Among the many common criticisms of the Turing test, a valid criticism concerns its scope. Intelligence is a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon that will require testing using as many different formats as possible. The Turing test continues to be valuable as a source of evidence to support the inductive inference that a machine possesses a certain kind of intelligence and when interpreted as providing a behavioural test for a certain kind of intelligence. This paper raises the novel criticism that (...) the Turing test represents an example of Goodhart’s Law operating in the field of artificial intelligence. As one measure towards the goal of creating genuinely intelligent machines, the Turing test must not be confused with the goal itself. Moreover, the Turing test ought to be augmented such that through its use additional evidence could be secured to support the strong inference that a machine, were it to pass the Turing Test, could think like a human. (shrink)

In his posthumously published Journals and Papers,, Kierkegaard boldly claimed, "Oh, once I am dead, Fear and Trembling alone will be enough for an imperishable name as an author. Then it will be read, translated into foreign languages as well. The reader will almost shrink from the frightful pathos in the book." Certainly, Fear and Trembling has been translated into foreign languages, and its fame has ensured Kierkegaard's place in the pantheon of Western philosophy. Today, however, most (...) shrink from the book not because of its frightful pathos but because of its fearsome impenetrability. In this first volume of a Reading Kierkegaard miniseries, Martens carefully unfolds the form and content of Kierkegaard's celebrated pseudonymous text, guiding and inviting the reader to embrace the challenge of wrestling with it to the end. Throughout, Martens demonstrates that Fear and Trembling is not merely a book that contains frightful pathos; it is also an entree into Kierkegaard's vibrant and polyphonic corpus that is nearly as restless as the faith it commends. (Publisher). (shrink)

Recently, there has been increasing interest in the use of heavily restricted randomization designs which enforce balance on observed covariates in randomized controlled trials. However, when restrictions are strict, there is a risk that the treatment effect estimator will have a very high mean squared error. In this article, we formalize this risk and propose a novel combinatoric-based approach to describe and address this issue. First, we validate our new approach by re-proving some known properties of complete randomization and (...) restricted randomization. Second, we propose a novel diagnostic measure for restricted designs that only use the information embedded in the combinatorics of the design. Third, we show that the variance of the MSE of the difference-in-means estimator in a randomized experiment is a linear function of this diagnostic measure. Finally, we identify situations in which restricted designs can lead to an increased risk of getting a high MSE and discuss how our diagnostic measure can be used to detect such designs. Our results have implications for any restricted randomization design and can be used to evaluate the trade-off between enforcing balance on observed covariates and avoiding too restrictive designs. (shrink)

One important concern regarding implantable Brain Computer Interfaces is the fear that the intervention will negatively change a patient’s sense of identity or agency. In particular, there is concern that the user will be psychologically worse-off following treatment despite postoperative functional improvements. Clinical observations from similar implantable brain technologies, such as deep brain stimulation, show a small but significant proportion of patients report feelings of strangeness or difficulty adjusting to a new concept of themselves characterized by a maladaptive (...) je ne sais quoi despite clear motor improvement. Despite the growing number of cases in the DBS literature, there is currently no accepted or standardized tool in neuroethics specifically designed to capture the phenomenological postoperative experience of patients implanted with DBS or BCI devices. Given potential risks of postoperative maladaptation, it is important for the field of neuroethics to develop a qualitative instrument that can serve as a shared method for capturing postoperative variations in patient experience of identity and agency. The goal of this article is to introduce an instrument we have developed for this purpose and call for further neuroethical efforts to assess the phenomenology of implantable brain device use. (shrink)

How could the paradigm shift towards enactive embodied cognitive science have implications for society and politics? Translating insights form enactive embodied cognitive science into ways of dealing with real-life issues is an important challenge. This paper focuses of the urgent societal issue of social cohesion, which is crucial in our increasingly segregated and polarized Western societies. We use Rietveld’s philosophical Skilled Intentionality Framework and work by the multidisciplinary studio RAAAF to extend Lambros Malafouris’ Material Engagement Theory to the social domain. (...) How could a landscape of social affordances generate change in the behavioral patterns of people from different socio-cultural backgrounds? RAAAF is currently imagining and planning an ambitious intervention in the public domain that could really change existing socio-cultural practices and aims to contribute to social cohesion. An animation film it made introduces a landscape of social affordances. We will present and discuss this Trusted Strangers animation film, which is a thinking model for new public domain all over the world. Tha animation film visualizes how a well-designed landscape of social affordances could invite all sorts of interactions between people from different socio-cultural backgrounds. (shrink)

Peirce, Ch. S. Die Festlegung einer Überzeugung.--Peirce, Ch. S. Was heisst Pragmatismus?--James, W. Der Wille zum Glauben.--James, W. Der Wahrheitsbegriff des Pragmatismus.--Schiller, F. C. S. Humanismus.--Dewey, J. Pragmatismus und Pädagogik.

In everyday contexts we do numerous things together. Philosophers of collective intentionality have wondered how we can distinguish parallel cases from cases where we act together. Often their theories argue in favor of one characteristic, feature, or function, that differentiates the two. This feature then distinguishes parallel actions from joint action. The approach in this book is different. Three claims are developed: (1) There are several functions that help human agents coordinate and act together. (2) This entails that joint action (...) should be understood through these different, interrelated, types of coordination. (3) A multidimensional conceptual space, with three levels of control and coordination, will allow us to connect these different forms of coordination and their interdependencies. This allows us to understand the jointness of an action in a more differentiated and encompassing way. This approach has ramifications for several distinctions that are typically understood to be binary, including those between action and mere bodily movement, joint action and parallel action, and action together and not together. (shrink)

Much of the human enhancement literature focuses on the ethical, social, and political challenges we are likely to face in the future. I will focus instead on whether we can make decisions to modify ourselves that are known to be likely to satisfy our preferences. It seems plausible to suppose that, if a subject is deciding whether to select a reasonably safe and morally unproblematic enhancement, the decision will be an easy one. The subject will simply figure (...) out her preferences and decide accordingly. The problem, however, is that there is substantial evidence that we are not very good at predicting what will satisfy our preferences. This is a general problem that applies to many different types of decisions, but I argue that there are additional complications when it comes to making decisions about enhancing ourselves. These arise not only for people interested in selecting enhancements but also for people who choose to abstain. (shrink)

The present paper suggests how, from a scientific perspective, the senses establish a link between mind and matter. Ongoing research in sensory science and data analysis is related to the ongoing debate about a non-reductive theory of consciousness based on psychophysical principles. Sensory science is interdisciplinary and deals with the human perception of objects by the senses of sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing etc. Perception as information pro- cessing is here understood in terms of interactions between external physical stimuli and (...) internal mental states resulting in behavioral responses. To deal with the complex and dynamic transformation between external physical energies and internal psychological experiences multivariate methods of data analysis are shown to be useful Examples will be given from food science where cognition and emotion, activated by sense perception are vital for the survival health and well-being of humans. These approaches may contribute to bridging the explanatory gap between the subjectively experienced and the objectively observed world. Future challenges towards deeper interdisciplinary discourses addressing mind-matter research in real-world situations are at stake. (shrink)

Critical approaches to the canon of Western political and legal thought from the point of view of race or gender have developed in recent years, as have studies highlighting the connections between supposedly universalist philosophies and their role in sustaining or legitimizing imperial and colonial conquests. On social contract theory in particular, seminal works include Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract and Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract. The importance of this type of work cannot be understated, and Mills is right to (...) insist on the “blinding whiteness of the discipline.” In the case of Hobbes, I argue, the privilege established in his texts is better qualified as “civilizational” rather than “racial.” Hobbes’s texts construct a certain image of civilization, a form of exclusion and domination that eschews biological determinism in favor of social, historical bias. This “civilizational” thinking certainly can work – and will work later on in conjunction with modern racism and white privilege – to exclude many. The racial contract – as per Mills – is only a late installment on a more fundamental one, the civilizing contract. (shrink)

Social practices are a key concept in Raimo Tuomela’s work on sociality, they help us understand many aspects of sociality, including customs, traditions, and institutions. The key elements in his analysis of social practices are we-attitudes and pattern-governed behaviors. I am sympathetic to Tuomela’s approach to sociality to the extent that it recognizes and spells out many sufficient and necessary conditions for different types of social activity that together make up sociality. I agree with him that the complexity and multiplicity (...) of human agency, both when acting individually as well as when acting collectively or cooperatively, indeed calls for such an analysis with multiple sufficiency conditions. I especially appreciate his acknowledgement of the role of habits, customs, and the like for sociality. His three most recent books all pay attention to this aspect of human being. In this paper, I will zoom in on this aspect of Tuomela’s work and look at how he integrates habits, customs, and skills. In Tuomela’s words, I will zoom in on pattern-governed behaviors and social practices. On the one hand he gives them an important role and mentions customs often, as the “collective counterpart of habits” (Tuomela, Raimo. The Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511487446, 2002, p. 121). At the same time, the analysis of habits and customs left me wanting. I will argue that they are too strongly dependent on and are integrated in a context in which we-attitudes are the key explanatory element. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reading Kierkegaard I: Fear and Trembling by Paul MartensDerek HostetterReading Kierkegaard I: Fear and Trembling Paul Martens EUGENE, OR: CASCADE BOOKS, 2017. 130 pp. $18.00The very first line of Reading Kierkegaard I: Fear and Trembling warns that "reading Søren Kierkegaard is a task that requires a relatively high level of intellectual investment" (ix). Yet the difficult task Paul Martens sets for himself, in keeping with the (...) goal of the Cascade Companions series, is to provide a short introduction to Kierkegaard's thought for a nonspecialist readership. In this first volume, the primary text in focus is Fear and Trembling (FT), with a second volume to focus on Works of Love. More specifically, the threefold purpose of this volume is "(1) to illuminate the internal logic of the text in a manner that renders the text more accessible; (2) to highlight the links between FT and Kierkegaard's broader context in a way that helps one make sense of some of its more opaque sections; and (3) to attend to the theological themes that permeate and drive the text" (xi). [End Page 205]Martens helpfully follows the structure provided by FT, explicating each "chapter" in turn and highlighting the ways it relates to the others as well as to the argument as a whole. This approach is particularly helpful for the long and difficult Problem III "chapter" in FT, which Martens frames as an attempt by Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author Johannes de Silentio to perform the text's argument by demonstrating "that the whole investigation—any investigation, even an unlimited poetic investigation of characters and concepts—only leads to one conspicuous conclusion: Abraham is unintelligible" (54).Attention to the links between FT and Kierkegaard's broader context is also helpful for unifying the seemingly disparate arguments in FT. In Martens's reading of this context, FT is to be understood against the broad backdrop of Kierkegaard's criticisms of nineteenth-century Danish Christendom and the particular backdrop of the Hegelianism that de Silentio finds within it. The overall task of FT is then "to raise the price of faith" (71).Martens clearly attends to the text's theological themes with his repeated juxtaposition between "faith" as de Silentio sees it in the story of Abraham and "the ethical" as de Silentio sees it in nineteenth-century Denmark. Many theological themes are also highlighted and then brought into the reader's context in the discussion questions that follow each chapter.In addition to the discussion questions, Martens provides an appendix, which includes a timeline of Kierkegaard's first authorship, a glossary of important terms that may be unfamiliar, and a list of suggested readings for further study. The glossary will be a particularly helpful tool for those less familiar with Kierkegaard. However, there are also several terms missing that are both significant enough and unclear enough to warrant inclusion. One thinks here of a figure like Socrates and concepts like the knight of faith and the knight of infinite resignation.Similarly, another feature of the book that is both a strength and a weakness is its commitment to the text of FT rather than the scholarship surrounding the text. This is a strength because it keeps the book short and accessible for nonspecialists. It is also a weakness, however, because the reader interested in further study is not clearly pointed toward competing interpretations, despite the fact that some lines are ripe for a brief footnote providing such a reference—"Not all agree with me on this" (76).Overall, the discussion questions and appendix, its short length and overall readability, and its commitment to the text make Reading Kierkegaard I: Fear and Trembling a significant pedagogical contribution to ethics and Kierkegaard studies as an entry point for nonspecialists. [End Page 206]Derek HostetterUniversity of DaytonCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Ivan Boh affirms and Robert Pasnau denies that William Heytesbury holds merely true belief to be sufficient for knowledge in the broad sense. I argue that Boh is correct and Pasnau is mistaken, and that there is a long-running orthodox medieval tradition agreeing with Heytesbury about the conditions for knowledge. I offer a hypothesis about the origins, continuance and demise of that medieval tradition, and some remarks about the tradition's significance.

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Existieren, Wahrsein und Verstehen" verfügbar.

“Shooting [or ‘guessing’] characters” was a game, and later a communication method, based on phonological analysis of Chinese syllables. Over time, it became used in a variety of ways, including as a teaching tool, a cipher, and a phonological writing aid for the less educated. The actual and proposed applications of one phonological game show that Chinese phonology did not just exist in books, but encompassed distinct non-written practices that were essential to its proliferation. Chinese phonology is generally studied as (...) a source for the history of the Chinese language, but it is also of interest for the history of cultural and intellectual life. (shrink)

Philosophical Papers, Volume 40, Issue 3, Page 421-438, November 2011.

Twaalf inheemse en religieuze leiders uit verschillende werelddelen spreken zich in dit boek uit over de heiligheid van de natuur. Hun eeuwenoude wijsheden inspireren ons om anders te gaan denken over onze omgang met alles wat leeft. Aan het woord komen de Groenlandse sjamaan Angakkorsuaq, de Amerikaanse indianenleider Chief Lane Jr., masaileider Mwarabu, de boeddhistische geestelijke Shih, de dichtende islamgeleerde Ur Rehman Chishti, orthodox rabbijn Slifkin, Maya-priester Sac Coyoy, hindoe-prins Jhala, Aztekenleider Sanchez, leider van de Canadese Bear Clan Wawatie, bisschop (...) Smeets van Roermond en theoloog Valerio van Rochester Cathedral. 0Oeroude natuurwijsheden uit alle streken! (shrink)

This is a critical exposition and limited defence of a theory of first- person belief transiently held by Roderick Chisholm after giving up the early haecceity theory of Person and Object and before adopting the late self-attribution theory of The First Person. I reconstruct that 'middle' theory as involving what I call a 'hard-core' approach to de re belief and I rebut objections concerning epistemic supervenience and abnormal consciousness. In my rebuttals, I sketch a variant of the middle theory according (...) to which first- person belief essentially involves the believer's introspective acquaintance with herself. (shrink)

The practical guide provides advice on assessing whether existing ethics programmes are effective and culturally appropriate and developing and disseminating organisation-wide values and standards to take account of the many cultures in which a business operates, including training which is as culturally relevant to employees worldwide.

Der Mensch ist das Wesen, das sich zu seiner Vergänglichkeit, seiner Sterblichkeit und Endlichkeit verhält. Das führt ihn zu Selbstdeutungen unterschiedlichster Art, aber die Frage, die der Mensch sich in Anbetracht von Geburt, Liebe und Tod selbst ist, bleibt letztlich offen. Rainer Marten zeigt, wie literarische, theologische und philosophische Entwürfe, die Seins- und Lebensfrage zu beantworten, kritisch besehen Gestaltungen ihrer Unbeantwortbarkeit sind. Von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart haben Dichter, Theologen und Philosophen kraft ihrer poetischen Selbstauslegung an das Geheimnis (...) endlichen menschlichen Lebens gerührt. Es ist der Mensch, der sich zum einen auf seine Endlichkeit zu besinnen vermag und der zum anderen anfängt zu verstehen, dass er mehr ist, als er weiß und wissen kann. (shrink)

Von Heraklit und Parmenides, Platon und Aristoteles bis zu Kant und dem Deutschen Idealismus und daruber hinaus bis heute hat die Philosophie sich als filosofia a solo, nicht aber als filosofia in compagnia verstanden. Der Einzelne steht vor ihr, zu dem kein Zweiter und Dritter tritt. Der auf ihn gerichtete Blick ist ein denkender und zugunsten des Denkens wertender. Weil die Philosophie es am liebsten mit der reinen Geistigkeit halt, gilt ihr Vernunft als selbstgenugsam: Sie hat hinreichend mit sich selbst (...) zu tun. Sieht Philosophie in der Denkkraft den ganzen, weil, wie sie emphatisch sagt, den wahren und wesentlichen Menschen und somit sich selbst als das Humanum, dann ist der Weg beschritten, das Denken mit dem Zudenkenden einswerden zu lassen. Daraus erwachsen vielfaltige Spekulationen des innigsten geistigen Einsseins, sei es in der Einheit von Sein und Nichtsein oder von Gott und Mensch. Rainer Marten wendet sich in diesem Buch gegen den Vorrang des Einen und unternimmt es, die Zweiheit philosophisch auszuzeichnen: die Zweiheit von Tag und Nacht, die Zweiheit von Leben und Tod, die Zweiheit von Ungerechtigkeit und Gerechtigkeit sowie die Zweiheit von Mann und Frau. (shrink)

This chapter examines the role of the Bible in the works of Soren Kierkegaard, explaining that Kierkegaard was so heavily indebted to the Bible that some critics considered him to be an expositor of Scripture. He used the Bible to obtain ideas for cultural criticism and literary images and tropes. The chapter argues that Kierkegaard cannot be ignored as a substantial participant within and contributor to the history of biblical interpretation, contending that he is personally and authorially inculturated in the (...) world of the Bible. (shrink)

A report on the 2019 Bonn “Simplicities and Complexities” Conference, organized by "The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider" research unit.