Here, we revise Pietraszewski's model of groups by assigning participant pairs with two triplets, denoting: the type of game that models the interaction, its critical switching point between alternatives, and the perception of strategic similarity with the opponent. These triplets provide a set of primitives that accounts for individuals' strategic motivations and observed behaviors.

While ethical conflicts in the provision of healthcare are common, the current third-party mediator model is limited by a lack of expert ethical mediators, who are often not on site when conflict escalates. In order to improve clinical outcomes in situations such as conflicts at the end of life, we suggest that clinicians—physicians, nurses and social workers—be trained to prevent and deescalate emerging conflicts. This can be achieved using a mediation model framed by a communication-training approach. A case example is (...) presented and the model is discussed. The implication of this preventative/early intervention model for improving clinical outcomes, in particular end-of life conflict, is considered. (shrink)

Don Marquis' future‐like‐ours account is regarded as the best secular anti‐abortion position because he frames abortion as a wrongful killing via deprivation of a valuable future. Marquis objects to the reductio ad absurdum of contraception as being immoral because it is too difficult to identify an individual that is deprived of a future. To demonstrate why Marquis’ treatment of the contraception reductio is flawed by his own future‐like‐ours line of reasoning, I offer an argument for why there is indeed a (...) candidate for harm—the ovum—for it can be viewed as providing the functional foundation for a new life through (1) mitochondrial DNA inheritance, (2) paternal histone restructuring during fertilization, and (3) ability to initiate parthenogenesis. As evidenced by these distinct and natural features of ova, candidate (2) “some ovum or other” should be morally prioritized as the direct candidate for harm in the contraception reductio. By assessing the philosophical inconsistencies in Marquis’ future‐like‐ours argument, this paper provides strong metaphysical grounds for rejecting the best secular anti‐abortion position. (shrink)

A computational theory of consciousness should include a quantitative measure of consciousness, or MoC, that (i) would reveal to what extent a given system is conscious, (ii) would make it possible to compare not only different systems, but also the same system at different times, and (iii) would be graded, because so is consciousness. However, unless its design is properly constrained, such an MoC gives rise to what we call the boundary problem: an MoC that labels a system as conscious (...) will do so for some – perhaps most – of its subsystems, as well as for irrelevantly extended systems (e.g., the original system augmented with physical appendages that contribute nothing to the properties supposedly supporting consciousness), and for aggregates of individually conscious systems (e.g., groups of people). This problem suggests that the properties that are being measured are epiphenomenal to consciousness, or else it implies a bizarre proliferation of minds. We propose that a solution to the boundary problem can be found by identifying properties that are intrinsic or systemic: properties that clearly differentiate between systems whose existence is a matter of fact, as opposed to those whose existence is a matter of interpretation (in the eye of the beholder). We argue that if a putative MoC can be shown to be systemic, this ipso facto resolves any associated boundary issues. As test cases, we analyze two recent theories of consciousness in light of our definitions: the Integrated Information Theory and the Geometric Theory of consciousness. (shrink)

Major online platforms deploy an array of policies and data-driven legislative and enforcement mechanisms, transforming economic, social, and technological powers into political might. While platforms use private law to legitimate the exercise of this form of power, the novel political relations and tools have a tremendous public impact, both on individuals’ and communities’ political freedom and on the public sphere. Digital rights literature that tends to focus on particular rights, such as privacy or freedom of expression, deals less with the (...) implications of platforms’ emerging political authority. The article addresses this lacuna by (1) analyzing the quasi-sovereign power of platforms, (2) mapping how this form of power disrupts political freedom and the public sphere, (3) revealing a theoretical trap that blocks existing attempts to address the threats and (4) developing a bottom-up approach to resolve this bind. The article proposes the creation of “Users Unions” – legal structures that create affordance for users to have a collective voice within platforms’ corporate governance and decision-making mechanisms. The proposed structural reform could mitigate the power disparities between users and online platforms and assist in respecting, protecting, and fulfilling users’ political rights. (shrink)

A recently proposed model of sensory processing suggests that perceptual experience is updated in discrete steps. We show that the data advanced to support discrete perception are in fact compatible with a continuous account of perception. Physiological and psychophysical constraints, moreover, as well as our awake-primate imaging data, imply that human neuronal networks cannot support discrete updates of perceptual content at the maximal update rates consistent with phenomenology. A more comprehensive approach to understanding the physiology of perception (and experience at (...) large) is therefore called for, and we briefly outline our take on the problem. (shrink)

In this article we introduce a logical structure for normative reasoning, called Normative Detachment Structure with Ideal Conditions, that can be used to represent the content of certain legal texts in a normalized way. The structure exploits the deductive properties of a system of bimodal logic able to distinguish between ideal and actual normative statements, as well as a novel formalization of conditional normative statements able to capture interesting cases of contrary-to-duty reasoning and to avoid deontic paradoxes. Furthermore, we illustrate (...) how the theoretical framework proposed can be mechanized to get an automated procedure of query-answering on an example of legal text. (shrink)

David Levine and Mathew Bowker explore cultural and political trends organized around the conviction that the world we live in is a dangerous place to be, that it is dominated by hate and destruction, and that in it our primary task is to survive by carrying on a life-long struggle against hostile forces. Their method involves the analysis of public fantasies to reveal their hidden meanings. The central fantasy explored is the fantasy of a destroyed world, which appears most commonly (...) in the form of post-apocalyptic and dystopian narratives. Their special concern in the book is with defenses against the painful consequences of the dominance of this fantasy in the inner world, especially defenses involving the use of guilt to assure that something can be done to repair the destroyed world. Topics explored include: the formation of internal fortresses and their projection into the world outside, forms of guilt including bystander guilt and survivor guilt, the loss of and search for home, and manic forms of reparation. (shrink)

This paper explores Kierkegaard’s method of irony and his distinct conception of temporality through the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. It suggests that Kierkegaard makes an ironic use of the term ‘sacrifice.’ Rather than asking us to abandon all human preferential relationships in favor of an abstract (religious) love to an anonymous neighbor, it advances the view that Kierkegaard’s prime objective is therapeutic. Kierkegaard seeks to disabuse us of the idea that we can fully possess faith, or indeed, anything meaningful whatsoever, (...) such as the love that pulsates in our hearts for a family member, romantic partner, friend, or even to ourselves. (shrink)

The concept of representation has been a key element in the scientific study of mental processes, ever since such studies commenced. However, usage of the term has been all but too liberal—if one were to adhere to common use it remains unclear if there are examples of physical systems which cannot be construed in terms of representation. The problem is considered afresh, taking as the starting point the notion of activity spaces—spaces of spatiotemporal events produced by dynamical systems. It is (...) argued that representation can be analyzed in terms of the geometrical and topological properties of such spaces. Several attributes and processes associated with conceptual domains, such as logical structure, generalization and learning are considered, and given analogues in structural facets of activity spaces, as are misrepresentation and states of arousal. Based on this analysis, representational systems are defined, as is a key concept associated with such systems, the notion of representational capacity. According to the proposed theory, rather than being an all or none phenomenon, representation is in fact a matter of degree—that is can be associated with measurable quantities, as is behooving of a putative naturalistic construct. (shrink)

This paper explores how phenomenological notions of rhythm might accommodate a richer description of preverbal infant-caregiver dialogue. Developmental psychologists have theorized a crucial link between rhythm and intercorporeality in the emergence of intersubjectivity and self. Drawing on the descriptions of rhythm in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Erwin Straus, Henri Maldiney and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, the paper emphasizes the role of art and aesthetic processes proposing that they not only be considered as metaphorical or representational aspects of rhythm but as primary (...) resources that can enrich and deepen our understanding of self-emergence and intercorporeality in preverbal infant-caregiver dialogue. (shrink)

According to transhumanists who urge the radical enhancement of human beings, humanity’s top priority should be engineering “posthumans,” whose features would include agelessness. Increasingly, transhumanism is critiqued on foundational grounds rather than based largely on anticipated results of its implementation, such as rising social inequality. This expansion is crucial but insufficient because, despite its radical aim, transhumanism reflects beliefs and attitudes that are evident in the broader culture. With a focus on the yearning to eliminate aging, I consider four of (...) these: a disproportionate reliance on science and technology to address major human challenges; the conceptualization of human beings in terms of binaries like “young-old”; a repudiation of vulnerability; and intensifying perfectionism. Illuminating these interlocked commitments both deepens an existing critique of transhumanism and draws our attention to deleterious cultural views that must be vigorously contested if our commitment to human flourishing is to be deep and unwavering. (shrink)

Recent progress in artificial intelligence has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or even beats that of humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in crucial ways. We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly human-like learning and thinking (...) machines will have to reach beyond current engineering trends in both what they learn and how they learn it. Specifically, we argue that these machines should build causal models of the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely solving pattern recognition problems; ground learning in intuitive theories of physics and psychology to support and enrich the knowledge that is learned; and harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. We suggest concrete challenges and promising routes toward these goals that can combine the strengths of recent neural network advances with more structured cognitive models. (shrink)

This article argues that we could improve the design of research protocols by developing an awareness of and a responsiveness to the social contexts of all the actors in the research enterprise, including subjects, investigators, sponsors, and members of the community in which the research will be conducted. ?Social context? refers to the settings in which the actors are situated, including, but not limited to, their social, economic, political, cultural, and technological features. The utility of thinking about social contexts is (...) introduced and exemplified by the presentation of a hypothetical case in which one central issue is limitation of the probability of injury to subjects by selection of individuals who are not expected to live long enough for the known risks of the study to become manifest as harms. Benefits of such considerations may include enhanced subject satisfaction and cooperation, community acceptance, and improved data quality, among other desirable consequences. (shrink)

A standing challenge for the science of mind is to account for the datum that every mind faces in the most immediate – that is, unmediated – fashion: its phenomenal experience. The complementary tasks of explaining what it means for a system to give rise to experience and what constitutes the content of experience (qualia) in computational terms are particularly challenging, given the multiple realizability of computation. In this paper, we identify a set of conditions that a computational theory must (...) satisfy for it to constitute not just a sufficient but a necessary, and therefore naturalistic and intrinsic, explanation of qualia. We show that a common assumption behind many neurocomputational theories of the mind, according to which mind states can be formalized solely in terms of instantaneous vectors of activities of representational units such as neurons, does not meet the requisite conditions, in part because it relies on inactive units to shape presently experienced qualia and implies a homogeneous representation space, which is devoid of intrinsic structure. We then sketch a naturalistic computational theory of qualia, which posits that experience is realized by dynamical activity-space trajectories (rather than points) and that its richness is measured by the representational capacity of the trajectory space in which it unfolds. (shrink)

Geometrical intuitions spontaneously drive visuo-spatial reasoning in human adults, children and animals. Is their emergence intrinsically linked to visual experience, or does it reflect a core property of cognition shared across sensory modalities? To address this question, we tested the sensitivity of blind-from-birth adults to geometrical-invariants using a haptic deviant-figure detection task. Blind participants spontaneously used many geometric concepts such as parallelism, right angles and geometrical shapes to detect intruders in haptic displays, but experienced difficulties with symmetry and complex spatial (...) transformations. Across items, their performance was highly correlated with that of sighted adults performing the same task in touch (blindfolded) and in vision, as well as with the performances of uneducated preschoolers and Amazonian adults. Our results support the existence of an amodal core-system of geometry that arises independently of visual experience. However, performance at selecting geometric intruders was generally higher in the visual compared to the haptic modality, suggesting that sensory-specific spatial experience may play a role in refining the properties of this core-system of geometry. (shrink)

In the present work we illustrate how two sorts of defeasible reasoning that are fundamental in the normative domain, that is, reasoning about exceptions and reasoning about violations, can be simulated via monotonic propositional theories based on a bimodal language with primitive operators representing knowledge and obligation. The proposed theoretical framework paves the way to using native theorem provers for multimodal logic, such as MleanCoP, in order to automate normative reasoning.

In many spheres, the law takes the legal concept of causation to correspond to the folk concept (the correspondence assumption). Courts, including the US Supreme Court, tend to insist on the "common understanding" and that which is "natural to say" (Burrage v. United States) when it comes to expressions relating to causation, and frequently refuse to clarify the expression to juries. As recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy has uncovered, lay attributions of causation are susceptible to a great number (...) of unexpected factors, some of which seem rather peripheral to causation. One of those is the norm effect (Knobe & Fraser, 2008): Agents who, in acting as they do, break a salient norm, are more likely to be considered as having caused a certain consequence than when they do not violate a norm. According to some (e.g., Alicke, 1992) this constitutes a bias. According to others (e.g., Sytsma, 2020), the folk concept of causation is sensitive to normative factors, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In this paper, we explore the question whether the norm effect should be considered a bias from the legal perspective on the one hand, and from the psychological perspective on the other. To do this, we test whether norms which are nonpertinent to the consequences or outright silly also impact causation judgements. The data from two preregistered experiments (total N=593) clearly show they do. This, we argue, makes the bias interpretation plausible from the psychological perspective, and both plausible and problematic from the legal perspective. It also shows that the law should abstain from unreflectively assuming conceptual correspondence between legal and ordinary language concepts. (shrink)

Philosophical Papers, Volume 41, Issue 1, Page 149-165, March 2012.

What stands out when we blend in? Performing Ground is the first book to explore camouflage as a performance practice, arguing that the act of blending into one's environment is central to the ways we negotiate our identities in and through space. Laura Levin tracks contemporary performances of camouflage through a variety of forms - performative photography; environmental, immersive, and site-specific performance; activist infiltration; and solo artworks - and rejects the conventional dismissal of blending in as an abdication of (...) self. Instead, she contemplates the empowering political possibilities of 'performing ground,' of human bodies intermingling with the material world, while directly engaging with the reality that women and other marginalized persons are often relegated to the background and associated with the properties of space. Performing Ground engages these questions through the works of some of today's most exciting performance artists such as Rebecca Belmore, Liu Bolin, Janieta Eyre, and Violeta Luna, and groups like Gob Squad, Punchdrunk, The Yes Men, and Urban Mimics. (shrink)

Scientific theories of consciousness identify its contents with the spatiotemporal structure of neural population activity. We follow up on this approach by stating and motivating Dynamical Emergence Theory, which defines the amount and structure of experience in terms of the intrinsic topology and geometry of a physical system’s collective dynamics. Specifically, we posit that distinct perceptual states correspond to coarse-grained macrostates reflecting an optimal partitioning of the system’s state space—a notion that aligns with several ideas and results from computational neuroscience (...) and cognitive psychology. We relate DET to existing work, offer predictions for empirical studies, and outline future research directions. (shrink)

Original reading of Heidegger suggesting what his project could mean for building an ethical way of life now and in the future.

This volume offers the first substantial study of Heidegger’s phenomenology of perception, focusing on perception as capacities that can be developed in learning processes, notably in ways befitting ontological mindfulness. The author proposes new interpretations of Heidegger’s five most important key words.

This chapter contains sections titled: Sex Talk Just Friends and Sex Too? Casual Sex History and Prevalence So, Why have Sex with a Friend? Communication in Friends with Benefits Relationships The Bottom Line.