: Research done in recent years shows that Virtual Reality can be an effective tool for distracting attention from pain. The purpose of this study was to test how the complexity of Virtual Environment influences the experienced intensity of thermal pain stimuli. A within-subjects design experiment was conducted, using cold pressor test for pain stimulation. Research was done on 31 students of Wroclaw Universities. Participants played games created for the purpose of the study, using head mounted displays and movement sensors. (...) Two Virtual Environments differing in the level of complexity and non-VR control condition were used. The order of all conditions was counterbalanced. Participants reported significantly lower pain intensity after playing the high complexity game, compared to the low complexity game. There were also significant differences between non-VR control condition and high complexity game, but not between non-VR and low complexity game. The pain tolerance was significantly higher in both VR conditions comparing to non-VR conditions. However, no significant differences between VE’s were found in pain tolerance ratings. Results of this study provide preliminary evidence that game complexity can be related to pain experience during VR interventions. (shrink)
In the grand debate between the paternalist and the libertarian, VanDeVeer sides decidedly with the libertarian. Paternalistic intervention he regards as presumptively wrong, and so the question becomes whether there are countervailing, morally relevant considerations by which paternalistic intervention can be justified. In shifting the burden of justification to the paternalist, VanDeVeer is not being innovative. H. L. A. Hart broke that ground in his Law, Liberty, and Morality in 1963, and Ronald Dworkin used the technique effectively in his 1966 (...) Yale Law Journal essay "Lord Devlin and the Enforcement of Morals." VanDeVeer's contribution, however, is in the explanation he gives for laying the burden of justification on those who would defend paternalistic intervention. Whereas Hart's explanation spoke at the societal or governmental level, VanDeVeer's speaks at the level of the individual person. He rests his argument on the essence of the libertarian position: a principle of overarching individual human autonomy. Consistent with his individualistic focus, he avoids restricting his definitions of paternalistic intervention to activities at the societal or governmental level. VanDeVeer insists that there are moral bounds to paternalistic intervention on the part of private individuals, and it is, perhaps, both the strength and the weakness of the book that he by and large joins conceptually paternalistic intervention by the government and paternalistic intervention by private individuals. (shrink)
Objectives: The objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between a physician’s subjective mortality prediction and the level of confidence with which that mortality prediction is made.Design and participants: The study is a prospective cohort of patients less than 18 years of age admitted to a tertiary Paediatric Intensive Care Unit at a University Children’s Hospital with a minimum length of ICU stay of 10 h. Paediatric ICU attending physicians and fellows provided mortality risk predictions and the level (...) of confidence associated with these predictions on consecutive patients at the time of multidisciplinary rounds within 24 hours of admission to the paediatric ICU. Median confidence levels were compared across different ranges of mortality risk predictions.Results: Data were collected on 642 of 713 eligible patients . Mortality predictions greater than 5% and less than 95% were made with significantly less confidence than those predictions 95%. Experience was associated with greater confidence in prognostication.Conclusions: We conclude that a physician’s subjective mortality prediction may be dependent on the level of confidence in the prognosis; that is, a physician less confident in his or her prognosis is more likely to state an intermediate survival prediction. Measuring the level of confidence associated with mortality risk predictions may therefore be important because different levels of confidence may translate into differences in a physician’s therapeutic plans and their assessment of the patient’s future. (shrink)
We tend to think of the French Revolution as a good idea gone awry--idealism consumed by its antithesis in an orgy of Freudian Oedipal violence. It's difficult for us to credit the theorists of the French Revolution with genius. And yet they did possess genius. They recognized the root tension that exists between the ideals of human liberty and human equality. Individual liberty, freely exercized results in social inequality. Enforced social equality of necessity curtails individual liberty. The genius of their (...) solution to this dilemma was, of course, proudly proclaimed in the battle cry of the Revolution: Libèrté! Ègalité! Fraternité! The two inconsistent ideals of liberty and equality are reconcilable and realizable, but only in the resolving agent of fraternity. The trouble was that, as emotively effective as the word 'fraternity' may be as part of a battle cry, it is not effective as the organizing principle for a state. A less emotive, more nuanced understanding of the complex and often conflicting natures of the components that go into the making of a state was needed. It was not there, and the Revolution itself betrayed its own ideals. (shrink)
The paper presents a draft model of the relationship between shame, treated as one of the self-conscious emotions, and the identity formation process. Two main concepts of shame have been discussed here: shame as an adaptive emotion, in line with the evolutionary approach, and as a maladaptive emotion, according to cognitive attribution theory. The main thesis of this paper states that shame has an essential, both constructive and maladaptive, importance for identity development and that its effect is indirect as it (...) works through the mechanisms of emotion regulation. The destructive and disrupting influence of shame is not an immanent feature of this emotion, but it is a consequence of malfunctioning mechanisms of shame regulation. The association of shame with identity formation relates to the exploration dimensions - exploration in breadth, exploration in depth and ruminative exploration, as well as to commitment making and identification with commitment. (shrink)
Marcin Lewinski: Internet Political Discussion Forums as an Argumentative Activity Type. A Pragma-dialectical Analysis of Online Forms of Strategic Manoeuvring in Reacting Critically Content Type Journal Article Pages 255-259 DOI 10.1007/s10503-011-9201-3 Authors Paul van den Hoven, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands Journal Argumentation Online ISSN 1572-8374 Print ISSN 0920-427X Journal Volume Volume 25 Journal Issue Volume 25, Number 2.
ZusammenfassungDer Artikel wirft einen religionswissenschaftlichen Blick auf soziologische Theorien zu Religion und Moderne und neuere empirische Befunde,1 und diskutiert dabei auch die inhärente Eurozentrik wirkmächtiger Theoriekonstrukte. Primärer Fokus ist die kontrovers geführte Debatte, ob sich die religiöse Gegenwartskultur Europas durch Säkularisierung oder Individualisierung auszeichne. Diese Frage ist nicht nur eine der Empirie, vielmehr sind auch der perspektivische Blick und der Religionsbegriff entscheidend, ob Religion wahrgenommen wird oder nicht. Dies tangiert v. a. sogenannt postmoderne Spiritualität, deren Ausdrucksformen mit einem herkömmlichen Religionsbegriff, (...) der sich an offizieller, institutionalisierter Religion orientiert, nicht erfasst werden können. Heute sind sie jedoch gerade auch unter Kirchenmitgliedern zu finden. Dies ist einer der teilweise überraschenden Befunde der länderübergreifenden quantitativen Erhebungen des Religionsmonitor 2008. In einem ersten Teil des Artikels werden die Resultate und ihre ganz unterschiedlichen Auswertungen dargestellt und analysiert. Ein zweiter Teil thematisiert wirkmächtige Modernetheorien und die Adaptions- und Wandlungsprozesse in der Theoriebildung, die sich unter dem Druck der Empirie zu ständigen Neujustierungen gezwungen sah – bis hin zum heutigen Hang, die Säkularisierungs- wie auch die Privatisierungsthese aufzugeben oder umzucodieren. (shrink)
Publication date: 30 November 2016 Source: Author: Marcin Böhm The Empire of Nicaea was a successor of the Byzantium shattered in 1204. In the newly established state marine traditions of Byzantines, remain alive. The best testimony to this, are the evidence contained in the chronicle of Georgios Akropolites, devoted to activities of the rulers of Nicaea, aimed to build their own naval forces. In this paper I'll also try to answer, where was beating the heart of the Nicean shipbuilding (...) industry and how large was the navy of this state. This is important from point of view of the maritime history, because of the fleet of the Empire of Nicaea, filled the gap created after the fall of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire, which was the local naval power in previous centuries. Akropolites give us a clear and direct answer to a question, where we should search for a center of Nicaean shipbuilding industry. Georgios Akropolites suggest us, that was in two towns, Holkos and Smyrna. The above-mentioned fleet consisted of the few squadrons, each counting 5-6 ships. We can only guess that a fleet of the John III, could count about 50 warships, whose quality was worse to that belonging to the Venetians. We must say that the fleet of the Empire of Nicaea, which we see in the chronicle of Akropolites, was the force, that lent itself to the support of ground forces. And in this role worked well. The situation was different when it comes to clashing with the Venetians, with the experienced crews of their ships, who surpassed Nicaean in this matter. Even with the advantage of numbers, Nicaean was unable to overcome at the sea, the citizens of the Republic of St. Mark. The plan to build their own naval forces, which was taken by the emperors of Nicaea, was a good direction. (shrink)
`On Usury`, the treaty by Martin Smiglecki SJ, was the first strictly scientific attempt to show the economic and social background of the bourgeois and peasant social stratum in Poland and Lithuania at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. The author, being an excellent logician, expressed his views in a very precise way, limiting his technical language to a minimum, so that his treatise would be understandable to readers from a range of social positions and circumstances. Its careful (...) analysis of the socio-economic situation and clear formulation of its postulates enabled it to function, over the course of two centuries, as a practical manual imparting guidance to the ruling class as they sought to maintain a just and fair stance in their dealings with the burghers and peasants. Smiglecki’s ideas have become a reference point for many generations of professors of moral philosophy and folk preachers seeking to raise social issues in their own works. (shrink)
Author: Moskalewicz Marcin Title: AESTHETIZATION OF POLITICS ACCORDING TO HANNAH ARENDT (Estetyzacja polityki w ujęciu Hannah Arendt) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2005, vol:.5, number: 2005/1, pages: 203-220 Keywords: ARENDT, AESTHETIZATION OF POLITICS, CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The article reflects on the problem of aesthetization of politics in Hannah Arendt’s work. It starts with the reconstruction of Arendt’s concept of the human condition, with the intention of placing (...) the political within it. Then, by exploring the theatrical metaphor of political life the author attempts to show in what sense can we say that the political and the aesthetical intertwine in Arendt’s thought. The author also discusses the reproach of the aesthetization of politics and its link to fascism, arguing that paying a closer attention to the distinction between creative and performative arts may help to avoid it. In conclusion, Arendt’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment serves as a basis for a more sympathetic interpretation of her aesthetization of politics, in which the gap between the moral and the aesthetical is reduced. (shrink)
Daniel Ciunajcis Marcin Moskalewicz Time-Space of History. Transcendental Conditions of Practicing History as PoliticsThe article deals with the issue of time-space in modern historiography, and the main thesis is that time-space is a transcendental condition of the possibility of the practice of history and that modern victory of time over space has various negative implications that are underscored and analyzed. In the first part of the article, the authors present classical asymmetric concepts – Greeks vs. Barbarians and Christians vs. (...) Pagans – as analyzed by Reinhardt Koselleck. In the second part of the article, the advent of a new Christian temporality is being examined via Karl Barth’s interpretation (as presented in his Dogmatics in Outline) of Pontius Pilate’s last judgment over Jesus Christ. In this context three aspects of temporality are being discerned: the horizon of expectation represented by Jesus Christ, the space of experience represented by the Jewish community and eternity represented by Pontius Pilate. Pilate is recognized as taking the place of God in the political order: himself an embodiment of state, a symbol of its transcendence, and a transcendental condition of possibility of modern political life. In the third part the authors defend the thesis that thinking is an embodied phenomenon. While applying and criticizing Hannah Arendt, they indicate that thinking should be taken as an original source of human temporality and as a condition of possibility of organizing external space. The authors emphasize Arendt’s conception of a metaphor as a bridge between the sensible and the supersensible, with due attention to both differences and similarities between thinking and acting. Next, the authors analyze some consequences of their thesis for storytelling and political history being organized today mostly according to mere chronological paradigm. In the fourth part of the article, the authors pay attention to spatial organization of politics, arguing against Karl Schlögel, who claims that in late modern times national historiography was responsible for the dominance of the spatial paradigm. The argument defended is that even in the case of seemingly spatial organization of politics and history – as for example in a map – the temporal order is playing a predominant, even if hidden, role, and that space is being analyzed and valued according to temporal criteria. The predominantly temporal dynamics of modernization and modern supremacy of the future – as presented in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Lexicon by Bielefeld School – is interpreted as a sign of loss and a symptom of narrowing our image of history. Keywords: time-space in modern historiography, transcendental condition of possibility of the practice of history, Reinhardt Koselleck, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)
Obóz Kultury 2.0 Mirosław Filiciak, Alek Tarkowski, Agata Jałosińska, Andrzej Klimczuk, Maciej Rynarzewski, Jacek Seweryn, Stunża M., D. Grzegorz, Marcin Wilkowski & Anna Orlik .
Contents: Leszek NOWAK, Marcin PAPRZYCKI: Introduction. ON THE NATURE OF SOCIAL SYSTEM. Ulrich K. PREUSS: Political Order and Democracy. Carl Schmitt and his Influence. Katarzyna PAPRZYCKA: A Paradox in Hobbes' Philosophy of Law. Stephen L. ESQUITH: Democratic Political Dialogue. Edward JELINSKI: Democracy in Polish Reformist Socialist Thought. Katarzyna PAPRZYCKA: The Master and Slave Configuration in Hegel's System. Maurice GODELIER: Lévi-Strauss, Marx and After. A reappraisal of structuralist and Marxist tools for analyzing social logics. Krzysztof NIEDZWIADEK: On the Structure of (...) Social System. Waldemar CZAJKOWSKI: Social Being and Its Reproduction. ON RATIONALITY AND CAPTIVITY. Marek ZIO??L??KOWSKI: Power and Knowledge. Leszek NOWAK: Two Inter-Human Limits to the Rationality of Man. Marcin PAPRZYCKI: The non-Christian Model of Man. An Attempt at a Psychoanalytic Explanation. Robert EGIERT: Toward the Sophisticated Rationalistic Model of Man. ON SOCIAL REVOLUTION. Leszek NOWAK: Revolution is an Opaque Progress but a Progress Nonetheless. Katarzyna PAPRZYCKA, Marcin PAPRZYCKI: How Do Enslaved People Make Revolutions? Grzegorz TOMCZAK: Is It Worth Winning a Revolution? Krzysztof BRZECHCZYN: Civil Loop and the Absorption of Elites. Richard C. MCCLEARY: What Makes Marxist Historical Materialism Objective? Grzegorz KOTLARSKI: Classes and Masses in Social Philosophy of Rosa Luxemburg. ON REAL SOCIALISM. Ernest GELLNER: The Civil and the Sacred. Witold MARCISZEWSKI: Economics and the Idea of Information. Why socialism must have collapsed? Leszek NOWAK, Katarzyna PAPRZYCKA, Marcin PAPRZYCKI: On Multilinearity of Socialism. Achim SIEGEL: The Overrepression Cycle in the Soviet Union. An Operationalization of a Theoretical Model. Krzysztof BRZECHCZYN: The State of the Teutonic Order as a Socialist Society. DISCUSSIONS. Richard MCCLEARLY: Socioanalysis and Philosophy. W??l??odzimierz HELLER: The Public and the Private in Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy. Methodological Remarks. Krzysztof BRZECHCZYN: Unsuccessful Conquest and Successful Subordination. A contribution to the theory of intersocial relations. (shrink)
In the book, I argue that the mind can be explained computationally because it is itself computational—whether it engages in mental arithmetic, parses natural language, or processes the auditory signals that allow us to experience music. All these capacities arise from complex information-processing operations of the mind. By analyzing the state of the art in cognitive science, I develop an account of computational explanation used to explain the capacities in question.
In this paper, I review the objections against the claim that brains are computers, or, to be precise, information-processing mechanisms. By showing that practically all the popular objections are either based on uncharitable interpretation of the claim, or simply wrong, I argue that the claim is likely to be true, relevant to contemporary cognitive (neuro)science, and non-trivial.
This paper centers around the notion that internal, mental representations are grounded in structural similarity, i.e., that they are so-called S-representations. We show how S-representations may be causally relevant and argue that they are distinct from mere detectors. First, using the neomechanist theory of explanation and the interventionist account of causal relevance, we provide a precise interpretation of the claim that in S-representations, structural similarity serves as a “fuel of success”, i.e., a relation that is exploitable for the representation using (...) system. Then, we discuss crucial differences between S-representations and indicators or detectors, showing that—contrary to claims made in the literature—there is an important theoretical distinction to be drawn between the two. (shrink)
