Connectionist models provide a promising alternative to the traditional computational approach that has for several decades dominated cognitive science and artificial intelligence, although the nature of connectionist models and their relation to symbol processing remains controversial. Connectionist models can be characterized by three general computational features: distinct layers of interconnected units, recursive rules for updating the strengths of the connections during learning, and “simple” homogeneous computing elements. Using just these three features one can construct surprisingly elegant and powerful models of (...) memory, perception, motor control, categorization, and reasoning. What makes the connectionist approach unique is not its variety of representational possibilities or its departure from explicit rule-based models, or even its preoccupation with the brain metaphor. Rather, it is that connectionist models can be used to explore systematically the complex interaction between learning and representation, as we try to demonstrate through the analysis of several large networks. (shrink)

Saccadic eye movements create (at least) two related but distinct problems for the visual system: they cause rapid image motion and a displacement of the retinal image. Although it is often assumed that the motion is too fast to be resolved, this is certainly not the case for low-spatial-frequency images. Recent experiments have suggested that the reason we are unaware of the motion during saccades is because motion channels are selectively suppressed, possibly by suppression of the magno-cellular (but not the (...) parvocellular) pathway. This suppression may explain why there is no sensation of motion during saccades, but it leaves open the problem of perceiving a stable world despite continual image displacements. (shrink)

This article offers several contributions to the interdisciplinary project of responsible research and innovation in data science and AI. First, it provides a critical analysis of current efforts to establish practical mechanisms for algorithmic auditing and assessment to identify limitations and gaps with these approaches. Second, it provides a brief introduction to the methodology of argument-based assurance and explores how it is currently being applied in the development of safety cases for autonomous and intelligent systems. Third, it generalises this method (...) to incorporate wider ethical, social, and legal considerations, in turn establishing a novel version of argument-based assurance that we call ‘ethical assurance.’ Ethical assurance is presented as a structured method for unifying the myriad practical mechanisms that have been proposed. It is built on a process-based form of project governance that enlists reflective innovation practices to operationalise normative principles, such as sustainability, accountability, transparency, fairness, and explainability. As a set of interlocutory governance mechanisms that span across the data science and AI lifecycle, ethical assurance supports inclusive and participatory ethical deliberation while also remaining grounded in social and technical realities. Finally, this article sets an agenda for ethical assurance, by detailing current challenges, open questions, and next steps, which serve as a springboard to build an active (and interdisciplinary) research programme as well as contribute to ongoing discussions in policy and governance. (shrink)

This article depends on much else that I have written elsewhere. Most of it has long since become public property, but some is recent enough to have gone unnoticed. My recent book, The Book of Revelation,1 devotes two chapters to Olivi as an exegete. Some of what I will say in the early part of this article is also presented there, because my aim in these chapters of the book was to show that the locus for Olivi's development of an (...) apocalyptic program was not simply his Revelation commentary but his exegesis as a whole. be it of Isaiah, Matthew, Job, Genesis or John. In fact, his threefold division of church history in line with Christ's three advents, which is featured in his... (shrink)

To understand the number sense, we need to understand its function. We argue that numerosity estimation is fundamental not only for perception, but also preparation and control of action. We outline experiments that link numerosity estimation with action, pointing to a generalized numerosity system that serves both perception and action preparation.

A great deal of attention has been paid to Petrus Iohannis Olivi’s last great work, his Apocalypse commentary. Less has been paid to his earliest writings. Here I want to address two aspects of those earlier works that rank among Olivi’s more interesting ideas. The first is the notion of Christ’s three advents in history: first in the flesh, then in the spirit, and finally in judgment. I mentioned those three advents years ago in my book on Olivi’s Apocalypse commentary, (...) but only briefly. Here I want to look more closely at the original context in which the three advents appeared.Second, I intend to examine the connection between the three advents and another of Olivi’s important ideas, that of the double... (shrink)

It is hardly news that medieval Joachism was a protean affair. Ever since Marjorie Reeve wrote, we have been aware that various people who valued Joachim did so for different reasons and, in the process, read him in different ways. They still do, and the different readings of Joachim offered today are hardly unrelated to the varieties of intepretation offered then. The important thing for our purposes is that, within a century after Joachim’s death, various intellectually adventurous souls in western (...) Europe were appropriating what we might reasonably describe as Joachite thought in a variety of ways, often without any indication that they recognized a connection between what they were saying and... (shrink)

One might assume that reviewing the revised edition of a book published in 1999 would be a simple task, but it is not, even if we avoid immersing ourselves in an examination of whether a revised issue was justified. The real question is whether in producing it Karris gives us something worth reading, something that makes us see the Admonitions as worth reading. The short answer is yes, certainly. Karris’s commentary on each admonition proceeds by presenting parallels. In speaking of (...) “parallels” rather than “sources” Karris, following New Testament scholar Daniel J. Harrington, recognizes that apparent similarities may result, not from direct borrowing, but from a common cultural milieu.... (shrink)

Book review of Danks, D. (2014) Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models.

William of Ockham on the right to Use Goods Quintessentially medieval—an almost word-for-word refutation of an already prolix defense of several improbationes of earlier papal decrees—its greatest claim to fame has usually been its length, not the content of Ockham's argument. Annabel Brett, for example, concluded in a remarkable study that William of Ockham had failed to adequately answer Pope John XXII's criticism of the Michaelist interpretation of Franciscan poverty. Specifically, she argued that he "failed to isolate a potestas licita (...) which would be a power to perform acts which are licit in the sense of consonant with right reason, but are not strictly just." One could imagine the pope making the very same claim, but this would be to misunderstand Ockham's point. It is true that Ockham probably had little chance of convincing the pope of the coherence of his position. But this is not to say that his position was untenable.A common criticism of Ockham's theory of poverty is that he was, more or less, fighting on John XXII's own terms, which generally also leads to the conclusion that Ockham's theory is deficient in some respect. But if Ockham can be accused of fighting on the pope's ground because he responded to Quia vir reprobus point-by-point, then the pope can equally be accused of fighting on Michaelist ground because he was doing essentially the same thing. Alternatively, this claim might be interpreted as meaning that Ockham accepted as axiomatic certain claims of John XXII and then proceeded to construct an alternate theory to that of the pope's; consequently, this argument would continue, because Ockham could not get past certain foundational statements he was unable to properly address in the pope's claims. It is a corollary of the argument presented here that this was not the case.One of the paradoxes of the Franciscan modus vivendi was that, although their goal was to disengage from the civil order as far as all property relationships went, and despite the fact that Francis strongly commanded all brothers "through obedience" not to ask letters of the Roman curia, it quickly became necessary to have recourse to the papacy for all sorts of things. It is easy to see how this paradoxical relationship with the papacy could lead to trouble for the order, and indeed it was in the course of one of these appeals that the "Franciscan crisis under John XXII" might be said to have begun. The story, recounted by a Minorite who leaves no doubt as to his partisanship, is that when a Franciscan, Berengar Talon , defended a Beguin's view that Christ and his disciples possessed nothing, "either individually or in common, by right of ownership and lordship" against the Dominican inquisitor Jean de Beaune, the latter accused Berengar, too, of heresy. Not surprisingly, given the historical success of this method, Berengar appealed to the pope. As David Burr has said, "John reacted vigorously and, one suspects, enthusiastically." This time around, however, the pope was not so certain that the Franciscan position was the correct one. This appeal served as a pretext for re-opening the poverty "question," even if the ultimate motive for this move remain enigmatic.1 John XXII's Position on UseIf we must continue to guess at what prompted John to broaden his attack, one point jumps out from the first version of Ad conditorem canonum: of the three traditional monastic vows, poverty was the least important. The pope, probably following Hervaeus Natalis, was equally convinced that "the perfection of the Christian life consists principally and essentially in charity," and that.. (shrink)

In this book, which thoroughly revises and greatly expands his classic work Sameness and Substance, David Wiggins retrieves and refurbishes in the light of twentieth-century logic and logical theory certain conceptions of identity, of substance and of persistence through change that philosophy inherits from its past. In this new version, he vindicates the absoluteness, necessity, determinateness and all or nothing character of identity against rival conceptions. He defends a form of essentialism that he calls individuative essentialism, and then a (...) form of realism that he calls conceptualist realism. In a final chapter he advocates a human being-based conception of the identity and individuation of persons, arguing that any satisfactory account of personal memory must make reference to the life of the rememberer himself. This important book will appeal to a wide range of readers in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Interpretation -- Introduction -- Interpreting Plato -- The political culture of Plato's early dialogues -- Dialogue -- Character and history -- The mouthpiece principle -- Forms of evidence -- Desire -- Socrates and eros -- The subjectivist conception of desire -- Instrumental and terminal desire -- Rational and irrational desires -- Desire in the critique of Akrasia -- Interpreting Lysis -- The deficiency conception of desire -- Inauthentic friendship -- Platonic desire -- Antiphilosophical desires -- Knowledge -- Excellence as wisdom (...) -- The epistemic unity of excellence -- Dunamis and technê -- Goodness and form -- The epistemological priority of definitional knowledge -- Ordinary ethical knowledge -- Method -- The Socratic fallacy -- Socrates' pursuit of definitions -- Hupothesis -- Two postulates -- The geometrical illustration -- Geometrical analysis -- The method of reasoning from a postulate -- Elenchus and hupothesis -- Knowledge and aitia -- F-conditions -- Cognitive security -- Aporia -- Forms of aporia -- Dramatic aporia -- The example of Charmides -- Charmides as autobiography -- The politics of Sôphrosunê -- Critias' Philotimia -- Self-knowledge and the knowledge of knowledge -- Knowledge of knowledge and knowledge of the good -- Philosophy and the polis. (shrink)

'" -Daniel Cottom, David A. Burr Chair of Letters, University of Oklahoma Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman investigates the fascination with joyful malice in eighteenth-century Europe and how this obsession helped inform ...

We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealised explanation game in which players collaborate to find the best explanation for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal (...) patterns of variable granularity and scope. We characterise the conditions under which such a game is almost surely guaranteed to converge on a optimal explanation surface in polynomial time, and highlight obstacles that will tend to prevent the players from advancing beyond certain explanatory thresholds. The game serves a descriptive and a normative function, establishing a conceptual space in which to analyse and compare existing proposals, as well as design new and improved solutions. (shrink)

Doctors’ strikes are legally permissible in the UK, with the situation differing in other countries. But are they morally permissible? Doug McConnell and Darren Mann have systematically attempted to dismiss the arguments for the moral impermissibility of doctors’ strikes and creatively attempted to provide further moral justification for them. Unfortunately for striking doctors, they fail to achieve this. Meanwhile, junior doctors’ strikes have continued in the UK through 2023 and have now extended into 2024. In this response, which focuses on (...) the UK situation and specifically junior doctors’ strikes in the National Health Service (NHS) in England, I will demonstrate a central problem with their arguments—namely that they underplay the harms caused by prolonged doctors’ strikes by ignoring the harms to patients with cancer. This weakens their conclusion that strikes are morally permissible in terms of the conditions and thresholds they set. I then provide a psychological critique of their justification for strikes in terms of the interests of the public. It follows that invoking the controversial concept of supererogatory action is ungrounded but also absurd when you consider time-critical cancer care. If those representing striking doctors wish to maintain a modicum of moral respectability, they should mitigate for patients with cancer and negotiate reasonably and with urgency. (shrink)

As business and society is an inherently multi-disciplinary scholarly area, the book will draw from work in areas outside of business and management, such as psychology, sociology, philosophy, religious studies, economics and other related fields, as well as the natural sciences, education, and other professional areas of study.

In the twenty-first century, the debate about life on other worlds is quickly changing from the realm of speculation to the domain of hard science. Within a few years, as a consequence of the rapid discovery by astronomers of planets around other stars, astronomers very likely will have discovered clear evidence of life beyond the Earth. Such a discovery of extraterrestrial life will change everything. Knowing the answer as to whether humanity has company in the universe will trigger one of (...) the greatest intellectual revolutions in history, not the least of which will be a challenge for at least some terrestrial religions. Which religions will handle the discovery of extraterrestrial life with ease and which will struggle to assimilate this new knowledge about our place in the universe? Some religions as currently practiced appear to only be viable on Earth. Other religions could be practiced on distant worlds but nevertheless identify both Earth as a place and humankind as a species of singular spiritual religious importance, while some religions could be practiced equally well anywhere in the universe by any sentient beings. Weintraub guides readers on an invigorating tour of the world's most widely practiced religions. It reveals what, if anything, each religion has to say about the possibility that extraterrestrial life exists and how, or if, a particular religion would work on other planets in distant parts of the universe. (shrink)

Foreword: Synchronicity is more than a happy accident by Brian Tart -- The quest -- Cycles of history and the law of one -- What is synchronicity? -- Understanding the sociopath -- The global adversary -- Karma is real -- Reincarnation -- Mapping out the afterlife -- The hero and his story -- The first and second acts of the hero -- Facing your fear and completing the quest -- Joan of arc rises again -- The 2,160-year cycle between rome (...) and the usa -- Vietnam, watergate and the fall of the iron curtain -- The sky is not falling-only our blindfolds -- September 11th-from both sides of the veil -- The thirteen years' war repeats in america -- 9/11 and the defeat of the cabal-the cycle perspective -- History gets a wicked case of deja vu -- Fomenko's cycles of history-and the Book of Daniel -- Explaining the cycles and the fourth-density shift. (shrink)

The Discovery of Evolution explains what the theory of evolution is all about by providing a historical narrative of discovery. Some of the major puzzles that confront anyone studying living things are discussed and it details how these were solved from an evolutionary perspective. Beginning with the emergence of the early naturalists in the seventeenth century, the scientific discoveries that led up to and then flowed from Darwin and Wallace's theory of evolution by natural selection are then discussed, and finally (...) the modern evolutionary studies at the close of the twentieth century are detailed. This new edition of The Discovery of Evolution is fully updated and contains a new chapter on the evolutionary studies of the twentieth century. By approaching the topic of evolution in this way, it is made accessible to the non-specialist and no previous study of biology is required in order to read and understand this book. (shrink)

_ Convention_ was immediately recognized as a major contribution to the subject and its significance has remained undiminished since its first publication in 1969. Lewis analyzes social conventions as regularities in the resolution of recurring coordination problems-situations characterized by interdependent decision processes in which common interests are at stake. Conventions are contrasted with other kinds of regularity, and conventions governing systems of communication are given special attention.

Here the philosopher and physicist David Z Albert argues, among other things, that the difference between past and future can be understood as a mechanical phenomenon of nature and that quantum mechanics makes it impossible to present the entirety of what can be said about the world as a narrative of “befores” and “afters.”.