How Galileo created the problem of consciousness -- Is there a ghost in the machine? -- Can physical science explain consciousness? -- How to solve the problem of consciousness -- Consciousness and the meaning of life.

This paper has aimed to remedy a neglect of multi-party disputes by addressing how those involved in a two-party argument may collaborate with others who are co-present. Collaboration is a complex phenomenon. In the first place, we have seen that disputes, although initially produced by two parties, do not consist simply of two sides. Rather, given one party's displayed position, stance, or claim, another party can produce opposition by simply aligning against that position or by aligning with a counterposition. This (...) means that parties can dispute a particular position for different reasons and by different means. It is therefore possible for several parties to serially oppose another's claim without achieving collaboration. A second complexity, then, is just that collaboration is a negotiated phenomenon. For example, while it is possible for an outside party to produce an uninvited alignment display that is sympathetic to an already-stated position in a two-party dispute, the party whose position it supports can agree or disagree with that display. Thus, outsiders' uninvited alignment displays that occur subsequent to those of the insiders or principals in a two-party dispute must be considered as collaboration offers, which can be accepted or rejected. But that is not the end of it, for an outside party can offer alignments that now align with a principal party's position and then, addressing a different aspect of the principal's talk, align against it. Finally, in addition to being offered, collaboration can also be solicited. A principal in a two-party dispute solicits collaboration by inviting an outsider to display an alignment favorable to inviter's own position or to participate in a joint activity that supports that stance. Such solicits can be accepted, rejected, or, again, handled in such a way as to exhibit neutrality. Argumentative collaboration, in short, is a specific, momentary, and delicate state of affairs that is also an organized, technical achievement.The fact that the subjects for this study were children has become submerged in the formal analysis of alignment structures and collaboration. Thus, following this research, two directions can be pursued. One would be to ask how children's arguments differ from those occurring among adults. A reasoned answer would be that matters of substance or content may distinguish disputes among youthful persons from those occurring among older ones, while the forms of disputing remain relatively invariant (Maynard, 1985a, 1985b). In other words, by studying multi-party disputes among first-grade children, we learn about the structure of collaboration as a generic phenomenon among at least practitioners of standard English no matter what their age. This claim can be sustained in part because the analysis presented here depends upon deriving a priori conventional relations between utterances, rather than statistical relations between variables (Coulter, 1983). We have not examined exogenous influences — which would include the age characteristics of participants — on disputes, but rather the endogenously-produced structure of argumentative discourse. Still, the claim that patterns of collaboration are generic to children and adults can be examined with further research on multi-party disputes among different age groups.Another, more radical, research orientation, would be to consider, in any social arena where the members are identified as children, how it is that such a ‘membership category’ (Sacks, 1972) is relevant. If that query is made, then research on ‘children's arguments’ would involve investigating formal practices for exhibiting the accountable category ‘children’ as much as it would mean describing the ways that disputing is done. Those who have studied children's arguments, in Pollner's (1979) terms, have treated ‘children’ as a social fact, a ‘thing,’ rather than as a socially organized meaning, or ‘ing.’To attend to the -ing of things involves a radical modification of the attitude of daily life, for it requires attending to the processes of constitution in lieu of the product thus constituted (Pollner, 1979: 253, fn. 11).In short, we have treated arguments as the important event without also seeing how it is that the category ‘children’ is constituted as a recognizable feature of and within the research setting. (shrink)

This paper makes the case for a revision of contemporary forms of political realism in political theory. I argue that contemporary realists have gone awry in increasingly centring their approach around a metaethical claim: that political theory should be rooted in a political form of normativity that is distinct from moral normativity. Several critics of realism have argued that this claim is unconvincing. But I suggest that it is also a counterintuitive starting point for realism, and one unnecessary to avoid (...) the ‘applied morality’ approach to political theory that realists oppose. Instead, realism should be methodologically orientated around what I term ‘empirically constitutive political realities’ - enduring features of real political contexts that are systematically consequential in their normative implications. Realists can persuasively argue that such empirically constitutive political realities must be attended to in political theory-building, and not merely treated as a context in which independently formulated moral theories are simply applied. This framing of realism accords real politics a genuinely foundational theoretical role, but without requiring any contentious metaethical stance about a non-moral political normativity. I explain some methodological implications that follow for realism – in particular the need to prioritise empirically grounded theorisation of real political contexts over abstract and rather essentialist claims about ‘the political’. I also argue that such a framing of realism helps engender a more accurate, less divisive, and more pluralist conception of methodological debates within political theory. (shrink)

Dualists say plausible things about our mental concepts: there is a way of thinking of pain, in terms of how it feels, which is independent of causal role. Physicalists make attractive ontological claims: the world is wholly physical. The attraction of a posteriori physicalism is that it has seemed to do both: to agree with the dualist about our mental concepts, whilst retaining a physicalist ontology. In this paper I argue that, in fact, a posteriori physicalism departs from the dualist's (...) intuitive picture of our phenomenal concepts in just as radical a manner as more traditional forms of physicalism. Whereas the physicalism of David Lewis and David Armstrong is counterintuitive in holding that our only way of thinking about pain is in terms of its causal role, the physicalism of David Papineau and Brian Loar departs from common sense in holding that our phenomenal concept of pain is opaque: thinking of pain in terms of how it feels reveals nothing of what it is for something to feel pain. The arguments of David Chalmers and Frank Jackson against a posteriori physicalism involve general claims about all concepts. In contrast, my argument makes a claim only about phenomenal concepts: phenomenal concepts are not opaque. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Where are the Funnies? Writing Images, Drawing Words Without Words Just Looking Where's the Fun? “What's That For?” Arts and Artifacts Notes References.

1 Non-reductive physicalists deny that there is any explanation of mentality in purely physical terms, but do not deny that the mental is entirely determined by and constituted out of underlying physical structures. There are important issues about the stability of such a view which teeters on the edge of explanatory reductionism on the one side and dualism on the other (see Kim 1998). 2 Save perhaps for eliminative materialism (see Churchland 1981 for a classic exposition). In fact, however, while.

Our story is changing. The Universe has given our species everything we need to actualize our potential. Evolution is knocking at our doors. The connected life is here. We are being fed this minute with the very nutrients that can assure that we live the lives that fulfill us and that serve the greater whole. Our natural inheritance, combined with the pattern that connects us with the rest of Life, calls us to be fully ourselves. This has always been the (...) case, but now it is becoming more evident. Our lives are Life's life. The details unfold within. David "Lucky" Goff, Ph.D., M.F.T., served as adjunct faculty at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, where he employed large group processes to promote community and personal development. David also assists organizations, including therapeutic and spiritual communities, in their quests to create and sustain genuine community. His research into the "psychological sense of community" is the first to examine and describe the conditions that facilitate collective consciousness. In 2003 David had a brain aneurism. As a result of his stroke and the onset of a rare brain syndrome, he nearly died and ended up permanently disabled. This experience had a transformational effect on David, which made him "Lucky" and cued him into how radically connected all things are. This broader awareness now informs his approach toward what it means to be human. He maintains a psychotherapy practice specializing in psycho-spiritual development. He also writes extensively about a psychology of interdependence, community, elders, and the conditions that lead to a social and ecological sense of connection. (shrink)

There has recently been a revival of interest in panpsychism as a theory of consciousness. The hope of the contemporary proponents of panpsychism is that the view enables us to integrate consciousness into our overall theory of reality in a way that avoids the deep difficulties that plague the more conventional options of physicalism on the one hand and dualism on the other. However, panpsychism comes in two forms — strong and weak emergentist — and there are arguments that seem (...) to show that weak emergentist panpsychism faces problems analogous to those of physicalism whilst strong emergentist panpsychism faces problems analogous to those of dualism. In this paper, I will develop a new hybrid of the strong and weak emergentist forms of panpsychism, a view according to which subjects of experience are strongly emergent but their phenomenal properties are weakly emergent. I will argue that this hybrid view manages to avoid the challenges facing both physicalism and dualism, and the analogues of those challenges that seem to undermine standard forms of panpsychism. (shrink)

Les partisans de la démocratie radicale ont développé une critique de la démocratie représentative, mettant en avant une priorité du politique sur le social ainsi que la centralité du conflit. Ils n'ont cependant pas produit une réflexion suffisante sur les conditions de la participation politique. C'est ce à quoi s'attelle ce livre, en s'inspirant du pragmatisme de Dewey et de sa définition de la politique démocratique en termes d'expérimentation. Après avoir dégagé l'ossature de la pensée de Dewey, ce livre en (...) interroge certains des points aveugles en puisant à la source des travaux de Charles Wright Mills. Puis il en examine une des actualisations récentes. Tout en montrant les richesses du pragmatisme deweyen qui déconstruit certains clivages stériles en philosophie politique et permet de penser la dynamique de formation des liens civils, ce livre met en relief certaines limites de l'expérimentalisme démocratique."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Quels sont les ressorts profonds de la grave crise économique, sociale et politique que nous traversons? Quelles lignes de fracture souterraines révèle-t-elle? Ces questions ont fait l'objet d'une journée de réflexion organisée à l'occasion du 60e anniversaire de la disparition du philosophe Emmanuel Mounier à l'âge de 45 ans, le 22 mars 1950. Vingt ans durant, le fondateur de la revue Esprit n'a cessé de passer au feu de la critique les politiques et idéologies aboutissant à la négation de la (...) personne, coeur vivant du personnalisme, sa doctrine. A l'origine de ces perversions : une erreur sur l'homme. Mounier l'identifie dès ses premiers textes consacrés à la crise des années 1930. Crise financière, crise économique, certes, mais plus en profondeur, " crise morale " et " spirituelle ". Elle se manifeste par le primat de l'argent déconnecté de l'économie réelle dans une délirante " autofécondité ", l'instrumentalisation du travail, la domination et les inégalités, la prolifération de besoins factices... 500 personnes dont 150 scolaires et étudiants ont participé à cette belle journée de débats qui s'est également interrogée sur l'influence internationale actuelle de la pensée de Mounier. (shrink)

The use of informational terms is widespread in molecular and developmental biology. The usage dates back to Weismann. In both protein synthesis and in later development, genes are symbols, in that there is no necessary connection between their form (sequence) and their effects. The sequence of a gene has been determined, by past natural selection, because of the effects it produces. In biology, the use of informational terms implies intentionality, in that both the form of the signal, and the response (...) to it, have evolved by selection. Where an engineer sees design, a biologist sees natural selection. (shrink)

The notion of ‘gentle barbarism’ was developed during our critical analysis of the discourses and mechanisms of ‘modernisation’ that emerged in the context of the movement for permanent reform (in education, the public services and business management), in which public bodies and businesses have been engaged since the 1980s. These discourses and mechanisms of modernisation seem to us to represent a blind spot where sociological analysis is concerned.

_‘Informative, accessible, and fun to read— this is an excellent reference guide for undergraduates and anyone wanting an introduction to the fundamental issues of metaphysics. I know of no other resource like it.’– __Meghan Griffith, Davidson College, USA_ _'Marvellous! This book provides the very best place to start for students wanting to take the first step into understanding metaphysics.Undergraduates would do well to buy it and consult it regularly. The quality and clarity of the material are consistently high.' – __Chris (...) Daly, University of Manchester, UK_ Ever wondered about Gunk, Brains in a Vat or Frankfurt’s Nefarious Neurosurgeon? With complete explanations of these terms and more, _Metaphysics: The Key Concepts_ is an accessible and engaging introduction to the most widely studied and challenging concepts in metaphysics. The authors clearly and lucidly define and discuss key terms and concepts, under the themes of: time particulars & universals realism & antirealism free will personal identity causation and laws. Arranged in an easy to use A-Z format, each concept is explored and illustrated with engaging and memorable examples, and accompanied by an up-to-date guide to further reading. Fully cross-referenced throughout, this remarkable reference guide is essential reading for students of philosophy and all those interested in the nature of reality. (shrink)

Concentrating on problems that commonly perplex general readers and beginning students, John Maynard Smith discusses fundamental issues in biology, with emphasis on evolution, development, and cognition. He provides a nontechnical account of molecular genetics, which is the foundation of modern biology, and explores such issues as heredity, animal behavior, the definition and origin of life, the brain and how we know things, artificial and natural intelligence, and genetics. The book is unique in presenting modern ideas in terms that can (...) be understood without an in-depth knowledge of biology. (shrink)

The first half of this book argues that physicalism cannot account for consciousness, and hence cannot be true. The second half explores and defends Russellian monism, a radical alternative to both physicalism and dualism. The view that emerges combines panpsychism with the view that the universe as a whole is fundamental.

With this treatise, an insightful exploration of the probabilistic connection between philosophy and the history of science, the famous economist breathed new life into studies of both disciplines. Originally published in 1921, this important mathematical work represented a significant contribution to the theory regarding the logical probability of propositions. Keynes effectively dismantled the classical theory of probability, launching what has since been termed the “logical-relationist” theory. In so doing, he explored the logical relationships between classifying a proposition as “highly probable” (...) and as a “justifiable induction.” Unabridged republication of the classic 1921 edition. (shrink)

Inevitably, much of this reply will concern points on which I disagree with one or other of the commentators. I should start, therefore, by saying that I am delighted to find that their thinking is in many ways similar to my own, and that a serious attempt is under way to clarify the concept of information in biology.

Federal regulations require that the level of risk posed by pediatric research be classified as “minimal,” “greater than minimal,” or “a minor increase over minimal.” Interpretation of the meaning of the levels has produced a significant literature exploring the ethical basis for making these determinations. This article examines the ethical basis of a variety of approaches proposed in the literature for classifying pediatric research risk. These approaches strive to take into account how society decides which risks are routinely accepted for (...) children outside of research. It is concluded that ways of classifying risk should compare research risks to normal risks for children without special disability and take into account the concerns of the research subject’s community. (shrink)

The Nuzi Workshop at the 55th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale. Edited by P. Abrahami and B. Lion. Studies on the Civilization and Culture of Nuzi and the Hurrians, vol. 19. Bethesda: CDL Press, 2012. Pp. xi + 292, illus. $70.

In Southeast Asian countries (SEA), road transport accounts for the main energy consumption and CO2 emission. Air pollution is a major concern in densely populated cities such as Bangkok, Manila, and Kuala Lumpur. The main objective of this paper is to give insights on trends of transport development, car ownership, and CO2 emissions in Southeast Asia. This study also attempts to review the successful transportation policies around the globe and to introduce the possible instruments that can help reduce air pollution (...) in Southeast Asian countries. Economic instruments to estimate the benefits of a cleaner environment due to new policies are introduced as well. The results of this research could help policy makers consider approaches that could internalize external costs of transportation and maximize the societal welfare. (shrink)

Financial sustainability of protected areas is one of the main challenges of management. Financial self-sufficiency is an important element in improving conservation effort in these areas. This study seeks to review best practices in recreational fee systems in different countries and to find a relevant entry fee for a wildlife sanctuary in Malaysia. The revenue of the National Elephant Conservation Center (NECC) in Kuala Gandah, Malaysia, comes from several sources, including the national government, but all these budgetary sources are strained (...) by tighter public budgets and greater demands. The present study investigates the introduction of visitor entrance fees to supplement an otherwise inadequate budget for supporting the operational costs of the sanctuary. Factor analysis and a double-bounded contingent valuation method were combined to estimate tourists' willingness to pay (WTP) the proposed entrance fee. Factor analysis showed that respondents' motivation to support the NECC with user fees is conditioned by their direct experiences with elephants, their satisfaction with NECC's educational programs and services, and other experiences it gives to users. The WTP model considered respondents' four motivation factors with their sociodemographic characteristics. Since NECC visitors arrive from both within and outside the country, this study suggests to center managers a two-tier fee structure (residents vs. nonresidents of Malaysia), based upon mean WTP estimates. This study further suggests that revenue from such an entrance fee for NECC could support the Center's management and development costs. © 2015 Elsevier B. (shrink)

We introduce a new operator – belief fusion– which aggregates the beliefs of two agents, each informed by a subset of sources ranked by reliability. In the process we definepedigreed belief states, which enrich standard belief states with the source of each piece of information. We note that the fusion operator satisfies the invariants of idempotence, associativity, and commutativity. As a result, it can be iterated without difficulty. We also define belief diffusion; whereas fusion generally produces a belief state with (...) more information than is possessed by either of its two arguments, diffusion produces a state with less information. Fusion and diffusion are symmetric operators, and together define a distributive lattice. Finally, we show that AGM revision can be viewed as fusion between a novice and an expert. (shrink)

In this brillant meditation on conceptions of history, Le Goff traces the evolution of the historian's craft. Examining real and imagined oppositions between past and present, ancient and modern, oral and written history, _History and Memory_ reveals the strands of continuity that have characterized historiography from ancient Mesopotamia to modern Europe.

There are continual “crises” in health care systems worldwide as producer and patient groups unify and decry the “underfunding” of health care. Sometimes this cacophony is the self interest of profit seeking producers and often it is advocacy of unproven therapies. Such pressure is to be expected and needs careful management by explicit rationing criteria which determine who gets access to what health care. Science and rationality, however, are unfortunately, rarely the rules of conduct in the medical market-place.

Richard Levins (1930-2016) was an outstanding ecologist, population geneticist, biomathematician, philosopher of science, complexity theorist, and Marxist. Key to all aspects of his work was a dialectical logic of process and change. His work provides a framework for the understanding of crises in environment and society and their analytic relationship with capitalism and imperialism, as well as the tools for the critique of biological determinist justifications for the existing structures of power. This anthology pays tribute to Levins by carrying forward (...) his work in the development of the understanding of the dialectics of nature and society. -/- The contributions are organized into four sections--Dialectics in Wholistic Research; Political Ecology and Health; Complex Systems; and Reminiscences and Tributes. The authors are as almost as hard to label as Levins; the fields they draw from range from biomathematics to NGO activism; environmental policy to island and aquatic ecology; eco-justice podcasting to biogeochemistry; reflective practice to science-in-society, agroecology to public health. (shrink)

A slew of recent political theorists—many taking their cue from the political writings of Bernard Williams—have recently contended that political normativity is its own kind of normativity, distinct from moral normativity. In this article, we first attempt to clarify what this claim amounts to and then reconstruct and interrogate five major arguments for it. We contend that all these arguments are unconvincing and fail to establish a sense in which political normativity is genuinely separate from morality.

In this brillant meditation on conceptions of history, Le Goff traces the evolution of the historian's craft. Examining real and imagined oppositions between past and present, ancient and modern, oral and written history, _History and Memory_ reveals the strands of continuity that have characterized historiography from ancient Mesopotamia to modern Europe.

This paper starts from the assumption that panpsychism is counterintuitive and metaphysically demanding. A number of philosophers, whilst not denying these negative aspects of the view, think that panpsychism has in its favour that it offers a good explanation of consciousness. In opposition to this, the paper argues that panpsychism cannot help us to explain consciousness, at least not the kind of consciousness we have pre-theoretical reason to believe in.

Xenophobia is one of the key drivers of marginalisation, discrimination, and conflict, yet many prominent machine learning fairness frameworks fail to comprehensively measure or mitigate the resulting xenophobic harms. Here we aim to bridge this conceptual gap and help facilitate safe and ethical design of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. We ground our analysis of the impact of xenophobia by first identifying distinct types of xenophobic harms, and then applying this framework across a number of prominent AI application domains, reviewing the (...) potential interplay between AI and xenophobia on social media and recommendation systems, healthcare, immigration, employment, as well as biases in large pre-trained models. These help inform our recommendations towards an inclusive, xenophilic design of future AI systems. (shrink)

In this paper, I reply to 18 of the essays on panpsychism in this issue. Along the way, I sketch out what a post-Galilean science of consciousness, one in which consciousness is taken to be a fundamental feature of reality, might look like.

The question of what constitutes a finished work is thrown open, reminding us that in certain of his completed autographs Beethoven continued the process that he normally reserved for the earlier stages of composition, setting out further choices, possibilities, and interchangeabilities, including radical alterations in goal as well as detail. In particular, the revision of movement endings was one of his long-standing preoccupations. In works of his middle period, Emil Platen observed, Beethoven continued to make essential alterations in the closing (...) sections of movements after the works had already taken concrete notational form; for example, in the scores of the String Quartets, op. 59, “out of a total of seven movement endings, six were altered after the fact, four in essential ways.”6 Indeed the relationship between sketches and compositional goals was always more problematical than traditional scholars were willing to allow. As Lewish Lockwood has shown, the closer one looks at the sketches the less one can continue to accept as an article of faith that “as a work progresses from first inklings to final realization it should pass through successive phases of growth and clarification of structure, and of complication of detail in relation to that structure, becoming progressively more definite en route to its goal.”7 To further thicken the issue, Janet Levy has pointed out that one “cannot assume that the goals of a completed work are necessarily the same as the goals of the sketches for it,” inasmuch as the composer’s intentions may well have changed during the course of composition and we may be left with sketches made in connection with goals no longer reflected in the final work.8 Composition is only partly a teleological process whereby the composer eventually finds a lapidary form for a predetermined idea. With Beethoven, not only is there no prospective inevitability, there may even be no inevitability after the fact. His sketches and autographs may well be series of rough maps to the multiplicity of universes he glimpsed, to a plurality of possibilities, a jammed crossroads of paths taken and not taken. 6. Emil Platen, “Beethovens Autographen als Ausgangspunkt morphologischer Untersuchungen,” in Bericht über den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress: Bonn 1970, ed. Carl Dahlhaus et al. , p. 535. See also Lewis Lockwood, “Beethoven and the Problem of Closure: Some Examples from the Middle-Period Chamber Music,” in Beiträge zu Beethovens Kammermusik, p. 270.7. Lockwood, “On Beethoven’s Sketches and Autographs: Some Problems of Definition and Interpretation,” Acta Musicologica 42 : 34.8. Levy, Beethoven’s Compositional Choices, p. 3. Maynard Solomon’s books include Beethoven , Beethoven Essays , and, most recently, Beethoven’s Tagebuch . He has also written on Schubert, Ives, and Freud, and has edited a standard work on Marxist aesthetics. He is currently writing a life of Mozart and a study of the origins of music. In 1990 he was visiting professor of music at Columbia University. (shrink)

We introduce the topic of panpsychism, before briefly outlining the 19 essays on panpsychism containing in this special issue.