Philosophers have traditionally used thought-experiments in their endeavours to find a satisfactory account of the self and personal identity. Yet there are considerations from empirical psychology as well as related ones from philosophy itself that appear to completely undermine the method of thought-experiment. This paper focuses on both sets of considerations and attempts a defence of the method.

Dreaming is a statistically robust cognitive correlate of REM sleep, but all of its formal features may occur in other states of sleep and even in waking, especially during fantasy. In order to test the hypothesis that the brain basis of such cognitive features as dream bizarreness is to be found in REM sleep neurophysiology, it is critical to quantify bizarreness in dreams and other mental states and to analyze the data with respect to both the magnitude and (...) the kind of bizarreness so measured. Any differences in the cognitive dimensions are candidate correlates of REM sleep neurophysiology. Sixty pairs of home-based dream and fantasy reports were collected from 12 subjects and scored for bizarreness using a two-stage scoring system adapted from Hobson, Hoffman, Helfand, and Kostner . Our results show that bizarreness was twice as prevalent in dream reports as in wake-state fantasy reports of the same subjects. Further analysis of the reports also showed differences in other features including the number of persona and remoteness of time and place. (shrink)

Current bioethical debate is bizarre because it concentrates on exceptional cases while it does not pay attention to underlying value perspectives that determine the agenda of the debate.

Binding can be described at three different levels: In neuroscience it refers to the integration of single-cell activities to form functional neural assemblies, especially in response to global stimulus properties; in cognitive science it refers to the integration of distributed modular input processing to form unified representations for memory and action, and in consciousness studies it refers to the unity of phenomenal consciousness . To describe and explain the unity of consciousness, detailed phenomenological descriptions of binding at the phenomenal level (...) and clarification of the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms are required. The disunity of consciousness during dreaming is a fruitful avenue to study phenomenal binding and its mechanisms. The notion of the 'bizarreness' of dreams is closely related to the concept of 'binding': bizarreness can be reconceptualized as referring to different types of unusual combinations of features in the binding of dream images coherently together. The present study concentrates on the representation of human characters and the bizarreness found in these representations. We developed a rating scale that distinguishes different types of bizarreness on the basis of the unusual combinations of elements that are manifested in dream images. The data consisted of 592 dream reports in the home-based dream diaries of 52 students. The results indicate that about half of the human characters appearing in our dreams contain bizarre elements, and that certain types of bizarreness are more frequent than others. Phenomenal features intrinsic to the representation of a person are less frequently bizarre than is the external relation between the person and the context . Thus, binding the local features of a representation coherently together appears to be less prone to errors than binding several different information streams together into a coherent phenomenal model of the world. (shrink)

Henrich et al. convincingly caution against the overgeneralization of findings from particular human populations, but fail to apply their own compelling reasoning to our nearest living relatives, the great apes. Here we argue that rearing history is every bit as important for understanding cognition in other species as it is in humans.

It is shown, with intuitionistic logic, that if every locally constant function from to has a property akin to constancy, then the fan theorem for -bars holds, and conversely.

This book affirms the experience of likeness at the heart of many, if not all, disciplines of knowledge and seeks to formalize that basic experience into a science of its own, "homeotics.".

We have conducted a home-based study of children′s dream reports in which parents used open-ended interviewing styles to collect 88 dream reports from their 4- to 10-year-old children in the comfortable and supportive environment of their own homes. Particular attention was paid to formal properties including characters , settings, self-representation, and bizarreness. In contrast to previous studies, our data indicate that young children are able to give long, detailed reports of their dreams that share many formal characteristics with adult (...) dream reports. Because this wide range of dream mentation is only revealed to trusted confidants in a familiar and comfortable environment, an important implication is that the sleep laboratory may not be the best source of naturalistic dream data. (shrink)

This book is an experiment. Inspired by the bizarre and uncanny, it is an attempt to use logic to expose the illogical foundations of logic; an attempt to use science to peek beyond the limits of science; an attempt to use rationality to lift the veil off the irrational. Its ways are unconventional: weaving along its path one finds UFOs and fairies, quantum mechanics, analytic philosophy, history, mathematics, and depth psychology. The enterprise of constructing a coherent story out of these (...) incommensurable disciplines is exploratory. But if the experiment works, at the end all these disparate threads will come together to unveil a startling scenario about the nature of reality and our condition within it. The payoff is handsome: a reason for hope, a boost for the imagination, and the promise of a meaningful future. But it does not come for free: this book may confront some of your dearest notions about truth and reason. Yet, one cannot dismiss its conclusions lightly, because the evidence it compiles and the philosophy it leverages are solid in the orthodox, academic sense. (shrink)

Although we are beginning to understand the neurocognitive processes that underlie the emergence of dreaming, what accounts for the bizarre phenomenology of dreams remains debated. I address this question by comparing dreaming with waking mind wandering and challenging previous accounts that utilize bizarreness to mark a sharp divide between conscious experiences in waking and sleeping. Instead, I propose that bizarreness is a common, non-deficient feature of spontaneous offline simulations occurring across the sleep-wake cycle and can be tied to (...) the specific characteristics of spontaneous thought as being dynamic, unconstrained, (hyper)associative and highly variable in content. Rather than misrepresenting waking reality, bizarreness can be employed to investigate the very building blocks of spontaneous cognition. The absence of bizarreness in thought processes is imposed by automatic and deliberate cognitive constraints. By contrast, thought and memory processes operating on their own without such constraints are inherently marked by different degrees and types of bizarreness. (shrink)

We introduce a path-based measure of convexity to be used in assessing the compactness of legislative districts. Our measure is the probability that a district will contain the shortest path between a randomly selected pair of its' points. The measure is defined relative to exogenous political boundaries and population distributions.

In order to explain delusional beliefs, one must first consider what factors should be included in a theory of delusion. Unlike a one-factor theory, a two-factor theory of delusion argues that not only anomalous experience (the first factor) but also an impairment of the belief-evaluation system (the second factor) is required. Recently, two-factor theorists have adopted various Bayesian approaches in order to give a more accurate description of delusion formation. By reviewing the progression from a one-factor theory to a two-factor (...) theory, I argue that in light of the second factor’s requirements, different proposed impairments can be unified within a consistent belief-evaluation system. Under this interpretation of the second factor, I further argue that the role of a mechanism responsible for detecting bizarreness is wrongly neglected. I conclude that the second factor is a compound system which consists of differing functional parts, one of which functions to detect bizarreness in different stages of delusion; moreover, I hold that the impairment can be one or several of these functional parts. (shrink)

If you think that semantic minimalism is the only alternative to contextualism but you’d rather do without Cappelen and Lepore’s mysteriously minimal “propositions,” you can. You just have to recognize that being semantically incomplete does not make a sentence context-sensitive. You don’t have to go through the ritual of repeatedly incanting things like this: “John is ready” expresses the proposition that John is ready. Instead, you can opt for Radical Minimalism and suppose that “John is ready” and its ilk fall (...) short of semantically expressing propositions – their semantic contents are propositional “radicals.” Now C&L think they’ve addressed Radical Minimalism and offered objections to it. So they find it strange and bizarre that I think they haven’t. In fact, they persist in confusing semantic incompleteness with context sensitivity. If they appreciated the difference, they might even welcome the opportunity to adopt a form of semantic minimalism that does without the minimal propositions that everyone but them find incredible (pun intended). (shrink)

Bizarre delusions are not specific to schizophrenia and can be found in other psychotic disorders. However, to date, there are no studies investigating socio-demographic and clinical characteristics associated with BizD across the psychosis spectrum. In this study 819 subjects with a diagnosis of SZ, schizoaffective disorder and bipolar I disorder were included. Patients with history of BizD and with no BizD were compared with respect to socidemographic and clinical variables, and predictors of BizD were explored. Patients with BizD were less (...) educated, less likely to be married, had higher Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale negative scores and lower Young Mania Rating Scale scores. Younger age, SZ and SZA diagnoses, higher PANSS positive scores, presence of reference delusions, tactile and olfactory hallucinations were predictors. Our results indicate that BizD are associated with higher illness severity, lower functionality and specific set of symptoms. (shrink)

The Report of the Ad Hoc Adivisory Group on the Operation of NHS Research Ethics Committees has resulted in a strange mixture of the timid, the revolutionary, and the bizarre.The Report of the Ad Hoc Advisory Group on the Operation of NHS Research Ethics Committees is a curious document.1 The remit of the review was focused on the workings and effectiveness of NHS research ethics committees and the multicentre committees ). The Group was primarily set up in response to a (...) series of complaints from medical researchers about the new research governance regime in the UK as a result of the Clinical Trials Directive2 and the Governance Arrangements for NHS Research Ethics Committees.3 The opportunity was also taken to consider the role of research ethics committees in a wider context, and take account of recent developments in relation to the ethics review of social care research,4 student projects,5 as well as recent legislation such as the Human Tissue Act,6 and the Mental Capacity Act.7 However, the resulting report is a strange mixture of the timid, the revolutionary, and the bizarre.A good example of the report’s timidity is its reluctance to propose fundamental change to the process of review or seriously limit the type of research that requires REC review. To its credit AHAG does suggest that some research ‘especially surveys and many studies on NHS staff, could normally be conducted safely without a requirement for REC review’ .1 This is, of course, to be welcomed. However, the report ultimately seems dismissive of the general complaint from researchers that the current process is inappropriately uniform. For example, in section 3.2, it is argued that the ‘common perception that the NHS REC system is dominated …. (shrink)

Research has shown that minimally counterintuitive concepts are more memorable than concepts that are simply bizarre. However, this disparity may exist only in studies using cross-cultural samples. To test the impact of bizarreness on culturally homogeneous populations, we read a fictional narrative to 33 college-age students at a Midwestern university. This narrative featured 18 sets of target items – six which were intuitive, six which were counterintuitive, and six which were bizarre. After hearing the story, experimenters administered a written (...) recall task. As hypothesized, students did not differ in their recall of counterintuitive or bizarre target items. Therefore, we propose a minimally distinctive model of memorability, encompassing both counterintuitiveness and bizarreness. This model may help us better understand the memorability of expectation violations, especially those within religious stories. (shrink)

Gedankenexperimente in der Philosophie zeichnen sich durch ein widersprüchliches Verhältnis aus: Sie werden gleichzeitig häufig genutzt und vielfältig kritisiert. Im Zentrum der Kritik steht dabei das Szenario sowie seine teilweise als absurd wahrgenommenen Details. Als Verteidigungsstrategie der Methode wird daher zum einen versucht, realistische Gedankenexperimente zu bevorzugen, zum anderen, das Argument hinter dem Szenario deutlicher in den Fokus zu rücken. Im Zuge dessen wird jedoch das eigentlich Charakteristische an einem Gedankenexperiment – das Szenario – vernachlässigt. Um die Relevanz des Szenarios (...) zu betonen, soll in diesem Aufsatz ein Blick in die Wissenschaftsforschung geworfen werden. Mithilfe von Überlegungen Ludwik Flecks, Bruno Latours und David Kirbys wird die Bedeutsamkeit von Transformationsprozessen wissenschaftlicher Theorien gezeigt. Mit Veränderungsstrategien wie dem Visualisieren und Generieren von Aufmerksamkeit versuchen Wissenschaftler*innen, ihre Theorien sowohl im Kreis der Kolleg*innen als auch in der breiten Öffentlichkeit zu verbreiten. Wissenschaftskommunikation hat dabei einen epistemologischen Stellenwert für die wissenschaftliche Praxis. Die These, die in diesem Aufsatz vertreten wird, ist, dass Gedankenexperimente hierbei die Funktion von Vermittlungsinstrumenten zwischen den beiden Kreisen der wissenschaftsinternen und -externen Kommunikation einnehmen. Dies soll mit der Analyse eines konkreten Beispiels – dem Geiger-Gedankenexperiment aus der angewandten Ethik – plausibel gemacht werden. Bei der Untersuchung, wie dieses Gedankenexperiment wissenschaftlich bzw. populär dargestellt und diskutiert wird, fällt auf, dass dabei das Szenario im Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit steht. Die eigentliche Argumentation hingegen wird meist nur aus dem Szenario missverständlich abgeleitet. Aus dieser Analyse lassen sich zwei mögliche Reaktionen ableiten: Zum einen kann sie als Begründung dafür verstanden werden, kritisch mit der Methode Gedankenexperiment umzugehen. Zum anderen – und dies ist die Position, die in diesem Aufsatz starkgemacht werden soll – kann die Beobachtung, dass das absurde Szenario des Geiger-Gedankenexperiments so populär ist, die These untermauern, dass Gedankenexperimente strategisch zur Vermittlung genutzt werden können. Absurde Szenarien können dabei hilfreich sein, weil sie Aufmerksamkeit wecken, in Erinnerung bleiben und zur Diskussion anregen. Insbesondere im Bereich der angewandten Ethik, die interdisziplinär diskutierte Themen behandelt, können Gedankenexperimente genutzt werden, um einen Diskurs zu öffnen und eine gemeinsame Diskussionsbasis zu schaffen. (shrink)

In this paper, a new method of quantitatively assessing continuity and discontinuity of visual attention is developed. The method is based on representing narrative information using graph theory. It is applicable to any type of narrative report. Since dream reports are often described as bizarre, and since bizarreness is partially characterized by discontinuities in plot, we chose to test our method on a set of dream data. Using specific criteria for identifying and arranging objects of visual attention, dream narratives (...) from 10 subjects were obtained and mapped onto graphs. The interrater reliabilities were 76% and 91% . Discontinuities in visual attention were quantified by plotting transitions from one part of a graph to another, which provided a spatiotemporal map of attention shifts within a narrative. This procedure was compared with other approaches to discontinuity and also applied to a set of 10 fantasy reports from the same subjects. The results showed that our method includes but transcends other approaches and has the capability to distinguish dream and fantasy reports. To our knowledge, the method provides the most rigorous and reliable measure to date of continuity and discontinuity of attention in narrative reports. (shrink)

The problem of scientific disregard is the problem of accounting for why some putative theories that appear to be well-supported by empirical evidence nevertheless play no role in the scientific enterprise. Laudan and Leplin suggest (and Hoefer and Rosenberg concur) that at least some of these putative theories fail to be genuine theoretical rivals because they lack some non-empirical property of theoreticity. This solution also supports their repudiation of the thesis of underdetermination. I argue that the attempt to provide criteria (...) of theoreticity fails, that there is a Bayesian solution to the problem of scientific disregard that fares better, and that this successful solution supports a distinctively Bayesian version of the underdetermination thesis. (shrink)

The aim was to verify the potential of holistic approaches towards the evaluation of human figure drawing. Groht-Marnat, Tharinger, Stark favour this approach, and findings seem to legitimize considerations about its diagnostic productivity. Yama, Dans-Lopez and Tarroja have identified bizarre and artistic quality criteria for drawing that have a relevant interpretative meaning. Within the study involving 525 normal adult subjects, the hypothesis of differences in personality traits and performance level produced by authors of selected types of drawings, was verified. The (...) criterium of bizarre drawing proved to be an important indicator of intellectual abilities monitored by subtests of the ISA-S test, the non-verbal CF 2A test, Decision-making test. They achieved the lowest scores in all parameters, with significance in relation to more detailed drawings. Results from IHAVEZ and DOPEN questionnaires suggest that bizarre character producers are more emotionally instable, less emotionally resilient, less anticipating, and less self-controlling, less rational, responding more intensely to problems and are less orientated towards their solution. They are more neurotic and present more psychotic experience. The main limitation is the chosen approach. Holistically evaluated drawing is rare in terms of its occurrence in a normal population. Even within the files involving several hundred participiants, it is possible to clearly classify drawing in the maximum number of tens. Diversity of the terminology and methodological ambiguity constitutes another limitation. The bizarreness itself is not interpreted clearly, rather the contrary. (shrink)

This article examines the distinction between judicial reasoning flawed by errors on questions of law, properly addressed on appeal, and errors that constitute judicial misconduct and are grounds for removal from the bench. Examples analysed are from the transcripts and reasons for decision in R v George SKQB (2015), appealed to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal (2016) and the Supreme Court of Canada (2017), and from the sentencing decision rendered by the same judge more than a decade earlier in R (...) v Edmondson SKQB (2003). Both were sexual assault cases. In George a thirty-five year old woman with five children was tried and ultimately acquitted of sexual assault and sexual interference after she was assaulted in her home by a fourteen year old male. Striking similarities between the reasoning and language in the trial decision in George and the sentencing decision in Edmondson demonstrate entrenched antipathy for sexual assault law and the fundamental principles of justice, equality, and impartiality. This is arguably judicial misconduct, persisting despite access in the interim to many years of judicial education programming, not merely legal error. The problem does not lie with the judge alone, however. A toxic mix of misogyny and blindly zealous enforcement of the law appears to have undermined the administration of justice in George from the outset at all levels. The problems are systemic. Were this not the case, it is likely that Barbara George would not have been charged. (shrink)

In recent years, we have witnessed three parallel and intertwined trends: First, food retail and processing firms have embraced private standards, usually with some form of third party certification employed to verify adherence to those standards. Second, firms have increasingly aligned themselves with, as opposed to fighting off, environmental, fair trade, and other NGOs. Third, firms have embraced supply chain management as a strategy for increasing profits and market share. Together, these trends are part and parcel of the neoliberal blurring (...) of the older liberal distinction between state and civil society. In this paper I ask what the implications of these changes are from the vantage point of the three major approaches to ethics: consequentialism, virtue theory, and rights theory. What are the consequences of these changes for food safety, for suppliers, for consumers? What virtues (e.g., trust, fairness) are these changes likely to embrace and what vices may accompany them? Whose rights will be furthered or curtailed by these changes? (shrink)