We should eventually understand how exactly first person phenomenal consciousness is generated. When we do, we should be able to enginner one for robots. This is the engineering thesis in machine consciousness.

This paper focuses on the influence of cultural familiarity on getting the most out of an e-negotiation for merger or acquisition based on subjective and objective negotiation behaviors. We examined if cultural awareness could increase the rate of negotiation self-efficacy, shorten the length of negotiation and optimize deal closure results. To do so, firstly we investigate the concept of e-negotiation and its development in the last two decades. Then a series of systematic reviews is performed on the parameters influencing the (...) success in offline and online merger or acquisition negotiations. We also considered the main traits of Western and Middle Eastern Arab cultures on negotiations. The results show that many of the requirements of successful collaboration, or negotiations, with Arab managers can currently happen only through face-to-face meetings. (shrink)

Peter Boltuc, Int. J. Mach. Conscious., 06, 5 (2014). DOI: 10.1142/S1793843014400022.

As a common saying goes “Hell is paved with good intentions”, though Kant would disagree. In real world we may be morally responsible for more than one’s intentions. Moral agents need to navigate between Scylla of “objective” and Charybdis of “subjective” theories of moral responsibility; the resultant theory shall be called a theory of realistic obligation. It takes into account both subjective intentions and objective results of moral action. Since human beings are both intentional entities and physical objects, neglect of (...) either objective or subjective factors leads to implausible consequences. In practical domains, such as business ethics, moral value needs to be assigned in part to our subjective intentions and in part to objective results of our actions. This allows for moral condemnation of inefficiency and balancing acts of efficiency versus deontic constraints. (shrink)

The so-called Common Sense Morality (C) is any moral theory that allows, or requires, an agent to accept special, non-instrumental reasons to give advantage to certain other persons, usually the agent’s friends or kin, over the interests of others. Opponents charge C with violating the requirement of impartiality defined as independence on positional characteristics of moral agents and moral patients. Advocates of C claim that C is impartial, but only in a positional manner in which every moral agent would acquire (...) the same relational characteristics if that agent was in a certain relationship to the given moral patient. The opponents of C reply that a theory that allows for positional characteristics is self-defeating; it violates the requirement of prescriptivity due to its inability to provide moral recommendations what should happen all things considered. Advocates of C retort that a moral theory should be prescriptive by telling every agent what to do, not what should the joint outcome of those activities be. In this paper I analyze the last two moves of this debate: the objection that C is self-defeating and the reply that there is a plausible moral theory (C) that accommodates positional characteristics of special moral reasons. (shrink)