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138123.682931
Solms’ unusual project of translating Freud’s “Project for a Scientific Psychology” into contemporary cognitive science terms is hard to assess. The most important theme, to my way of thinking, is Solms’ support, in present-day terms, of Freud’s insistence that emotion lies at the heart of all cognition. Taking this one idea seriously will require significant alterations to the working assumptions of many in cognitive science.
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170220.683101
That AI will have a major impact on society is no longer in question. Current debate turns instead on how far this impact will be positive or negative, for whom, in which ways, in which places, and on what timescale. Put another way, we can safely dispense with the question of whether AI will have an impact; the pertinent questions now are by whom, how, where, and when this positive or negative impact will be felt, and hence what governance needs to be put in place to provide the best possible answers. In order to frame these questions in a more substantive way, in this prolegomena we introduce what we consider the four core opportunities for society offered by the use of AI, four associated risks which could emerge from its overuse or misuse, and the opportunity costs associated with its underuse. We then offer a high-level view of the emerging advantages for organisations of taking an ethical approach to developing and deploying AI. Finally, we introduce a set of five principles which should guide the development and deployment of AI technologies – four of which build on existing bioethics principles and an additional one that we argue is of equal importance in the case of AI.
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228153.683123
As a highly technological innovation, cultured meat is the subject of techno-optimistic as well as techno-sceptical evaluations. The chapter discusses this opposition and connects it with arguments about seeing the world in the right way. Both sides not only call upon us to see the world in a very particular light, but also point to mechanisms of selective attention in order to explain how others can be so biased. I will argue that attention mechanisms are indeed relevant for dealing with the Anthropocene, but that dualism has paralysing effects. In a dualistic framework, cultured meat is associated with ecomodernist optimism, bold technological control over nature and alienation from animals. But interested citizens and farmers in focus groups rather envisioned the future of cultured meat through small scale production on farms combined with intensive relations with animals. Such scenarios, involving elements from both sides of the dualistic gap, depend on constructive ways of dealing with dualisms and ambivalence.
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260946.683138
Covid-19 vaccination take up has been disappointingly low in many countries, or parts of countries, such as in America. Given that vaccination offers significant private and public benefits, this is surprising. …
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476644.683153
Here is a familiar story about electoral democracy. Modern policymaking is incredibly complicated. Voters are rationally ignorant. This ignorance has many potential bad consequences. If elected officials are closely responsive to the ignorant voters, they will make bad decisions, resulting in bad outcomes. More plausibly, this ignorance will simply serve to insulate elected officials from voter scrutiny, making them easy targets for capture and manipulation— which will also lead to bad outcomes.
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517448.683188
When interacting with other people, we assume that they have their reasons for what they do and believe, and experience recognizable feelings and emotions. When people act from weakness of will or are otherwise irrational, what they do can still be comprehensible to us, since we know what it is like to fall for temptation and act against one’s better judgment. Still, when someone’s experiences, feelings and way of thinking is vastly different from our own, understanding them becomes increasingly difficult. Delusions and psychosis are often seen as marking the end of intelligibility. In this paper, I argue first for the importance of seeing other people as intelligible as long as this is at all possible. Second, I argue, based on both previous literature and my own lived experience, that more psychotic phenomena than previously thought can be rendered at least somewhat intelligible. Besides bizarre experiences like illusions, hallucinations and intense feelings of significance, I also explain what it is like to lose one’s bedrock, and how this loss impacts which beliefs one has reason to reject. Finally, I give an inside account of some disturbances of reason, and show that there are important similarities between certain psychotic reasoning problems and common non-pathological phenomena.
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521256.683205
Frege famously claimed that variations in the sense of a proper name can sometimes be ‘tolerated’. In this paper, we offer a novel explanation of this puzzling claim. Frege, we argue, follows Trendelenburg in holding that we think in language— sometimes individually and sometimes together. Variations in sense can be tolerated in just those cases where we are using language to coordinate our actions, but we are not engaged in thinking together about an issue.
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538280.683224
Physicalism demands an explication of what it means for something to be physical. But the most popular way of providing one—viz., characterizing the physical in terms of the postulates of a scientifically derived physical theory—is met with serious trouble. Proponents of physicalism can either appeal to current physical theory or to some future physical theory (preferably an ideal and complete one). Neither option is promising: currentism almost assuredly renders physicalism false and futurism appears to render it indeterminate or trivial. The purpose of this essay is to argue that attempts to characterize the mental encounter a similar dilemma: currentism with respect to the mental is likely to be inadequate or contain falsehoods and futurism leaves too many significant questions about the nature of mentality unanswered. This new dilemma, we show, threatens both sides of the current debate surrounding the metaphysical status of the mind.
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542657.683238
Is it permissible to be a fan of an artist or a sports team that has behaved immorally? While this issue has recently been the subject of widespread public debate, it has received little attention in the philosophical literature. This paper will investigate this issue by examining the nature and ethics of fandom. I will argue that the crimes and misdemeanors of the object of fandom provide three kinds of moral reasons for fans to abandon their fandom. First, being a fan of the immoral may provide support for their immoral behavior. Second, fandom alters our perception in ways that will often lead us to be fail to perceive our idol’s faults and even to adopting immoral points of view in order to be able to maintain the positive view we have of them. Third, fandom, like friendship, may lead us to engage in acts of loyalty to protect the interests of our idols. This gives fans of the immoral good reason to abandon their fandom. However, these reasons will not always be conclusive and, in some cases, it may be possible to instead adopt a critical form of fandom.
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557409.683252
Angell’s logic of analytic containment AC has been shown to be characterized by a 9-valued matrix NC by Ferguson, and by a 16-valued matrix by Fine. We show that the former is the image of a surjective homomorphism from the latter, i.e., an epimorphic image. The epimorphism was found with the help of MUltlog, which also provides a tableau calculus for NC extended by quantifiers that generalize conjunction and disjunction.
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557516.683266
Kant’s engagement with Newton’s notion of ‘absolute space’ is fascinating, complex and spans over both the pre-Critical and the Critical period. The received view has it that in the pre-Critical period Kant shifted from an originally Leibnizian view of space (still visible in Physical Monadology, 1756/1992, and New Doctrine of Motion and Rest, 1758/2012) to a proper Newtonian view of absolute space via the incongruent counterparts argument in Directions in Space (1768/1992), for then abandoning absolute space in the Inaugural Dissertation (1770/1992). Indeed, the same argument from incongruent counterparts was later employed in the Prolegomena (1783) as an argument for space as “the form of outer intuition of […] sensibility” (Prol, 4:286).
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557520.683282
Smartphone use plays an increasingly important role in our daily lives. Philosophical research that has used first-wave or second-wave theories of extended cognition in order to understand our engagement with digital technologies has focused on the contribution of these technologies to the completion of specific cognitive tasks (e.g., remembering, reasoning, problem-solving, navigation). However, in a considerable number of cases, everyday smartphone use is either task-unrelated or task-free. In psychological research, these cases have been captured by notions such as absent-minded smartphone use (Marty- Dugas et al., 2018) or smartphone-related inattentiveness (Liebherr et al., 2020). Given the prevalence of these cases, we develop a conceptual framework that can accommodate the functional and phenomenological characteristics of task-unrelated or task-free smartphone use. To this end, we will integrate research on second-wave extended cognition with mind-wandering research and introduce the concept of ‘extended mind-wandering’. Elaborating the family resemblances approach to mind-wandering (Seli, Kane, Smallwood, et al., 2018), we will argue that task-unrelated or task-free smartphone use shares many characteristics with mind-wandering. We will suggest that an empirically informed conceptual analysis of cases of extended mind-wandering can enrich current work on digitally extended cognition by specifying the influence of the attention economy on our cognitive dynamics.
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557577.683298
People’s attitudes towards social norms play a crucial role in understanding group behavior. Norm psychology accounts focus on processes of norm internalization that influence people’s norm following attitudes but pay considerably less attention to social identity and group identification processes. Social identity theory studies group identity but works with a relatively thin and instrumental notion of social norms. We argue that to best understand both sets of phenomena, it is important to integrate the insights of both approaches. We highlight tensions between the two approaches and conflicting observations, and sketch the contours of an integrated account. We conclude with some observations on how a twofold account may contribute to studying the evolution of human groups and understanding behavior and social norms in complex societies.
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557638.683312
As the range of potential uses for Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular machine learning (ML), has increased, so has awareness of the associated ethical issues. This increased awareness has led to the realisation that existing legislation and regulation provides insufficient protection to individuals, groups, society, and the environment from AI harms. In response to this realisation, there has been a proliferation of principle-based ethics codes, guidelines and frameworks. However, it has become increasingly clear that a significant gap exists between the theory of AI ethics principles and the practical design of AI systems. In previous work , we analysed whether it is possible to close this gap between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of AI ethics through the use of tools and methods designed to help AI developers, engineers, and designers translate principles into practice. We concluded that this method of closure is currently ineffective as almost all existing translational tools and methods are either too flexible (and thus vulnerable to ethics washing) or too strict (unresponsive to context). This raised the question: if, even with technical guidance, AI ethics is challenging to embed in the process of algorithmic design, is the entire pro-ethical design endeavour rendered futile? And, if no, then how can AI ethics be made useful for AI practitioners? This is the question we seek to address here by exploring why principles and technical translational tools are still needed even if they are limited, and how these limitations can be potentially overcome by providing theoretical grounding of a concept that has been termed ‘Ethics as a Service’
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557643.683325
For many people, the phenomenon of divine hiddenness is so total that it is far from clear to them that God (roughly speaking, the God of Jewish and Christian tradition) exists at all. Reasonably enough, they therefore do not believe that God exists. Yet it is possible, whilst lacking belief in God’s reality, nonetheless to see it as a possibility that is both realistic and attractive; and in this situation, one will likely want to be open to the considerable benefits that would be available if God were real. In this paper I argue that certain kinds of desire for God can aid this non-believing openness. It is possible to desire God even in a state of non-belief, since desire does not require belief that its object exists. I argue that if we desire God in some particular capacity, and with some sense of what would constitute satisfaction, then through the desire we have knowledge – incomplete yet vivid in its personal significance – about the attributes God would need in order to satisfy us; thus, if God is real and does have those attributes, one knows something about God through desiring him. Because desire does not require belief, neither does the knowledge in question. Expanding on recent work by Vadas and Wynn, I sketch the epistemology of desire needed to support this argument. I then apply this epistemology to desire for God. An important question is how one might cultivate the requisite kinds desire for God; and one way, I argue, is through engaging with certain kinds of sacred music. I illustrate desire’s religiously epistemic power in this context, before replying to two objections.
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557663.683339
Substrate independence and mindbody functionalism claim that thinking does not depend on any particular kind of physical implementation. But realworld information processing depends on energy and energy depends on material substrates. Biological evidence for these claims comes from ecology and neuroscience, while computational evidence comes from neuromorphic computing and deep learning. Attention to energy requirements undermines the use of substrate independence to support claims about the feasibility of artificial intelligence, the moral standing of robots, the possibility that we may be living in a computer simulation, the plausibility of transferring minds into computers, and the autonomy of psychology from neuroscience.
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557712.683352
Attributed to William Walwyn, leader of the Levellers in the England of 1647 The individual differences of which so much is made (…) will always survive, and they are to be welcomed, not regretted. But their existence is no reason for not seeking to establish the largest possible measure of equality of environment, and circumstance, and opportunity. On the contrary, it is a reason for redoubling our efforts to establish it, in order to ensure that these diversities of gifts may come to fruition.
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595869.683374
1. Introduction. A genealogy would be an historical account of how someone, or some number of people, came to believe or to value the things that they do. What is genealogy for? The question may seem unfair: couldn’t genealogy be pursued for its own sake and without ulterior motive? Even if its pursuit serves wider ends, perhaps it serves them by instancing those ends rather than by providing an independently specifiable means to them. If, for example, there is value in knowing, then insofar as genealogical inquiry promises to furnish knowledge, its fruits might instance the wider value of our coming to know. Relatedly, insofar as the activities associated with inquiry are themselves valuable, independently of their resulting in knowing, then the activities associated with genealogical inquiry might instance those values, and that might be so independently of whether those activities also terminated in our acquiring genealogical knowledge. However, even if it were accepted that genealogy can have a value of its own, or can instance what is intrinsically valuable, that need not exclude that it also serves further ends. Let us therefore allow the question.
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610056.68339
« More quantum computing popularization! On Guilt
The other night Dana and I watched “The Internet’s Own Boy,” the 2014 documentary about the life and work of Aaron Swartz, which I’d somehow missed when it came out. …
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623983.683404
I've previously argued that sadistic pleasure (in oppressing the innocent) lacks value. But consider a complication. Suppose this time that the sadistic majority are all conscientious utilitarians who would never willingly increase net suffering in the world. …
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696130.683417
Though not all scholars agree on the meaning of the term,
“neoliberalism” is now generally thought to label the
philosophical view that a society’s political and economic
institutions should be robustly liberal and capitalist, but
supplemented by a constitutionally limited democracy and a modest
welfare state. Recent work on neoliberalism, thus understood, shows
this to be a coherent and distinctive political philosophy. This entry
explicates neoliberalism by examining the political concepts,
principles, and policies shared by F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and
James Buchanan, all of whom play leading roles in the new historical
research on neoliberalism, and all of whom wrote in political
philosophy as well as political economy.
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752134.683431
I was watching Biogen’s stock (BIIB) climb over 100 points yesterday because its Alzheimer’s drug, aducanumab [brand name: Aduhelm], received surprising FDA approval? I hadn’t been following the drug at all (it’s enough to try and track some Covid treatments/vaccines). …
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765021.683446
Exchange is fundamental to business. ‘Business’ can mean
an activity of exchange. One entity (e.g., a person, a firm)
“does business” with another when it exchanges a good or
service for valuable consideration, i.e., a benefit such as money. ‘Business’ can also mean an entity that offers goods and
services for exchange, i.e., that sells things. Target is a business. Business ethics can thus be understood as the study of the ethical
dimensions of the exchange of goods and services, and of the entities
that offer goods and services for exchange. This includes related
activities such as the production, distribution, marketing, sale, and
consumption of goods and services (cf.
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773739.68346
Have we entered a “post-truth” era? The present paper attempts to answer this question by (a) offering an explication of the notion of “post-truth” from recent discussions; (b) deriving a testable implication from that explication, to the effect that we should expect to see decreasing information effects—i.e., differences between actual preferences and estimated, fully informed preferences—on central political issues over time; and then (c) putting the relevant narrative to the test by way of counterfactual modelling, using election year data for the period of 2004-2016 from the American National Election Studies’ (ANES) Times Series Study. The implication in question turns out to be consistent with the data: at least in a US context, we do see evidence of a decrease in information effects on key, political issues—immigration, same-sex adoption, and gun laws, in particular—in the period 2004 to 2016. This offers some novel, empirical evidence for the “post-truth” narrative.
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830468.683478
The vast literature on negative treatment of outgroups and favoritism toward ingroups provides many local insights but is largely fragmented, lacking an overarching framework that might provide a unified overview and guide conceptual integration. As a result, it remains unclear where different local perspectives conflict, how they may reinforce one another, and where they leave gaps in our knowledge of the phenomena. Our aim is to start constructing a framework to help remedy this situation. We first identify a few key ideas for creating a theoretical roadmap for this complex territory, namely the principles of etiological functionalism and the dual inheritance theory of human evolution. We show how a “molecular” approach to emotions fits into this picture, and use it to illuminate emotions that shape intergroup relations. Finally, we weave the pieces together into the beginnings of a systematic taxonomy of the emotions involved in social interactions, both hostile and friendly. While it is but a start, we have developed the argument in a way that illustrates how the foundational principles of our proposed framework can be extended to accommodate further cases.
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860414.683492
One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon's youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: ‘I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.’ Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it.
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1062287.683506
It is often suspected, of various works of fourteenth-century English literature, that they show the influence of philosophical voluntarism. This is an especially tempting thought to have with regard to Piers Plowman, both because of the poem’s explicit engagement with philosophy and theology, and because of the poem’s choice to make Will its central character. It is Will, in Nicolette Zeeman’s vivid phrase, who is the “single, holistic protagonist, the narrator and motive force of the whole text” (2006, 66). So although the extent of Langland’s familiarity with the philosophical ideas of his era is a matter of conjecture, it is hard to resist the thought that he is writing under the influence of the fourteenth-century voluntarist movement. An obstacle to such claims, however, is that no one has ever produced a clear and systematic account of what the voluntarist movement was. I hope to do that in detail elsewhere, but here I will attempt something more modest: to distinguish between a few claims that might be associated with voluntarism, and to consider some signs of their presence within Piers Plowman. A clear understanding of the philosophical character of voluntarism, and its implications for human nature, makes for a compelling case that we should understand the poem as the supreme medieval attempt to imbue an abstract philosophical thesis about the primacy of will with concrete meaning, set within the context of ordinary life.
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1089791.68352
It is tempting to suppose that the reason why the world remains profoundly unjust is that not enough of us hold the correct beliefs about the demands of justice and/or are motivated to bring it about. As Allen Buchanan shows, however, this is to miss a crucially important part of the picture: agents' mistaken beliefs about what it takes to achieve justice can seriously hamper prospects for such achievements. In this paper, I expand on Buchanan's taxonomy of mistaken beliefs about what it takes to achieve justice, and I bring his account (so expanded) to bear on the notion of epistemic justice.
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1096267.683535
Current discussions of hermeneutical injustice, I argue, poorly characterise the cognitive state of victims by failing to account for the communicative success that victims have when they describe their experience to other similarly situated persons. I argue that victims, especially when they suffer moral wrongs that are yet unnamed, are able (1) to grasp certain salient aspects of the wrong they experience and (2) to cultivate the ability to identify instances of the wrong in virtue of moral emotions. By moral emotions I mean emotions like indignation that reflect an agent’s ethical commitments and bear on her ethical assessments. Further, I argue that victims can impart their partial understanding of the wrong they suffer to others who are not similarly situated by eliciting moral emotions such as pity that are tied to broad notions of justice and fairness.
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1114085.683549
The Covid-19 pandemic has caused significant economic hardships for millions of people around the world. Meanwhile, many of the world’s richest people have seen their wealth increase substantially during the pandemic, despite the significant economic disruptions that it has caused on the whole. It is uncontroversial that these effects, which have exacerbated already unacceptable levels of poverty and inequality, call for robust policy responses from governments. In this paper, I argue that the disparate economic effects of the pandemic also generate direct obligations of justice for those who have benefitted from pandemic windfalls. Specifically, I argue that even if we accept that those who benefit from distributive injustice in the ordinary, predictable course of life within unjust institutions do not have direct obligations to redirect their unjust benefits to those who are unjustly disadvantaged, there are powerful reasons to hold that benefitting from pandemic windfalls does ground such an obligation.