of “meat and gender” enmeshments in Korea and Taiwan respectively, showing the mutual interdependence of carnivorism and patriarchal power. So deeply rooted are the entangled strands of carnivorism and sexism that contesting them (either together or apart) means (...) dismantling the very definition of human corporeality: in The Vegetarian, this means that a woman becomes a plant; in The Butcher’s Wife, it means that a man becomes the very cattle he has spent his life slaughtering; in both, questioning meat is a very dangerous challenge that comes from a woman through a narrative perspective that is clearly feminist. Both novels plainly show deep analogies and correspondences between domestic violence and violence against animals, and yet, in both, there is a taut relationship between vegetable-based histories and a more meat-based modernity. This article argues firstly that the violence of meat-eating in The Vegetarian and The Butcher’s Wife is both physical and psychological. Dreams and madness are involved. Normalcy is male, deviance female. Order is meat, chaos vegetal. And the threat of death will either be fully realized or will hang menacingly in the air. Secondly, this article argues that the novels importantly show that breaking points (psychological and environmental) are often utterly unpredictable and that once breached, the results can also be devastatingly unpredictable. (shrink)

We argue that the self-experimentation espoused by Roberts as a means of generating new ideas, particularly in the area of mood, may be confounded by the experimental procedure eliciting those affective changes. We further suggest that ideas might be better generated through contact with a broad range of people, rather than in isolation.

Rolls defines emotion as innate reward and punishment. This could not explain our results showing that people learn faster in a negative mood. We argue that what people know about their world affects their emotional state. Negative emotion signals a failure to predict negative reward and hence prompts learning to resolve the ignorance. Thus what you don't know affects how you feel.

The topics of Anthropocene literature have a perceived global relevance that is greater than that of literature in any other period in history, and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, and Paulo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl show this clearly. These books hit common global registers, at once dealing with issues such as urbanization, corporate capitalism, and climate change as common concerns while vigorously valuing and affirming cultural heterogeneity. The topics of these novels virtually guarantee their position as (...) world literature. Sinha, Mistry, and Bacigalupi offer hope rather than doom-and-gloom on topics that are of pressing global concern. In the process, they reveal that Anthropocene fiction has, by its very topicality, a propensity to being world literature, whatever the greatness or weakness of its national origin. Theorizing about world literature thus needs to grapple more decisively than it has with what cli-fi and Anthropocene fiction offer. (shrink)

Literature has an ethical obligation to respond to the climate change crisis, and scholars have a responsibility to understand how these responses work. Neither the humanities nor the sciences have a good record when it comes to encouraging people to limit their desires, their consumption, or their growth. While there may be genetic reasons for this failure, calls for humanity to limit itself need better responses. Literature can help us to respond better to climate change, but only if we reconceptualize (...) narrative and accord to it the importance it once held as a source not only of entertainment but of knowledge necessary for our very survival. (shrink)

This paper argues that food security is a very important topic in cosmopolitanism, one that has simply not received the kind of attention that it should receive. The paper reveals how global food monopolies destroy possibilities for national self-sufficiency, raises questions about neo-nationalism in an age of terror, and exposes the insidious and invidious corporate neo-imperialism that attends seed patenting. “Food, eating, and ethics” as a topic is rarely seen as a proper or important part of discussions about “the new (...) cosmopolitanism,” let alone as part of literary discussions. This paper examines the violence and barbarity of transnational corporations such as Monsanto. I show what happens in the global supermarket and how lives and livelihoods are at stake, how the new corporate imperialism swallows up traditions and histories, and how dangerous food has become. (shrink)

Issues about heritage, knowledge, and memory are central to climate change narratives. In an age when reality television stars become world leaders, the urgency of climate change narratives requires us to understand the crucial roles of memory and heritage to the future of our planet. The sanctity of knowledge simply cannot be abandoned. Knowledge slips away through the cracks, both in mainstream media efforts to sell its news and in the nonchalance of the admittedly more mindful scholars and popularizers of (...) climate change narratives. We face complex issues here, and there is an urgent need to reassess the value systems and ethics that brought us to where we are in terms of climate change. This is no easy task. To face this complex and controversial issue will require tremendous care with facts, honesty about heritage, and commitment to remembering. It will also need recognition of the painful fact that heritage can no longer be an excuse for continued derogation of the natural environment. (shrink)

This paper argues that garbage is no longer the site of contempt and fear and has become an object of profound theoretical investigation. The paper reviews some of the salient points in the growing body of theory about garbage and shows that if one thing has come out of this scholarship, it is that waste is both productive and dangerous, spent but agential, rejected but inescapable, and the intensity of disruptions of order potential in waste are immense. I show that (...) two very different poems – one entitled “Above the Water, Under the Water” by South Korean poet Choi Sung-ho, the other entitled “Garbage” by American poet A.R. Ammons –reveal in very different ways both the agentic capacity of garbage and the ascension of garbage to a semiotics of the sublime in the twentieth century, East and West. (shrink)

The hard problem of consciousness is the question how subjective experience arises from brain matter. I suggest that quantum physics may be part of the answer. The simultaneous unity and complexity of subjective experience is very difficult to understand from a classical physics perspective. In contrast, quantum entanglement is naturally both complex and holistic. Building on recent remarkable progress in quantum technology and neuroscience, I propose a concrete hypothesis as a basis for further investigation, namely that subjective experience is related (...) to the dynamics of a complex entangled state of spins, which is continuously generated and updated through the exchange of photons. The proposed hypothesis raises many interesting experimental and theoretical questions in neuroscience, quantum physics, evolutionary biology, psychophysics, and philosophy. (shrink)

Epistemic theories of truth, such as those presumed to be typical for anti-realism, can be characterised as saying that what is true can be known in principle: p → ◊Kp. However, with statements of the form “p & ¬Kp”, a contradiction arises if they are both true and known. Analysis of the nature of the paradox shows that such statements refute epistemic theories of truth only if the the anti-realist motivation for epistemic theories of truth is not taken into account. (...) The motivation in a link of understandability ans meaningful- ness suggests to change the above principle and to restrict the theory to logically simple sentences, in which case the paradox does not arise. This suggestion also allows to see the deep philosophical problems for anti-realism those counterexamples are pointing at. (shrink)

This paper introduces a new typology and associated measure of social and environmental mission integration by conceptually framing a feature of hybrid organizations—the degree of integration of their revenue model and social–environmental mission. The SEMI measure is illustrated using a hand-collected sample of 256 North American Certified B Corporations. We explore the heterogeneity of SEMI scores by identifying external-facing correlates and demonstrate non-congruence with Certified B Corporation’s audit results. Overall, our findings advance existing knowledge of these hybrid organizations and how (...) they balance their social–environmental missions with their economic objectives. (shrink)

Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians is an invaluable resource to educators seeking to bring history alive for students at all levels. Filled with insightful reflections on teaching oral history, it offers practical suggestions for educators seeking to create curricula, engage students, gather community support, and meet educational standards. By the close of the book, readers will be able to successfully incorporate oral history projects in their own classrooms.

Abstract“Comprehensive Healthcare for America” is a largely single-payer reform proposal that, by applying the insights of behavioral economics, may be able to rally patients and clinicians sufficiently to overcome the opposition of politicians and vested interests to providing all Americans with less complicated and less costly access to needed healthcare.

We first describe how the concept of “fringe consciousness” can characterise gradations of consciousness between the extremes of implicit and explicit learning. We then show that the NEO-PI-R personality measure of openness to feelings, chosen to reflect the ability to introspect on fringe feelings, influences both learning and awareness in the serial reaction time task under conditions that have previously been associated with implicit learning . This provides empirical evidence for the proposed phenomenology and functional role of fringe consciousness in (...) so-called implicit learning paradigms . Introducing an individual difference variable also helped to identify possible limitations of the exclusion task as a measure of conscious sequence knowledge. Further exploration of individual differences in fringe awareness may help to avoid polarity in the implicit learning debate, and to resolve apparent inconsistencies between previous SRT studies. (shrink)

We argue performance in the serial reaction time task is associated with gradations of awareness that provide examples of fringe consciousness [Mangan, B. . Taking phenomenology seriously: the “fringe” and its implications for cognitive research. Consciousness and Cognition, 2, 89–108, Mangan, B. . The conscious “fringe”: Bringing William James up to date. In B. J. Baars, W. P. Banks & J. B. Newman , Essential sources in the scientific study of consciousness . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.], and address limitations (...) of the traditional SRT procedure, including criticism of exclusion generation tasks. Two experiments are conducted with a modified SRT procedure where irrelevant stimulus attributes obscure the sequence rule. Our modified paradigm, which includes a novel exclusion task, makes it easier to demonstrate a previously controversial influence of response stimulus interval on awareness. It also allows identification of participants showing fringe consciousness rather than explicit sequence knowledge, as reflected by dissociations between different awareness measures. The NEO-PI-R variable Openness to Feelings influenced the diversity of subjective feelings reported during two awareness measures, but not the degree of learning and awareness as previously found with traditional SRT tasks [Norman, E., Price, M. C., & Duff, S. C. . Fringe consciousness in sequence learning: the influence of individual differences. Consciousness and Cognition, 15, 723–760.]. This suggests possible distinctions between two components of fringe consciousness. (shrink)

Factitious disorder is the deliberate simulation of illness for the purpose of seeking the sick role. It is a 20th-century diagnosis, though the grounds for its introduction are uncertain. While previous authors have considered the social changes contributing to growth in the disorder, this article looks at some of the pressures on doctors that may have created the diagnostic need for a disorder between hysteria and malingering. The recent history of those disorders suggests that malingering would no longer be acceptable (...) when applied to the potentially larger numbers involved in workers’ compensation or in mass conscription. Equally, the absolution given to hysteria on the basis of the Freudian subconscious would survive only as long as that model retained credibility. Growing egalitarianism and changing doctor—patient relationships in the 20th century would no longer tolerate a sharp division between culpable malingering and exculpated hysteria, which may previously have been made on grounds of class or gender. They would contribute to the need for a mediating diagnosis, such as factitious disorder. (shrink)

This paper argues that research on normative issues in the life sciences will benefit from a tighter integration of philosophy of science. We examine research on ethical, legal and social issues in the life sciences (“ELSI”) and discuss three illustrative examples of normative issues that arise in different areas of the life sciences. These examples show that important normative questions are highly dependent on epistemic issues which so far have not been addressed sufficiently in ELSI, RRI and related areas of (...) research. Accordingly, we argue for the integration of research on the epistemic aspects of the relevant areas of science into ELSI research to provide a better basis for addressing normative questions. (shrink)

The “smart village” flourishes – at least in policy papers that envision the revitalization of rural areas through the civic deployment of networked media and telecommunications. Yet, while such aspirations are widespread, little is known about the views of those tasked with supervising and supporting digitally driven public participation for rural progress. To address the lack of insight into what these intermediary administrators conceive as catalysts and challenges for the realization of smart village conceptions, we surveyed representatives of regions in (...) Germany who oversee rural development schemes, most notably within the European LEADER framework. For these key actors, digital participation does not mainly hinge on broadband access and IT availability. Instead, they emphasize the importance of human and administrative resources as well as multi-actor collaboration, which we discuss in terms of digital readiness, digital willingness, and digital activity. Building the smart village, we conclude, seems not so much a matter of technological infrastructure, but rather of sociotechnical infrastructuring. (shrink)

The term “lean in” was popularized by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, via her #1 Best Seller encouraging women to defy their fears and dare to be leaders in their fields. She received criticism because although admitting to external barriers contributing to the gender gap in leadership, the scope of her book focused on the internal shortcomings of women. She asserted that women are hindered by barriers that exist within themselves, and provided practical tips, backed by research, to equip women with (...) strategies to proactively progress in the workplace instead of shying away. Sandberg is not the first to raise concern about gender inequality. Other women in history like Susan B. Anthony and Maggie Lena Walker also challenged lopsided gender roles through their words and actions. Using the critical biography methodology, this paper explores these women’s experiences, philosophies and contributions, reflects on Sandberg’s insight, and develops a framework, based on the theory of planned behavior as well as the ethical principles of utilitarianism and corporate social responsibility, that links internal factors, organizational external factors, and societal external factors to intentions to lean in and leaning in behavior. Thus, via critical biography, this paper examines both internal and external factors, showing how they are linked, and how they may impact leaning in intentions and behavior. The paper also discusses how leaning in may influence both individual and gender mobility for women, and ultimately, increased gender equality. (shrink)

Sound symbolism refers to non‐arbitrary mappings between the sounds of words and their meanings and is often studied by pairing auditory pseudowords such as “maluma” and “takete” with rounded and pointed visual shapes, respectively. However, it is unclear what auditory properties of pseudowords contribute to their perception as rounded or pointed. Here, we compared perceptual ratings of the roundedness/pointedness of large sets of pseudowords and shapes to their acoustic and visual properties using a novel application of representational similarity analysis (RSA). (...) Representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) of the auditory and visual ratings of roundedness/pointedness were significantly correlated crossmodally. The auditory perceptual RDM correlated significantly with RDMs of spectral tilt, the temporal fast Fourier transform (FFT), and the speech envelope. Conventional correlational analyses showed that ratings of pseudowords transitioned from rounded to pointed as vocal roughness (as measured by the harmonics‐to‐noise ratio, pulse number, fraction of unvoiced frames, mean autocorrelation, shimmer, and jitter) increased. The visual perceptual RDM correlated significantly with RDMs of global indices of visual shape (the simple matching coefficient, image silhouette, image outlines, and Jaccard distance). Crossmodally, the RDMs of the auditory spectral parameters correlated weakly but significantly with those of the global indices of visual shape. Our work establishes the utility of RSA for analysis of large stimulus sets and offers novel insights into the stimulus parameters underlying sound symbolism, showing that sound‐to‐shape mapping is driven by acoustic properties of pseudowords and suggesting audiovisual cross‐modal correspondence as a basis for language users' sensitivity to this type of sound symbolism. (shrink)