String theory promises to be able to provide us with a working theory of quantum gravity and a unified description of all fundamental forces. In string theory there are so called ‘dualities’; i.e. different theoretical formulations that are physically equivalent. In this article these dualities are investigated from a philosophical point of view. Semantic and epistemic questions relating to the problem of underdetermination of theories by data and the debate on realism concerning scientific theories are discussed. Depending on ones views (...) on semantic issues and realism different interpretations are possible of the dualities. (shrink)

This special 10th anniversary edition of the David Suzuki classic, re-examines our place in the natural world in light of sweeping environmental changes and recent advances in scientific knowledge.

This is a nontechnical overview of how various approaches to quantum gravity suggest modifications to the way we conceptualize space and time. A theory of quantum gravity is needed to reconcile quantum physics with general relativity, our best theory for gravity. The most popular approaches to quantum gravity are string theory and loop quantum gravity. So far, no approach has been empirically successful, and there is no commonly accepted theory. Thus, the conclusions presented here are tentative. Many approaches suggest that (...) space and time—or perhaps, it is better to talk about spacetime—might not be fundamental. Various views on how to think about time in quantum gravity are briefly presented. (shrink)

Business ethics should not just be a corporate code, but be implemented in the line of business as a corporate philosophy. As anexample of the above, I would like to present corporate activities of Canon, Inc. based on the “Kyosei” Initiative which I directed, especially its global development. I would like to show that these activities are ahead of the times and result in great prosperity of a corporation, and to tell my dream to increase corporations which take the same (...) types of actions based on the “Kyosei” Initiative. (shrink)

Many contemporary physicists suggest that we should take the claim that we live in a multiverse seriously. When doing this they often invoke arguments based on the controversial anthropic principle. Critics argue that this leads to untestable and unscientific theories. In this paper criteria are suggested that need to be satisfied before a multiverse theory should be considered scientifically respectable. One important point is that the multiverse is described in sufficient detail. In some cases, a multiverse theory can be testable; (...) however, to properly test a multiverse theory it is important to distinguish new predictions from explanations based on the multiverse. (shrink)

In this paper, some conceptual issues are addressed in order to make sense of what string theory is supposed to tell us about spacetime. The dualities in string theory are used as a starting point for our argumentation. We explore the consequences of a standard view towards these dualities, namely that the dual descriptions represent the same physical situation. Given this view, one has to understand string theory in a manner such that what counts as physical spacetime is based only (...) on the shared physical content—or common core—of the dual descriptions. In general such a spatiotemporal picture does not have to agree with, or be similar to, any of the ones suggested by naïve readings of the dual descriptions. However, in certain regimes or limits, one or the other of the initial dual descriptions may give a good effective description of physical spacetime. (shrink)

Well-known critics of AI such as Hubert Dreyfus and Michael Polanyi tend to confuse cybernetics with AI. Such a confusion is quite misleading and should not be overlooked. In the first place, cybernetics is not vulnerable to criticism of AI as cognitivistic and behaviouristic. In the second place, AI researchers are recommended to consider the cybernetics approach as a way of overcoming the limitations of cognitivism and behaviourism.

A collection of essays discussing the philosophy and foundations of quantum gravity. Written by leading philosophers and physicists in the field, chapters cover the important conceptual questions in the search for a quantum theory of gravity, and the current state of understanding among philosophers and physicists.

String theory has been the dominating research field in theoretical physics during the last decades. Despite the considerable time elapse, no new testable predictions have been derived by string theorists and it is understandable that doubts have been voiced. Some people have argued that it is time to give up since testability is wanting. But the majority has not been convinced and they continue to believe that string theory is the right way to go. This situation is interesting for philosophy (...) of science since it highlights several of our central issues. In this paper we will discuss string theory from a number of different perspectives in general methodology. We will also relate the realism/antirealism debate to the current status of string theory. Our goal is two-fold; both to take a look at string theory from philosophical perspectives and to use string theory as a test case for some philosophical issues. (shrink)

To become more broadly applicable, positions on AI ethics require perspectives from non-Western regions and cultures such as China and Japan. In this paper, we propose that the addition of the concept of harmony to the discussion on ethical AI would be highly beneficial due to its centrality in East Asian cultures and its applicability to the challenge of designing AI for social good. We first present a synopsis of different definitions of harmony in multiple contexts, such as music and (...) society, which reveals that the concept is, at its core, about well-balanced relationships and appropriate actions which give rise to order, balance, and aesthetically pleasing phenomena. The mediator for these well-balanced relationships isTaktwhich is an ability to act thoughtfully and sensibly according to the specific situation and to put things into proportion and order. We propose that the central challenge of building harmonizing AI is to make intelligent systems tactful and also to design and use them tactfully. For an AI system to become tactful, it needs to be able to have an advanced sensitivity to the specific contexts which it is in and their social and ethical implications and have the capability of approximately inferring the emotional and cognitive states of people with whom it is interacting. (shrink)

Since sending explicit messages can be costly, people often utilize “what is not said,” i.e., informative silence, to economize communication. This paper studies the efficient communication rule, which is fully informative while minimizing the use of explicit messages, in cooperative environments. It is shown that when the notion of context is defined as the finest mutually self-evident event that contains the current state, the efficient use of informative silence exhibits the defining property of indexicals in natural languages. While the efficient (...) use of silence could be complex, it is also found that the efficient use of silence can be as “simple” as the use of indexicals in natural languages if and only if the information structure satisfies some centrality and dominance properties. (shrink)

This paper presents a cross-cultural study on peoples’ negative attitude toward robots. 467 participants from seven different countries filled in the negative attitude towards robots scale survey which consists of 14 questions in three clusters: attitude towards the interaction with robots, attitude towards social influence of robots and attitude towards emotions in interaction with robots. Around one half of them were recruited at local universities and the other half was approached through Aibo online communities. The participants’ cultural background had a (...) significant influence on their attitude and the Japanese were not as positive as stereotypically assumed. The US participants had the most positive attitude, while participants from Mexico had the most negative attitude. The participants from the online community were more positive towards robots than those not involved. Previous experience in interacting with Aibo also had a positive effect, but owning an Aibo did not improve their attitude. (shrink)

String theory has been very influential within theoretical physics for the past few decades. It is the most popular attempt to solve the problem of formulating a viable theory of quantum gravity. Furthermore, it also unifies the other fundamental forces within one theoretical framework. In string theory, it is assumed that what before was thought to be point particles should really be seen as one-dimensional extended entities, i.e. strings. Different particles are supposed to correspond to various vibrational patterns of the (...) strings.In recent years, much critique has been directed towards string theory, and the fact that it inhabits such a strong position within the theoretical physics community. The main complaint is the complete lack of empirical confirmation of new predictions derived from string theory. The books, criticizing string theory, that have received most attention are the ones written by Smolin (2006), Woit (2006), but there are many more critics some of which express much harsher criticism towards string theory than the above-mentioned authors. (shrink)

The idea that the thalamo-cortical system is the crucial constituent of the neurobiological mechanisms of consciousness has a long history. For the last few decades, however, consciousness research has to a large extent overlooked the interplay between the cortex and thalamus. Here we revive an integrated view of the neurobiology of consciousness by presenting and discussing several recent major findings about the role of the thalamocortical interactions in consciousness. Based on these findings we propose a specific cellular mechanism how thalamic (...) nuclei modulate the integration of different processing streams within single cortical pyramidal neurons. This theory is inspired by recent work done in rodents, but it integrates decades of work conducted on various species. We illustrate how this new view readily explains various properties and experimental phenomena associated with conscious experience. We discuss the implications of this idea and some of the experiments that need to be done in order to test it. Our view bridges two long-standing perspectives on the neural mechanisms of consciousness and proposes that cortical and thalamo-cortical processing interact at the level of single pyramidal cells. (shrink)

Extending techniques of Dowd and those of Poizat, we study computational complexity of in the case when is a generic oracle, where is a positive integer, and denotes the collection of all -query tautologies with respect to an oracle . We introduce the notion of ceiling-generic oracles, as a generalization of Dowd's notion of -generic oracles to arbitrary finitely testable arithmetical predicates. We study how existence of ceiling-generic oracles affects behavior of a generic oracle, by which we show that is (...) not a subset of is comeager in the Cantor space. Moreover, using ceiling-generic oracles, we present an alternative proof of the fact (Dowd) that the class of all -generic oracles has Lebesgue measure zero. (shrink)

Reflections on Science, technology and nature - the pain of animals - genetics and society - our fragile democracy - dancing on racism's grave; The lesson of Japan - the prostitution of Academia - how educators have failed - the ecosystem as capital - the rape of the Amazon; The future; borrowing from the children - showdown in Brazil - Aboriginal people and the land; Acid rain - rain forests - deforestation - population.

Este texto procura traçar algumas linhas gerais da articulação entre música e ironia (ou audição musical e hermenêutica) no romantismo. Procura-se explorar a apropriação original que Søren Kierkegaard fez das “técnicas” hermenêuticas desenvolvidas por Friedrich Schlegel e Friedrich Schleiermacher.

This note is a continuation of our former paper ''Complexity of the r-query tautologies in the presence of a generic oracle.'' We give a very short direct proof of the nonexistence of t-generic oracles, a result obtained first by Dowd. We also reconstitute a proof of Dowd's result that the class of all r-generic oracles in his sense has Lebesgue measure one.

Japan has often been regarded as an ethnically homogeneous society whose restrictive immigration policies reflect the deep-seated cultural peculiarities of this ‘island nation’. By contrast, I shall argue that Japan’s post- 1945 cultural separation from the other countries of East Asia, and its strict border controls, were to a large extent products of Cold War politics. The postwar democratization of Japan went hand in hand with the introduction of tight restrictions on cross-border mobility: restrictions which had profound consequences for the (...) rights of ethnic minorities in Japan (particularly Koreans and Taiwanese). An exploration of the emergence and impact of this border control regime casts new light, not just on Japan’s role in the Northeast Asian region, but also on key limitations of nation-state centred notions of liberal democracy. (shrink)

The Bird Song Diamond project is a series of multifaceted and multidisciplinary installations with the aim of bringing contemporary research on bird communication to a large public audience. Using art and technology to create immersive experiences, BSD allows large audiences to embody bird communication rather than passively observe. In particular, BSD Mimic, a system for mimicking bird song, asks participants to grapple with both audition and vocalization of birdsong. The use of interactive installations for public outreach provides unique experiences to (...) a diverse audience, while providing direct feedback for artists and researchers interested in the success of such outreach. By following an iterative design process, both artists and researchers have been able to evaluate the effectiveness of each installation for promoting audience engagement with the subject matter. The execution and evaluation of each iteration of BSD is described throughout the paper. In addition, the process of interdisciplinary collaboration in our project has led to a more defined role of the artist as a facilitator of specialists. BSD Mimic has also led to further questions about the nature of audience collaboration for an engaged experience. (shrink)

Feinberg and Mallatt, in their presentation of neurobiological naturalism, have suggested that visual consciousness was acquired by early vertebrates and inherited by a wide range of descendants, and that its neural basis has shifted to nonhomologous nervous structures during evolution. However, their evolutionary scenario of visual consciousness relies on the assumption that visual consciousness is closely linked with survival, which is not commonly accepted in current consciousness research. We suggest an alternative idea that visual consciousness is linked to a specific (...) class of agency, consequently justifying their phylogenetic claim. We also examine the implication of their phylogenetic claim: visual consciousness is homologous across vertebrates, but its neural basis is not. This apparent incongruence illustrates a general phenomenon of homology, and that the resulting hierarchical view of visual consciousness and its neural basis can be straightforwardly accommodated by neurobiological naturalism. Throughout these discussions, we aim to address the potential theoretical issues in neurobiological naturalism and refine the picture illustrated by Feinberg and Mallatt regarding phylogenetic distribution and trajectories of visual consciousness. (shrink)

In this paper, we model a relational notion of subjectivity by means of two experiments in subjective computing. The goal is to determine to what extent a cognitive and social robot can be regarded to act subjectively. The system was implemented as a reinforcement learning agent with a coaching function. To analyze the robotic agent we used the method of levels of abstraction in order to analyze the agent at four levels of abstraction. At one level the agent is described (...) in mentalistic or subjective language respectively. By mapping this mentalistic to an algorithmic, functional, and relational level, we can show to what extent the agent behaves subjectively as we make use of a relational concept of subjectivity that draws upon the relations that hold between the agent and its environment. According to a relational notion of subjectivity, an agent is supposed to be subjective if it exhibits autonomous relations to itself and others, i.e. the agent is not fully determined by a given input but is able to operate on its input and decide what to do with it. This theoretical notion is confirmed by the technical implementation of self-referentiality and social interaction in that the agent shows improved behavior compared to agents without the ability of subjective computing. On the one hand, a relational concept of subjectivity is confirmed, whereas on the other hand, the technical framework of subjective computing is being theoretically founded. (shrink)

A theory of the evolution of mind cannot be complete without an explanation of how cognition became representational. Artificial approximations of cognitive evolution do not, in general, produce representational cognition. We take this as an indication that there is a gap in our understanding of what drives evolution towards representational solutions, and propose a theory to fill this gap. We suggest selection for learning and selection for second order learning as the causal factors driving the emergence of innate and acquired (...) forms of representation, respectively. Cognition is commonly viewed as a “black box”—selection works on externally visible behaviour alone, with little regard for implementation structure. Yet even if implementation structure is not constrained by selection on behaviour, implementation structure does affect how easy or difficult it is to make specific modifications to the behaviour. Hence selection for learning can affect the implementation structure of behaviour. Similarly, the implementation structure of learning ability itself is not under direct selection, but selection for second order learning can affect the implementation structure of first order learning. We argue that these indirect selection effects guide evolution towards representational implementations, as structural alignment between implementation structure and environment structure guarantees that simple changes in the environment can be met with simple changes in implementation. We illustrate the theory with examples of computational investigations, and discuss how the theory may help put representational cognition within reach of purely connectionist AI. (shrink)

We present an approach to subjective computing for the design of future robots that exhibit more adaptive and flexible behavior in terms of subjective intelligence. Instead of encapsulating subjectivity into higher order states, we show by means of a relational approach how subjective intelligence can be implemented in terms of the reciprocity of autonomous self-referentiality and direct world-coupling. Subjectivity concerns the relational arrangement of an agent’s cognitive space. This theoretical concept is narrowed down to the problem of coaching a reinforcement (...) learning agent by means of binary feedback. Algorithms are presented that implement subjective computing. The relational characteristic of subjectivity is further confirmed by a questionnaire on human perception of robot’s behavior. The results imply that subjective intelligence cannot be externally observed. In sum, we conclude that subjective intelligence in relational terms is fully tractable and therefore implementable in artificial agents. (shrink)