O objetivo deste artigo é mostrar a semântica da palavra Eros dentro da tradição cristã. Limita-se a algumas dessas significações. A reflexão mostra a limitação dessa expressão na língua portuguesa. Seu significado é muito mais rico na língua grega. Se a tradição cristã carregou esta palavra de forma negativa, outros Padres leram-na em sintonia com Ágape e com outros significados. A relação mística a interpreta como uma relação “erótica” entre homem e Deus. Esta intimidade procura explicar o aspecto do desejo (...) de Deus e da relação mútua entre aquele que ama e o amado, que tem sua raiz na busca mais íntima da humanidade. Negar por preconceitos palavras carregadas de desejos não divinos e nem dignos da humanidade, como na Antigüidade, é reduzir demais seu campo semântico na história. Esta palavra reflete o amor da alma para com Deus numa perspectiva mística, assume variações significativas, dentre tantas, como o amor de Jesus Cristo, como sinônimas de Ágape, do amor de Deus para com os homens, como amor individual ligado a Deus, o Eros como virtude e como castidade. A compreensão das dimensões do amor se realiza na capacidade de ver que todas elas são positivas e importantes para obtermos o equilíbrio da vida humana, numa harmonia destas dimensões constitutivas e importantes para a vida. Palavras-chave: Eros; Patrística; Amor; Alma; Mística; Virtude; Castidade e Ágape. ABSTRACT This article aims at demonstrating the semantics of the term Eros in Christian tradition, pointing out the limitations of the term in Portuguese. The scope of its meaning is much wider in Greek. If Christian tradition has charged the word with a negative feature, other priests have read it in tune with Agape and other meanings. The mystical perspective interprets it as an ‘erotic’ relationship between man and God. Such intimacy attempts to explain God’s desire and the mutual relation between the one who loves and the beloved, rooted in mankind’s most intimate longing. To deny, on account of prejudice, words charged with non-divine desires unworthy of humanity, as happened in antiquity, is to reduce their semantic field in history. That word reflects the soul’s love for God in a mystical perspective and assumes meaningful variations, among which Christ’s love, ‘Agape’ or God’s love for men, and individual love connected with God: ‘Eros’ as virtue and chastity. The comprehension of the dimensions of love takes place in the capacity to realize that they are all positive and relevant to human life’s balance, in the harmony of those dimensions that constitute life. Key words: Eros; Patristics; Love; Soul; The mystical; Virtue; Chastity; Agape. (shrink)

Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin argue for a revolution in our cosmological ideas. Ideal for non-scientists, physicists and cosmologists.

This book is the outcome of the Workshop Ciências Humanas, held in the city of São Pedro (SP), by thePROPe (Pró-Reitoria de Pesquisa da Universidade Estadual Paulista "Júlio de Mesquita Filho" - Unesp), with the aim of comprising ebooks for the collection "Desafios Contemporâneos". On this occasion, a team of teachers and representatives of research groups, formed by academics Evandro Fiorin, José Marcos Romão da Silva, Maria Antônia Benutti, Paula da Cruz Landim, Paulo Roberto Masseran, Rosa Maria Araújo Simões (...) and Rosangela da Silva Leote (of several university units and different courses), discussed the ideas of its formulation according to the following "Art, science and creative processes; philosophy in Brazil: incorporation or creation. (shrink)

There are two main ways in which the notion of mereological fusion is usually defined in the current literature in mereology which have been labelled ‘Leśniewski fusion’ and ‘Goodman fusion’. It is well-known that, with Minimal Mereology as the background theory, every Leśniewski fusion also qualifies as a Goodman fusion. However, the converse does not hold unless stronger mereological principles are assumed. In this paper I will discuss how the gap between the two notions can be filled, focussing in particular (...) on two specific sets of principles that appear to be of particular philosophical interest. The first way to make the two notions equivalent can be used to shed some interesting light on the kind of intuition both notions seem to articulate. The second shows the importance of a little-known mereological principle which I will call ‘Mild Supplementation’. As I will show, the mereology obtained by adding Mild Supplementation to Minimal Mereology occupies an interesting position in the landscape of theories that are stronger than Minimal Mereology but weaker than what Achille Varzi and Roberto Casati have labelled ‘Extensional Mereology’. (shrink)

In this paper I start from a definition of “culture of the artificial” which might be stated by referring to the background of philosophical, methodological, pragmatical assumptions which characterizes the development of the information processing analysis of mental processes and of some trends in contemporary cognitive science: in a word, the development of AI as a candidate science of mind. The aim of this paper is to show how (with which plausibility and limitations) the discovery of the mentioned background might (...) be dated back to a period preceding the cybernetic era, the decade 1930–1940 at least. Therefore a somewhat detailed analysis of Hull's “robot approach” is given, as well as of some of its independent and future developments. -/- Reprinted in R.L. Chrisley (ed.), Artificial Intelligence: Critical Concepts in Cognitive Science, vol. 1, Routledge, London and New York, 2000, pp. 301-326. (shrink)

In this article, Roberto Esposito lays out the genealogical pathways linking the three major concepts around which his most recent work has wound its way: community, immunity, and biopolitics. Although immunity is necessary to the preservation of our life, when driven beyond a certain threshold it forces life into a sort of cage where not only our freedom gets lost but also the very meaning of our existence – that opening of existence outside itself that takes the name of (...) communitas. A hermeneutics informed by immunity can allow the category of community to regain a new political significance, without ending up in a substantialist metaphysics. This task is dictated by the urgent need for an affirmative biopolitics – a horizon of meaning – in which life would no longer be the object but somehow the subject of politics. But what sort of shape would this take? Where would we trace its symptoms? And with what objectives? A preliminary answer focuses on breaking the vise grip between public and private that threatens to crush the common, by seeking instead to expand the space of the common, in the fight, for example, against the planned privatization of water and the battle over energy sources. (shrink)

There is much effort nowadays to protect communication networks against different cybersecurity attacks (which are more and more sophisticated) that look for systems’ vulnerabilities they could exploit for malicious purposes. Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs) are popular tools to detect and classify such attacks, most of them based on ML models. However, ML-based NIDSs cannot be trained by feeding them with network traffic data as it is. Thus, a Feature Engineering (FE) process plays a crucial role transforming network traffic raw (...) data onto derived one suitable for ML models. In this work, we study the effects of applying one such FE technique in different ways on the performance of two ML models (linear and non-linear) and their selected features. This the Feature as a Counter approach. The derived observations are computed from either with the same number of raw samples, (batch-based approaches) or by aggregating them by time intervals (timestamp-based approach). Results show that there is no significant differences between the proposed approaches neither in the performance of the models nor in the selected features that validate our proposal making it feasible to be widely used as a standard FE method. (shrink)

The present article delineates how the Roman and Christian dispositif of the person has increasingly brought about a neat division between persons and things. This has had devastating effects for both. On the one hand, things are reduced not only to servile objects but also to disposable commodities. On the other, the process of derealization of things is paralleled by that of depersonalization of persons; different typologies of persons emerge, historically reproduced by the distinction between real persons and those that (...) are declared non-persons, almost-persons, temporary persons or anti-persons. It is, however, possible to develop a new anti-hierarchical conception of things and persons by focusing on the human body and by taking into account the findings of anthropology as well as the works of philosophers such as Spinoza, Simondon and Latour. (shrink)

O presente artigo busca demonstrar a estreita relação entre as culturas de consumo e as mídias —entendidas como mediadoras das relações socioculturais— na contemporaneidade, na medida em que colocam em ação processos de formação de significações simbólicas, a partir das diferentes práticas, bens e hábitos de consumo. Esses processos produzem “jogos de aparência” que permitem a negociação na construção da própria imagem por meio dos usos e consumos referentes à vestimenta, a estilos e também ao corpo. Além disso, a própriaabordagem (...) antropológica sobre o consumo e a aparência é problematizada ao evidenciar que essas relações são construções simbólicas onde os termos utilizados devem ser entendidos a partir do contexto da sua produção. (shrink)

This high-level study discusses Newtonian principles and 19th-century views on electrodynamics and the aether. Additional topics include Einstein's electrodynamics of moving bodies, Minkowski spacetime, gravitational geometry, time and causality, and other subjects. Highlights include a rich exposition of the elements of the special and general theories of relativity.

The early examples of self-directing robots attracted the interest of both scientific and military communities. Biologists regarded these devices as material models of animal tropisms. Engineers envisaged the possibility of turning self-directing robots into new “intelligent” torpedoes during World War I. Starting from World War II, more extensive interactions developed between theoretical inquiry and applied military research on the subject of adaptive and intelligent machinery. Pioneers of Cybernetics were involved in the development of goal-seeking warfare devices. But collaboration occasionally turned (...) into open dissent. Founder of Cybernetics Norbert Wiener, in the aftermath of World War II, argued against military applications of learning machines, by drawing on epistemological appraisals of machine learning techniques. This connection between philosophy of science and techno-ethics is both strengthened and extended here. It is strengthened by an epistemological analysis of contemporary machine learning from examples; it is extended by a reflection on ceteris paribus conditions for models of adaptive behaviours. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo nos hemos propuesto la factura de una exposición sucinta en torno a la crítica contra la metafísica clásica desde la perspectiva de Eduardo Nicol. Puede decirse que, desde el punto de vista de nuestro autor, la característica básica de la metafísica ha consistido en el soterramiento del ser, es decir, la metafísica clásica, de alguna u otra manera, ha versado acerca de un ser atemporal y oculto. El ocultamiento del ser ha estado íntimamente ligado al olvido (...) del tiempo y al endiosamiento de la razón; justo por esto Nicol se propone ahora una recuperación de la visibilidad del ser en aras de un contradiscurso del método. (shrink)

The notion of the "impolitical" developed in this volume draws its meaning from the exhaustion of modernity's political categories, which have become incapable of giving voice to any genuinely radical perspective. The impolitical is not the opposite of the political but rather its outer limit: the border from which we might glimpse a trajectory away from all forms of political theology and the depoliticizing tendencies of a completed modernity. The book's reconstruction of the impolitical lineage-which is anything but uniform-begins with (...) the extreme conclusions reached by Carl Schmitt and Romano Guardini in their reflections on the political and then moves through a series of encounters between several great twentieth-century texts: from Hannah Arendt's On Revolution to Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, to Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power; from Simone Weil's The Need for Roots to Georges Bataille's Sovereignty to Ernst Junger's An der Zeitmauer. The trail forged by this analysis offers a defiant counterpoint to the modern political lexicon, but at the same time a contribution to our understanding of its categories. (shrink)

Since the early eighties, computationalism in the study of the mind has been “under attack” by several critics of the so-called “classic” or “symbolic” approaches in AI and cognitive science. Computationalism was generically identified with such approaches. For example, it was identified with both Allen Newell and Herbert Simon’s Physical Symbol System Hypothesis and Jerry Fodor’s theory of Language of Thought, usually without taking into account the fact ,that such approaches are very different as to their methods and aims. Zenon (...) Pylyshyn, in his influential book Computation and Cognition, claimed that both Newell and Fodor deeply influenced his ideas on cognition as computation. This probably added to the confusion, as many people still consider Pylyshyn’s book as paradigmatic of the computational approach in the study of the mind. Since then, cognitive scientists, AI researchers and also philosophers of the mind have been asked to take sides on different “paradigms” that have from time to time been proposed as opponents of (classic or symbolic) computationalism. Examples of such oppositions are: -/- computationalism vs. connectionism, computationalism vs. dynamical systems, computationalism vs. situated and embodied cognition, computationalism vs. behavioural and evolutionary robotics. -/- Our preliminary claim in section 1 is that computationalism should not be identified with what we would call the “paradigm (based on the metaphor) of the computer” (in the following, PoC). PoC is the (rather vague) statement that the mind functions “as a digital computer”. Actually, PoC is a restrictive version of computationalism, and nobody ever seriously upheld it, except in some rough versions of the computational approach and in some popular discussions about it. Usually, PoC is used as a straw man in many arguments against computationalism. In section 1 we look in some detail at PoC’s claims and argue that computationalism cannot be identified with PoC. In section 2 we point out that certain anticomputationalist arguments are based on this misleading identification. In section 3 we suggest that the view of the levels of explanation proposed by David Marr could clarify certain points of the debate on computationalism. In section 4 we touch on a controversial issue, namely the possibility of developing a notion of analog computation, similar to the notion of digital computation. A short conclusion follows in section 5. (shrink)

A magisterial study of the philosophy of physics that both introduces the subject to the non-specialist and contains many original and important contributions for professionals in the area. Modern physics was born as a part of philosophy and has retained to this day a properly philosophical concern for the clarity and coherence of ideas. Any introduction to the philosophy of physics must therefore focus on the conceptual development of physics itself. This book pursues that development from Galileo and Newton through (...) Maxwell and Boltzmann to Einstein and the founders of quantum mechanics. There is also discussion of important philosophers of physics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and of twentieth-century debates. In the interest of appealing to the broadest possible readership the author avoids technicalities and explains both the physics and philosophical terms. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have developed several accounts of how consideration of scientific models can prompt learning about real-world targets. In recent years, various authors advocated the thesis that consideration of so-called minimal models can prompt learning about such targets. In this paper, I draw on the philosophical literature on scientific modelling and on widely cited illustrations from economics and biology to argue that this thesis fails to withstand scrutiny. More specifically, I criticize leading proponents of such thesis for failing to (...) explicate in virtue of what properties or features minimal models supposedly prompt learning and for substantially overstating the epistemic import of minimal models. I then examine and refute several arguments one may put forward to demonstrate that consideration of minimal models can prompt learning about real-world targets. In doing so, I illustrate the implications of my critique for the wider debate on the epistemology of scientific modelling. (shrink)

We introduce and discuss a knowledge-driven distillation approach to explaining black-box models by means of two kinds of interpretable models. The first is perceptron (or threshold) connectives, which enrich knowledge representation languages such as Description Logics with linear operators that serve as a bridge between statistical learning and logical reasoning. The second is Trepan Reloaded, an ap- proach that builds post-hoc explanations of black-box classifiers in the form of decision trees enhanced by domain knowledge. Our aim is, firstly, to target (...) a model-agnostic distillation approach exemplified with these two frameworks, secondly, to study how these two frameworks interact on a theoretical level, and, thirdly, to investigate use-cases in ML and AI in a comparative manner. Specifically, we envision that user-studies will help determine human understandability of explanations generated using these two frameworks. (shrink)

The explanation of the phenomenon of Brownian motion, given by Einstein in 1905 and based on the kinetic–molecular conception of matter, is considered one of the fundamental pillars supporting atomism in its victorious struggle against phenomenological physics in the early years of this century. Despite the importance of the subject, there exists no specific study on it of sufficient depth. Generally speaking, most histories of physics repeat the following scheme: the discovery made by Robert Brown in 1827 , of the (...) continuous movement of small particles suspended in a fluid did not arouse interest for a long time. Finally, at the close of the century, Gouy's research brought it to the attention of the physicists. Gouy was convinced that Brownian motion constituted a clear demonstration of the existence of molecules in continuous movement. Nevertheless, he did not work out any mathematized theory that could be subjected to quantitative confirmation. All nineteenth-century research remained at the qualitative level and yet it was able to clarify some general characteristics of the phenomenon: the completely irregular, unceasing, motion of the particles is not produced by external causes. It does not depend on the nature of the particles but only on their size. The first significant measurements, carried out by Felix Exner in 1900, appeared to deny the possibility of reconciling the kinetic theory with Brownian motion. The discovery of the ultra-microscope then allowed Zsigmondy to perceive the presence of movements, which were completely analogous to Brown's, in the particles of the colloids; these movements were rather smaller in size than those invesigated up to then. Thus Zsigmondy aroused interest in the phenomenon. Finally, in 1905, Einstein succeeded in stating the mathematical laws governing the movements of particles on the basis of the principles of the kinetic–molecular theory. The following year Smoluchowski arrived at conclusions which corresponded to Einstein's. These laws received a first, rough confirmation in the years immediately following by the work of The Svedberg, Seddig and, for some historians, Henri. Then in 1908 Jean Perrin gave it a definitive confirmation. (shrink)

Axiom weakening is a technique that allows for a fine-grained repair of inconsistent ontologies. Its main advantage is that it repairs on- tologies by making axioms less restrictive rather than by deleting them, employing the use of refinement operators. In this paper, we build on pre- viously introduced axiom weakening for ALC, and make it much more irresistible by extending its definitions to deal with SROIQ, the expressive and decidable description logic underlying OWL 2 DL. We extend the definitions of (...) refinement operator to deal with SROIQ constructs, in particular with role hierarchies, cardinality constraints and nominals, and illustrate its application. Finally, we discuss the problem of termi- nation of an iterated weakening procedure. (shrink)

In recent years, several authors have called to ground descriptive and normative decision theory on neuro-psychological measures of utility. In this paper, I combine insights from the best available neuro-psychological findings, leading philosophical conceptions of welfare and contemporary decision theory to rebut these prominent calls. I argue for two claims of general interest to philosophers, choice modellers and policy makers. First, severe conceptual, epistemic and evidential problems plague ongoing attempts to develop accurate and reliable neuro-psychological measures of utility. And second, (...) even if these problems are solved, neuro-psychological measures of utility lack the potential to inform welfare analyses and policy evaluations. (shrink)

We analyse the liberal ethics of noninterference in social choice. A liberal principle, capturing noninterfering views of society and inspired by John Stuart Mill's conception of liberty, is examined. The principle expresses the idea that society should not penalise individuals after changes in their situation that do not affect others. An impossibility for liberal approaches is highlighted: every social decision rule that satisfies unanimity and a general principle of noninterference must be dictatorial. This raises some important issues for liberal approaches (...) in social choice and political philosophy. (shrink)

Introduction -- Inquiry as the logic of practical reasoning -- From reasoning to judgment -- Expressive inquiry -- The public sphere -- Pragmatism, pluralism, and the fact of relativism -- A pragmatic theory of objectivity -- Why justification matters? -- Pragmatism as an epistemology of practice.

The expression ‘‘artificial intelligence’’ (AI) was introduced by John McCarthy, and the official birth of AI is unanimously considered to be the 1956 Dartmouth Conference. Thus, AI turned fifty in 2006. How did AI begin? Several differently motivated analyses have been proposed as to its origins. In this paper a brief look at those that might be considered steps towards Dartmouth is attempted, with the aim of showing how a number of research topics and controversies that marked the short history (...) of AI were touched on, or fairly well stated, during the year immediately preceding Dartmouth. The framework within which those steps were taken was the development of digital computers. Earlier computer applications in areas such as complex decision making and management, at that time dealt with by operations research techniques, were important in this story. The time was ripe for AI’s intriguingly tumultuous development, marked as it has been by hopes and defeats, successes and difficulties. (shrink)

Nonhuman animals are the most prominent alterity with which humans have engaged in interaction and in comparative self-definition. The reference point of nonhuman alterity is central both to the development of humanism and of posthumanism. In the complex and nonlinear interfaces with nonhumans, humans are extensively hybridized in a process that defines their very humanity. Understanding humans as open and interactive animals rather than as closed and autarchic entities is indispensable to the dismantling of humanism and the development of posthuman (...) thought. Nonhuman and human animals host and are hosted by one another in dynamic and emergent relations. (shrink)

Heuristic programming was the first area in which AI methods were tested. The favourite case-studies were fairly simple toy- problems, such as cryptarithmetic, games, such as checker or chess, and formal problems, such as logic or geometry theorem-proving. These problems are well-defined, roughly speaking, at least in comparison to real-life problems, and as such have played the role of Drosophila in early AI. In this chapter I will investigate the origins of heuristic programming and the shift to more knowledge-based and (...) real-life problem solving. (shrink)

The present investigation aims to elucidate the presence of myth in the work of Eduardo Nicol. This inquiry of course, is something not thought about, since the author in question from the beginning of his philosophy has recognized that the path of thought is beyond myth, that is, it is nuanced by reason and by conceptual rigor. In other words, for him philosophy is about what is phenomenologically accessible and about what is rationally intelligible. Precisely for this reason, one of (...) the names with which Nicol's philosophy is known is under the name of "Metaphysics of expression" by virtue of the fact that what is given is commonly acquired through an expressive or communicative act. However, and despite this conceptual position, the fact is that the presence of myth can be found at the very heart of this philosopher’s philosophy. It should be noted that there is a particular myth that prevails in the clearing of his work, namely the myth of the androgyne. Through this myth it is possible to elucidate the origin of man and the original idea about symbol. (shrink)

Technoscientific progress brings into question both anthropocentric epistemology and anthropocentric/humanistic ontology, which considers the human being as a self-constructing and self-sufficient entity. Even though, Darwinism recomposes the humanistic disjunction between reality and representation: by defining the human being as the result of an adaptive reflection, it reveals the idealistic character of post-Cartesian thought, which is the backbone of philosophical anthropocentrism. The non-human can be a dialogic entity if and only if it is considered not as “animal-by” but “animal-with”, that is, (...) free to express its authenticity in terms of subjectivity, diversity and uniqueness. Whilst the post-human laboratory celebrates the power of human beings, the post-humanistic perspective emphasizes the conjugation with the non-human. (shrink)

Male-to-female transsexualism manifests itself in the form of a discrepancy between the male sex assigned at birth and the subjective experience of belonging to the female gender, which in many cases also involves a somatic transition by cross-sex hormone treatment and genital surgery. Until now, no studies related to MtF transsexualism have been carried out within the framework of a phenomenological/existential approach. This paradigm would make it possible to better articulate the transsexual experience beyond the simplistic diagnostic criteria by which (...) it is currently defined. In this study, I will reread MtF transsexualism in the light of Ludwig Binswanger’s theories on Mannerism and Jean Paul Sartre’s remarks on the self and the body. I will do this largely by focusing on first-hand accounts of the MtF transsexual’s experience, in other words from a first-person viewpoint. Finally, I will present some considerations on the meaning of psychological intervention in this field. (shrink)

In this article, I shall examine some of the issues and questions involved in the technology of autonomous robots, a technology that has developed greatly and is advancing rapidly. I shall do so with reference to a particularly critical field: autonomous military robotic systems. In recent times, various issues concerning the ethical implications of these systems have been the object of increasing attention from roboticists, philosophers and legal experts. The purpose of this paper is not to deal with these issues, (...) but to show how the autonomy of those robotic systems, by which I mean the full automation of their decision processes, raises difficulties and also paradoxes that are not easy to solve. This is especially so when considering the autonomy of those robotic systems in their decision processes alongside their reliability. Finally, I would like to show how difficult it is to respond to these difficulties and paradoxes by calling into play a strong formulation of the precautionary principle. (shrink)

This paper extends the analysis of liberal principles in social choice recently proposed by Mariotti and Veneziani (2009a) to infinitely-lived societies. First, some novel characterisations of inegalitarian leximax social welfare relations are derived based on the Individual Benefit Principle (IBP), which incorporates a liberal, non-interfering view of society. This is surprising because the IBP does not explicitly incorporate any preference for inequality, nor does it assign priority to well-off members of society. Second, some impossibility results are derived that highlight a (...) general tension between standard fairness and efficiency axioms in social choice, and a liberal Principle of Non-Interference that generalises IBP. (shrink)

My aim here is to raise a few questions concerning the problem of representation in scientific discovery computer programs. Representation, as Simon says in his paper, "imposes constraints upon the phenomena that allow the mechanisms to be inferred from the data". The issue is obviously barely outlined by Simon in his paper, while it is addressed in detail in the book by Langley, Simon, Bradshaw and Zytkow (1987), to which I shall refer in this note. Nevertheless, their analysis would appear (...) to leave open certain issues related to the nature of the "constraints" imposed by representation on problem solving strategies. (shrink)

In this paper I put forward a reconstruction of the evolution of certain explanatory hypotheses on the neural basis of association and learning that are the premises of connectionism in the cybernetic age and of present-day connectionism. The main point of my reconstruction is based on two little-known case studies. The first is the project, published in 1913, of a hydraulic machine through which its author believed it was possible to simulate certain essential elements of the plasticity of nervous connections. (...) The author, S. Bent Russell, was an engineer deeply influenced by the neurological hypotheses on nervous conduction of Herbert Spencer, Max Meyer and Edward L. Thorndike. The second is the project, published in 1929, of an electromechanical machine in which the author, the psychologist J.M. Stephens, believed it was possible to embody Thorndike's law of effect. Thus both Bent Russell and Stephens referred to the principles of learning that Thorndike defined as connectionist . Their attempt was that of simulating by machines at least certain simple aspects of inhibition, association and habit formation that are typical of living organisms. I propose to situate their projects within the frame of thediscovery of a simulative (modelling) methodology which I believe might be considered an important topic of the Culture of the Artificial . Certain more recent steps toward such a methodology made by both connectionism of the 1950s and present-day connectionism are briefly pointed out in the paper. (shrink)

A través del análisis del concepto de duración a lo largo de la filosofía de Henri Bergson, se propone una particular filosofía del tiempo como modelo de temporalidad intensiva, vivida, heterogénea y antitética de toda explicación mecanicista, en aras de situar dicha filosofía del tiempo en una necesaria interlocución con el planteamiento teórico acerca del tiempo desde un punto de vista fenomenológico. Para ello, nos serviremos de nociones claves del pensamiento de Henri Bergson, como son: memoria intuición o vida, en (...) su necesaria interrelación con el fenómeno de la duración, que dará cuenta de la coherencia interna del pensamiento bergsoniano y permitirá esclarecer mejor el carácter intensivo de la temporalidad. (shrink)

The notion of loop seems to be ubiquitous in the study of organisms, the human mind and symbolic systems. With the possible exception of quantum-mechanical approaches, the treatments of consciousness we are acquainted with crucially appeal to the concept of loop. The uses of loops in this context fall within two broad classes. In the first one, loops are used to express the control of the organism’s interaction with the environment; in the second one, they are used to express self-reference. (...) Both classes are tied with investigations which aim at accounting for symbolic capabilities, and ultimately for subjectivity. Neurophysiological research detects loops in the animal nervous system since its very inception (e.g., all the work on the reflex arc). Recently, Gray proposed a model purporting to explain the mechanism supporting the contents of consciousness in the human CNS, in ways that are practically indistinguishable from models formulated within the cybernetical point of view. Both types of models apply loops in strikingly similar ways. While there is no conclusive evidence that loops are necessary to support consciousness, they are nonetheless as good a candidate as today can be found for inclusion in the list of essential ingredients for subjectivity to arise. In the first two sections we discuss the above mentioned uses by means of significant examples. In the third section, we compare Gray’s recent model to MacKay’s early cybernetical model of a selfobserving system, in the setting of a broader discussion on loops for consciousness. (shrink)