When our choice affects some other person and the outcome is unknown, it has been argued that we should defer to their risk attitude, if known, or else default to use of a risk avoidant risk function. This, in turn, has been claimed to require the use of a risk avoidant risk function when making decisions that primarily affect future people, and to decrease the desirability of efforts to prevent human extinction, owing to the significant risks associated with continued human (...) survival. I raise objections to the claim that respect for others’ risk attitudes requires risk avoidance when choosing for future generations. In particular, I argue that there is no known principle of interpersonal aggregation that yields acceptable results in variable population contexts and is consistent with a plausible ideal of respect for others’ risk attitudes in fixed population cases. GPI Working Paper No . 20-2022. (shrink)

Some believe that the current era is uniquely important with respect to how well the rest of human history goes. Following Parfit, call this the Hinge of History Hypothesis. Recently, MacAskill has argued that our era is actually very unlikely to be especially influential in the way asserted by the Hinge of History Hypothesis. I respond to MacAskill, pointing to important unresolved ambiguities in his proposed definition of what it means for a time to be influential and (...) criticizing the two arguments used to cast doubt on the claim that the current era is a uniquely important moment in human history. GPI Working Paper No. 9 - 2022. (shrink)

Even with the passage of time, the misguided motivations of highly educated, physician-participants in the genocide known as the Holocaust remain inexplicable and opaque. Typically, the physician-patient relationship inherent within the practice of medicine, has been rooted in the partnership between individuals. However, under the Third Reich, this covenant between a physician and patient was displaced by a public health agenda that was grounded in the scientific theory of eugenics and which served the needs of a polarized political system (...) that relied on this hypothesis to justify society’s racial hygiene laws. As part of the National Socialist propaganda, Adolf Hitler ominously argued that the cultural decline of Germany after World War I could largely be based on interbreeding and a “resultant drop in the racial level.” This foundational premise defined those who could be ostracized, labeled and persecuted by society, including those who were assimilated. The indoctrination and implementation of this distorted social policy required the early and sustained cooperation and leadership of the medical profession. Because National Socialism promised it could restore Germany’s power, honor and dignity, physicians embraced their special role in the repair of the state. This article will explore the imperative role, moral risks and deliberate actions of physicians who participated in the amplification process from “euthanasia” to systemic murder to medically-sanctioned genocide. A goal of this analysis will be to explore what perils today’s physicians would face if they were to experience the transitional and collective behaviors of a corrupted medical profession, or if they would, instead, have the fortitude and courage necessary to protect themselves against this collaboration. Our premise is that an awareness of history can serve as a safeguard to the conceit of political ascendency and discrimination. (shrink)

In the ongoing research of the functions of consciousness, special emphasis has been put on integration of information: the ability to combine different signals into a coherent, unified one. Several theories of consciousness hold that this ability depends on – or at least goes hand in hand with – conscious processing. Yet some empirical findings have suggested otherwise, claiming that integration of information could take place even without awareness. Trying to reconcile this apparent contradiction, the “windows of integration” hypothesis (...) claims that conscious access enables signal processing over large integration windows. The hypothesis applies to integration windows defined either temporally, spatially, or semantically. In this review, we explain the hypothesis and re-examine it in light of new studies published since it was suggested. In line with the hypothesis, these studies provide compelling evidence for unconscious integration, but also demonstrate its limits with respect to time, space, and semantic distance. The review further highlights open questions that still need to be pursued to demonstrate the applicability of the WOI hypothesis as a guiding principle for understanding the depth and scope of unconscious processes. (shrink)

Some believe that the current era is uniquely important with respect to how well the rest of human history goes. Following Parfit, call this the Hinge of History Hypothesis. Recently, MacAskill has argued that our era is actually very unlikely to be especially influential in the way asserted by the Hinge of History Hypothesis. I respond to MacAskill, pointing to important unresolved ambiguities in his proposed definition of what it means for a time to be influential and (...) criticizing the two arguments used to cast doubt on the claim that the current era is a uniquely important moment in human history. (shrink)

An extended examination of Libet's works led to a comprehensive reinterpretation of his results. According to this reinterpretation, the Minimum Train Duration of electrical brain stimulation should be considered as the time needed to create a brain stimulus efficient for producing conscious sensation and not as a basis for inferring the latency for conscious sensation of peripheral origin. Latency for conscious sensation with brain stimulation may occurafterthe Minimum Train Duration. Backward masking with cortical stimuli suggests a 125-300 ms minimum (...) value for the latency for conscious sensation of threshold skin stimuli. Backward enhancement is not suitable for inferring this latency. For determining temporal relations between stimuli that correspond to subjects' reports, theendof cerebral Minimum Train Duration should be used as reference, rather than its onset. Results of coupling peripheral and cortical stimuli are explained by a latency after the cortical Minimum Train Duration, having roughly the same duration as the latency for supraliminal skin stimuli. Results of coupling peripheral stimuli and stimuli to medial lemniscus (LM) are explained by a shorter LM latency and/or a longer peripheral latency. This interpretation suggests a 230 ms minimum value for the latency for conscious sensation of somatosensory near-threshold stimuli. The backward referral hypothesis, as formulated by Libet, should not be retained. Long readiness potentials preceding spontaneous conscious or nonconscious movements suggest that both kinds of movement are nonconsciously initiated. The validity of Libet's measures of W and M moments (Libet et al., 1983a) is questionable due to problems involving latencies, training, and introspective distinction of W and M. Veto of intended actions may be initially nonconscious but dependent on conscious awareness. (shrink)

This paper provides a criticism of the New Left’s discourse of legitimation of the globalization hypothesis based on the same understanding of it than contemporary Conservative Liberalism. According to the New Left’s basic epistemological-political standpoint, the economic globalization is a consolidated process which leads not only to the era of international economy, but also to the failure of a nationalist interventionist politics, as to the irreversible weakening of the Welfare State model of strong political institutions as the basis of (...) economic constitution and of social evolution. According to the New Left, only international political institutions can frame the international economy. We argue that the New Left does not seriously consider the notion of late capitalism, disregarding the political-economic dependence between central and peripheral countries as the fundamental characteristic of international politics and of global economic constitution. Here, international political institutions cannot tackle macroeconomic contradictions and pathologies due to the fact that the international economic order is grounded on political inequality and dependence of these central and peripheral countries. The important epistemological-political question is not primarily the economic globalization itself, but its political basis, that is, the international politics founded on the periphery’s dependence as the condition to central development. Therefore, only the recovery and the renewal of a nationalist and interventionist politics based on the strengthening of political institutions in general and of the Welfare State in particular can respond to problems of economic globalization, deconstructing the New Left’s globalization hypothesis. (shrink)

When addressing the notion of proper time in the theory of relativity, it is usually taken for granted that the time read by an accelerated clock is given by the Minkowski proper time. However, there are authors like Harvey Brown that consider necessary an extra assumption to arrive at this result, the so-called clock hypothesis. In opposition to Brown, Richard TW Arthur takes the clock hypothesis to be already implicit in the theory. In this paper (...) I will present a view different from these authors by taking into account Einstein’s notion of natural clock and showing its relevance to the debate. (shrink)

Some recent physiological data indicate that the “subjective timing” of experiences can be “automatically referred backwards in time” to represent a sequence of events even though the earlier portions of associated neurophysiological activity are themselves insufficient to elicit the experience of any sensation. The challenge, then, is to explain how subjects can experience what they do in the reported ways when, if one looked just at certain neurophysiological activity, it would seem that perhaps subjects should report their sensations differently. (...) The phenomenon has seemed sufficiently remarkable to the neurobiologist John Eccles to count as evidence for mind-body dualism. This dualistic interpretation has resulted in a spirited attack by P. S. Churchland on both the physiological research and the dualistic interpretation. Her attack resulted in an equally spirited defense of the research by the primary investigator, B. Libet, where he reaffirmed his more guarded interpretation that “the temporal discrepancy creates relative difficulties for identity theory, but that these are not insurmountable”. In turn, Churchland has defended her criticism of Libet's research so that, for her, Libet's hypothesis remains “infirm and unconfirmed”. (shrink)

The Whorfian hypothesis has received support from recent findings in psychology, linguistics, and anthropology. This evidence has been interpreted as supporting the view that language modulates all stages of perception and cognition, in accordance with Whorf’s original proposal. In light of a much broader body of evidence on time perception, I propose to evaluate these findings with respect to their scope. When assessed collectively, the entire body of evidence on time perception shows that the Whorfian hypothesis (...) has a limited scope and that it does not affect early stages of time perception. In particular, all the available evidence shows that the scope of language modulation is limited in the case of time perception, and that the most important mechanisms for time perception are cognitive clocks and simultaneity windows, which we use to perceive the temporal properties of events. Language modulation has distorting effects, but only at later stages of processing or with respect to specific categorization tasks. The paper explains what is the role of these effects in the context of all the available evidence on time cognition and perception. (shrink)

The paper discusses recent proposals by Carroll and Chen, as well as Barbour, Koslowski, and Mercati to explain the arrow of time without a Past Hypothesis, i.e. the assumption of a special initial state of the universe. After discussing the role of the Past Hypothesis and the controversy about its status, we explain why Carroll's model - which establishes an arrow of time as typical - can ground sensible predictions and retrodictions without assuming something akin to (...) a Past Hypothesis. We then propose a definition of a Boltzmann entropy for a classical N-particle system with gravity, suggesting that a Newtonian gravitating universe might provide a relevant example of Carroll's entropy model. This invites comparison with the work of Barbour, Koslowski, and Mercati that identifies typical arrows of time in a relational formulation of classical gravity on shape space. We clarify the difference between this gravitational arrow in terms of shape complexity and the entropic arrow in absolute spacetime, and work out the key advantages of the relationalist theory. We end by pointing out why the entropy concept relies on absolute scales and is thus not relational. (shrink)

Mental representations remain the central posits of psychology after many decades of scrutiny. However, there is no consensus about the representational format(s) of biological cognition. This paper provides a survey of evidence from computational cognitive psychology, perceptual psychology, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and social psychology, and concludes that one type of format that routinely crops up is the language-of-thought (LoT). We outline six core properties of LoTs: (i) discrete constituents; (ii) role-filler independence; (iii) predicate–argument structure; (iv) logical operators; (v) inferential (...) promiscuity; and (vi) abstract content. These properties cluster together throughout cognitive science. Bayesian computational modeling, compositional features of object perception, complex infant and animal reasoning, and automatic, intuitive cognition in adults all implicate LoT-like structures. Instead of regarding LoT as a relic of the previous century, researchers in cognitive science and philosophy-of-mind must take seriously the explanatory breadth of LoT-based architectures. We grant that the mind may harbor many formats and architectures, including iconic and associative structures as well as deep-neural-network-like architectures. However, as computational/representational approaches to the mind continue to advance, classical compositional symbolic structures – that is, LoTs – only prove more flexible and well-supported over time. (shrink)

If an asymmetry in time does not arise from the fundamental dynamical laws of physics, it may be found in special boundary conditions. The argument normally goes that since thermodynamic entropy in the past is lower than in the future according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, then tracing this back to the time around the Big Bang means the universe must have started off in a state of very low thermodynamic entropy: the Thermodynamic Past Hypothesis. In (...) this paper, we consider another boundary condition that plays a similar role, but for the decoherent arrow of time, i.e. the quantum state of the universe is more mixed in the future than in the past. According to what we call the Entanglement Past Hypothesis, the initial quantum state of the universe had very low entanglement entropy. We clarify the content of the Entanglement Past Hypothesis, compare it with the Thermodynamic Past Hypothesis, and identify some challenges and open questions for future research. (shrink)

A solution to the issue of time in quantum gravity is proposed. The hypothesis that time is not defined at the fundamental level (at the Planck scale) is considered. A natural extension of canonical Heisenberg-picture quantum mechanics is defined. It is shown that this extension is well defined and can be used to describe the "non-Schrödinger regime," in which a fundamental time variable is not defined. This conclusion rests on a detailed analysis of which quantities are (...) the physical observables of the theory; a main technical result of the paper is the identification of a class of gauge-invariant observables that can describe the (observable) evolution in the absence of a fundamental definition of time. The choice of the scalar product and the interpretation of the wave function are carefully discussed. The physical interpretation of the extreme "no time" quantum gravitational physics is considered. (shrink)

As a continuation of this author’s previous cosmological neuroscience papers on the hypothesized Soul of Multiverse and its possible laws, the present work examined the social aspects of four of these laws. The following key aspects were recognized: (1) Knowing about the cosmic Law of Coexistence in Diversity can let our mind respect not only the endless diversity of human beings but also the cohesive force of space-time in which all are connected. This may help realizing the superiority of (...) cooperation for shared goals over competition for gaining by harming others. (2) Knowing about the cosmic Law of Truth in Complexity can ready our mind to confront the problems of societies with the understanding that these problems are much more complex than generally thought. This may help initiating the needed intellectual renaissance of the 21st century. (3) Knowing about the cosmic Law of Divine - Evil Asymmetry can make our mind appreciate the slight yet sufficient supremacy of divine over evil. This may help restoring faith in the eventual creation of a just society, where social justice is defined as an administrative mechanism providing the right conditions for every human being to accomplish his or her Conscience-led Mission throughout life, while allowing each of these accomplishments to be reciprocated with the gratitude it induced in the involved social systems, small or large, to let equal opportunities in life coexist with due diversity in welcomed, not abused, social recognitions. And (4) knowing about the cosmic Law of Lives to Transcend can empower our mind to build on these advances. This may help moving evolution towards the human species worthy of its origin and destination. (shrink)

Pandemic can prompt a variety of human motives, ranging from a desire for security to altruism. In our current perilous times, some patients have voiced a desire to help others. Such action can result in self-peril, and, as a result, their motives may be questioned. One health system now has a pandemic-based advance directive that queries patients about their value preferences regarding care that is directed toward others. Some object to this action because it may evoke patients to altruism. We (...) examine both remote and recent examples of altruism, in which coercion could have played a major role. We next consider concerns based on aspects of the process of “inquiry versus evocation,” slippery-slope claims, and inherent manipulation, and conclude that patients should be allowed to be asked about their preferences and values regarding altruism. (shrink)

If the Past Hypothesis underlies the arrows of time, what is the status of the Past Hypothesis? In this paper, I examine the role of the Past Hypothesis in the Boltzmannian account and defend the view that the Past Hypothesis is a candidate fundamental law of nature. Such a view is known to be compatible with Humeanism about laws, but as I argue it is also supported by a minimal non-Humean "governing'' view. Some worries arise (...) from the non-dynamical and time-dependent character of the Past Hypothesis as a boundary condition, the intrinsic vagueness in its specification, and the nature of the initial probability distribution. I show that these worries do not have much force, and in any case they become less relevant in a new quantum framework for analyzing time's arrows---the Wentaculus. Hence, the view that the Past Hypothesis is a candidate fundamental law should be more widely accepted than it is now. (shrink)

The promised paradises of colonial capitalism and neoliberalism are set in a perpetually elusive future (Fitzpatrick 1992). This future is not a set destination, but an endless linear journey set to the thrum of ‘progress’ and ‘development’. This paper considers, in the context of recent cases relating to development in the Athabasca tar sands region, what the law of the Canadian settler state does when it is faced with interruptions and ruptures in its timescape. Drawing on Fitzpatrick’s seminal work, The (...) Mythology of Modern Law, I argue that a conceptualisation of law’s behaviour in these contexts as functionally mythological highlights some of the elusive ways that settler law maintains a stranglehold over legal imaginaries of oil and gas developments: by distorting and flattening the pasts and presents of Indigenous societies that pre-dated (and continue to co-exist with) the settler state on ‘Canadian’ land, by mediating between the ‘origin’ of the settler state and the daily rhythms of colonial time through ‘Eternal Objects’ such as property and economic development, and by asserting a general ‘objectivity’ of law to evade any direct grappling with the stark possibilities of the ‘end of the world’ created by the climate crisis. I conclude, drawing on Indigenous scholarship and the work of de Goede and Randalls, that a meaningful response to the climate crisis requires re-enchanted attachments to life that necessitate a departure from the one-dimensional temporality of the mythologies of settler law. (shrink)

In a quantum universe with a strong arrow of time, it is standard to postulate that the initial wave function started in a particular macrostate---the special low-entropy macrostate selected by the Past Hypothesis. Moreover, there is an additional postulate about statistical mechanical probabilities according to which the initial wave function is a ''typical'' choice in the macrostate. Together, they support a probabilistic version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: typical initial wave functions will increase in entropy. Hence, there (...) are two sources of randomness in such a universe: the quantum-mechanical probabilities of the Born rule and the statistical mechanical probabilities of the Statistical Postulate. I propose a new way to understand time's arrow in a quantum universe. It is based on what I call the Thermodynamic Theories of Quantum Mechanics. According to this perspective, there is a natural choice for the initial quantum state of the universe, which is given by not a wave function but by a density matrix. The density matrix plays a microscopic role: it appears in the fundamental dynamical equations of those theories. The density matrix also plays a macroscopic / thermodynamic role: it is exactly the projection operator onto the Past Hypothesis subspace. Thus, given an initial subspace, we obtain a unique choice of the initial density matrix. I call this property "the conditional uniqueness" of the initial quantum state. The conditional uniqueness provides a new and general strategy to eliminate statistical mechanical probabilities in the fundamental physical theories, by which we can reduce the two sources of randomness to only the quantum mechanical one. I also explore the idea of an absolutely unique initial quantum state, in a way that might realize Penrose's idea of a strongly deterministic universe. (shrink)

The Internalization Hypothesis (I.H.), as expressed in GM II 16 of On the Genealogy of Morals, is the essential albeit under-theorized principle of Nietzsche’s psychology. In the following essay, I investigate the purpose I.H. serves concerning Nietzsche’s theory of drives as well as the Hypothesis’s epistemic warrant. I demonstrate that I.H. needs a Neo-Darwinian underpinning for two reasons: 1) to answer the Time-Crunch Problem of Transformation, and 2) in order to render it coherent with Nietzsche’s physiological determinism (...) as articulated in Twilight of the Idols. My re-examination of I.H., then, serves to underwrite the Hypothesis on solid empirical footing. In addition, my analysis provides further evidence to think that Brian Leiter’s initial (but naïve) type-fact reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy of psychology is accurate, deterministic warts and all. (shrink)

It has been proposed that inferring personal authorship for an event gives rise to intentional binding, a perceptual illusion in which one’s action and inferred effect seem closer in time than they otherwise would . Using a novel, naturalistic paradigm, we conducted two experiments to test this hypothesis and examine the relationship between binding and self-reported authorship. In both experiments, an important authorship indicator – consistency between one’s action and a subsequent event – was manipulated, and its effects (...) on binding and self-reported authorship were measured. Results showed that action-event consistency enhanced both binding and self-reported authorship, supporting the hypothesis that binding arises from an inference of authorship. At the same time, evidence for a dissociation emerged, with consistency having a more robust effect on self-reports than on binding. Taken together, these results suggest that binding and self-reports reveal different aspects of the sense of authorship. (shrink)

According to the Temporal Focus Hypothesis, space–time mappings in people’s minds are shaped by their attentional focus. Previous research has shown that numerous cultural and individual factors underpinning temporal focus may contribute to the direction of space–time mappings in people’s mental models. However, the role of time of day in shaping spatial conceptions of time has not been investigated. In a series of three experiments, Chinese participants, who were more likely to be future-focused in the (...) morning than afternoon, were also more likely to produce a future-in-front mapping. However, this morning future-minded effect can only be found in morning people, suggesting a mediating role of chronotype processes. Taken together, the findings across studies suggest that people’s representations of time may arise from an interaction between a person’s chronotype and time-of-day, a phenomenon that we refer to as the chronotype future-minded effect. (shrink)

The Perils of Invention is based on three Hannah Arendt Center Conferences: "Human Being in an Inhuman Age," "Lying and Politics," and "Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age without Facts." Contributions written for these conferences are placed alongside many new essays that reflect on the ideas they raised. The result is a freshly invigorated investigation into these critical and timely themes. The authors have diverse backgrounds--Arendt scholars, public intellectuals, novelists, journalists, and business people--and include Uday Mehta, Marrianne Constable, Nicholson Baker, (...) George Kateb, Marianne Constable, Linda M.G. Zerilli, Peg Birmingham, Davide Panagia, and many others. (shrink)

The Universal Space–Time Mapping Hypothesis suggests that temporal expression is based on spatial metaphor for all human beings. This study examines its applicability in the Chinese language using the data elicited from the Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus, which collected the utterances produced by 168 Mandarin-speaking preschoolers in a semistructured play context. The unique pair of Chinese words, qian and hou, which can be used to express either time or space in daily communication, was the unit of analysis. (...) The results indicated that: there was a significant age effect in the production of “qian/hou,” indicating that the period before the age of 4.5 may be critical for the development of temporal and spatial expression; the pair was produced to express time much earlier than space, indicating that the expression of time might not necessarily be based on the spatial metaphor; and the pair was used more frequently to express time than space by the preschoolers, thus challenging the hypothesis. (shrink)

Observations on the morphological and functional similarity between embryonic or trophoblast tissues and tumors are very old. Over a period of time many investigators have created different hypotheses on the origin of cancerogenesis or tumor efficiency in relation to the host immune system. Some of these ideas have been rejected but many of them are still current. A presumption of the inefficiency of anti-tumor immunity in mammals due to the high similarity between trophoblast and embryonic cells to tumor cells (...) is very real. The mechanisms for the escape of tumors from the immune response are very similar to the mechanisms for the escape of a fetoplacental unit from the maternal immune response. The similarity between these two mechanisms is so great that any randomness must be banished. At the same time, an incidence of malignant tumors and the types of more frequent tumors in non-mammalian vertebrates is significantly different to that in mammals. Lastly, the mechanisms of anti-tumor immunity in mammals are substantially different from the mechanisms of anti-tumor immunity in other classes of vertebrates. These facts indicate that the immune system of mammals during anti-tumor immune response is tricked by the similarity between tumor cells and trophoblast or other placental cells. From this aspect, our conclusion is that anti-tumor immunity failure in mammals can be defined as an immunoreproductive phenomenon, which is developed under the evolutionary pressure of autoimmunity and reproductive effectiveness. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to one of the most intriguing theory that was invented by medieval theologians and philosophers in order to explain the nature of God. I am not personally keen on the theological dimension of this idea, I would rather like to focus on its promising philosophical usefulness and its explanatory power. For the very long time I was hesitating what aspect of this theory to choose as the most interesting and most illuminating. I eventually made a (...) decision that there is still a very important and unsolved problem with 'pure experience' that has nothing to do with any concepts and theories; that is totally direct and devoid of any mediating factors. It seems to be very interesting to shed a little bit of light on it and combine it with what is at first sight such an old-fashioned theory as the theory of transcendental. My paper is divided into three sections. In the first of them will consider some difficulties connected with the problem of pure experience. In the second part the theory of transcendentals is outlined. The third section contains the application of the theory of transcendental to the problem of pure experience. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to one of the most intriguing theory that was invented by medieval theologians and philosophers in order to explain the nature of God. I am not personally keen on the theological dimension of this idea, I would rather like to focus on its promising philosophical usefulness and its explanatory power. For the very long time I was hesitating what aspect of this theory to choose as the most interesting and most illuminating. I eventually made a (...) decision that there is still a very important and unsolved problem with 'pure experience' that has nothing to do with any concepts and theories; that is totally direct and devoid of any mediating factors. It seems to be very interesting to shed a little bit of light on it and combine it with what is at first sight such an old-fashioned theory as the theory of transcendental. My paper is divided into three sections. In the first of them will consider some difficulties connected with the problem of pure experience. In the second part the theory of transcendentals is outlined. The third section contains the application of the theory of transcendental to the problem of pure experience. (shrink)

According to the conventionalist doctrine of space elaborated by the French philosopher-scientist Henri Poincaré in the 1890s, the geometry of physical space is a matter of definition, not of fact. Poincaré’s Hertz-inspired view of the role of hypothesis in science guided his interpretation of the theory of relativity (1905), which he found to be in violation of the axiom of free mobility of invariable solids. In a quixotic effort to save the Euclidean geometry that relied on this axiom, Poincaré (...) extended the purview of his doctrine of space to cover both space and time. The centerpiece of this new doctrine is what he called the ‘‘principle of physical relativity,’’ which holds the laws of mechanics to be covariant with respect to a certain group of transformations. For Poincaré, the invariance group of classical mechanics defined physical space and time (Galilei spacetime), but he admitted that one could also define physical space and time in virtue of the invariance group of relativistic mechanics (Minkowski spacetime). Either way, physical space and time are the result of a convention. (shrink)

In 1955, Norbert Wiener suggested a sociological model according to which all forms of culture ultimately depended on the temporal coordination of human activities, in particular their synchronization. The basis for Wiener’s model was provided by his insights into the temporal structures of cerebral processes. This article reconstructs the historical context of Wiener’s ‘brain clock’ hypothesis, largely via his dialogues with John W. Stroud and other scholars working at the intersection of neurophysiology, experimental psychology, and electrical engineering. Since the (...) 19th century, physiologists and psychologists have been conducting experimental investigations into the relation between time and the brain. Using innovative instruments and technologies, Stroud rehearsed these experiments, in part without paying any attention at all to the experimental traditions involved. Against this background, this article argues that the novelty of Wiener’s model relies largely on his productive rephrasing of physiological and psychological findings that had been established long before the Second World War. (shrink)

It is often said that the world is explained by laws of nature together with initial conditions. But does that mean initial conditions don’t require further explanation? And does the explanatory role played by initial conditions entail or require that time has a preferred direction? This chapter looks at the use of the ‘initialness defence’ in physics, the idea that initial conditions are intrinsically special in that they don’t require further explanation, unlike the state of the world at other (...) times. Such defences commonly assume a primitive directionality of time to distinguish between initial and final conditions. Using the case study of the time-asymmetry of thermodynamics and the so-called ‘past hypothesis’ — the hypothesis that the early universe was in a state of very low entropy —, I outline and support a deflationary account of the initialness defence that does not pre- suppose a basic directionality of time, and argue that there is a relevant explanatory asymmetry between initial conditions and the state of systems at other times only if certain causal conditions are satisfied. Hence, the initialness defence is available to those who reject a fundamental direction of time. (shrink)

Open theists deny that God knows future contingents. Most open theists justify this denial by adopting the position that there are no future contingent truths to be known. In this paper we examine some of the arguments put forward for this position in two recent articles in this journal, one by Dale Tuggy and one by Alan Rhoda, Gregory Boyd, and Thomas Belt. The arguments concern time, modality, and the semantics of ‘will’ statements. We explain why we find none (...) of these arguments persuasive. This wide road leads only to destruction. (shrink)

Quality of life is a difficult concept to define and to measure. An hypothesis is proposed which suggests that the quality of life measures the difference, or the gap, at a particular period of time between the hopes and expectations of the individual and that individual's present experiences. Quality of life can only be described by the individual, and must take into account many aspects of life. The approach is goal-orientated, and one of task analysis. The hypothesis (...) is developed in a diagramatic way, and several methods of testing the hypothesis suggested. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis essay examines the prospects and plans of a family of small-scale French papermakers, the Serves, from the 1780s to the 1830s. It explores the interplay of risk, the state, labor discipline, and technological diffusion. Pierre Serve petitioned the monarchy, the Revolutionary state, and the Napoleonic regime for a subsidy to install Hollander beaters, a machine that macerated rags, in his shops. His son pursued a law to humble the journeymen paperworkers, whose custom and skill continuously challenged the Serves' (...) mastery of their mill. Timely responses from the state, which favored large producers, never came. Consequently, the Serves fell back on their own resources and the market, which determined their fate. (shrink)

This paper centers on Takashi Yagisawa’s book Worlds and Individuals, Possible and Otherwise (Oxford: 2010), which provides a novel and systematic analysis of modality and time. I consider the overall structure of Yagisawa’s treatment of modality and time, and discuss in detail the following three topics: (i) Possible worlds as modal indices, (ii) Trans-world identity, (iii) The claim that existence, unlike reality, is relative. My main conclusion is that Yagisawa's view of modality is driven by a strong primitivism, (...) leading to the endorsement of possibility, actuality, and presentness, but also possible worlds and times, as irreducible. The resulting view is saddled with the typical problems of primitivism on the one hand, and modal realism on the other. I criticize the view that existence is relative. (shrink)

Large-scale data systems are increasingly envisioned as tools for justice, with big data analytics offering a key opportunity to advance health equity. Health systems face growing public pressure to collect data on patient “social factors,” and advocates and public officials seek to leverage such data sources as a means of system transformation. Despite the promise of this “data-driven” strategy, there is little empirical work that examines big data in action directly within the sites of care expected to transform. In this (...) article, I present a case study on one such initiative, focusing on a large public safety-net health system’s initiation of sexual orientation and gender identity data collection within the clinical setting. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with providers, staff, and administrators, I highlight three main challenges that elude big data’s grasp on inequality: provider and staff’s limited understanding of the social significance of data collection; patient perception of the cultural insensitivity of data items; and clinic need to balance data requests with competing priorities within a constrained time window. These issues reflect structural challenges within safety-net care that big data alone are unable to address in advancing social justice. I discuss these findings by considering the present data-driven strategy alongside two complementary courses of action: diversifying the health professions workforce and clinical education reform. To truly advance justice, we need more than “just data”: we need to confront the fundamental conditions of social inequality. (shrink)

This paper critically examines efforts to “professionalize” the field of healthcare management and its corresponding costs. Drawing upon the scholarly critiques of professionalization in medicine and the broader field of management, this paper seeks to explore the symbolic role professionalization might play in the psyche of its constituents, and specifically its function as a defense against uncertainty and anxiety. This psychodynamic heuristic is then deployed to put forth the hypothesis that an ongoing crisis of professional identity continues to both (...) propel and impede professionalization efforts in healthcare management, giving rise to a litany of standardization pressures that ultimately limit the field’s potential. To mitigate these pressures, the call is made for rekindling healthcare management’s moral, political, and existential aspects. Specifically, this entails engaging with the deeper themes that flow through the field: the experience of illness and what it means to suffer, the experience of life and what it means to have hope, and the experience of death and dying. It also entails squarely confronting questions of power, poverty and disease, and the pursuit of justice. (shrink)

Inductive reasoning requires exploiting links between evidence and hypotheses. This can be done focusing either on the posterior probability of the hypothesis when updated on the new evidence or on the impact of the new evidence on the credibility of the hypothesis. But are these two cognitive representations equally reliable? This study investigates this question by comparing probability and impact judgments on the same experimental materials. The results indicate that impact judgments are more consistent in time and (...) more accurate than probability judgments. Impact judgments also predict the direction of errors in probability judgments. These findings suggest that human inductive reasoning relies more on estimating evidential impact than on posterior probability. (shrink)

In a quantum universe with a strong arrow of time, we postulate a low-entropy boundary condition to account for the temporal asymmetry. In this paper, I show that the Past Hypothesis also contains enough information to simplify the quantum ontology and define a unique initial condition in such a world. First, I introduce Density Matrix Realism, the thesis that the quantum universe is described by a fundamental density matrix that represents something objective. This stands in sharp contrast to (...) Wave Function Realism, the thesis that the quantum universe is described by a wave function that represents something objective. Second, I suggest that the Past Hypothesis is sufficient to determine a unique and simple density matrix. This is achieved by what I call the Initial Projection Hypothesis: the initial density matrix of the universe is the normalized projection onto the special low-dimensional Hilbert space. Third, because the initial quantum state is unique and simple, we have a strong case for the \emph{Nomological Thesis}: the initial quantum state of the universe is on a par with laws of nature. This new package of ideas has several interesting implications, including on the harmony between statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, the dynamic unity of the universe and the subsystems, and the alleged conflict between Humean supervenience and quantum entanglement. (shrink)

This study examined the extent to which individual differences in time perspective, i.e. habitual way of relating to the personal past, present, and future, are associated with sleep quality and daytime sleepiness in a sample of older adults. The participants (N = 437, 60-90 years) completed the Karolinska Sleep Questionnaire (KSQ), a version of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (S-ZTPI) and two ratings of SWB (life satisfaction, happiness). Based on established relationships between dimension of time perspective and (...) other variables (e.g. depression) and relations between negative retrospection (rumination) and negative prospection (worry) in prior studies, we expected higher scores on Past Negative and Future Negative to be linked to poor sleep quality and (indirectly) increased daytime sleepiness. Moreover, we examined the possibility that variations in perceived sleep and sleepiness during the day mediates the expected association between an aggregate measure of deviations from a so called balanced time perspective (DBTP) and subjective well-being (SWB). In regression analyses controlling for demographic factors (age, sex, work status), higher scores on Past Negative and Future Negative predicted poorer sleep quality and higher levels of daytime sleepiness. Additionally, most of the association between time perspective and daytime sleepiness was accounted for by individual differences in sleep quality. Finally, structural equation modelling yielded results consistent with the hypothesis that variations in sleep mediate part of the negative relationship between DBTP and SWB. Given that good sleep is essential to multiple aspects of health, future studies evaluating relationships between time perspective and adverse health outcomes should consider sleep quality as a potentially contributing factor. (shrink)

Aristotle’s brief considerations concerning how we perceive that we perceive led to a long and wide-ranging discussion of the problem by his commentators, one that extended over several centuries. From the second century to the sixth, Aristotle’s ancient Greek commentators, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Pseudo-Simplicius, and Pseudo-Philoponus, offered various interpretations of apperception. The discussion of the problem is historically revealing, for the commentators did not so much attempt to write historically accurate interpretations of the texts upon which they commented; rather, (...) they used the text as an occasion for their own active philosophical reflection. They sought to extract the truth from a revered text. Hence, their commentaries are very helpful in reconstructing the development of philosophical views representative of their own times. Their discussions of self-awareness in perception are of particular interest, because in them we can witness changes in the broader questions of the nature of the self and truth. (shrink)

The paper begins with the prerequisite assumption that social deprivation is a fragile and porous category. Thus, our hypothesis is, that how people are affected by the restrictions against the spreading of the coronavirus is often discussed in far too general and simplistic terms. It is often taken as a given, that the virus and the restriction measures not only have caused severe difficulties for us all (due to social distancing, fear, affected health, etc.), but that the measures have (...) exacerbated already previously existing forms of social deprivation. Therefore, it is assumed that marginalized groups are particularly affected by these effects of the pandemic. Two major German studies show the alleged effects of the relevant measures on adolescents and emerging adults (COPSY and FIBS) against the backdrop of social and economic deprivation; their results confirmed that social deprivation entails a higher degree of being affected by the pandemic.However, this picture becomes thwarted by considering the results of 10 narrative interviews, that were conducted by us with emerging adults in a German vocational training institute between April and August 2021 and showed variegated forms of experiencing issues related to the pandemic. In our analysis, we used the method of objective hermeneutics. In this paper, we present our considerations by outlining two contrastive experiences with the Covid-19 pandemic, in order to highlight the divergent ways in which the pandemic has been experienced even among individuals who previously had been affected by social deprivation – at least at first glance – in similar ways. The conceptual lens through which we interpret these two examples is, firstly, the one of precariousness and precarity (Butler 2009). And secondly, the concept of recognition derived from Honneth’s pertinent theory and Butler’s account of recognizability will play a pivotal role. While Honneth’s approach allows us to emphasize the normative and existential role of the fulfilment of our basic desire for recognition and the detrimental implications of disregard, Butler provides us with the means to thoroughly analyse the socio-historical conditions of misrecognition and social invisibility. Moreover, Butler focuses specifically on the recognizability of precariousness (Honneth’s triad of love, being respected as a rights bearer and solidarity shows a different focus). Combining qualitative research on precarious live circumstances with a theoretical perspective on recognition can also be found in a stunning research on couples in atypical working relations (Wimbauer and Motakef 2019). Proceeding from these theories and ‘applying’ them to our empirical material, we seek to call into question a too generalizing and hegemonic picture of how people were affected by pertinent restrictions. Qualitative interviews are able to point us to significant differences in the experience of the restrictions.In terms of an outlook, we suggest that a sensitization for previously excluded kinds of experiences forms a crucial basis for a less normalizing, that is, more inclusive account of interpreting the affectedness and needs of variegated social groups; the pandemic has influenced and altered structures of the recognition of vulnerability and, by the same token, made them more explicit. It thus is an occasion for a critical engagement with the recognizability of needs, deprivation, discrimination, and related phenomena. (shrink)