One of this century's leading works on Zen, this book is a valuable source for those wishing to understand its concepts in the context of Japanese life and art.

Feinberg and Mallatt, in their presentation of neurobiological naturalism, have suggested that visual consciousness was acquired by early vertebrates and inherited by a wide range of descendants, and that its neural basis has shifted to nonhomologous nervous structures during evolution. However, their evolutionary scenario of visual consciousness relies on the assumption that visual consciousness is closely linked with survival, which is not commonly accepted in current consciousness research. We suggest an alternative idea that visual consciousness is linked to a specific (...) class of agency, consequently justifying their phylogenetic claim. We also examine the implication of their phylogenetic claim: visual consciousness is homologous across vertebrates, but its neural basis is not. This apparent incongruence illustrates a general phenomenon of homology, and that the resulting hierarchical view of visual consciousness and its neural basis can be straightforwardly accommodated by neurobiological naturalism. Throughout these discussions, we aim to address the potential theoretical issues in neurobiological naturalism and refine the picture illustrated by Feinberg and Mallatt regarding phylogenetic distribution and trajectories of visual consciousness. (shrink)

To become more broadly applicable, positions on AI ethics require perspectives from non-Western regions and cultures such as China and Japan. In this paper, we propose that the addition of the concept of harmony to the discussion on ethical AI would be highly beneficial due to its centrality in East Asian cultures and its applicability to the challenge of designing AI for social good. We first present a synopsis of different definitions of harmony in multiple contexts, such as music and (...) society, which reveals that the concept is, at its core, about well-balanced relationships and appropriate actions which give rise to order, balance, and aesthetically pleasing phenomena. The mediator for these well-balanced relationships isTaktwhich is an ability to act thoughtfully and sensibly according to the specific situation and to put things into proportion and order. We propose that the central challenge of building harmonizing AI is to make intelligent systems tactful and also to design and use them tactfully. For an AI system to become tactful, it needs to be able to have an advanced sensitivity to the specific contexts which it is in and their social and ethical implications and have the capability of approximately inferring the emotional and cognitive states of people with whom it is interacting. (shrink)

Negative attitudes toward robots are considered as one of the psychological factors preventing humans from interacting with robots in the daily life. To verify their influence on humans‘ behaviors toward robots, we designed and executed experiments where subjects interacted with Robovie, which is being developed as a platform for research on the possibility of communication robots. This paper reports and discusses the results of these experiments on correlation between subjects’ negative attitudes and their behaviors toward robots. Moreover, it discusses influences (...) of gender and experience of real robots on their negative attitudes and behaviors toward robots. (shrink)

This paper presents a cross-cultural study on peoples’ negative attitude toward robots. 467 participants from seven different countries filled in the negative attitude towards robots scale survey which consists of 14 questions in three clusters: attitude towards the interaction with robots, attitude towards social influence of robots and attitude towards emotions in interaction with robots. Around one half of them were recruited at local universities and the other half was approached through Aibo online communities. The participants’ cultural background had a (...) significant influence on their attitude and the Japanese were not as positive as stereotypically assumed. The US participants had the most positive attitude, while participants from Mexico had the most negative attitude. The participants from the online community were more positive towards robots than those not involved. Previous experience in interacting with Aibo also had a positive effect, but owning an Aibo did not improve their attitude. (shrink)

The idea that the thalamo-cortical system is the crucial constituent of the neurobiological mechanisms of consciousness has a long history. For the last few decades, however, consciousness research has to a large extent overlooked the interplay between the cortex and thalamus. Here we revive an integrated view of the neurobiology of consciousness by presenting and discussing several recent major findings about the role of the thalamocortical interactions in consciousness. Based on these findings we propose a specific cellular mechanism how thalamic (...) nuclei modulate the integration of different processing streams within single cortical pyramidal neurons. This theory is inspired by recent work done in rodents, but it integrates decades of work conducted on various species. We illustrate how this new view readily explains various properties and experimental phenomena associated with conscious experience. We discuss the implications of this idea and some of the experiments that need to be done in order to test it. Our view bridges two long-standing perspectives on the neural mechanisms of consciousness and proposes that cortical and thalamo-cortical processing interact at the level of single pyramidal cells. (shrink)

To investigate whether people with social anxiety have less actual and “anticipatory” anxiety when interacting with a robot compared to interacting with a person, we conducted a 2 × 2 psychological experiment with two factors: social anxiety and interaction partner. The experiment was conducted in a counseling setting where a participant played the role of a client and the robot or the confederate played the role of a counselor. First, we measured the participants’ social anxiety using the Social Avoidance and (...) Distress Scale, after which, we measured their anxiety at two specific moments: “anticipatory anxiety” was measured after they knew that they would be interacting with a robot or a human confederate, and actual anxiety was measured after they actually interacted with the robot or confederate. Measurements were performed using the Profile of Mood States and the State–Trait Anxiety Inventory. The results indicated that participants with higher social anxiety tended to feel less “anticipatory anxiety” and tension when they knew that they would be interacting with robots compared with humans. Moreover, we found that interaction with a robot elicited less tension compared with interaction with a person regardless of the level of social anxiety. (shrink)

A great deal of research has been performed recently on robots that feature functions for communicating with humans in daily life, i.e., communication robots. We consider it important to develop methods to measure humans’ attitudes and emotions that may prevent them from interaction with communication robots, as indices to study short-term and long-term interaction between humans and communication robots. This study is aimed at exploring the influence of negative attitudes toward robots, focusing on applications of communication robots to daily-life services. (...) First, a scale of negative attitudes toward robots consisting of three subordinate scales, “negative attitudes toward situations of interaction with robots,” “negative attitudes toward the social influence of robots,” and “negative attitudes toward emotions in interaction with robots,” was developed based on a data sample comprising of 263 Japanese university students. This scale was administered to 240 Japanese university students to confirm its validity and reliability. In this paper, we report on the results of analyses of these data samples. Moreover, we discuss some future problems including a comparison of attitudes toward robots between nations. (shrink)

Homology is a fundamental concept in biology. However, the metaphysical status of homology, especially whether a homolog is a part of an individual or a member of a natural kind, is still a matter of intense debate. The proponents of the individuality view of homology criticize the natural kind view of homology by pointing out that homologs are subject to evolutionary transformation, and natural kinds do not change in the evolutionary process. Conversely, some proponents of the natural kind view of (...) homology argue that a homolog can be construed both as a part of an individual and a member of a natural kind. They adopt the Homeostatic Property Cluster theory of natural kinds, and the theory seems to strongly support their construal. Note that this construal implies the acceptance of essentialism. However, looking back on the history of the concept of homology, we should not overlook the fact that the individuality view was proposed to reject the essentialist interpretation of homology. Moreover, the essentialist notions of natural kinds can, in our view, mislead biologists about the phenomena of homology. Consequently, we need a non-essentialist view of homology, which we name the “persistently reproducible module” view. This view highlights both the individual-like and kind-like aspects of homologs while stripping down both essentialist and anti-essentialist interpretations of homology. In this article, we articulate the PRM view of homology and explain why it is recommended over the other two views. (shrink)

This special 10th anniversary edition of the David Suzuki classic, re-examines our place in the natural world in light of sweeping environmental changes and recent advances in scientific knowledge.

This paper is a comparative study of the propositional intuitionistic (non-modal) and classical modal languages interpreted in the standard way on transitive frames. It shows that, when talking about these frames rather than conventional quasi-orders, the intuitionistic language displays some unusual features: its expressive power becomes weaker than that of the modal language, the induced consequence relation does not have a deduction theorem and is not protoalgebraic. Nevertheless, the paper develops a manageable model theory for this consequence and its extensions (...) which also reveals some unexpected phenomena. The balance between the intuitionistic and modal languages is restored by adding to the former one more implication. (shrink)

In this paper, we establish the first-order definability of sequents with consistent variable occurrence on bi-approximation semantics by means of the Sahlqvist–van Benthem algorithm. Then together with the canonicity results in Suzuki (2011), this allows us to establish a Sahlqvist theorem for substructural logic. Our result is not limited to substructural logic but is also easily applicable to other lattice-based logics.

This paper revisits one of the most celebrated verses on dao and ming in the Opening Chapter of the received Laozi Daodejing. I shall clarify two types of English interpretations which are possibly applicable to the verse and demonstrate that they are equally sustainable. It follows that a commitment to either one of these interpretations may thereby spoil the meta-perspective effect which the verse skillfully creates.

In this paper, we extend the canonicity methodology in Ghilardi & Meloni (1997) to arbitrary lattice expansions, and syntactically describe canonical inequalities for lattice expansions consisting of -meet preserving operations, -multiplicative operations, adjoint pairs, and constants. This approach gives us a uniform account of canonicity for substructural and lattice-based logics. Our method not only covers existing results, but also systematically accounts for many canonical inequalities containing nonsmooth additive and multiplicative uniform operations. Furthermore, we compare our technique with the approach in (...) Dunn et al. (2005) and Gehrke et al. (2005). (shrink)

In their target article, Childress et al provide a detailed analysis of dilemmas arising from disagreement between an ICU team and a competent patient (Mr J) about dis/continuation of extra-corpore...

This paper attempts to reconcile the conceptual conflict between typological and population thinking to provide a philosophical foundation for extended evolutionary synthesis. Typological thinking has been considered a pre-Darwinian, essentialist dogma incompatible with population thinking, which is the core notion of Darwinism. More recent philosophical and historical studies suggest that a non-essentialist form of typology has some advantages in the study of evolutionary biology. However, even if we adopt such an epistemological interpretation of typological thinking, there still remains an epistemological (...) and methodological conflict between these two styles of thinking. How can we relate typological thinking with population thinking in pursuit of more integrated or interconnected research into evolutionary biology? I propose that homology thinking, which is another style of thinking that recognizes homologous characters, provides a common basis for typological representations of character states and for character dynamics in an evolving population. Good examples of this bridging role are found in teratology and breeding, where variation and novelty are recognized in developmental and morphological traits, gene expression patterns, and so on. Essentialism-free, dynamic views of homology have great potential to reconcile typological and population thinking and to set the stage for the EES. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Nature (Ziran 自然) of Technological and Economic Development in Early DaoismYumi Suzuki (bio)I. IntroductionEric Nelson's Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life provides comprehensive guidance on how early and later Daoist thought could offer both ideological and practical solutions to contemporary environmental issues. Nelson does not simple-mindedly claim that Daoists are environmentalists or that Daoism is comparable with modern environmental thought. His monograph has a more sophisticated, and also (...) more ambitious and consequently philosophically provocative, goal: to evolutionally develop old Daoist thought to directly address contemporary philosophical discourses on the environment.1I have summarized elsewhere what I find to be the most significant and meaningful contributions this book has made.2 I think its goal has successfully been achieved in various ways: Nelson gives careful and accurate interpretations to each passage from the original texts.3 What he calls "the new Daoism" deployed on the basis of these interpretations is reasonable and uncontroversial. The monograph overall offers an exemplary model of how wisdom acquired through studying the history of philosophy can be adapted to cogitating on newly emerging philosophical questions, despite differences in the intellectual contexts that we are required to warily distinguish. Moreover, by focusing on the Daoist tradition in East Asia, it well demonstrates how other systems of philosophical thought can be usefully employed to critically reflect on fundamental assumptions that an existing system is already committed to and that could be the very cause of relevant philosophical and pragmatic problems.While I mostly agree with his arguments in chapters 1–4 and 6, the only part I found unsatisfactory is chapter 5, "Early Daoist Biopolitics and a New [End Page 771] Daoist Political Ecology" (pp. 100–118). The present review aims to elaborate reasons for my resistance to Nelson's all-out endorsement of what he regards as the sociopolitical implications of Daoism. When it comes to politics, it appears to me, early Daoist texts such as the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi express often disappointingly ambiguous and agnostic attitudes toward what can be done with respect to their doctrinal opponents and outsiders. My suggestion is that if we examine the explorations of their contenders, that is, mainly Confucians and Legalists, concerning political and technological devices, they may present an altogether less biased and more balanced range of solutions to a question Nelson raises regarding an environmental challenge associated with a competitive globalized economy and rapidly developing technologies in our modern age.II. A Challenge to the Current Environmental MovementChapter 5 begins with the following statement:Appeals to encountering the myriad things in their environmental contexts and relations are necessary for an ecological transformation of existing cultures and societies. Yet an environmental ethos and culture of nature is not sufficient given how systematically reproduced social-economic processes in advanced capitalist societies meditate, entangle, and obstruct the transformative potential of such encounters. To this extent, an adequate environmental philosophy must concurrently be social-political philosophy that can offer an environmentally oriented critique of existing social structures and institutions that directly and indirectly harm creatures and degrade ecosystems in myriad ways such that transformations must transpire in economic and societal structures as well as at the level of individual cultivation and reflections.(p. 100)Nelson maintains that even though it is cardinal to transform the ways in which the myriad things encounter and mutually correspond with each other, as well as alter their own existential state, by cultivating an environmental ethos and culture of nature in each individual and society, one of the most serious challenges for such transformations could originate with already existing capitalist, materialist, and consumerist social structures and institutions widely prevailing and deeply embedded in the highly complex economic and political systems of our age.This, I think, captures the core problem of modern environmentalism. An individual, a group of people such as nonprofit or nongovernmental organizations, or a single city or country might be convinced by the Daoist "biospiritual" mode of life. Nevertheless, it appears to be far more difficult in practice to have certain countries or multinational mega-firms abandon their steadfast, primary commitment to national, industrial, commercial, or corporate missions to pursue their own benefits that deprioritize or... (shrink)

The human environment is currently undergoing massive change amid the rapid adoption of information and communications technology (ICT). ICT can be characterized as offering an opportunity to consider the nature of humanity, create new values, and foster new cultures. As humans, the question that technical innovation relating to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robots thrusts before us is, “What is a human?” What exactly are the things that AI will never be able to do, no matter how close it gets to (...) human capabilities? What makes us humans, and what is it that only humans can do? This essay discusses the impact of AI technology on humans and society from the perspective of a turning point in how people perceive themselves and humanity. (shrink)

Unconscious processing of stimuli with emotional content can bias affective judgments. Is this subliminal affective priming merely a transient phenomenon manifested in fleeting perceptual changes, or are long-lasting effects also induced? To address this question, we investigated memory for surprise faces 24 h after they had been shown with 30-ms fearful, happy, or neutral faces. Surprise faces subliminally primed by happy faces were initially rated as more positive, and were later remembered better, than those primed by fearful or neutral faces. (...) Participants likely to have processed primes supraliminally did not respond differentially as a function of expression. These results converge with findings showing memory advantages with happy expressions, though here the expressions were displayed on the face of a different person, perceived subliminally, and not present at test. We conclude that behavioral biases induced by masked emotional expressions are not ephemeral, but rather can last at least 24 h. (shrink)

This paper studies a sender-receiver game in which both players want the receiver to choose the state-optimal action. Before observing the state, the sender observes a “contextual signal,” a payoff-irrelevant signal that correlates with states and is imperfectly shared with the receiver. Once the sender observes the state, the sender sends a message to the receiver, incurring a small messaging cost. It is shown that there is no miscommunication in any efficient equilibrium if the messaging cost is uniform or contextual (...) information is poorly shared between players. However, if the messaging costs are different between some messages, and contextual information can affect the probability ranking of states and is shared reasonably well, any efficient equilibrium that favors the sender exhibits miscommunication. Furthermore, the messages that cause miscommunication can be coarse or ambiguous, depending on how well players share contextual information. (shrink)

When an agent’s motivation is sensitive to how his supervisor thinks about the agent’s competence, the supervisor has to take into account both informational and expressive contents of her message to the agent. This paper shows that the supervisor can credibly express her trust in the agent’s ability only by being un- clear about what to do. Suggesting what to do, i.e., “directives,” could reveal the supervisor’s “distrust” and reduce the agent’s equilibrium effort level even though it provides useful information (...) about the decision environment. There is also an equilibrium in which directives are neutral in expressive content. However, it is shown that neologism proofness favors equilibria in which directives are double- edged swords. (shrink)

Modal counterparts of intermediate predicate logics will be studied by means of algebraic devise. Our main tool will be a construction of algebraic semantics for modal logics from algebraic frames for predicate logics. Uncountably many examples of modal counterparts of intermediate predicate logics will be given.

Zen Buddhism as it has been discovered by the West in our time emerges as one of the great challenges to Western philosophy, psychology, and religion. The present volume, composed of the work of D. T. Suzuki, Zen's chief exponent in English, and presented to Western readers by William Barrett, is intended to introduce the general reader to the history and spirit of Zen.

In [STU 00, KUT 03] we introduced a family of ‘modal' languages intended for talking about distances. These languages are interpreted in ‘distance spaces' which satisfy some of the standard axioms of metric spaces. Among other things, we singled out decidable logics of distance spaces and proved expressive completeness results relating classical and modal languages. The aim of this paper is to axiomatize the modal fragments of the semantically defined distance logics of [KUT 03] and give a new proof of (...) their decidability. (shrink)

Broadening access to both computational and educational resources is crit- ical to diffusing machine learning (ML) innovation. However, today, most ML resources and experts are siloed in a few countries and organizations. In this article, we describe our pedagogical approach to increasing access to applied ML through a massive open online course (MOOC) on Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML). We suggest that TinyML, applied ML on resource-constrained embedded devices, is an attractive means to widen access because TinyML leverages low-cost and globally (...) accessible hardware and encourages the development of complete, self-contained applications, from data collection to deployment. To this end, a collaboration between academia and industry produced a four part MOOC that provides application-oriented instruction on how to develop solutions using TinyML. The series is openly available on the edX MOOC platform, has no prerequisites beyond basic programming, and is designed for global learners from a variety of backgrounds. It introduces real-world applications, ML algorithms, data-set engineering, and the ethi- cal considerations of these technologies through hands-on programming and deployment of TinyML applications in both the cloud and on their own microcontrollers. To facili- tate continued learning, community building, and collaboration beyond the courses, we launched a standalone website, a forum, a chat, and an optional course-project com- petition. We also open-sourced the course materials, hoping they will inspire the next generation of ML practitioners and educators and further broaden access to cutting-edge ML technologies. (shrink)