Jeremy Sherman distills Terrence Deacon's breakthrough natural science hypothesis for the emergence of agents and agency, selves and aims in an otherwise aimless universe. The theory cuts a new path through the dualistic spirit vs. mechanism debate, unifying the hard and soft sciences and suggesting new solutions to philosophical mysteries.

In The Sleepwalkers and The Act of Creation Arthur Koestler provided pioneering studies of scientific discovery and artistic inspiration, the twin pinnacles of human achievement. The Ghost in the Machine looks at the dark side of the coin: our terrible urge to self-destruction... Could the human species be a gigantic evolutionary mistake? To answer that startling question Koestler examines how experts on evolution and psychology all too often write about people with an 'antiquated slot-machine model based on the naively mechanistic (...) world-view of the nineteenth century. His brilliant polemic helped to instigate a major revolution in the life sciences, yet its 'glimpses of an alternative world-view' form only the background to an even more challenging analysis of the human predicament. Perhaps, he suggests, we are a species in which ancient and recent brain structures - or reason and emotion - are not fully co-ordinated. Such in-built deficiencies may explain the paranoia, violence and insanity that are central strands of human history. And however disturbing we find such issues, Koestler contends, it is only when we face our limitations head-on that we can hope to find a remedy. (shrink)

Her shape and his hand -- Distractions -- The other door, it's floods of tears with consolation enclosed -- Not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there -- There are crossroads.

'Ghosting' or the unethical practice of having someone other than the student registered in the course take the student's exams, complete their assignments and write their essays has become a common method of cheating in today's online higher education learning environment. Internet-based teaching technology and deceit go hand-in-hand because the technology establishes a set of perverse incentives for students to cheat and institutions to either tolerate or encourage this highly unethical form of behavior. For students, cheating becomes an increasingly attractive (...) option as pre-digital safeguards-for instance, in-person exam proctoring requirements and face-to-face mentoring-are quietly phased out and eventually eliminated altogether. Also, as the punishments for violating academic integrity policies are relaxed, the temptation to cheat increases accordingly. For institutions, tolerating, normalizing and encouraging one type of student cheating, ghosting, improves the profitability of their online divisions by bolstering student enrolments and retention. In universities and colleges across the globe, online divisions and programs have become thriving profit centers, not because of the commonly attributed reasons (student ease, safety during health crises and convenience of taking courses online), but due to a single strategic insight: Ubiquitous opportunities for ghosting improve profit margins and maximize revenue. (shrink)

Competing perspectives on the nature of emotion are illustrated with latent and emergent variable models. Latent variable models draw from classical test theory, assuming that the measured indicators of emotion covary by virtue of some common executive, organizing neural circuit or network in the brain. By contrast, emergent variable models draw from a theory-driven, operational definition tradition, positing that emotions do not cause, but rather are caused by, the measured indicators of emotion, assuming no executive neural circuit or network, and (...) requiring no covariation among indicators. I suggest that the emergent variable model may be more compatible with the extant literature on the nature of emotion, especially in the age of affective neuroscience. (shrink)

Anecdotes have shown that some articles on profitable drugs are constructed by and shepherded through publication by pharmaceutical companies and their agents, whose influence is largely invisible to readers. This is ghost-management, the substantial but unrecognized research, analysis, writing, editing and/or facilitation behind publication. Publicly available documents suggest that these practices extremely widespread affecting up to 40% of clinical trial reports in key periods but it has been unclear how representative these documents are. This article presents the results of an (...) investigative sampling of the self-presentation of publication planning services, and presents this and other evidence of a sizable publication planning industry. Thus different lines of evidence indicate that ghost-management is a common and important phenomenon, strongly affecting the published medical literature in the service of marketing. (shrink)

The overwhelming motif of nineteenth century anti-Semitic discourse is the metaphor of the Jew as a ghost. In all cultures, the ghost represents the antithesis of what is categorically human: it represents the other par excellence. By using the heuristic of the ghost to interpret how Enlightenment discourse has dealt with the other, this article will argue that the Enlightenment model of the self and its relation to others was a contributing factor to Modern Racism. Enlightenment discourse on subjectivity finds (...) its counterpart in Confucian notions of subjectivity. By looking at how ghosts are understood within Confucian discourse and how they are evoked in popular literature, I argue that Confucian philosophy’s model of subjectivity contributed to the success of the Chinese empire’s assimilation project. (shrink)

Zombies are bodies without minds: creatures that are physically identical to actual human beings, but which have no conscious experience. Much of the consciousness literature focuses on considering how threatening philosophical reflection on such creatures is to physicalism. There is not much attention given to the converse possibility, the possibility of minds without bodies, that is, creatures who are conscious but whose nature is exhausted by their being conscious. We can call such a ‘purely conscious’ creature a ghost.

Metaphors that compare the computer to a human brain are common in computer science and can be traced back to a fertile period of research that unfolded after the Second World War. To conceptualize the emerging “intelligent” properties of computing machines, researchers of the era created a series of virtual objects that served as interpretive devices for representing the immaterial functions of the computer. This paper analyses the use of the terms “artificial” and “virtual” in scientific papers, textbooks, and popular (...) articles of the time, and examines how, together, they shaped models in computer science used to conceptualize computer processes. (shrink)

I present a detailed ethnographic study of magic and divination of the Nuosu people in southwest China and offer a cognitive account of the surprising prevalence of these objectively ineffective practices in a society that has ample access to modern technology and mainstream Han culture. I argue that in the belief system of the Nuosu, ghosts, divination, and magical healing rituals form a closely interconnected web that gives sense and meaning to otherwise puzzling practices, and such a belief system (...) is importantly supported and reinforced by individual’s everyday experiences. Contemporary Nuosu people overwhelmingly treat these practices as instruments for achieving specific ends and often entertain considerable uncertainty regarding their efficacy, which may be overestimated for a number of reasons, including the following: (1) the intuitive plausibility of divination for ghost identification and exorcist rituals is enhanced by the belief in the existence of ghosts as a result of abductive reasoning, (2) negative instances (divinatory or healing ritual failures) are underreported, and (3) people’s misperception of the probability of uncertain events’ occurrence often prevents them from realizing that the efficacies of magical/divinatory practices do not outperform chance. I conclude with some comments on the generalizability of the psychological and social mechanisms discussed. (shrink)

_Any assistance an author receives with writing a scientific article that is not acknowledged in the article is described as ghost-writing. Articles ghost-written by medical writers engaged by pharmaceutical companies who have a vested interest in the content have caused concern after scandals revealed misleading content in some articles. A key criterion of authorship in medical journals is final approval of the article submitted for publication. Authors are responsible for the content of their articles and for acknowledging any assistance they (...) receive. Action taken by some journals and medical writer associations to encourage acknowledgement is an uphill task in the light of disinterest from the pharmaceutical industry and ignorance or similar lack of interest by those who agree to be named authors. However, acknowledgment alone is not sufficient to resolve medical ghost-writing; issues of how the acknowledgement is formulated, permission to acknowledge and access to raw data also need to be tackled._. (shrink)

To appear in David Chalmers, Ryan Wasserman and David Manley, eds., Metametaphysics (OUP, 2009).

Two experiments were conducted to explore whether children, who have been exposed to the concept of the soul, differentiate the soul from the mind. In the first experiment, 4- to 12-year-old children were asked about whether a religious ritual affects the mind, the brain, or the soul. The majority of the children claimed that only the soul was different after baptism. In a follow-up study, 6- to 12-year-old children were tested more explicitly on what factors differentiate the soul from the (...) mind and the brain. Children differentiated the soul from the mind and the brain along two dimensions: function and stability. In contrast to their responses about the mind and the brain, children did not claim that the soul was important for cognitive, non-cognitive, or biological functioning. Children consistently indicated that the mind and the brain change and grow over time. In contrast, children indicated that the soul is something that stays constant and is devoted to various, predominantly spiritual, functions. (shrink)

The notion of embodiment is central to the phenomenological approach to schizophrenia. This paper argues that fundamental concepts for the understanding of schizophrenia have a bodily dimension. We present two single cases of first-onset schizophrenic patients and analyze the reports of their experiences. Problems such as loss of self, loss of common sense, and intentionality disorders reveal a disconnectedness that can be traced back to a detachment from the lived body. Hyperreflectivity and hyperautomaticity are used as coping mechanisms, but reflect (...) the same problem of the split between body and mind. It is argued that the sole focus on cognitive impairments leads to a distorted image of schizophrenia, and that the acknowledgment of its fundamental bodily roots enables one to see the coherence between the diverse symptoms. As for the practical implications of the phenomenological approach, further research is needed to investigate if and how body- and movement-oriented therapies might strengthen the embodiment of schizophrenic patients. (shrink)

We used a new method called “Ghost-in-the-Machine” (GiM) to investigate social interactions with a robotic bartender taking orders for drinks and serving them. Using the GiM paradigm allowed us to identify how human participants recognize the intentions of customers on the basis of the output of the robotic recognizers. Specifically, we measured which recognizer modalities (e.g., speech, the distance to the bar) were relevant at different stages of the interaction. This provided insights into human social behavior necessary for the development (...) of socially competent robots. When initiating the drink-order interaction, the most important recognizers were those based on computer vision. When drink orders were being placed, however, the most important information source was the speech recognition. Interestingly, the participants used only a subset of the available information, focussing only on a few relevant recognizers while ignoring others. This reduced the risk of acting on erroneous sensor data and enabled them to complete service interactions more swiftly than a robot using all available sensor data. We also investigated socially appropriate response strategies. In their responses,the participants preferred to use the same modality as the customer’s requests, e.g., they tended to respond verbally to verbal requests. Also, they added redundancy to their responses, for instance by using echo questions. We argue that incorporating the social strategies discovered with the GiM paradigm in multimodal grammars of human–robot interactions improves the robustness and the ease-of-use of these interactions, and therefore provides a smoother user experience. (shrink)

This discussion examines how Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence questions what remains of being human and the assemblage of humanity when the human and the machine collide and elide their limit of differentiation. It will be shown how the film's predilection for technology in its narrative content and technological rationalism in its wider conceptual embedding reconstructs humanity but rejects the metaphysical valuation of humanity through notions of dignity, taboo, respect, affect, and so forth. By connecting this twin problematic of (...) ontological difference and metaphysical poverty to the ontological philosophy of Martin Heidegger and psychoanalytic philosophy of Slavoj Žižek, this paper aims to unearth and lay bare the paradoxes inherent in the view of technology and society deployed by Innocence and how the film is able to, in the presence of these explicitly ontological paradoxes, put the question of what constitutes a human Subject into crisis by coding it as a symptom. (shrink)

Evolution is a continuous trial and error process in which most lineages go extinct without leaving fossil remains. Many of these lineages would be closely related and occasionally hybridized with lineages that gave rise to extant species. Hence, it is likely that one can find genetic signatures of these ancient introgression events in present‐day genomes, so‐called ghost introgression. The increasing availability of high‐quality genome assemblies for non‐model organisms and the development of more sophisticated methods for detecting introgression will undoubtedly reveal (...) more cases of ghost introgression, indicating that the Tree of Life is even more reticulated than assumed. The presence of ghost introgression has important consequences for the study of numerous evolutionary processes, including adaptation, speciation, and macroevolutionary patterns. In addition, detailed studies of introgressed regions could provide insights into the morphology of the extinct lineage, providing an unexpected link between genomics and the fossil record. Hence, new methods that take into account ghost introgression will need to be developed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:656 Feminist Studies 43, no. 3. © 2017 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Ghost Story The day our house burned, Mama dumped it in the river. Palms on the shore, finch in place of bruises. A hollowed tusk birthing pockets of gray glowing some kind of holy, salt-spittle and rattling. Carolina Horror Story Sandra, softest face south of the Mason Dixon line, got eggshells under her toes, eyes made of (...) salt and other things too holy to remember. Oil slicks and line breaks spilling out of her mouth, gets called sugar, sugar walkin’ down the street, sugar at high tide, high noon, peeled molasses at the bottom of the barrel, shotgun cool. Sugar’s got a face I can only look at crying, look at human, arranged and harmless. Sugar, sugar what’s wrong, Emily Zhang Emily Zhang 657 air’s so stale it could choke a hurricane? Turns to me like the tide, shoots me through and through with her face, refractin’ all the night’s light. Honey Open up the sky, shaken of its salt. Open up the lip of a run-on sentence, blurry and reeling, the way air turns into breath. Open when the smallest fires become streams of bright dust, swimming pools swelling from bee stings. Open the sweetness out of summer. Open when we dump frogs into bathtubs and the waves set like milk, when our mouths are full of spit and we shuck foam from our hair. Open for the movie theater trips when the sky is setting heavy, for the horror films where girls sound like rabbits and rabbits look like girls. Open with waxwings birthed from dirt, the Band-Aids and yawning trash cans, the cavities. Open for the way the air sticks to us like a hide, the way we feel like wine stains, but wanted. Open in the grocery store produce section when we see the damp crabs clawing each other and we think of womanhood. Open for the girls with lips like copper wiring, fluorescents, double-exposure, for our melting sense of un-worry, our hands always self-corrected. Open when we’re halfway over the fence and the neighbor’s Doberman is trying to bite the meat off our ankles. Open the way a sprinkler head looks like a rotting berry, the way we all fall lightly in love with witches. Open for the radios spilling music slow, elbows on the dashboard, weary elbows, loud elbows. Open for the unholy women throughout history who sat alone on islands where the sky was so blue it burned with borrowed static now lost.... (shrink)

Certain forms of practical deference seem to be incompatible with personal autonomy. I argue that such deference undermines autonomy not by compromising the governance of an authentic self, nor by constituting a failure to track objective reasons, but by constituting a particular social relation: one of interpersonal rule. I analyse this social relation and distinguish it from others, including ordinary relations of love and care. Finally, I argue that the particular form of interpersonal rule constituted by dispositions of practical deference (...) in itself entails a partial, though not total, disconnection from the good of a self-authored life. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that sentences containing a non-denoting description embedded in the scope of a propositional attitude verb have true de dicto interpretations, and Russell's (1905) analysis of definite descriptions is often praised for its simple analysis of such cases, cf. e.g. Neale (1990). However, several people, incl. Elbourne (2005, 2009), Heim (1991), and Kripke (2005), have contested this by arguing that Russell's analysis yields incorrect predictions in non-doxastic attitude contexts. Heim and Elbourne have subsequently argued that once certain (...) facts about presupposition projection are fully appreciated, the Frege/Strawson analysis of definite descriptions has an explanatory advantage. In this paper, I argue that both Russell's analysis and the Frege/Strawson analysis face a serious problem when it comes to the interaction of attitude verbs and definite descriptions. I argue that the problem observed by Elbourne, Heim, and Kripke is much more general than standardly assumed and that a solution requires a revision of the semantics of definite and indefinite descriptions. I outline the conditions that are required to solve the problem and present an analysis couched in dynamic semantics which can provide a solution. I conclude by discussing some further issues related to propositional attitude verbs that complicate a fully general solution to the problem. (shrink)

We are not only threatened by the Sixth Extinction, but also haunted. Coming back from the future, the Ghosts of History — some para-Benjaminian creatures—try to tell us how serious the threat is....

Günther Anders offers one of the first phenomenological analyses of broadcast radio and its transformation of the contemporary experience of music. Anders also develops a reflection on its political consequences as he continues his reflection in a discussion of radio and newsreel, film and television in his 1956 ‘The World as Phantom and Matrix’. A reflection on the consequences of this transformation brings in Friedrich Kittler’s reflection on radio and precision bombing. A further reflection on Jean Baudrillard’s notion of ‘speech (...) without response’ permits a review of digital culture and the self-creation of the digital consumer absorbed in what Anders named a schizo-topia, that is, today, an autistic culture of distraction, displacement, and self-driven surveillance. (shrink)

Many of us assume that all the free editing and sorting of online content we ordinarily rely on is carried out by AI algorithms — not human persons. Yet in fact, that is often not the case. This is because human workers remain cheaper, quicker, and more reliable than AI for performing myriad tasks where the right answer turns on ineffable contextual criteria too subtle for algorithms to yet decode. The output of this work is then used for machine learning (...) purposes to generate algorithms constructed from large data sets containing thousands of correctly coded observations. The fact that ghost workers are treated as consumers distorts the basic logic of the employment relationship, effectively placing the worker-as-consumer in the worst of both worlds, in which they hold the legal rights of neither group. This puts them in a regulatory limbo position in which they have little or no protection, control, or guarantee of return on investment. This is because the platforms that facilitate ghost work have orchestrated a three-way virtual relationship that absolves all parties of responsibility, while placing nearly all the risks and opportunity costs squarely on the shoulders of the workers. As a result, we believe such a work arrangement as it stands, does not uphold basic standards of Rawlsian justice as fairness. (shrink)

This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of the acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.

During my childhood I was fascinated by videogames. One game that stands out in my memory is Pacman. It wasn’t the gameplay that interested me so much as the behavior of the ghosts. As you watch them roam around the maze, you get the feeling that they are intelligent. They seem to be making decisions about how best to catch Pacman. But how free are their decisions? One of the interesting things I noticed was that I could play exactly (...) the same game over and over if I moved Pacman in precisely the same way each time. The ghosts always followed the same behavioral pattern and didn’t deviate from that pattern until I changed my pattern. Experimenting with Pacman in this way revealed to me something about the ghosts’ behavior. True, they make decisions, but their decisions are firmly and predictably determined by the way I move around the maze. (shrink)

Beginning with our cosmic ancestors and the 1950s ancestors of Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, this essay highlights the wider, post-World War II cultural context, including other science and religion organizations, in which IRAS was formed. It then considers eight challenges from today's context. From the context of science there are the challenge of scale that leads us to question our place in the scheme of things and can lead to a challenge to morale concerning whether we (...) make any difference; the challenge of human variability that leads to the question whether there is a single human moral nature; and the challenge of detailed explanation that leads to the question of what is the task of theology in relation to detailed scientific explanation. From the religion context there are the challenge of objectivity—studying religion without practicing religion; and the challenge of pluralism and the variety of cultural and religious perspectives. From the context of the growing and diverse science-and-religion enterprise, considered from the perspective of IRAS developed in the first part of this essay, there are the challenges of apologetics and intellectualization. Finally, from the context of our growing, worldwide consumerist culture that is contributing to the radical alteration of the planetary environment, leading to much suffering, there is the challenge of becoming more motivated to act for the long-term global good. (shrink)

The notion of `memes' as replicators similar to genes, but concerned with cultural units, was put forward by Dawkins (1976). Blackmore (1999) used this notion to elaborate an ambitious theory designed to account for numerous aspects of human evolution and psychology. Her theory is based on the human capacity for imitation, and although the operation of the `memes' is said to be purely mechanical, the figurative language used implies that their `actions' are purposive. This article will show that imitation had (...) been regarded as important for human advance well before Darwinism. Moreover, at the end of the 19th century descriptions of the functioning of imitation in society had been put forward that closely parallel those given by Blackmore. Hence it is argued that what is convincing about her thesis is not new, and what is new is speculative and highly questionable. (shrink)

Abstract Of the many ways in which identity is constructed and performed online, few are as strongly ‘anchored’ to existing offline relationships as in online social networks like Facebook and Myspace. These networks utilise profiles that extend our practical, psychological and even corporeal identity in ways that give them considerable phenomenal presence in the lives of spatially distant people. This raises interesting questions about the persistence of identity when these online profiles survive the deaths of the users behind them, via (...) the practice of ‘memorialising’ social network profile pages. I situate these practices within a phenomenology of grief that accounts for the ways in which the dead can persist as moral patients, and show how online survival in this case illuminates an important difference between persons and selves within contemporary philosophy of personal identity. Ultimately, the online persistence of the dead helps bring into view a deep ontological contradiction implicit in our dealings with death: the dead both live on as objects of duty and yet completely cease to exist. Content Type Journal Article Category Special Issue Pages 1-17 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0050-7 Authors Patrick Stokes, Philosophy Group, School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire de Havilland Campus, Hatfield, Hertfordshire AL10 9AB, UK Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433. (shrink)

The relationship between the canonical operator and the path integral formulation of quantum electrodynamics is analyzed with a particular focus on the implementation of gauge constraints in the two approaches. The removal of gauge volumes in the path integral is shown to match with the presence of zero-norm ghost states associated with gauge transformations in the canonical operator approach. The path integrals for QED in both the Feynman and the temporal gauges are examined and several ways of implementing the gauge (...) constraint integrations are demonstrated. The upshot is to show that both the Feynman and the temporal gauge path integrals are equivalent to the Coulomb gauge path integral, matching the results developed by Kurt Haller using the canonical formalism. In addition, the Faddeev–Popov form for the Feynman gauge and temporal gauge Lagrangian path integrals are derived from the Hamiltonian form of the path integral. (shrink)