This paper presents a theoretical study of the binary oppositions underlying the mechanisms of natural computation understood as dynamical processes on natural information morphologies. Of special interest are the oppositions of discrete vs. continuous, structure vs. process, and differentiation vs. integration. The framework used is that of computing nature, where all natural processes at different levels of organisation are computations over informational structures. The interactions at different levels of granularity/organisation in nature, and the character of the phenomena that unfold through (...) those interactions, are modeled from the perspective of an observing agent. This brings us to the movement from binary oppositions to dynamic networks built upon mutually related binary oppositions, where each node has several properties. (shrink)

This paper connects information with computation and cognition via concept of agents that appear at variety of levels of organization of physical/chemical/cognitive systems – from elementary particles to atoms, molecules, life-like chemical systems, to cognitive systems starting with living cells, up to organisms and ecologies. In order to obtain this generalized framework, concepts of information, computation and cognition are generalized. In this framework, nature can be seen as informational structure with computational dynamics, where an (info-computational) agent is needed for the (...) potential information of the world to actualize. Starting from the definition of information as the difference in one physical system that makes a difference in another physical system – which combines Bateson and Hewitt’s definitions, the argument is advanced for natural computation as a computational model of the dynamics of the physical world, where information processing is constantly going on, on a variety of levels of organization. This setting helps us to elucidate the relationships between computation, information, agency and cognition, within the common conceptual framework, with special relevance for biology and robotics. (shrink)

The United States is one of the most charitable nations, yet comprises some of the most materialistic citizens in the world. Interestingly, little is known about how the consumer trait of materialism, as well as the opposing moral trait of gratitude, influences charitable giving. We address this gap in the literature by theorizing and empirically testing that the effects of these consumer traits on charitable behavior can be explained by diverse motivations. We discuss the theoretical implications, along with implications for (...) charitable organizations, and offer suggestions for future research. (shrink)

In this piece, I propose a reading of Plato’s Gorgias that pays special attention to the role that the fictional audience plays in the unfolding of the dialogue. To this end, I use some of the insights that Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts–Tyteca conveyed in their seminal work, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation in order to argue that thinking about the way in which Socrates’ arguments are shaped by the different audiences that Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles aim to (...) address and represent provides us with a new hermeneutical understanding of what is at stake in each of the different interactions Socrates engages in throughout the dialogue. In unpacking the way in which Socrates appropriates Gorgias’ particular audience, transforms Polus’ universal audience, and challenges Callicles’ elite audience, I provide an outline of the difficulties that Plato’s Socrates has to overcome in order to achieve the ‘community of minds’ that Perelman and Olbrechts–Tyteca identify as the bedrock of fruitful argumentation. Having done this, in the last section I turn to Plato’s Phaedrus, for the purpose of making evident that thinking about Plato’s deployment of rhetorical audiences is a crucial step in the effort to expose the implicit continuity that links the discussion of rhetoric delivered by the Gorgias to that of the Phaedrus. (shrink)

Among ethicists and engineers within robotics there is an ongoing discussion as to whether ethical robots are possible or even desirable. We answer both of these questions in the positive, based on an extensive literature study of existing arguments. Our contribution consists in bringing together and reinterpreting pieces of information from a variety of sources. One of the conclusions drawn is that artifactual morality must come in degrees and depend on the level of agency, autonomy and intelligence of the machine. (...) Moral concerns for agents such as intelligent search machines are relatively simple, while highly intelligent and autonomous artifacts with significant impact and complex modes of agency must be equipped with more advanced ethical capabilities. Systems like cognitive robots are being developed that are expected to become part of our everyday lives in future decades. Thus, it is necessary to ensure that their behaviour is adequate. In an analogy with artificial intelligence, which is the ability of a machine to perform activities that would require intelligence in humans, artificial morality is considered to be the ability of a machine to perform activities that would require morality in humans. The capacity for artificial (artifactual) morality, such as artifactual agency, artifactual responsibility, artificial intentions, artificial (synthetic) emotions, etc., come in varying degrees and depend on the type of agent. As an illustration, we address the assurance of safety in modern High Reliability Organizations through responsibility distribution. In the same way that the concept of agency is generalized in the case of artificial agents, the concept of moral agency, including responsibility, is generalized too. We propose to look at artificial moral agents as having functional responsibilities within a network of distributed responsibilities in a socio-technological system. This does not take away the responsibilities of the other stakeholders in the system, but facilitates an understanding and regulation of such networks. It should be pointed out that the process of development must assume an evolutionary form with a number of iterations because the emergent properties of artifacts must be tested in real world situations with agents of increasing intelligence and moral competence. We see this paper as a contribution to the macro-level Requirement Engineering through discussion and analysis of general requirements for design of ethical robots. (shrink)

This article aims to give an overview of Jewish archives and archival sources in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Besides describing significant existing collections, the article looks into ongoing archival projects, digitizing and infrastructure programs, and maps out future challenges.

Notwithstanding universities’ many laudable aims, incidents of serious bullying, academic harassment and sexual harassment in academic settings are reported with increasing regularity globally. However, the human rights violations involved in bullying and academic harassment have not received attention by the literature. In this article, we pierce the veil of silence surrounding university environments and provide a systematic account of the breaches of international and European human rights law involved in academic bullying and harassment. By adopting a socio-legal lens, we shed (...) light onto such practices and tactics, the breaches of specific human rights and norms and the reluctance of states and regulators to intervene in what is perceived to be universities’ ‘sovereign’ sphere of jurisdiction in order to prevent human rights’ violations and to protect the victims of human rights abuse. We call for a multi-faceted and multi-agency approach to tackle academic bullying and harassment, and make a number of institutional and policy recommendations to ensure universities’ compliance with human rights standards and the effective protection of academics under attack. (shrink)

Professional musicians are expected to perform at a very high level of proficiency. Many times, this high standard is associated with perfectionism, which has been shown to prompt both adaptive and maladaptive motivational dynamics and outcomes among music students. The question about how perfectionism interplays with motivational dynamics in music students is still unanswered and research within this line is scarce, especially in Latin America. In the light of Self-Determination Theory, this cross-sectional study investigated the relationship between the perceptions of (...) motivational context, basic psychological needs, perfectionism, and flourishing in University music students from Lima, Peru. We performed a path analysis testing a model in which motivational teaching styles predicted both, perfectionism and flourishing via need satisfaction and frustration. The model's fit indices were ideal [χ2 = 7.48, p = 0.300, CFI = 0.998, TLI = 0.992, RMSEA = 0.021, SRMR =0.040]. In this model, perceived autonomy supportive style predicted need satisfaction positively and need frustration negatively; perceived controlling teaching style did not predict need satisfaction nor frustration. In turn, need satisfaction positively predicted adaptive perfectionism and flourishing; whereas, need frustration predicted maladaptive perfectionism. These results shed light on the relevance of perfectionism in the psychology of higher music education students. Lastly, we highlight the importance of autonomy support in fostering adaptive high standards and flourishing in music learning. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence is a general-purpose technology (GPT), term given to technologies that shape an entire era and reorient innovations by reconfiguring the economy’s logic and functioning and bringing in new business models. AI offers unprecedented opportunities and risks. The benefits of AI are extraordinary, as are its potential harms. Potential damage does not have the same degree of problematization, since the intensity and extent of the damage varies according to the domain and the object of application. To address the scale (...) of this challenge, regulation is necessary but not sufficient. Standards, unwritten codes of compliance and arbitration procedures, supervision and auditability, AI governance, international agreements, compliance with current local and global standards and laws. All of this needs to be integrated. Society seems to have no alternative to facing the challenges of at least mitigating the damage already identified and trying to predict future damage in advance. The purpose of this article is to encourage reflection regarding the main initiatives that are available to society to protect its citizens and organizations from the potential harm caused by AI models, vis-à-vis the technology’s own limits to act in ethical and legal compliance. (shrink)

The relationship between food and religion is a lived activity formed by the dynamics of both tradition and adaption. Religious commitments to food are influenced by various factors, ranging from personal spirituality and experiences to social patterns of belonging, ethical, polit­ical and doctrinal convictions. _Challah_, _gefilte_ _fish_, _blintzes_ – these are just a few of the traditional Finnish Jewish meals that are still prepared by members of the community. The originally Eastern European dishes are one of the last living links (...) that connect assimilated Finnish Jews with their Orthodox Jewish ancestors mainly from Russia, Poland, Belarus, and Lithuania. The current paper aims to present the conceptions and reflections relating to boundaries of identity connected with the multi-ethnic culinary traditions of Jews living in Finland as well as their ways of coping with the requirements of _kashrut_. The article is based on ethnographic data from interviews as well as personal encounters, informal conversations and home visits. (shrink)

The framing of the debate concerning sovereignty in terms of the dualism of retention or rejection conceals the floating character of sovereignty and constrains the capacity of the state to mutate, adapt and respond adequately to the diverse and complex processes which range in, through and above it. The paper develops the idea of floating sovereignty by putting forward four main propositions: (i) sovereignty's historical entanglement with statehood makes it unsuitable for non‐state political organisations; (ii) although the state has been (...) the necessary condition for sovereignty, the latter is no longer necessary for the evolution of the state; (iii) the traditional ideological function performed by sovereignty, namely the legitimation of state power, could be performed by other organizing principles which prioritize governmental efficiency over territorial extent and democratic criteria over nationalist ones; (iv) this means that the state will no longer be in a position to command the loyalty of its citizens but it would have to purchase it through its capacity to meet social needs, to fulfil its basic functions and through the normative qualities of its institutions and policies. Three institutional designs in core areas of ‘high politics’, that is, the fields of determination of nationality, immigration policy and foreign and security policy show how floating sovereignty could be implemented. (shrink)

This is a short presentation by the Guest Editors of the series of Special Issues of the journal _Philosophies_ under the common title “Contemporary Natural Philosophy and Philosophies” in which we present Part 2. The series will continue, and the call for contributions to the next Special Issue will appear shortly.

What is reality for an agent? What is minimal cognition? How does the morphology of a cognitive agent affect cognition? These are still open questions among scientists and philosophers. In this chapter we propose the idea of info-computational nature as a framework for answering those questions. Within the info-computational framework, information is defined as a structure, and computation as the dynamics of information. To an agent, nature therefore appears as an informational structure with computational dynamics. Both information and computation in (...) this context have broader meaning than in everyday use, and both are necessarily grounded in physical implementation. Evolution of increasingly complex living agents is understood as a process of morphological computation driven by agents’ interactions with the environment. It is a process much more complex than random variation; instead the mechanisms of change are morphological computational processes of self-organisation. Reality for an agent emerges as a result of interactions with the environment together with internal information processing. Following Maturana and Varela, we take cognition to be the process of living of an organism, and thus it appears on different levels of complexity, from cellular via organismic to social. The simpler the agent, the simpler its “reality” defined by the network of networks of info-computational processes, which constitute its cognition. The debated topic of consciousness takes its natural place in this framework, as a process of information integration that we suggest naturally evolved in organisms with a nervous system. Computing nature/pancomputationalism is sometimes confused with panpsychism or claimed to necessarily imply panpsychism, which we show is not the case. Even though we focus on natural systems in this chapter, the info-computational approach is general and can be used to model both biological and artifactual cognitive agents. (shrink)

The ‘reinvention’ of nationhood in theory and the reform of British naturalization rules in praxis have been unable to address satisfactorily the issue of unjust exclusion and to make naturalization law and citizenship more compatible with democratic ideals. This has much to do with the fact that the discourse of new patriotism and the reconfiguration of national citizenship have inbuilt limits. In examining the ‘new’ discourse of patriotism in its various shades, I argue that it is inconsistent and unpersuasive. Neither (...) the rehabilitation of civic nationalism under ‘republican patriotism’, nor ‘constitutional patriotism’, nor ‘rooted patriotism’ succeed in transforming the nationality model of citizenship in order to render it more compatible with contemporary developments and with cultural pluralism. Similarly, the three models of citizenship developed by the literature, namely, postnational, transnational and multicultural citizenship remain rooted within the civic nationalist trajectory. Instead of arguing for the liberalization of naturalization requirements and the ensuing pluralization of citizenship, I put forward an argument as to how the nationality model of citizenship might be transcended by developing a model of civic registration. By contrasting this model with the Labour Government’s reforms in the fields of naturalization and citizenship, I argue that the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 places too much emphasis on social cohesion, thereby overlooking that a sense of belonging to community develops with inclusion in society and politics rather than as a result of citizenship ceremonies and language proficiency tests. (shrink)

Discourses and the ideas, perceptions and templates upon which they are based exert a powerful influence on law-making, push policy-making in a precise direction and determine operational action and outcomes. British counterterrorist law and policy post 9/11 is heavily mediated through a conceptual filter that evokes a siege mode of democracy, which deliberately displaces the traditional rights-based model, and a security narrative based on a double asymmetry. By blending a discursive theoretical approach with an institutionalist perspective, the discussion examines the (...) siege mode of democracy and its implications and the double asymmetry underpinning the Government's framing of the threat and of the means to counter it. Both features of the Government's security discourse are critical in explaining not only British counter-terrorist legislation and policy evolution in the 21st century and the controversial operation ‘Kratos’ adopted by ACPO in 2002, but also their official depiction as necessary, and singular, responses to some structured necessity and the associated logic of ‘no alternative’. (shrink)

This book proposes a new institutional constructivist model, for social scientific and legal enquiries, based on the interrelations within the social and political world and the application of change in EU laws and politics. Much of the research conducted in social sciences and law examines the diverse activities of individuals and collectivities and the role of institutions in the social and political world. Although there exist many vantage points from which one can gain entry into understanding how agents in the (...) world act, interact, shape and bear the world, socio-legal scientific epistemology has found monism and dualism to be convincing models. This book argues that current models do not capture the complexity of our micro-worlds, macro-worlds and meso-worlds. Nor can they account for the forms and patterns of socio-legal change. Mind, time and change are brought together in an attempt to contribute to socio-legal epistemology and to enhance its toolkit. (shrink)

A life colonization is produced due to systemic demands that as a sign of the present-day life invades it with its logical functioning throwing moral and ethical values out either in private life or in public opinion. It is also important to point out a great increase of many pathologies in private..

The proposal of the work centers on pointing out some of the relationships between the concepts that refer to the processes of socialization and subjectivation in its articulation with the understanding. For this end, a brief reference to them is made from a multidisciplinary and transversal approac..

v. 1. Nae Ionescu -- v. 2. Mircea Eliade -- v. 3. Octav Onicescu -- v. 4, pt. 1-2. Noica şi Securitatea.

In Archive Fever, Derrida opens a critical perspective on the status of the trace as that which remains with his reading of Gradiva, the Pompeian fantasy woman who is supposed to have left her singular toe-print in the ash of Vesuvius. This article returns to the figure of Gradiva as emblem for the non-coincidence of origin and trace, in order to outline the archival aspects of Gunter Demnig's Stolperstein-project, a large-scale, decentralized memorial commemorating those deported under National Socialism. Returning to (...) the site of a missed encounter, Demnig attempts to reinscribe the trace of those who vanished there. But as his project grows, it also shows signs of archive fever, betraying a desire to take possession of the trace of the other, and revealing how, as Derrida describes, the archive does not exist without the political control of memory. (shrink)

Populistic political discourse often portrays ethnic minorities as threats to the majority society. However, the deeper characteristics of perceived threats have not been sufficiently empirically investigated. The goal of this study is to identify the similarities and differences in intergroup threats perceived by Slovak majority from Roma, Muslims, and ethnic Hungarian minorities. The participants included 1244 adults who were instructed to write the first five associations that came to mind when thinking about one of the minorities. Our findings indicate that (...) power threat was dominant from the Hungarian minority and safety threat from the Roma and Muslim minorities. Moreover, the safety threat from the Roma minority related mainly to theft and violence, while from Muslims it was terrorism. Mapping and addressing specific threats associated with different minorities can help explain misperceptions and reduce prejudice against them. (shrink)

In this paper we analyze methodological and philosophical implications of algorithmic aspects of unconventional computation. At first, we describe how the classical algorithmic universe developed and analyze why it became closed in the conventional approach to computation. Then we explain how new models of algorithms turned the classical closed algorithmic universe into the open world of algorithmic constellations, allowing higher flexibility and expressive power, supporting constructivism and creativity in mathematical modeling. As Goedels undecidability theorems demonstrate, the closed algorithmic universe restricts (...) essential forms of mathematical cognition. In contrast, the open algorithmic universe, and even more the open world of algorithmic constellations, remove such restrictions and enable new, richer understanding of computation. (shrink)