Robert Rosen has proposed several characteristics to distinguish “simple” physical systems (or “mechanisms”) from “complex” systems, such as living systems, which he calls “organisms”. The Memory Evolutive Systems (MES) introduced by the authors in preceding papers are shown to provide a mathematical model, based on category theory, which satisfies his characteristics of organisms, in particular the merger of the Aristotelian causes. Moreover they identify the condition for the emergence of objects and systems of increasing complexity. As an application, the cognitive (...) system of an animal is modeled by the “MES of cat-neurons” obtained by successive complexifications of his neural system, in which the emergence of higher order cognitive processes gives support to Mario Bunge’s “emergentist monism.”. (shrink)

We comment on the preceding reviews of our book “ Memory Evolutive Systems ”, discussing the improvements proposed by some of the reviewers and answering to critics of others, in particular on the use of category theory for modeling living systems.

The INBIOSA project brings together a group of experts across many disciplines who believe that science requires a revolutionary transformative step in order to address many of the vexing challenges presented by the world. It is INBIOSA’s purpose to enable the focused collaboration of an interdisciplinary community of original thinkers. This paper sets out the case for support for this effort. The focus of the transformative research program proposal is biology-centric. We admit that biology to date has been more fact-oriented (...) and less theoretical than physics. However, the key leverageable idea is that careful extension of the science of living systems can be more effectively applied to some of our most vexing modern problems than the prevailing scheme, derived from abstractions in physics. While these have some universal application and demonstrate computational advantages, they are not theoretically mandated for the living. A new set of mathematical abstractions derived from biology can now be similarly extended. This is made possible by leveraging new formal tools to understand abstraction and enable computability. [The latter has a much expanded meaning in our context from the one known and used in computer science and biology today, that is "by rote algorithmic means", since it is not known if a living system is computable in this sense (Mossio et al., 2009).] Two major challenges constitute the effort. The first challenge is to design an original general system of abstractions within the biological domain. The initial issue is descriptive leading to the explanatory. There has not yet been a serious formal examination of the abstractions of the biological domain. What is used today is an amalgam; much is inherited from physics (via the bridging abstractions of chemistry) and there are many new abstractions from advances in mathematics (incentivized by the need for more capable computational analyses). Interspersed are abstractions, concepts and underlying assumptions “native” to biology and distinct from the mechanical language of physics and computation as we know them. A pressing agenda should be to single out the most concrete and at the same time the most fundamental process-units in biology and to recruit them into the descriptive domain. Therefore, the first challenge is to build a coherent formal system of abstractions and operations that is truly native to living systems. Nothing will be thrown away, but many common methods will be philosophically recast, just as in physics relativity subsumed and reinterpreted Newtonian mechanics. -/- This step is required because we need a comprehensible, formal system to apply in many domains. Emphasis should be placed on the distinction between multi-perspective analysis and synthesis and on what could be the basic terms or tools needed. The second challenge is relatively simple: the actual application of this set of biology-centric ways and means to cross-disciplinary problems. In its early stages, this will seem to be a “new science”. This White Paper sets out the case of continuing support of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for transformative research in biology and information processing centered on paradigm changes in the epistemological, ontological, mathematical and computational bases of the science of living systems. Today, curiously, living systems cannot be said to be anything more than dissipative structures organized internally by genetic information. There is not anything substantially different from abiotic systems other than the empirical nature of their robustness. We believe that there are other new and unique properties and patterns comprehensible at this bio-logical level. The report lays out a fundamental set of approaches to articulate these properties and patterns, and is composed as follows. -/- Sections 1 through 4 (preamble, introduction, motivation and major biomathematical problems) are incipient. Section 5 describes the issues affecting Integral Biomathics and Section 6 -- the aspects of the Grand Challenge we face with this project. Section 7 contemplates the effort to formalize a General Theory of Living Systems (GTLS) from what we have today. The goal is to have a formal system, equivalent to that which exists in the physics community. Here we define how to perceive the role of time in biology. Section 8 describes the initial efforts to apply this general theory of living systems in many domains, with special emphasis on crossdisciplinary problems and multiple domains spanning both “hard” and “soft” sciences. The expected result is a coherent collection of integrated mathematical techniques. Section 9 discusses the first two test cases, project proposals, of our approach. They are designed to demonstrate the ability of our approach to address “wicked problems” which span across physics, chemistry, biology, societies and societal dynamics. The solutions require integrated measurable results at multiple levels known as “grand challenges” to existing methods. Finally, Section 10 adheres to an appeal for action, advocating the necessity for further long-term support of the INBIOSA program. -/- The report is concluded with preliminary non-exclusive list of challenging research themes to address, as well as required administrative actions. The efforts described in the ten sections of this White Paper will proceed concurrently. Collectively, they describe a program that can be managed and measured as it progresses. (shrink)

Perhaps the most distinct question in science throughout the ages has been the one of perceivable reality, treated both in physics and philosophy. Reality is acting upon us, and we, and life in general, are acting upon reality. Potentiality, found both in quantum reality and in the activity of life, plays a key role. In quantum reality observation turns potentiality into reality. Again, life computes possibilities in various ways based on past actions, and acts on the basis of these computations. (...) This book is about a new approach to biology. Its subtitle suggests a perpetual movement and interplay between two elusive aspects of modern science — reality/matter and potentiality/mind, between physics and biology — both captured and triggered by mathematics — to understand and explain emergence, development and life all the way up to consciousness. But what is the real/potential difference between living and non-living matter? How does time in potentiality differ from time in reality? What we need to understand these differences is an integrative approach. This book contemplates how to encircle life to obtain a formal system, equivalent to the ones in physics. Integral Biomathics attempts to explore the interplay between reality and potentiality. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Info-computational Constructivism and Cognition” by Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic. Upshot: I propose a mathematical approach to the framework developed in Dodig-Crnkovic’s target article. It points to an important property of natural computation, called the multiplicity principle (MP), which allows the development of increasingly complex cognitive processes and knowledge. While local dynamics are classically computable, a consequence of the MP is that the global dynamics is not, thus raising the problem of developing more elaborate computations, perhaps with (...) the help of Turing oracles. (shrink)

Category theory has been proposed as the ultimate algebraic model for biology. We review the Ehresmann–Vanbremeersch theory in the context of other mathematical approaches.

Call generalism about children’s and adults’ wellbeing the thesis that the same theory of wellbeing applies to both children and adults. Our goal is to examine whether generalism is true. While this question has not received much attention in the past, it has recently been suggested that generalism is likely to be false and that we need to elaborate different theories of children’s and adults’ wellbeing. In this paper, we defend generalism against the main objections it faces and make a (...) positive case for it. (shrink)

With their landmark architectures, exhibitions and museums of science and technology partake in the spatial inscription of science in twentieth century landscapes. Unlike other beacons of progress, exhibitions and museums of science and technology double up, inside, as material arrangements of objects, visuals and texts aiming to confer meaning onto the modern world. They both embody and seek to order the spectacle of modernity while often being deployed with the aim of promoting particular visions of social and material progress. An (...) approach sensitive to the material, spatial, and experiential dimensions of displaying science and technology suggests that exhibitions and museums were in the twentieth century crucial sites for reflecting upon and promoting particular futures. (shrink)

Dance anthropologists and ethnomusicologists are trained to treat the labels ‘dance’ and ‘music’ with caution, because the terms carry preconceptions that may mask significant aspects of the structured movement/sound systems they study. Yet many talk about ‘the body’ – the medium through which these systems come into being – as something given and ‘true’, without investigating its emic conceptualizations or looking into the implications these may have in terms of how music and dance are experienced. The article investigates the dancing (...) bodies of western ballet dancers and of Tiwi dancers of northern Australia. The latter have an extensive vocabulary for body parts, but no word for ‘body’ as a bounded entity, comparable to the ‘body’ conceptualized by ballet dancers. The article argues that for the Tiwi landscape and human bodies are unavoidably tied together and that the dancers incarnate both land and cosmology. While specific parts have a concrete practical existence, the whole body expands into the landscape so that the landscape becomes flesh. Through the aesthetic transformation of dancing, dancers and land become one, and life is sustained and the land revitalized. (shrink)

Museums are safe spaces for the objects they hold and for the persons that visit them, providing environments that can function in therapeutic ways. Within the wide range of objects, there is enough diversity to help guests discover what similarities they have with others as well as what makes them unique as individuals. Within exhibits, individuals can explore themselves through the reactions they have to particular pieces, through the observation of what holds their attention within the environment, and through the (...) awareness and development of their contemplative mind. Museums can introduce transpersonal information, add information to previous transpersonal experiences, and even promote expanded states of awareness. With direction, guests can use museums to learn about themselves, thus optimizing the therapeutic potentials of these institutions. (shrink)

In recent years, many scholars have offered innovative accounts of social categories such as gender, race, and disability. By contrast, comparatively little work has been done on the category of children. The goal of our paper is to offer a new account of what children are. We start by discussing the two main accounts that have been put forward so far in the literature: naturalistic accounts and normative accounts. According to the former, to be a child is a matter of (...) possessing, or lacking, some ‘natural’ and ‘objective’ properties. According to the latter, to be a child is to possess a particular normative status. We argue that both naturalistic and normative accounts are subject to a variety of objections. We then propose our own social constructivist account. According to it, to be a child in any given society is to be regarded by the dominant ideology of that society as the target of a set of broadly paternalistic norms, in virtue of the possession of a cluster of natural properties such that, according to the dominant ideology of that society, it is justified to subject that individual to such norms. We conclude our paper by showing that our account meets the criteria of success for an account of what it is to be a child and by addressing some objections. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that the phenomenon of predation is the source of several problems for Donaldson and Kymlicka's account of our duties towards wild and liminal animals. According to them, humans should adopt a general policy of non-intervention with respect to predatory behaviour involving wild and liminal animals. They justify this recommendation by appealing to the status of those animals as, respectively, members of sovereign communities and denizens of human-animal societies. Our goal is not to question their recommendation, (...) but to challenge the reasons given in its support. On the one hand, we argue that, insofar as wild animal communities are incapable of dealing with massive predation, they do not possess the competence required for sovereignty. Moreover, we argue that, even if we leave the issue of competence aside, attributing sovereignty rights to communities including both predators and preys may not be the best way to protect wild animals’ fundamental interests. On the other hand, we argue that there exist two important disanalogies between human denizens and liminal animals, which render Donaldson and Kymlicka's denizenship framework problematic. We suggest that the ultimate justification for a general policy of non-intervention lies in the significant risk of causing greater harm by acting otherwise, due to our limited knowledge and resources. (shrink)

Andrée-Anne Cormier | : Cet article explore la question des implications de l’exclusion des animaux de la catégorie des sujets de justice dans le cadre du libéralisme politique de John Rawls. Plus spécifiquement, j’examine et critique les lectures de Ruth Abbey et de Robert Garner. Abbey suggère que le libéralisme politique est incompatible avec la thèse selon laquelle nous avons des devoirs moraux universels envers les animaux. Garner, pour sa part, avance que la théorie de Rawls n’autorise pas l’État libéral (...) à adopter des mesures de protection des animaux. Dans cet article, je démontre que ces lectures sont erronées, car elles sont fondées sur des interprétations du libéralisme politique qui ne sont pas plausibles. Je soutiens, d’une part, que le libéralisme politique est neutre eu égard à la question de la nature de nos devoirs moraux envers les animaux et, d’autre part, qu’il permet de justifier une gamme considérable d’interventions étatiques visant la protection des animaux. Je suggère donc que la tension entre le libéralisme politique et l’éthique animale est moins forte que ne l’affirment ces auteurs. Enfin, j’identifie des stratégies possibles, cohérentes avec le cadre théorique rawlsien, pour élargir la sphère des sujets de justice de manière à y intégrer les animaux. | : What are the implications of John Rawls’s Political Liberalism for animal ethics? In this paper, I examine Ruth Abbey’s and Robert Garner’s answers to this question. Abbey claims that Political Liberalism is incompatible with the view that there exist universal moral duties toward animals. Garner contends that Rawls’s theory cannot justify state interventions designed to protect animals. I show that these readings are based on implausible interpretations of Rawls’s theory. I argue, on the one hand, that Political Liberalism is neutral with respect to the question of the nature of our moral duties toward animals and, on the other hand, that the theory can potentially justify a significant range of state interventions in the interest of animals. This indicates that the tension between Rawls’s theory and animal ethics is less sharp than Abbey and Garner suggest. Finally, I identify possible strategies, consistent with the Rawlsian framework, for including animals among the subjects of justice. (shrink)

During the past 25 years, the words “theory of action” and “agency theory” have become key-terms in a new branch of philosophy. The themes appear to gain a centrality and influence such that one is led to think that they should cover most of philosophy, including the foundation for all of the human sciences. The number of treatises on human action and on philosophical and special-scientific theories of action is staggering. For the most part inspired by analytic philosophy, the new (...) approach threatens to take over that school’s central place on the stage of international philosophical concern. Having ousted theory of science from that position with an avalanche of analytic studies, analytic philosophy, in turn, is now being overrun by philosophy of action as supposedly suitable basis for the sciences. (shrink)

Andrée-Anne Cormier and Harry Brighouse explore the question of whether there are good reasons for schools to try and produce citizens disposed to use, and practiced in, civil discourse and behavior, and if so, what this implies for schools. First, the authors propose an account of the value (and disvalue) of civility, drawing on Cheshire Calhoun’s conception. They argue that civility is good in many circumstances, but not always. In some circumstances, it is neither beneficial nor morally required. Second, they (...) elucidate the reasons for teaching civility in schools and what they think that doing so would involve, what demands it would make on teachers, and how the aim of promoting civility would shape the structure of schools. Finally, they identify some reasons for pessimism that schools can be very successful in promoting civility. They do not think that these are conclusive reasons against teaching civility in schools, but they suggest that civility can only be taught well if educators are clear-eyed about the hurdles they will have to overcome. (shrink)

This chapter argues that school should cease to be compulsory at age 16 and that an education resource account (ERA) should be established for students who leave school at that age. The ERA would be sufficient to cover three years of full-time education. It could be linked to inflation and early school leavers could use it in accredited non-profit educational institutions at any later point in their lives. Two sets of arguments are discussed in support of the proposal. The first, (...) building on the empirical literature, focuses on efficiency and highlights the advantages of an ERA with respect to the ‘disruptive’ students issue in particular. The second set of arguments is anti-paternalistic. The chapter distinguishes three anti-paternalistic arguments: the view that individuals are the best judges of their own welfare, the idea that autonomous decision-making is a component of well-being, and a respect-based view of what renders anti-paternalism wrong. (shrink)

This article explores the question of whether it is morally permissible for the liberal state to require schools to teach religions “neutrally” to children. I examine this question through the normative analysis of Canadian Supreme Court case Loyola High School v. Quebec. I argue that it is in principle morally impermissible for the liberal state to oblige all schools to adopt a neutral approach to teaching children about religious diversity. I propose a normative framework for evaluating the legitimacy of such (...) an imposition and identify a strategy in support of accommodating schools like Loyola that does not appeal to the existence of a strong parental right to control their children’s education. (shrink)

Games may seem like a waste of time, where we struggle under artificial rules for arbitrary goals. The author suggests that the rules and goals of games are not arbitrary at all. They are a way of specifying particular modes of agency. This is what make games a distinctive art form. Game designers designate goals and abilities for the player; they shape the agential skeleton which the player will inhabit during the game. Game designers work in the medium of agency. (...) Game-playing, then, illuminates a distinctive human capacity. We can take on ends temporarily for the sake of the experience of pursuing them. Game play shows that our agency is significantly more modular and more fluid than we might have thought. It also demonstrates our capacity to take on an inverted motivational structure. Sometimes we can take on an end for the sake of the activity of pursuing that end. (shrink)

Cicero distinguishes between two forms of divination: natural and artificial divination. Most contemporary scholars assume that Cicero presents a Stoic division and some even draw far-reaching conclusions about the scientific status of divination based on this distinction. However, his justification for the division is apparently contradictory and neither fits with Stoic nor Peripatetic claims that are found elsewhere. This paper examines the exact meaning of the division and sheds light on its Stoic and Peripatetic origin. In this way, we will (...) not only be able to better understand the overall argument of Cicero’s De divinatione, but also to assess his real achievement as a philosophical author. (shrink)

In this paper I problematise quite a simple assertion: that the two major frameworks used in assessing consent to post-mortem organ donation, presumed consent and informed consent, are procedurally similar in that both are ‘default rules.’ Because of their procedural common characteristic, both rules do exclude marginalized groups from consent schemes. Yet this connection is often overlooked. Contract theory on default rules, better than bioethical arguments, can assist in choosing between these two rules. Applying contract theory to the question of (...) post-mortem organ donation suggests that the default rule should be one that goes against the wishes of the stronger party in consent decisions. (shrink)

There seems to be a deep tension between two aspects of aesthetic appreciation. On the one hand, we care about getting things right. On the other hand, we demand autonomy. We want appreciators to arrive at their aesthetic judgments through their own cognitive efforts, rather than deferring to experts. These two demands seem to be in tension; after all, if we want to get the right judgments, we should defer to the judgments of experts. The best explanation, I suggest, is (...) that aesthetic appreciation is something like a game. When we play a game, we try to win. But often, winning isn’t the point; playing is. Aesthetic appreciation involves the same flipped motivational structure: we aim at the goal of correctness, but having correct judgments isn’t the point. The point is the engaged process of interpreting, investigating, and exploring the aesthetic object. Deferring to aesthetic testimony, then, makes the same mistake as looking up the answer to a puzzle, rather than solving it for oneself. The shortcut defeats the whole point. This suggests a new account of aesthetic value: the engagement account. The primary value of the activity of aesthetic appreciation lies in the process of trying to generate correct judgments, and not in having correct judgments. -/- *There is an audio version available: look for the Soundcloud link, below.*. (shrink)

The Greek philosopher Aristotle, writing over two thousand years before Wall Street, called people who engaged in activities which did not contribute to society "parasites." In his latest work, renowned scholar Robert C. Solomon asserts that though capitalism may require capital, but it does not require, much less should it be defined by the parasites it inevitably attracts. Capitalism has succeeded not with brute strength or because it has made people rich, but because it has produced responsible citizens and--however unevenly--prosperous (...) communities. It cannot tolerate a conception of business that focuses solely on income and vulgarity while ignoring traditional virtues of responsibility, community, and integrity. Many feel that there is too much lip-service and not enough understanding of the importance of cooperation and integrity in corporate life. This book rejects the myths and metaphors of war-like competition that cloud business thinking and develops an "Aristotelean" theory of business. The author's approach emphasizes several core concepts: the corporation as community, the search for excellence, the importance of integrity and sound judgment, as well as a more cooperative and humane vision of business. Solomon stresses the virtues of honesty, trust, fairness, and compassion in the competitive business world, and confronts the problem of "moral mazes" and what he posits as its solution--moral courage. (shrink)

I propose to study one problem for epistemic dependence on experts: how to locate experts on what I will call cognitive islands. Cognitive islands are those domains for knowledge in which expertise is required to evaluate other experts. They exist under two conditions: first, that there is no test for expertise available to the inexpert; and second, that the domain is not linked to another domain with such a test. Cognitive islands are the places where we have the fewest resources (...) for evaluating experts, which makes our expert dependences particularly risky. -/- Some have argued that cognitive islands lead to the complete unusability of expert testimony: that anybody who needs expert advice on a cognitive island will be entirely unable to find it. I argue against this radical form of pessimism, but propose a more moderate alternative. I demonstrate that we have some resources for finding experts on cognitive islands, but that cognitive islands leave us vulnerable to an epistemic trap which I will call runaway echo chambers. In a runaway echo chamber, our inexpertise may lead us to pick out bad experts, which will simply reinforce our mistaken beliefs and sensibilities. (shrink)

Kant’s postulate of the immortality of the soul has received strikingly little attention among Kant scholars, and only very few have regarded it positively. This is not surprising given the numerous problems associated with his argument. However, it is not the only argument for immortality that Kant offers in his critical philosophy. There is also a second argument that differs from the one furnished in the Second Critique and can be found both in the Critique of Pure Reason and later (...) texts from the 1790s. Kant also addresses here many of the problems that interpreters have found with his postulate of immortality in both earlier and later texts. This paper considers the main difficulties associated with the postulate and proposes a coherent interpretation of Kant’s argument. I show that despite the apparent change in his approach to immortality Kant did not in fact substantially alter his position during his critical period. (shrink)

Lors d’un entretien paru dans la revue Communications (n° 37, 1983), Philippe Ariès mettait l’accent sur la difficulté qu’il y avait à écrire une histoire de la vieillesse sous ses deux aspects : celle de ses représentations, et surtout celle de ses rôles réels dans la société. Quelques historiens s’y sont toutefois risqués, tel Jean-Pierre Bois (Les vieux de Montaigne aux premières retraites, Fayard, 1989), qui préface l’ouvrage d’Elise Feller en insistant sur la nouvelle mise en perspective...

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 10, Page 28-30, October 2011.

An adequate theory of rights ought to forbid the harming of animals to promote trivial interests of humans, as is often done in the animal-user industries. But what should the rights view say about situations in which harming some animals is necessary to prevent intolerable injustices to other animals? I develop an account of respectful treatment on which, under certain conditions, it’s justified to intentionally harm some individuals to prevent serious harm to others. This can be compatible with recognizing the (...) inherent value of the ones who are harmed. My theory has important implications for contemporary moral issues in nonhuman animal ethics, such as the development of cultured meat and animal research. (shrink)