In this paper, we examine the lawfulness of a proposal to provide elective ventilation to incompetent patients who are potential organ donors. Under the current legal framework, this depends on whether the best interests test could be satisfied. It might be argued that, because the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (UK) (and the common law) makes it clear that the best interests test is not confined to the patient's clinical interests, but extends to include the individual's own values, wishes and beliefs, (...) the proposal will be in the patient's best interests. We reject this claim. We argue that, as things currently stand, the proposal could not lawfully be justified as a blanket proposition by reference to the best interests test. Accordingly, a modification of the law would be necessary to render the proposal lawful. We conclude with a suggestion about how that could be achieved. (shrink)

Ours is an age of offense, a time of reactionary shock—always received, never given. Ours is an age that has forgone cultural narratives, a time of individualism—wherein personal identities trump the collective spirit. Ours is an age of failing earth, a time of ecological collapse—yet the consumption of global capitalism continues to run amok. But don't fear. You have the correct worldview, the best solutions. It’s not your fault these things are happening. It’s the president’s, the immigrant’s, and the Islamicist’s. (...) Or perhaps It’s the socialist’s, the tree hugger’s, and the baby killer’s. But it’s not your fault. Never yours. For the world exists as you see it—in an echo chamber lined with golden pixels. Do I still have your attention? Then join me. Within the covers of Narrativizing Theories, I dive into ambiguity and aesthetics to depict how clashing worldviews exist side by side yet remain mutually incompatible. I examine how cultures distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable beliefs, embodiments, and identities. And I outline an aesthetic theory of ambiguity that highlights—through the twists and turns of literature—the provisionality of knowledge and the narrativization of reality. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a renewed debate over the importance of groupselection, especially as it relates to the evolution of altruism. Onefeature of this debate has been disagreement over which kinds ofprocesses should be described in terms of selection at multiple levels,within and between groups. Adapting some earlier discussions, we presenta mathematical framework that can be used to explore the exactrelationships between evolutionary models that do, and those that donot, explicitly recognize biological groups as fitness-bearing entities.We show a fundamental set (...) of mathematical equivalences between these twokinds of models, one of which applies a form of multi-level selectiontheory and the other being a form of ``individualism.'' However, we alsoargue that each type of model can have heuristic advantages over theother. Indeed, it can be positively useful to engage in a kind ofback-and-forth switching between two different perspectives on theevolutionary role of groups. So the position we defend is a``gestalt-switching pluralism.''. (shrink)

Altruism is generally understood to be behavior that benefits others at a personal cost to the behaving individual. However, within evolutionary biology, different authors have interpreted the concept of altruism differently, leading to dissimilar predictions about the evolution of altruistic behavior. Generally, different interpretations diverge on which party receives the benefit from altruism and on how the cost of altruism is assessed. Using a simple trait-group framework, we delineate the assumptions underlying different interpretations and show how they relate to one (...) another. We feel that a thorough examination of the connections between interpretations not only reveals why different authors have arrived at disparate conclusions about altruism, but also illuminates the conditions that are likely to favor the evolution of altruism. (shrink)

This paper is an experiment in collective writing conducted in Autumn 2019 at the Faculty of Education at Beijing Normal University. The experiment involves 12 international masters' students readi...

One of the remarkable developments in the contemporary study of Paul is the dramatic interest in his thought amongst European philosophers. This collection of insights from leading scholars makes accessible a discussion often elusive to those not already conversant in the categories of European philosophy"--Publisher description.

Positioning technologies, such as GPS are widespread in society but are used only sparingly in behavioural science research, e.g., because processing positioning technology data can be cumbersome. The current work attempts to unlock positioning technology potential for behavioural science studies by developing and testing a research tool to analyse GPS tracks. This tool—psyosphere—is published as open-source software, and aims to extract behaviours from GPSs data that are more germane to behavioural research. Two field experiments were conducted to test application of (...) the research tool. During these experiments, participants played a smuggling game, thereby either smuggling tokens representing illicit material past border guards or not. Results suggested that participants varied widely in variables, such as course and speed variability and distance from team members in response to the presence of border guards. Subsequent analyses showed that some of these GPS-derived behavioural variables could be linked to self-reported mental states, such as fear. Although more work needs to be done, the current study demonstrates that psyosphere may enable researchers to conduct behavioural experiments with positioning technology, outside of a laboratory setting. (shrink)

We investigated the accuracy of gender stereotypes regarding digital game genre preferences. In Study 1, 484 female and male participants rated their preference for 17 game genres (gender differences). In Study 2, another sample of 226 participants rated the extent to which the same genres were presumably preferred by women or men (gender stereotypes). We then compared the results of both studies in order to determine the accuracy of the gender stereotypes. Study 1 revealed actual gender differences for most genres—mostly (...) of moderate size. Study 2 revealed substantial gender stereotypes about genre preferences. When comparing the results from both studies, we found that gender stereotypes were accurate in direction for most genres. However, they were, to some degree, inaccurate in size: For most genres, gender stereotypes overestimated the actual gender difference with a moderate mean effect size. (shrink)

We generalize standard Turing machines, which work in time ω on a tape of length ω, to α-machines with time α and tape length α, for α some limit ordinal. We show that this provides a simple machine model adequate for classical admissible recursion theory as developed by G. Sacks and his school. For α an admissible ordinal, the basic notions of α-recursive or α-recursively enumerable are equivalent to being computable or computably enumerable by an α-machine, respectively. We emphasize the (...) algorithmic approach to admissible recursion theory by indicating how the proof of the Sacks–Simpson theorem, i.e., the solution of Post’s problem in α-recursion theory, could be based on α-machines, without involving constructibility theory. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is two-fold. First, similarities generated from six semantic models were compared to human ratings of paragraph similarity on two datasets—23 World Entertainment News Network paragraphs and 50 ABC newswire paragraphs. Contrary to findings on smaller textual units such as word associations (Griffiths, Tenenbaum, & Steyvers, 2007), our results suggest that when single paragraphs are compared, simple nonreductive models (word overlap and vector space) can provide better similarity estimates than more complex models (LSA, Topic Model, SpNMF, (...) and CSM). Second, various methods of corpus creation were explored to facilitate the semantic models’ similarity estimates. Removing numeric and single characters, and also truncating document length improved performance. Automated construction of smaller Wikipedia-based corpora proved to be very effective, even improving upon the performance of corpora that had been chosen for the domain. Model performance was further improved by augmenting corpora with dataset paragraphs. (shrink)

The Central Bank of China is testing its Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) in the cities of Shenzhen, Suzhou, Chengdu and Xunan with the involvement of four large state-owned banks in the...

In Book 2 of The Peloponnesian War, the ancient Greek historian Thucydides describes the Plague of Athens which killed an estimated 75,000 people in 430 BC, the second year of the war. Thucydides i...

This essay discusses the role of new mechanical devices put forward in the seventeenth century in anatomy and pathology, showing how several of those devices were promptly deployed in anatomical investigations. I also discuss the role of dead bodies as boundary objects between living bodies and machines, highlighting their problematic status in experimentation and vivisection.

In this article we argue that Norbert Wiener, the mathematician and founder of cybernetics, can be considered a philosophical pragmatist. The article outlines his open yet limited relativism, his voluntary finitist theodicy, his reconfiguring of the divide between biology and technology, and his conception of message as organization. We argue these points resonate both with the thinking of Peirce, James and Royce and with ongoing problems in communication theory, especially the reconsideration of transmission.

This collection explores, in Adorno's description, `philosophy directed against philosophy'. The essays cover all aspects of Benjamin's writings, from his early work in the philosophy of art and language, through to the concept of history. The experience of time and the destruction of false continuity are identified as the key themes in Benjamin's understanding of history.

A number of recent discussions have argued that George Price's equationfor representing evolutionary change is a powerful and illuminatingtool, especially in the context of debates about multiple levels ofselection. Our paper dissects Price's equation in detail, and comparesit to another statistical tool: the calculation and comparison ofaverage fitnesses. The relations between Price's equation and equationsfor evolutionary change using average fitness are closer than issometimes supposed. The two approaches achieve a similar kind ofstatistical summary of one generation of change, and they (...) achieve thisvia a similar loss of information about the underlying fitnessstructure. (shrink)

This collection explores, in Adorno's description, `philosophy directed against philosophy'. The essays cover all aspects of Benjamin's writings, from his early work in the philosophy of art and language, through to the concept of history. The experience of time and the destruction of false continuity are identified as the key themes in Benjamin's understanding of history.

Michael A. Peters Beijing Normal UniversityDeclinism is back in fashion again. It is now a common and persistent source of historical reflection that has been a constant theme since the first Chris...

Umberto Eco argues that a mirror image is not a sign. At best it is a double, a thing that ceases to be once the reflected object is removed. Harry Mulisch narratively suggests that mirror images function metaphorically as gateways between human suffering and the divine. And interestingly, science employs mirrors and mirror images both to turn our gaze upwards and to show us reflections of our place in the cosmos. Tying together Eco's notion of the double, Mulisch's insistence that (...) mirror images reflect humanity's construction of the divine, and the Giant Magellan Telescope Project's cosmic images, it is my contention that modern, telescopic mirror images are much more than snapshots of the cosmos. They are constructions of human and divine meaning that—signifying—pose the question, what is reflected: the cosmos or humanity? (shrink)

The World Health Organization has been subjected to serious criticism for its handling of the COVID-19 virus, specifically that it failed to act decisively to stop the global outbreak and tha...

Formal methods developed for modeling levels of selection problems have recently been applied to the investigation of major evolutionary transitions. We discuss two new tools of this kind. First, the ‘near-variant test’ can be used to compare the causal adequacy of predictively equivalent representations. Second, ‘state-variable gestalt-switching’ can be used to gain a useful dual perspective on evolutionary processes that involve both higher and lower level populations.

Deaths of Despair (DoD), or mortality resulting from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-related liver disease, have been rising steadily in the United States over the last several decades. In 2020, a record 186,763 annual despair-related deaths were documented, contributing to the longest sustained decline in US life expectancy since 1915–1918. This forum feature considers how health humanities disciplines might fruitfully engage with this era-defining public health catastrophe and help society better understand and respond to the crisis.

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Adaptive training adjusts a training task with the goal of improving learning outcomes. Adaptive training has been shown to improve human performance in attention, working memory capacity, and motor control tasks. Additionally, correlations have been observed between neural EEG spectral features and the performance of some cognitive tasks. This relationship suggests some EEG features may be useful in adaptive training regimens. Here, we anticipated that adding a neural measure into a behavioral-based adaptive training system would improve human performance on a (...) subsequent transfer task. We designed, developed, and conducted a between-subjects study of 44 participants comparing three training regimens: Single Item Fixed Difficulty, Behaviorally Adaptive Training, and Combined Adaptive Training using both behavioral and EEG measures. Results showed a statistically significant transfer task performance advantage of the CAT-based system relative to SIFD and BAT systems of 6 and 9 percentage points, respectively. Our research shows a promising pathway for designing closed-loop BCI systems based on both users' behavioral performance and neural signals for augmenting human performance. (shrink)

This article introduces and defines the Health in All Policies concept and examines existing state legislation, with a focus on California. The article starts with an overview of HiAP and then analyzes the status of HiAP legislation, specifically addressing variations across states. Finally, the article describes California's HiAP approach and discusses how communities can apply a HiAP framework not only to improve health outcomes and advance health equity, but also to counteract existing laws and policies that contribute to health inequities.

Le visage est-il un phénomène simple ou complexe? Serait-il juste de le définir comme cet aspect de l’être humain qui dépasse tout effort de compréhension et de totalisation, ou bien y a-t-il d’autres caractéristiques de ce phénomène qu’il faut inclure dans toute définition ou description du visage? Le visage est un événement fondamental. Parmi les multiples manières d’approcher l’être, de se rapporter...

A model of “ephemeral” population structure is presented that applies not only to biological systems in which discrete groups form but also to networks without group boundaries. The evolution of altruistic behaviors is discussed. Nonrandom interaction and nonlinear fitness structures are modeled; together, these factors can produce stable polymorphisms of altruistic and selfish types, as well as bistability. Empirical applications of the model may be found in microbes, marine invertebrates, annual plants, and other organisms.

This paper explores relationships between environment and education after the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of philosophy of education in a new key developed by Michael Peters and the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia. The paper is collectively written by 15 authors who responded to the question: Who remembers Greta Thunberg? Their answers are classified into four main themes and corresponding sections. The first section, ‘As we bake the earth, let's try and bake it from scratch’, gathers wider (...) philosophical considerations about the intersection between environment, education, and the pandemic. The second section, ‘Bump in the road or a catalyst for structural change?’, looks more closely into issues pertaining to education. The third section, ‘If you choose to fail us, we will never forgive you’, focuses to Greta Thunberg’s messages and their responses. The last section, ‘Towards a new normal’, explores future scenarios and develops recommendations for critical emancipatory action. The concluding part brings these insights together, showing that resulting synergy between the answers offers much more then the sum of articles’ parts. With its ethos of collectivity, interconnectedness, and solidarity, philosophy of education in a new key is a crucial tool for development of post-pandemic education. (shrink)

Wright’s “adaptive landscape” has been influential in evolutionary thinking but controversial, especially because the landscape that organisms encounter is altered by the evolutionary process itsel...

ABSTRACT:A wide range of research uses patterns of genetic variation to infer genetic similarity between individuals, typically referred to as genetic ancestry. This research includes inference of human demographic history, understanding the genetic architecture of traits, and predicting disease risk. Researchers are not just structuring an intellectual inquiry when using genetic ancestry, they are also creating analytical frameworks with broader societal ramifications. This essay presents an ethics framework in the spirit of virtue ethics for these researchers: rather than focus on (...) rule following, the framework is designed to build researchers’ capacities to react to the ethical dimensions of their work. The authors identify one overarching principle of intellectual freedom and responsibility, noting that freedom in all its guises comes with responsibility, and they identify and define four principles that collectively uphold researchers’ intellectual responsibility: truthfulness, justice and fairness, anti-racism, and public beneficence. Researchers should bring their practices into alignment with these principles, and to aid this, the authors name three common ways research practices infringe these principles, suggest a step-by-step process for aligning research choices with the principles, provide rules of thumb for achieving alignment, and give a worked case. The essay concludes by identifying support needed by researchers to act in accord with the proposed framework. (shrink)

The Deaf culture in the United States is a unique culture that is not widely understood. To members of the Deaf community in the United States, deafness is not viewed as a disease or pathology to be treated or cured; instead it is seen as a difference in human experience. Members of this community do not hide their deafness; instead they take great pride in their Deaf identity. The Deaf culture in the United States is very communitarian not individualistic. Mary (...) Beth and Dominic are a married couple in their late 20s who are genetically deaf. They are active members in the Deaf community and work as advocates for individuals who are deaf, family members of Deaf people and sign language interpreters who identify with the Deaf culture. Mary Beth and Dominic approach the fertility clinic with a request that they only want a child with the genetic gene for deafness. They would want the embryos that do not have the gene to be destroyed. This would entail creating a child who would have the gene for deafness. Medically and ethically, should the fertility clinic agree to the couple’s request? The authors argue that the couple's request should be denied and provide reasons for it from the perspectives of foundational and clinical ethics. (shrink)

An ideal vision model accounts for behavior and neurophysiology in both naturalistic conditions and designed lab experiments. Unlike psychological theories, artificial neural networks (ANNs) actually perform visual tasks and generate testable predictions for arbitrary inputs. These advantages enable ANNs to engage the entire spectrum of the evidence. Failures of particular models drive progress in a vibrant ANN research program of human vision.

This dissertation examines the psychology of moral judgment and its implications for normative ethics and metaethics. Recent empirical findings in moral psychology, such as the impact of emotions, intuitions, and situational factors on moral judgments, have sparked a debate about whether ordinary moral judgments are systematically error-prone. Some philosophers, such as Peter Singer and Joshua Greene, argue that these findings challenge the reliability of moral intuitions and support more "reasoned", consequentialist approaches over deontological ones. The first part of the dissertation (...) reviews these provocative findings and the philosophical reactions to them, which often invoke the notion of 'moral relevance' - the idea that some factors shaping moral judgments are morally irrelevant. The second part develops a psychological account of moral relevance, drawing on theories of the moral domain, the role of emotions, and models of moral cognition. This account reveals the complex interplay of intuitive and reasoned processes in generating impressions of moral relevance. The final part reevaluates the philosophical discussions in light of this psychological understanding. It contends that the evolutionary background of moral intuitions does not necessarily render them inadequate, and that both deontological and consequentialist judgments likely depend on evolved intuitions to a significant degree. Furthermore, the tendency to dismiss certain influences on moral judgment as irrelevant can itself be explained psychologically. Considering the psychological account presented, mind-independent accounts of morality become less plausible. The dissertation concludes that while empirical moral psychology reveals important constraints on normative theorizing, it does not decisively favor consequentialism over deontology. To assess the significance of empirical-scientific findings for ethics, a nuanced understanding of the origins of moral judgments is nevertheless indispensable. (shrink)