The article seeks to highlight the relation between ontology and communication while considering the role of AI in society and environment. Bioinformationalism is the technical term that foregrounds this relationality. The study reveals instructive consequences for philosophy of technology in general and AI in particular. The first section introduces the bioinformational approach to AI, focusing on three critical features of the current AI debate: ontology of information, property-based vs. relational AI, and ontology vs. constitution of AI. When applied to the (...) themes of relationality and non-anthropocentric communications, bioinformational insights highlight an inclusive and meaningful groundwork for understanding AI by ‘relating’ it with society and the environment through an engagement with the ongoing critique of human supremacy. In the second section, we move from ‘relating’ AI to ‘rewilding’ AI by proposing taxonomical classification for certain technological entities. We situate our proposal in the broader personhood debate with the proposal of taxonomical ranking. In the last section, we show an instance of a relational approach steeped in substantialist ontology by introducing the fourth feature of the AI debate. A broad critique of Floridi’s philosophy of information introduces this fourth feature from the domain of philosophy and sociology to address various theoretical and ecological problems with current relational accounts. In doing so, we argue for ‘communication’ to be the replacement of ‘information’ as the moral unit. A bioinformational understanding of AI advocates taking ontological commitments seriously at all levels of informational and technological processes and products. (shrink)

Anthropocene jurisprudence amounts to a legal attitude that posits human beings as the ultimate subject to which the legal ontology, epistemology, and language serve. This attitude inevitably leads to exceptionalism not only in terminology but also in the impact which legal verdicts incur, especially on the natural environment and species. In this paper, we make a coupled reading of jurisprudence and environmental science while suggesting a post-Anthropocene model of law which can be made philosophically consistent by appropriating a new theory (...) of human as a 'biocultural creature' to outgrow the attitude of exceptionalism in law. In doing so, we take recourse of dynamic systems and complexity theory for a law to account for the ontology, epistemology and linguistics of post-Anthropocene jurisprudence. (shrink)

Although consumers increasingly claim to demand ethical products and state that they are willing to reward firms that are ethical, studies have highlighted that there is a significant gap between consumers’ explicit attitudes toward ethical products and their actual purchase behavior. This has major implications for firm policies revolving around business ethics. This research contributes to the understanding of the attitude–behavior gap in ethical consumption that literature has identified but not explored much. We utilize the model of dual attitudes as (...) a basis for the arguments presented in the paper and test them. We suggest that the gap in ethical consumerism exists because individuals have implicit as well as explicit attitudes, which are impacted differentially by stimuli and elicit dissimilar behavioral responses and thus have different implications for business ethics policies. Two longitudinal studies are conducted to better understand the impact of an individual’s dual attitudes on preferences and choice. Our findings support the presence of dual attitudes in consumers. Explicit attitudes are found to be easily influenced by the nature of the stimuli. On the other hand, implicit attitudes are relatively unaffected by the nature of the stimuli present and remain relatively constant. Based on the findings, implicit attitudes guide behavior and determine an individual’s preferences. Even though explicit attitudes react to the stimuli presented, our findings suggest they have no impact on the choice of consumers. These findings improve the understanding of ethical consumption, provide a reason as to why the attitude–behavior gap exists, provide a foundation for future researchers and help firms better understand the impact of perceived business on creating a behavioral shift in ethical consumption. (shrink)

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

Mody and Carey (2016) investigated children's capacity to reason by the disjunctive syllogism by hiding stickers within two pairs of cups (i.e., there is one sticker in cup A or B, and one in cup C or D) and then showing one cup to be empty. They found that children as young as 3 years of age chose the most likely cup (i.e., not A, therefore choose B; and disregard C and D) and suggested that these children were representing the (...) dependent relationship between A and B by applying the logical operator “or”. However, it is possible that children succeeded using simpler strategies, such as avoiding the empty cup and choosing within the manipulated pair. We devised a new version of the task in which a sticker was visibly removed from one of the four cups so that 2.5- to 5-year-old children (N = 100) would fail if they relied on such strategies. We also included a conceptual replication of Mody and Carey's (2016) original condition. Our results replicated their findings and showed that even younger children, 2.5 years of age, could pass above chance levels. Yet, 2.5-, 3- and 4-year-olds failed the new condition. Only 5-year-old children performed above chance in both conditions and so provided compelling evidence of deductive reasoning from the premise “A or B", where “or” is exclusive. We propose that younger children may instead conceive of the relationship between A and B as inclusive “or” across both versions of the task. (shrink)

This book provides a detailed analysis of classical and modern Indian views on consciousness along with their related meditative methods. It offers a critical analysis of three distinct trends of Indian thought.

ABSTRACT Social media is becoming increasingly embedded in people’s daily lives. These virtual spaces are now regularly used as a tool for information dissemination. Drawing on the moral intensity literature combined with uses and gratifications theory, this research explores how using social media to consume information can affect the ethical decision-making process. This study compares the influence of two online media dissemination formats – an online news article and social media discussion thread – on individuals’ ethical perceptions and decisions. Results (...) indicate that social media usage has an effect on perceptions of social consensus, problem recognition, and ethical sensemaking. Overall, Social media is shown to inhibit ethical decision-making when used as an information dissemination tool. (shrink)

This volume consists of a collection of essays that explores the songs of Rabindranath Tagore, also known as Rabindrasangeet as independent poetic verses. It is an intellectual reading of his songs that are collected in the Gitabitan, which is a collection of all of his 2232 songs.

Sri Aurobindo dedicated his life to the transformation of humanity. His journey saw him traverse many paths, including that of poet, journalist, jailed revolutionary, philosopher, and radical mystic. Essays, translations, literary criticism, political articles, philosophical treatises, poetry, epics, plays and short stories-his writings encompass the depth and range of his extraordinary life. The modern sage commented on spiritual texts such as the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Bhagwad Gita, authored an epic poem, Savitri, presented his integral vision in The Life (...) Divine, wrote on contemporary issues, all the while writing thousands of letters to guide his disciples, and even documenting his inner life in meticulous detail. The relevance of Sri Aurobindo's message has never been more urgent and compelling, yet, his Complete Works, thirty-six volumes in all, can be a daunting prospect even for those acquainted with his philosophy and practice. Reading Sri Aurobindo introduces each of these volumes through the perspectives of twenty-one contributors. The result is a book packed with insights inviting us to explore Sri Aurobindo's deep wisdom and vision for resolving the fundamental issues facing individuals, societies, and nations today. (shrink)

This book presents and argues for a suitably articulated version of consensualism as a form of Kantian moral theory with an ability to powerfully illuminate the moral intuitions to which Kantian and utilitarian theories have traditionally appealed.

Der aktuelle Eurozentrismus führt dazu, dass Europa und hier insbesondere die Europäische Union verschiedene Entwicklungen und Ereignisse in den internationalen Beziehungen falsch auffassen und interpretieren. Der Autor setzt sich thesenhaft mit diesem Phänomen auseinander und zeigt auf, wie es durch eine eurozentristische Sichtweise, die er als Überbewertung europäischer Interessen, Bedürfnisse, Strukturen und Ereignisse versteht, zu einer verzerrten Wahrnehmung der internationalen Politik durch die Europäer kommt.

Journeying through the writings and activism of anti-colonial thinkers, anti-globalization protesters, and queer activists, Rao demonstrates that important currents of Third World protest have long battled against both the international and the domestic, in a manner that combines nationalist and cosmopolitan sensibilities.

This paper is intended to explore the Rorty’s notion of truth and its vicinity and divergences with Putnam’s notion of truth. Rorty and Putnam, both the philosophers have developed their notion of truth against the traditional representational notion of truth but their strength lies in its distinctive characterization. For Putnam, truth is the property of a statement which cannot be lost but the justification of it could be. I will also examine the importance of Putnam’s idealized justificatory conditions without which (...) he may succumb to the charge of relativism at the same time how does Putnam overcome the tension between metaphysical and relativistic stances of truth. For Rorty, truth is not representational rather it is social, which means the justification for a true belief is not external but internal to the community of believers. I would further examine how Rorty tries to dispel the charge of relativism which is hard to overcome. Finally, I shall try to defend the concept of truth which is free from metaphysical baggage and relativistic threats; and in this enterprise Rorty walks half the way and Putnam completes the journey. (shrink)

The development of manufacturing technologies for new materials involves the generation of a large and continually evolving volume of information. The analysis, integration and management of such large volumes of data, typically stored in multiple independently developed databases, creates significant challenges for practitioners. There is a critical need especially for open-sharing of data pertaining to engineering design which together with effective decision support tools can enable innovation. We believe that ontology applied to engineering (OE) represents a viable strategy for the (...) alignment, reconciliation and integration of diverse and disparate data. The scope of OE includes: consistent capture of knowledge pertaining to the types of entities involved; facilitation of cooperation among diverse group of experts; more effective ongoing curation, and update of manufacturing data; collaborative design and knowledge reuse. As an illustrative case study we propose an ontology focused on the representation of composite materials focusing in particular on the class of Functionally Graded Materials (FGM) in particular. The scope of the ontology is to provide information about the components of such materials, the manufacturing processes involved in creation, and diversity of application ranging from additive manufacturing to restorative dentistry. The ontology is developed using Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI). (shrink)

The phenomenon of consciousness has always been a central question for philosophers and scientists. Emerging in the past decade are new approaches to the understanding of consciousness in a scientific light. This book presents a series of essays by leading thinkers giving an account of the current ideas prevalent in the scientific study of consciousness. The value of the book lies in the discussion of this interesting though complex subject from different points of view ranging from physics, computer science to (...) the cognitive sciences. Reviews of controversial ideas related to the philosophy of mind from western and eastern sources including classical Indian first person methodologies provide a breadth of coverage that has seldom been attempted in a book before. Additionally, chapters relating to the new approaches in computational modelling of higher order cognitive function and consciousness are included. The book is of great value for established as well as young researchers from a wide cross-section of interdisciplinary scientific backgrounds, aiming to pursue research in this field, as well as an informed public. * Presents the latest developments in the scientific study of consciousness * Critically reviews different theoretical and philosophical explanations related to the subject * An important book for both students and researchers in designing research projects on consciousness. (shrink)

As students progress towards their PhD degrees, they will become more independent and practitioner-like; for those moving into academia, it is often assumed the programs of their PhD mentors will serve as prototypes for their own successful research programs. However, the author's research program as an Assistant Professor led him in directions never considered as a graduate student. The author had to make significant decisions in choosing a primary audience, finding an overarching theme, defining the individual problems, and developing these (...) problems into researchable projects. Infrastructure-related issues associated with the author's research program were also considered. The details of his journey from the end of his doctoral degree to his current position as an Assistant Professor are described in this article. (shrink)

The project of inquiring into the history of our morals is premised upon the idea that some of our deeply held moral convictions might have emerged through a complicated historical process, rather than, say, through a process of rational deliberation. Were that the case, our philosophical efforts to properly understand our present moral conceptions, as well as our efforts to criticize them, would certainly profit from serious attention to the history of our morals. Jesse Prinz notes, however, that there are (...) several different genealogical methods we could employ in pursuit of this project of historicizing morals.1 Prinz focuses upon three such methods—utilitarian genealogies (such as the ones offered by... (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to refute the fregean assumption that declarative sentences refer to truth-Values. A consequence of the assumption is that the truth-Value of a declarative sentence containing another as part remains unchanged when the part is replaced by another sentence having the same truth-Value, Provided that the part as part has only customary reference and expresses a complete thought. The refutation proceeds by demonstrating this consequence to be false.

BackgroundNeuropsychological profile of Indian Duchenne muscular dystrophy subjects remains unidentified and needs to be evaluated.MethodsA total of 69 DMD and 66 controls were subjected to detailed intelligence and neuropsychological assessment. The factor indexes were derived from various components of Malin’s Intelligence Scale for Indian Children and Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test.ResultsPoor verbal and visual memory profiles were demonstrated by DMDs, which include RAVLT-immediate recall, RAVLT-delayed recall, Rey–Osterrieth complex figure test -IR, and RCFT-DR. RAVLT-memory efficiency index demonstrated poor verbal memory efficiency. (...) Significant differences in the functioning of working memory axis [RAVLT T1, recency T1, Digit Span Backward ] were observed along with reduced performance in visuomotor coordination, visuospatial, and visual recognition abilities. Block designing efficiency index and attention fraction showed a normal performance in DMD kids.ConclusionWorking memory deficits were found to be the crucial element of cognitive functioning in DMD cases. Working memory interventions may be beneficial to improve the neuropsychological profile in DMD. (shrink)

Many of the policy choices we face that have implications for the lives of future generations involve creating a risk that they will live lives that are significantly compromised. I argue that we can fruitfully make use of the resources of Scanlon’s contractualist account of moral reasoning to make sense of the intuitive idea that, in many cases, the objection to adopting a policy that puts the interest of future generations at risk is that doing so wrongs those who will (...) live in the further future. (shrink)

In the late nineteenth century, Jagadish Chandra Bose devised millimeter- and micro-wave experiments to record responses of plants to electromagnetic stimuli. Based on these experiments, Bose conceptualized his thesis of the unity of living and nonliving entities through their different sensitivities to electromagnetic vibrations. By relating Bose’s thesis of the unity of life based on electromagnetic vibrations to Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy and N. Katherine Hayles’s work on the cognitive nonconscious, I argue for a processual media theory that connects (...) both human and plant intelligence to electromagnetic signaling. In doing so, I examine how discourses about different living bodies (plants, animals, humans) variously sensing their environments are formulated into claims about which species have what degree of cognitive capability and intelligence. I trace the influence of Bose’s work on the ecological thinking of the 1970s espoused by cyberneticists and countercultural environmentalists and on contemporary plant neurobiologists who are closely working with Internet of Things designers and researchers. This enables me to emerge with an understanding of electrosensitivity that acknowledges that there is more to the intensities and energies of signals than mere data and that such infra-informatic signals can create both capacities and incapacities, capabilities and debilities, in bodies. (shrink)

I examine here Theory and Scholarship (taken to be formalized social scientific frameworks that seek to map out the real world and social actions in an objective fashion) via an autoethnographic lens. Chiefly, I ask how autoethnography as a research method reconfigures them: how may we extend knowledge using autoethnography? While much critique has centered on the "doing" (dispassionately?) versus "being" (going native?) of autoethnography, I argue that such a dichotomy is inherently false. Instead, doing is located within the ethnographer's (...) very being, so that a closer look at the autoethnographic research process is required, from conception to implementation to introspection. I attempt such a processual analysis here: drawing on an earlier social scientific project, I relate the intellectual and social process whereby it was translated into an autoethnography. Using a performative lens to illustrate the dialectical mode of doing and being in the research process, I intersperse portions of personal narrative with academic writing, to enable a disjunctural appreciation of the various layers of interpretation. While the epistemic framework I hold to here is indeed a poststructural one, privileging fragmentation and social situatedness, it also emphasizes continuity and interconnections in the research process. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of the phenomenon that has come to be known as ‘moral luck’ have either dismissed it as illusory or touted it as the evidence for doubting the probative value of our commitment to certain widely avowed views concerning interpersonal assessments of responsibility. In this discussion, we present a third, distinctive interpretation of the moral luck phenomenon. Drawing upon empirically robust results from psychological studies of judgment bias, we argue that the phenomenon of moral luck is demonstrably not illusory. (...) What we suggest, however, is that the phenomenon ought not to be taken to countenance doubts about the standards generally taken to be regulative of assessments of interpersonal responsibility. Rather, its significance lies in foregrounding certain generally unacknowledged obstacles we face in the process of conclusively applying general valid moral standards in making specific judgments of responsibility and desert.1. (shrink)

Recent events have highlighted large-scale systemic racial disparities in U.S. criminal justice based on race and other demographic characteristics. Although criminological datasets are used to study and document the extent of such disparities, they often lack key information, including arrestees’ racial identification. As AI technologies are increasingly used by criminal justice agencies to make predictions about outcomes in bail, policing, and other decision-making, a growing literature suggests that the current implementation of these systems may perpetuate racial inequalities. In this paper, (...) we argue that AI technologies should be investigated to understand how they recognize racial categories and whether they can be harnessed to fill missing race data. By bridging this gap, we can work towards better understanding racial inequalities in a wide range of contexts, most notably criminal justice. Using a multidisciplinary perspective, we rethink the design and methodology used in facial processing technology (FPT) based on supervised deep learning model (DLM) image classification. By modifying standard FPT pipelines to tackle multiple sources of DLM bias, we propose an experimental methodology based on ethical AI principles to generate binary (Black and White) racial categories using mugshots. We go beyond simply reporting DLM accuracies and address fundamental issues such as generalizability and interpretability by using a “self-auditing” approach. First, we evaluate the inference performances of 42 fine-tuned DLMs using unseen test images from the same dataset but subject to varying data augmentations. Next, to interpret and validate our methodological approach, we apply gradient-based saliency maps to assess the consistency of facial region relevance and attribution. Finally, drawing upon insights from three areas (computer science, sociology, and law), we investigate the efficacy of our DLM-based method as a tool for detecting racial inequalities in criminal justice. (shrink)

According to prominent bioethics scholars and international guidelines, researchers and sponsors have obligations to ensure that the products of their research are reasonably available to research participants and their communities. In other words, the claim is that research is unethical unless it has local social value. In this article, we argue that the existing conception of reasonable availability should be replaced with a social value obligation that extends to the global poor. To the extent the social value requirement has been (...) understood as geographically constrained to the communities that host research and the countries that can afford the products of research, it has neglected to include the global poor as members of the relevant society. We argue that a new conception of social value obligations is needed for two reasons. First, duties of global beneficence give reason for researchers, sponsors, and institutions to take steps to make their products more widely accessible. Second, public commitments made by many institutions acknowledge and engender responsibilities to make the products of research more accessible to the global poor. Future research is needed to help researchers and sponsors discharge these obligations in ways that unlock their full potential. (shrink)