While tens of thousands of people across the United States serve on hospital and other healthcare ethics committees , almost no carefully prepared educational material exists for HEC members. Ethics by Committee is a one volume collection of chapters developed exclusively for this educational purpose. Experts in bioethics, clinical consultation, health law, and social psychology from across the country contribute chapters on ethics consultation, education, and policy development.

This is an interview with author Ken Wilber, whose work on consciousness over the last twenty‐five years has been tremendously influential. His work blends "Eastern" and "Western" approaches and has influenced scholars in psychology, philosophy, and religion, as well as in anthropology. His work on transpersonal psychology is especially well‐known, and his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, arguably marks the beginning of transpersonal studies. Frances Vaughan has referred to Wilber's work as the "work of genius." Daniel Goleman once listed (...) Wilber among the "ranks of the grand theorists of human consciousness" including "Ernst Cassirer, Mircea Eliade, and Gregory Bateson." Wilber discusses the scope of the consciousness problem as well as contributions to the field that anthropologists might be well suited to make. (shrink)

This paper aims to show the logical consistency between the subjective and the intersubjective constitution of meaning in Alfred Schutz by revealing his insight into the dynamic character of reality. In reconstructing what is implied by the proposition “the problem of meaning is a time problem,” this paper reveals that the interrelationship between the past and the present, namely “becoming,” is fundamental to meaning-constitution. By critically introducing the Bergsonian view of the tension between the durée and its symbolization, Schutz thematizes (...) our meaningful reality in the fluidity. From this perspective, the intersubjective world is characterized as a continuous dynamic reality taken for granted by the actors. While subjectivity, as a function of articulating experiences in becoming, is a condition of the intersubjective world, the intersubjective process enables the taken-for-grantedness of subjective reality. Schutzian phenomenology may lead to a theory of the complexity and uncertainty of social reality. (shrink)

Public trust of conventionally produced food is now a pivotal issue for the Canadian food supply chain as consumers are increasingly demanding traceability, transparency and sustainability of the agri-food system. To ensure that Canadians understand what farmers do, how they do it, and why—there has been significant human and financial investment by both the agri-food industry and government over the last decade. Farmers, civil servants, and non-farming agricultural professionals alike are being encouraged to join the national conversation promoting the legitimacy (...) of conventional agriculture. As part of this large-scale effort, women in agriculture are advocating, in gendered ways, for the safety and legitimacy of the agri-food system and its conventional farming practices. This is being done by utilizing their motherhood capital. This motherhood capital legitimizes the authority granted to mothers as expert decisionmakers regarding their children’s food consumption. Through the usage of their motherhood capital, women are being positioned—and are positioning themselves—as an important voice in re-narrating the story of conventional agriculture through the circulation of their maternal foodwork experiences. Using their authority as mothers they are advocating for the safety, necessity, and trustworthiness of conventional agriculture to counter narratives of mistrust and risk. (shrink)

:The problems of poor or biased information and of misleading health and well-being advice on the Internet have been extensively documented. The recent decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to authorize a large number of new generic, top-level domains, including some with a clear connection to health or healthcare, presents an opportunity to bring some order to this chaotic situation. In the case of the most general of these domains, “.health,” experts advance a compelling argument in (...) favor of some degree of content oversight and control. On the opposing side, advocates for an unrestricted and open Internet counter that this taken-for-granted principle is too valuable to be compromised, and that, once lost, it may never be recovered. We advance and provide evidence for a proposal to bridge the credibility gap in online health information by providing provenance information for websites in the.health domain. (shrink)

Environmental ethics arises as the output of a trade-off between our rights and nature's right to life. This negotiation secures the possibility of achieving sustainable developments, if it is conducted fairly. The rights of persons are delimited by their origin, as are the rights of the other. A person is the output of relationships taking place at three levels: (1) a material self; (2) a social self; and (3) a private or internal self. Pollution and war serve as an epitaph (...) to remind us of failed ethical trade-offs in these associations. (shrink)

This article provides a much‐needed review of the neural bases of implicit statistical learning. Batterink, Paller and Reber focus on the neural processes that underpin performance in experimental paradigms employed in implicit learning and statistical learning research. An important insight is that learning across all paradigms is supported by interactions between the declarative and nondeclarative memory systems of the brain. They conclude with a helpful discussion of future directions of research.

The realist belief in the primacy of the world and its underlying structure answers the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing.’ The world, and all things contained in it exists because of God’s creative act. Personal death in Christian philosophy continues the gift of human existence by shifting that temporal existence into eternal life. The death and resurrection of Christ lays the foundation for the possibility of eternal life, while the will of God provides an answer to the (...) why of human existence. The aim of this paper is to examine the effects of the death and resurrection of Christ on the metaphysical strings of human existence. The phenomenon of human death takes place on the arms of consciousness and being’s unconcealment. The subjective correlate of human death is the irreversible loss of consciousness, while the objective correlate of human death presents as the infolding of the gift of existence, namely, of being’s unconcealment from consciousness. These correlates function as a dynamic unit to explain human death and resurrection. The attempt to justify a belief in the existence of life after death from the point of view of consciousness alone is dualistic and leads to several absurdities and confusions about the nature of the afterlife state. The explanation of the resurrection of Christ as a continuation of the dialogue between being and consciousness begun on earth avoids those absurdities while maintaining personal identity. (shrink)

The infamous “Sydney Tar Ponds” are well known as one of the largest toxic waste sites of Canada, due to almost 100 years of steelmaking in Sydney, a once beautiful and peaceful city located on the east side of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. This article begins with a contextual overview of the Tar Ponds issue including a brief introduction and history and summaries of the effects on the earth, the people, and the biotic community (animals and vegetation). Then the (...) authors talk about the STS analysis approach, namely, a discussion of six systems to indicate what has been brought to the earth and mankind by technology and modern industry. The remaining part of the article describes the difficulties confronting China, some of which are similar to the ones Canada faces as a result of the Tar Ponds contamination, and summarizes some of the experiences at Tar Ponds and the lessons China can learn from Tar Ponds. (shrink)

Pictures of normal brain activity during human thought can be worth a great deal. Electrophysiology and functional neuroimaging together allow both temporal and spatial dimensions of neurocognitive functions to be explored. Although these techniqueshave their limitations, the Cognitive Neuroscience approach is well-suited to pursuing questions about how words are perceived, understood, and remembered.

Priming and recollection are expressions of human memory mediated by different brain events. These brain events were monitored while people discriminated words from nonwords. Mean response latencies were shorter for words that appeared in an earlier study phase than for new words. This priming effect was reduced when the letters of words in study-phase presentations were presented individually in succession as opposed to together as complete words. Based on this outcome, visual word-form priming was linked to a brain potential recorded (...) from the scalp over the occipital lobe about 450 ms after word onset. This potential differed from another potential previously associated with recollection, suggesting that distinct operations associated with these two types of memory can be monitored at the precise time that they occur in the human brain. (shrink)

For a large proportion of our daily lives, spontaneously occurring thoughts tend to disengage our minds from goal-directed thinking. Previous studies showed that EEG features such as the P3 and alpha oscillations can predict mind-wandering to some extent, but only with accuracies of around 60%. A potential candidate for improving prediction accuracy is the Steady-State Visual Evoked Potential, which is used frequently in single-trial contexts such as brain-computer interfaces as a marker of the direction of attention. In this study, we (...) modified the sustained attention to response task that is usually employed to measure spontaneous thought to incorporate the SSVEP elicited by a 12.5-Hz flicker. We then examined whether the SSVEP could track and allow for the prediction of the stickiness and task-relatedness dimensions of spontaneous thought. Our results show that the SSVEP evoked by flickering words was able to distinguish between more and less sticky thinking but not between whether a participant was on- or off-task. This suggests that the SSVEP is able to track spontaneous thinking when it is strongly disengaged from the task but not off-task thought in general. Future research should determine the exact dimensions of spontaneous thought to which the SSVEP is most sensitive. (shrink)

Previous research has found that funding disparities are driven by applications’ final impact scores and that only a portion of the black/white funding gap can be explained by bibliometrics and topic choice. Using National Institutes of Health R01 applications for council years 2014–2016, we examine assigned reviewers’ preliminary overall impact and criterion scores to evaluate whether racial disparities in impact scores can be explained by application and applicant characteristics. We hypothesize that differences in commensuration—the process of combining criterion scores into (...) overall impact scores—disadvantage black applicants. Using multilevel models and matching on key variables including career stage, gender, and area of science, we find little evidence for racial disparities emerging in the process of combining preliminary criterion scores into preliminary overall impact scores. Instead, preliminary criterion scores fully account for racial disparities—yet do not explain all of the variability—in preliminary overall impact scores. (shrink)

Elliott Sober is both an empiricist and an instrumentalist. His empiricism rests on a principle called actualism, whereas his instrumentalism violates this. This violation generates a tension in his work. We argue that Sober is committed to a conflicting methodological imperative because of this tension. Our argument illuminates the contemporary debate between realism and empiricism which is increasingly focused on the application of scientific inference to testing scientific theories. Sober’s position illustrates how the principle of actualism drives a wedge between (...) two conceptions of scientific inference and at the same time brings to the surface a deep conflict between empiricism and instrumentalism. (shrink)

Unconscious processing of stimuli with emotional content can bias affective judgments. Is this subliminal affective priming merely a transient phenomenon manifested in fleeting perceptual changes, or are long-lasting effects also induced? To address this question, we investigated memory for surprise faces 24 h after they had been shown with 30-ms fearful, happy, or neutral faces. Surprise faces subliminally primed by happy faces were initially rated as more positive, and were later remembered better, than those primed by fearful or neutral faces. (...) Participants likely to have processed primes supraliminally did not respond differentially as a function of expression. These results converge with findings showing memory advantages with happy expressions, though here the expressions were displayed on the face of a different person, perceived subliminally, and not present at test. We conclude that behavioral biases induced by masked emotional expressions are not ephemeral, but rather can last at least 24 h. (shrink)