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)

The human environment is currently undergoing massive change amid the rapid adoption of information and communications technology (ICT). ICT can be characterized as offering an opportunity to consider the nature of humanity, create new values, and foster new cultures. As humans, the question that technical innovation relating to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robots thrusts before us is, “What is a human?” What exactly are the things that AI will never be able to do, no matter how close it gets to (...) human capabilities? What makes us humans, and what is it that only humans can do? This essay discusses the impact of AI technology on humans and society from the perspective of a turning point in how people perceive themselves and humanity. (shrink)

The spread of the novel coronavirus brought an impact on human civilization. The history of infectious diseases teaches us that overcoming them requires the long-term perspective for the complex of the following keys, including the mutation of pathogens, the disappearance of vectors, the effectiveness of protective measures, the acquisition of herd immunity, the development of vaccines, and the climate. So, what do we lose or gain in this unwanted situation of living with viruses? From the perspective of historical anthropology, it (...) is necessary to consider the transformation of humanity and the culture, social etiquette, ceremonies, and rites in the age of living with COVID-19. (shrink)

Living in an era of technological innovations, we must understand and trust them to benefit from these new technologies. In this context, paternalism is renewed as the so-called “soft-” or “Libertarian paternalism”. How can we face it and ensure freedom in the vortex of wellmeaning advice and persuasion? This paper will discuss 1. the characteristics of freedom since the 18th century from the perspective of the Enlightenment discourse in Germany by Mendelssohn and Kant, 2. the conditions for freedom in the (...) contemporary age of accelerating technological innovation, and 3. from trans-modernism, rethinking the dichotomy between otherness and autonomy, coercion and freedom, by the idea of 融通無碍 Yuzu-Muge, tactfulness in 華厳学 Hua-Yan Philosophy. (shrink)

The need for a reconsideration of human-nature relationships has been widely recognized in the Anthropocene. It is difficult to rethink, however, because there is a crisis of imagination that is deeply entrenched within the fundamental premises of modernity. This article explores how ‘critical animism’ developed by Miyazaki Hayao of Studio Ghibli can address this paucity of imagination by providing alternative ways of knowing and being. ‘Critical animism’ emerged from the fusion of a critique of modernity with informal cultural heritage in (...) Japan. It is a philosophy that perceives nature as a non-dualistic combination of the life-world and the spiritual-world, while also emphasizing the significance of place. Miyazaki’s critical animism challenges anthropocentrism, secularism, Eurocentrism, as well as dualism. It may be the ‘perfect story’ that could disrupt the existing paradigm, offering a promise to rethink human-nonhuman relationships and envisaging a new paradigm for the social sciences. (shrink)

This study investigates the individual outcomes of irrational thinking, including belief in the paranormal and non-scientific thinking. These modes of thinking are identified through factor analysis of eleven questions asked in a large-scale survey conducted in Japan in 2008. Income and happiness are used as measures of individual performance. We propose two hypotheses. Previous studies in finance lead us to consider Hypothesis 1 that both higher belief in the paranormal and non-scientific thinking are associated with lower income. Literature on the (...) association between religion, the paranormal, and happiness suggest Hypothesis 2 that higher belief in the paranormal is associated with greater happiness, while higher non-scientific thinking is associated with greater unhappiness. To examine these hypotheses, we regress income and happiness on belief in the paranormal and non-scientific thinking with appropriate control variables. We employ the Mincer-type wage function as the income equation. Income, sex, and age are controlled in the happiness equation. Analysis supports both hypotheses, which highlights the complex features of irrationality. Although irrationality results in diminishing financial profitability, the component of belief in the paranormal improves the psychological state. (shrink)

30th Nov. and 1st Dec. 2013 at Kyoto University. Organizer: Takeshi Sakon.

思想家・後藤新平は、「儒服をつけた英雄」蕃山から何を学んだのか? 百年先を読んだ政治家、後藤新平(1857-1929)の思想はどのようにして培われてきたのか。後藤新平が終生の愛読書としていた熊沢蕃山(1619-91)の『集義和書』を手がかりに、思想家・後藤新平の知ら れざる中枢に切り込む。.

Shehtman and Skvortsov introduced Kripke bundles as semantics of non-classical first-order predicate logics. We show the structural equivalence between Kripke bundles for intermediate predicate lógics and Kripke-type frames for intuitionistic modal propositional logics. This equivalence enables us to develop the semantical study of relations between intermediate predicate logics and intuitionistic modal propositional logics. New examples of modal counterparts of intermediate predicate logics are given.

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)

University campuses are framed as sexualised spaces marked by high sexual risk-taking behaviour and toxic masculinities that often fuel abusive relationships and sexual violence. More often, the most vulnerable groups, to this violence include sexual minorities, girls and students with disabilities. Drawing on qualitative ethnographic research and semi-structured interviews with students and staff from two universities in Zimbabwe, this article examines how toxic campus ‘cultures’ and campus sexual economies can be transformed and made more inclusive and safer for all students. (...) The study uses Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, especially the field and habitus to understand how toxic masculinities are produced and reproduced on campus, as well as how everyday practice on campus can be instrumentalised to reconfigure coercive sexual practices and toxic masculinities. Although there is a huge body of research on sexual violence in Zimbabwe, very little of this has focused on the prevalence and experiences of this phenomenon within university campus spaces. Therefore, little is known about how students experience, perceive, and navigate sexual violence on campus, as well as institutional responses to sexual violence. Consequently, this study seeks to fill this gap and contribute to the burgeoning scholarship and debates on sexual violence, including coercive sexual practices and heteronormativity in university campus spaces. We seek to contribute to three sustainable development goals, that is goal 3 (good health and well-being), goal 5 (gender quality) and finally goal 10 (reduced inequalities). Contribution: This article foregrounds the ways in which institutions of higher learning respond to sexual violence within the university campus. The key contribution of this article relates to how students’ religious and socio-cultural subjectivities shaped or mediated experiences of and perceptions on sexual violence on campus. Consequently, we assert that the campus religious ‘field’ and students’ spiritual ‘habitus’ had a huge influence on the campus sexual economies.The research contributes to the field of Biblical Theology engaged with Gender Justice, Health and Human Development. (shrink)

In this paper, we establish the first-order definability of sequents with consistent variable occurrence on bi-approximation semantics by means of the Sahlqvist–van Benthem algorithm. Then together with the canonicity results in Suzuki (2011), this allows us to establish a Sahlqvist theorem for substructural logic. Our result is not limited to substructural logic but is also easily applicable to other lattice-based logics.

Kaneko-Suzuki developed epistemic logics of shallow depths with multiple players for investigations of game theoretical problems. By shallow depth, we mean that nested occurrences of belief operators of players in formulae are restricted, typically to be of finite depths, by a given epistemic structure. In this paper, we develop various methods of surgical operations (cut and paste) of epistemic world models. An example is a bouquet-making, i.e., tying several models into a bouquet. Another example is to engraft a model (...) to some branches of another model. By these methods, we obtain various meta-theorems on semantics and syntax on epistemic logics. To illustrate possible uses of our meta-theorems, we present one game theoretical theorem, which is also a meta-theorem in the sense of logic. (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)

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)

A great deal of research has been performed recently on robots that feature functions for communicating with humans in daily life, i.e., communication robots. We consider it important to develop methods to measure humans’ attitudes and emotions that may prevent them from interaction with communication robots, as indices to study short-term and long-term interaction between humans and communication robots. This study is aimed at exploring the influence of negative attitudes toward robots, focusing on applications of communication robots to daily-life services. (...) First, a scale of negative attitudes toward robots consisting of three subordinate scales, “negative attitudes toward situations of interaction with robots,” “negative attitudes toward the social influence of robots,” and “negative attitudes toward emotions in interaction with robots,” was developed based on a data sample comprising of 263 Japanese university students. This scale was administered to 240 Japanese university students to confirm its validity and reliability. In this paper, we report on the results of analyses of these data samples. Moreover, we discuss some future problems including a comparison of attitudes toward robots between nations. (shrink)

To investigate whether people with social anxiety have less actual and “anticipatory” anxiety when interacting with a robot compared to interacting with a person, we conducted a 2 × 2 psychological experiment with two factors: social anxiety and interaction partner. The experiment was conducted in a counseling setting where a participant played the role of a client and the robot or the confederate played the role of a counselor. First, we measured the participants’ social anxiety using the Social Avoidance and (...) Distress Scale, after which, we measured their anxiety at two specific moments: “anticipatory anxiety” was measured after they knew that they would be interacting with a robot or a human confederate, and actual anxiety was measured after they actually interacted with the robot or confederate. Measurements were performed using the Profile of Mood States and the State–Trait Anxiety Inventory. The results indicated that participants with higher social anxiety tended to feel less “anticipatory anxiety” and tension when they knew that they would be interacting with robots compared with humans. Moreover, we found that interaction with a robot elicited less tension compared with interaction with a person regardless of the level of social anxiety. (shrink)

This paper is a comparative study of the propositional intuitionistic (non-modal) and classical modal languages interpreted in the standard way on transitive frames. It shows that, when talking about these frames rather than conventional quasi-orders, the intuitionistic language displays some unusual features: its expressive power becomes weaker than that of the modal language, the induced consequence relation does not have a deduction theorem and is not protoalgebraic. Nevertheless, the paper develops a manageable model theory for this consequence and its extensions (...) which also reveals some unexpected phenomena. The balance between the intuitionistic and modal languages is restored by adding to the former one more implication. (shrink)

In this paper, we extend the canonicity methodology in Ghilardi & Meloni (1997) to arbitrary lattice expansions, and syntactically describe canonical inequalities for lattice expansions consisting of -meet preserving operations, -multiplicative operations, adjoint pairs, and constants. This approach gives us a uniform account of canonicity for substructural and lattice-based logics. Our method not only covers existing results, but also systematically accounts for many canonical inequalities containing nonsmooth additive and multiplicative uniform operations. Furthermore, we compare our technique with the approach in (...) Dunn et al. (2005) and Gehrke et al. (2005). (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)

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.