To me a painted paroquet Hath been – a most familiar bird– Taught me my alphabet to say– To lisp my very earliest word. Edgar Allan Poe, “Romance,” Poetry and Tales 53 Logographical necessity (ana...

Digital technologies are frequently considered as lacking material aspects. Today, it is evident that behind digital technologies lies a huge and complex material infrastructure in the form of fiber optic cables, servers, satellites, and screens. Postphenomenology has theorized the relations to material things as embodiment relations. Taking into account that technologies can also have hermeneutic aspects, this theory defines hermeneutic relations as those in which we read the world through technologies. The article opens with a review of some theoretical developments (...) to hermeneutic relations with a special focus on digital technologies. The article suggests that in the digital world, material hermeneutics needs to be updated as it shifts from a scientific to an everyday technological context. Now, technologies not only “give voice” to things, they also produce new meanings to informational structures and direct users to certain meanings. When it comes to digital technologies, especially those involving artificial intelligence (AI), the technology actively mediates the world. In postphenomenological terms, it possesses a technological intentionality. The postphenomenological formula should be updated to reflect this type of technological intentionality, by reversing the arrow of intentionality so that it points to the user, rather than from the user. (shrink)

From the middle of the twentieth‐century onwards, there has been a growing emphasis on the importance of relationality in what it means to be human, which we call a “relational turn.” This is found in various domains, including philosophical psychology, psychoanalysis, and theological anthropology. Many have seen a close connection between relationality and personhood. In the second half of the article, we consider the implications of this trend for artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. So far, AI has largely neglected relational (...) intelligence, though that could perhaps be about to change. Cybernetics was rendered more open to assumptions about the contextuality of intelligence by its rather different assumptions from AI. Social robotics increasingly requires relational intelligence, and promising steps might be found in computational modeling of human relationships. Questions about whether robots can achieve personhood are difficult to resolve, though the possibility should not be ruled out. (shrink)

The adaptive BCI known as ‘closed-loop deep brain stimulation’ (clDBS) is a device that stimulates the brain in order to prevent pathological neural activity and automatically adjusts stimulation levels based on computational algorithms that detect or predict those pathological processes. One of the prominent ethical concerns raised by clDBS is that, by inhibiting or modulating the undesirable neural states of a cognitive agent automatically, the device potentially undermines her autonomy. It has been argued that clDBS is not a threat because (...) autonomy is fundamentally relational, i.e., it essentially depends on external (e.g., social or cultural) factors. If the relational approach to autonomy includes human-computer interaction, then the mechanisms of clDBS, even if external to the brain and exerting some degree of control over the individual, may support her autonomy. However, DBS applications are substantially different from one another, each involving a specific neurological or psychiatric condition, neural target, mechanism and symptom(s), and therefore at least some of them may not fit into the relational analysis. I examine different clDBS applications for treatment resistant depression and claim that while internal capsule/ventral striatum (VC/VS) clDBS is a case of relational autonomy, subgenual cingulate gyrus (Cg25) clDBS is not. Autonomy (relational or otherwise) requires some degree of self-regulation of our motivational states, which is supported by VC/VS DBS but is absent in Cg25 DBS. In Cg25 DBS the device itself directly influences motivational states, thus substituting or overriding (instead of supporting) the auto-regulatory cognitive processes required for autonomous action. (shrink)

A blockchain can be considered a technological phenomenon that is made up of different interconnected and autonomous systems. Such systems are referred to here as cyber-physical systems: complex interconnections of cyber and physical components. When cyber-physical systems are interconnected, a new whole consisting of a system of systems is created by the autonomous systems and their intercommunication and interaction. In a blockchain, individual systems can independently make decisions on joint information transactions. The decision-making procedures needed for this are executed based (...) on fault-tolerant communication and voting and consensus procedures, while the results of these decision-making procedures are stored in distributed ledgers. Due to the intercommunication, interaction, and independent decision making by autonomous systems, the new whole of a blockchain is a complex entity. Complexity science rather than the usual reductionist scientific approach can help us better understand the behaviour of the new and continuously developing whole of a blockchain as a technological phenomenon. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is an attempt to give an answer to the question what does it mean that a computational system is intelligent. We base on some theses that though debatable are commonly accepted. Intelligence is conceived as the ability of tractable solving of some problems that in general are not solvable by deterministic Turing Machine.

This article outlines a sociological agenda for the era of “tech,” a period when digital technologies have come to dominate our social lives. It argues that we should break “tech” down into two parts, the production side and the consumption side. The production side concerns the ways in which these technologies are made, the social actors involved on the design, financing, and production side, and the consumption side refers to the ways in which ordinary users make use of these technologies (...) and the ways in which their use is transforming everyday life. The article maintains that this is an area of research to which sociologists need to pay much greater attention if they are to understand the contemporary world satisfactorily. (shrink)

Purpose This paper is concerned with the place of human rights in the process of technological development but specifically as this process is situated within the corporate-technological complex of modern digital communications and their derivatives. This paper aims to argue that expecting and institutionalizing the incorporation of human rights in the process of technological innovation and production, particularly in the context of global economic actors, constitutes a necessary act if we want to navigate the immediate future of artificial intelligence and (...) ubiquitous connectivity in ways that protect democracy and human dignity. Design/methodology/approach The discussion presents the case for defending human rights through a social control perspective, which assumes the conscious quest for impacting change and cartographing a path of actions and intentions. The authors approach the problem from James Ralph Beniger’s theory of the Control Revolution to explain the emergence of a new social order and to outline the main challenges brought particularly by media and information and communication technology corporations as global actors of power. Findings Ethics initiatives, considering human rights as an ethical framework for media and ICT businesses, can be based on social control perspectives to regard the more complex variables interacting in the formation of effective policy making. It is the right to participate in the construction of knowledge in society and, informed by this knowledge, help manage or control democratic issues, including influencing on the regulation of technology and other cultural formats of control. Knowing social control tools enable citizens to lead their destinies, plan their freedom and the change what they wish in the societies they live in. Originality/value Social control is often understood as a term taken for granted and many times faced as representing malignant and anti-democratic forms. Here, the authors try to build a theoretical ground where both sides – the benign and the malignant – can be taken in consideration to bring awareness to the need to discuss social control as a democratic endeavor, and consider human rights as part of this and not something apart and idealized. The practice of human rights is directly associated with social control forms and is from within these practices individuals must understand its role on social control and act. (shrink)

Explanations of biological phenomena such as cell division, protein synthesis or circadian rhythms commonly take the form of models of the responsible mechanisms. Recently philosophers of science have attempted to analyze this practice, presenting mechanisms as organized collections of parts performing operations that together produce the phenomenon. But in some cases what researchers seek to explain is not a general phenomenon, but a specific feature of a more fine-grained phenomenon. In some of these cases, it is not the model of (...) the mechanism that performs the explanatory work. I consider a case in which the investigator offered an abstract representation of a fine-grained phenomenon to show why in had the feature in question. I consider a second case in which a researcher abstracted from the mechanism to identify a design principle that explains why the functioning mechanism exhibits a specific feature. (shrink)

Citizen science projects have started to utilize Machine Learning to sort through large datasets generated in fields like astronomy, ecology and biodiversity, biology, and neuroimaging. Human–machine systems have been created to take advantage of the complementary strengths of humans and machines and have been optimized for efficiency and speed. We conducted qualitative content analysis on meta-summaries of documents reporting the results of 12 citizen science projects that used machine learning to optimize classification tasks. We examined the distribution of tasks between (...) citizen scientists, experts, and algorithms, and how epistemic agency was enacted in terms of whose knowledge shapes the distribution of tasks, who decides what knowledge is relevant to the classification, and who validates it. In our descriptive results, we found that experts, who include professional scientists and algorithm developers, are involved in every aspect of a project, from annotating or labelling data to giving data to algorithms to train them to make decisions from predictions. Experts also test and validate models to improve their accuracy by scoring their outputs when algorithms fail to make correct decisions. Experts are mostly the humans involved in a loop, but when algorithms encounter problems, citizens are also involved at several stages. In this paper, we present three main examples of citizens-in-the-loop: when algorithms provide incorrect suggestions; when algorithms fail to know how to perform classification; and when algorithms pose queries. We consider the implications of the emphasis on optimization on the ideal of science and the role of citizen scientists from a perspective informed by Science and Technology Studies and Information Systems. Based on our findings, we conclude that ML in CS classification projects, far from being deterministic in its nature and effects, may be open to question. There is no guarantee that these technologies can replace citizen scientists, nor any guarantee that they can provide citizens with opportunities for more interesting tasks. (shrink)

To be successful, the research agenda for a novel control view of cognition should foresee more detailed, computationally specified process models of cognitive operations including higher cognition. These models should cover all domains of cognition, including those cognitive abilities that can be characterized as online interactive loops and detached forms of cognition that depend on internally generated neuronal processing.

The impact of Cyberculture, of digital devices on young people as extensions of the body, can be seen in terms of the decreasing structuring of thoughts and information, increasing impulsivity in perception and action, and the development of more primitive defense mechanisms. These adverse impacts result in the feeling of isolation and devaluation, frustration of present and uncertainty of the future, exteriorization and floating identities, mimetic and adhesive identifications, less cohesion of the self, and decreasing tolerance of the other. This (...) paper focuses on the following themes: Symbiosis versus syncretism: The affirmations of symbiosis. The dilutions of syncretism. Synopsis: Too much syncretism, too little symbiosis. Lack of a deeper co-construction of knowledge, more lasting, and sustainable. Lack of increased more independent personal cognitive deepening. Lack of ability to be alone. Causality and free will: Symbiotic versus syncretic causality. Conclusions: Cyber-selfs—either distributed or not at all? (shrink)

In a range of digital creative productions and digital culture, questions of how to deal with finitude are on the rise. On the one hand, sectors of the digital entertainment industry – specifically computer games developers – are concerned with the question of how to manage `death' digitally. On the other hand, death and suicide have become the impetus for humorous artistic expression. This article tracks the emergence of a digital ethos that is cognizant of consequence, finitude and even death. (...) Rather than pit a 1990s `will to life' against an emerging `death drive', I argue that the shift to an ethos in which dark consequences ensue from digital actions must be understood by working through digital code's technicity and unfolding this relation of technics to both ethics and politics. Although Bernard Stiegler's analysis of technicity goes some way toward unfolding a political analysis of the aesthetics of digital code, his articulation of noopolitics fails to provide us with a way to conduct ourselves digitally in an era of cognitive capitalism. I look to critical software practices and their provisional networked publics, with potential lines of flight for contemporary technoculture via novel digital `codings'. (shrink)

This article discusses the issue of social and cultural ‘autotranscendence’ - self-production, creativity - in the debates on self-organization. The point of departure is Cornelius Castoriadis’s idea of ‘self-creation’. First, a schisma between mechanical and ontological modeling is indicated and used to introduce the idea of a ‘creative organization’. This is further discussed in relation to Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s concept of social ‘autotranscendence’ by ‘complex methodological individualism’, with particular respect to the incomprehension of the social. Following Johann P. Arnason’s treatment of (...) the question of cultural articulation in Castoriadis, the article argues that the problem of autotranscendence presents a further problem of self-creation discernible in Castoriadis’s notions of phusis/nomos, living being/human, and constraint/magma. The article closes with a consideration of Duncan Watts, Alberto-László Barabási and Bernardo Huberman’s sketch of a network sociology. (shrink)

The emerging transdisciplinary field of consciousness studies merges transpersonal psychology with recent brain studies. In this paper, I argue that this new discipline must come to terms with the rhetorics of control in the history of brain research. I establish parallels between the discourses of lobotomy and psychosurgery, Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB), and cybernetics, using the work of Jose Delgado, Norbert Wiener, and Bernard Wolfe. The rhetoric of social control remains a shadow side of brain research, of the (...) popularization of brain science, and of attempts to apply such research. (shrink)

Twentieth-century theoretical efforts towards the articulation of general system properties came short of having the significant impact on biological practice that their proponents envisioned. Although the latter did arrive at preliminary mathematical formulations of such properties, they had little success in showing how these could be productively incorporated into the research agenda of biologists. Consequently, the gap that kept system-theoretic principles cut-off from biological experimentation persisted. More recently, however, simple theoretical tools have proved readily applicable within the context of systems (...) biology. In particular, examples reviewed in this paper suggest that rigorous mathematical expressions of design principles, imported primarily from engineering, could produce experimentally confirmable predictions of the regulatory properties of small biological networks. But this is not enough for contemporary systems biologists who adopt the holistic aspirations of early systemologists, seeking high-level organizing principles that could provide insights into problems of biological complexity at the whole-system level. While the presented evidence is not conclusive about whether this strategy could lead to the realization of the lofty goal of a comprehensive explanatory integration, it suggests that the ongoing quest for organizing principles is pragmatically advantageous for systems biologists. The formalisms postulated in the course of this process can serve as bridges between system-theoretic concepts and the results of molecular experimentation: they constitute theoretical tools for generalizing molecular data, thus producing increasingly accurate explanations of system-wide phenomena. (shrink)

This essay traces the increased centrality of technology to social life across the period of modernity. It examines major shifts in thinking about technology which underpin the shift from industrial to post-industrial society, and the emergence of concepts such as ‘technoscience’ and ‘technoculture’. It argues that a critical analysis of technology must probe the way that histories of technological progress have been implicated in colonial hierarchies privileging the West. In examining the extension of technology from machines that make things to (...) ‘machines that think’, including biotechnology and computerized ‘aritificial life’, something implied in every historical iteration of technology is laid bare: defining the technological activates the border between nature and culture, and goes to the heart of what it means to be human. (shrink)

There had been interesting interactions between philosophical reflections, technical developments and the work of artists, poets and designers, starting especially in the 1950s and 1960s with a stimulating cell in Stuttgart and Ulm in Germany spreading mutual international interactions. The paper aims to describe the philosophical background of Max Bense with his research on the intellectual history of mathematics and the upcoming studies on technology and cybernetics. Together with communication theories and semiotics, new aesthetics such as cybernetic aesthetics had been (...) worked out, based on the notions of information and sign. This background stimulated international students, artists and researchers from different creative disciplines for methodical approaches leading to first computer art experiments. The interrelations in these fields with Latin America are in the focus of these studies. Students, artists, and poets from Latin America, especially Brazil, came to Germany for studies and exhibitions in the creative scientific cell around Max Bense. Some of them stayed in Europe, but the exchange developed also in the opposite direction, traveling to and working in Latin America. Some of those fruitful international interrelations will be described and reflected. (shrink)

Mental disorders as defined by current classifications are not fully supported by scientific evidence. It is unclear whether main disorders should be broken down into separate categories or disposed along a continuous spectrum. In the near future, new classes of mental disorders could be defined through associations of so-called abnormalities observed at the genetic, molecular and neuronal circuitry levels.

This article describes the phenomenon of knowledge building in online environments. Knowledge building is a process within a community, which leads to the development of knowledge. In order to analyze this process, we will look into the ways in which individuals interact with the collective as a whole. For this purpose, the psychic and social systems, which are involved here are regarded as meaning-based systems in the sense of Luhmann’s systems theory—open to the environment, but operatively closed. The respective modes (...) of operation of psychic and social systems will be examined, and “structural coupling” between these systems described. Another characteristic of knowledge-building communities is self-organization, which is described here in the sense of autopoiesis. A pivotal task, which knowledge-building communities have to tackle, is to handle complexity and reach common understanding. These aspects will also be described using conceptualizations of Luhmann’s systems theory, illustrated by many examples. (shrink)

Plato's Republic lurks in cybernetics, a word popularly attributed to US American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964). In his accounts of how he came up with it, however, Wiener never mentions Plato, though he does note it was formed from the ancient Greek word kubernētēs (navigator). Among the earliest popular books about the cybernetics craze are three published in France, and their authors show a special interest in the origin of cybernetics. In something like learned rebukes to Wiener, all three books (...) credit Plato with significant use of kubernē-based terms. This article presents evidence, one, that Wiener knows well he has chosen a word with a Platonic history and, two, that Wiener deems the technical and social climate of ancient Athens (and of the Republic) instructive only as an anti-model for the mid-20th-century United States and so does not feel compelled to associate cybernetics with Plato. Instead, Wiener focuses on the challenges cybernetics and automation pose for his own engineering-oriented, capitalist, multiracial, democratic republic. Wiener's decisions not to use Plato as an authorizing force and not to put ancient Athens on a pedestal merit recognition, since subsequent writers link ancient Athens with cybernation via a presumption that cybernation will enable and fully democratize the sort of leisure activities, including thinking and participation in public life, deemed by some to be emblematic of ancient Athens. (shrink)

This article describes how an empirically supported theory of human behaviour, perceptual control theory, can be used to advance nursing practice and improve health outcomes for people who are accessing nursing care. Nursing often takes a pragmatic approach to the delivery of care, with an emphasis on doing what appears to work. This focus on pragmatism can sometimes take precedence over any consideration of the underlying theoretical assumptions that inform decisions to take one particular approach over another or the mechanisms (...) through which nursing interventions have their effects. For nursing to develop as a profession, there needs to be an increased focus on the core principles that underpin the delivery of care. In addition to understanding what works, nurses must develop their understanding of how and why particular approaches work or do not work. Understanding the fundamental principles that underpin nurses’ actions will lead to more efficient and effective approaches to the delivery of nursing care. It will also enable nurses to maximize those elements of their practice that are most beneficial for people and minimize other activities that either have little effect or actually lead to worse outcomes. In this article, we will propose that the phenomenon of control is fundamental to human health. Perceptual control theory provides a coherent theoretical framework that enables us to understand the phenomenon of control through a functional model of human behaviour. People are healthy when their neurochemical, physiological, biological, psychological and social states are all controlled satisfactorily. We will explain the implications of understanding health as control throughout the paper. From this perspective, we will argue that the aim of nurses and nursing should be to support people to maintain or recover control over those aspects of their lives that are important and meaningful to them. (shrink)

As part of our exploration of a new conceptual framework for an economy that works for 100% of humanity, this conceptual paper asks why all talk about the purpose of organizations seems to suffer from a certain bias, namely the bias of scarcity, and how this myth of scarcity influences our understanding of corporate responsibility. The mainstream understanding of corporate purpose always contains partly normative and partly functional aspects designed to cope with the purported problem of scarcity. According to economic (...) and CSR reasoning, this bias concerning the purpose of business organizations triggers two quite distinct understandings of the essence of corporate responsibility. The economic view interprets it as responsibility towards the company, while CSR and business ethics argue that it reflects, or at least ought to reflect, a broader responsibility towards society. To overcome this responsibility gap, we need to affect a paradigm shift in economic reasoning, a shift which reconciles economic responsibility on the micro-level logic of raising profit with the greater demands of the meso, macro, and supra levels. Only then do we obtain a truly meaningful lever for changing real-world business practice from within the micro-logics of running a corporation. This paradigm shift requires a different mental model - a model of resource growth and natural abundance, rather than of scarcity - on the part of both economists and business ethicists. It can be labeled the economic model of future viability. This paper develops a conceptual argument for a future viable model of business practice which, first and foremost, takes seriously the need for the kind of micro-level decision-making which keeps individual organizations afloat, but which also, and crucially, delivers a solution for future viable business models and business behavior which breaks the apparent downward spiral of modern wealth creation, i.e. the spiral of continuous acceleration, disruption, concentration and resource exploitation, and which, thirdly, delivers a proper definition of purpose which can be applied in measurement systems which are free of biased assumptions of scarcity. (shrink)

En esta primera parte de la entrevista, Mignolo ubica las coordenadas intelectuales en las que surge su primera obra (1995) junto con la necesidad del desarrollo del concepto de semiosis colonial, y la recepción de sus tesis en aquel momento. Describe también las posibilidades (o imposibilidades) de diálogo de la perspectiva decolonial con otras como la posmoderna y la poscolonial, refiriéndose a las diferentes inscripciones teóricas debidas, fundamentalmente, a diferencias geopolíticas. Por ello, plantea una alternativa pluri-versal al universalismo moderno occidental, (...) que intenta hacer pasar su provincialismo, cristiano primero, luego liberal y ahora neoliberal, por la verdad misma (eurocentrismo o atlanticismo). Finalmente, sitúa su “conformación cosmo-cultural” en relación con la reconstitución de conceptos que la civilización occidental fue destituyendo en su proceso de constitución del vocabulario y las subjetividades moderno-coloniales. Grupo de estudio Las nociones de transmodernidad y pluriversidad en la Filosofía de la Liberación y el giro decolonial. (shrink)

(1997). Towards a unified concept of information: Presentation of a new approach. World Futures: Vol. 49, The Quest for a Unified Theory of Information, pp. 309-320.

Intercultural Digital Ethics faces the central challenge of how to develop a global IDE that can endorse and defend some set of universal ethical norms, principles, frameworks, etc. alongside sustaining local, culturally variable identities, traditions, practices, norms, and so on. I explicate interpretive pros hen ethical pluralism ) emerging in the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century in response to this general problem and its correlates, including conflicts generated by “computer-mediated colonization” that imposed homogenous values, communication styles, and so (...) on upon “target” peoples and cultures via ICTs as embedding these values in their very design. I contrast different kinds of ethical pluralisms as structural apparatus for understanding what differences may mean and allow for, as these emerged in the 1990s forwards with EP. As interwoven with phronēsis, a form of reflective judgment and virtue, EP more radically preserves irreducible differences and so fosters positive engagements across deep cultural differences. I show how EP emerged in the context of empirical research on “Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication” beginning in 1998, and then in specific applications within Internet Research Ethics beginning in 2000. I summarize its main characteristics and trace how it has further been taken up in ICE, IRE, Intercultural Information Ethics, and virtue ethics more broadly. I respond to important criticisms and objections, arguing that EP thus stands as an important component for a contemporary IDE that seeks an ethical cosmopolitanism in place of computer-mediated colonization. (shrink)

Deleuze's Postscript on the Societies of Control has been the most common entry point for interrogating the ways in which contemporary digital technologies have altered the social and the subjective from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective. It is, however, in A Thousand Plateaus that we find the most comprehensive set of resources for grappling with the Algocene, the contemporary digitally interconnected world of ubiquitous computing, drones, data mining, smart cities, social media, automated trading and other data-driven technologies that are heavily reliant upon (...) algorithmic processes and deep learning networks. In this broad survey, I argue that in order to grapple with these new technological assemblages and the implications of their deployment across society, we should posit a new major stratum, the algoplastic, and, along with it, new modes of operation of order-words and the regimes of signs they form part of. I conclude by posing some of the new problems that emerge with the Algocene. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of internet-based activism or ‘hacktivism’ as a phenomenon that cannot be confined to the instrumental use of information technologies. It focuses on a subset of hacktivism – the distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack for political ends – that aims at making an internet host unavailable to its intended users. Since the early 2000s these attacks have been increasingly conducted by means of botnets – networks of infected computers that send bogus requests to a target website without the (...) consent of their users. The capacity of botnets to engender a more-than-human politics is analyzed from two distinct theoretical angles. First, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, the hacktivist DDoS is discussed as an assemblage of signifying and a-signifying components, voluntary and involuntary actions. Second, Gilbert Simondon’s notions of transindividuation and transduction allow for a conceptualization of hacktivism as a sociotechnical assemblage with a high degree of indetermination. (shrink)

Autonomous mechanisms have been proposed to regulate certain aspects of society and are already being used to regulate business organisations. We take seriously recent proposals for algorithmic regulation of society, and we identify the existing technologies that can be used to implement them, most of them originally introduced in business contexts. We build on the notion of ‘social machine’ and we connect it to various ongoing trends and ideas, including crowdsourced task-work, social compiler, mechanism design, reputation management systems, and social (...) scoring. After showing how all the building blocks of algorithmic regulation are already well in place, we discuss the possible implications for human autonomy and social order. The main contribution of this paper is to identify convergent social and technical trends that are leading towards social regulation by algorithms, and to discuss the possible social, political, and ethical consequences of taking this path. (shrink)

The concept of information has been extensively studied and written about, yet no consensus on a unified definition of information has to date been reached. This paper seeks to establish the basis for a unified definition of information. We claim a biosemiotics perspective, based on Gregory Bateson’s definition of information, provides a footing on which to build because the frame this provides has applicability to both the sciences and humanities. A key issue in reaching a unified definition of information is (...) the fundamental problem of identifying how a human organism, in a self-referential process, develops from a state in which its knowledge of the human-organism-in-its-environment is almost non-existent to a state in which the human organism not only recognizes the existence of the environment but also sees itself as part of the human-organism-in-its-environment system. This allows a human organism not only to self-referentially engage with the environment and navigate through it, but also to transform it in its own image and likeness. In other words, the Fundamental Problem of the Science of Information concerns the phylogenetic development process, as well as the ontogenetic development process of Homo sapiens sapiens from a single cell to our current multicellular selves, all in a changing long-term and short-term environment, respectively. (shrink)

This study explores the ethical attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions of a sampling of political science students in Taiwan. It investigates their intentions toward observing ethics in the area of digital rights, on topics such as the freedom of expression, freedom of association, equal access to information, confidentiality, security, and protection of intellectual property while using computers. Based on preliminary studies, a questionnaire was designed and distributed to 660 political science and public administration students throughout colleges in Taiwan. Data collected from (...) 440 valid samples have been analyzed using structural equation modeling to test the three sets of hypotheses made by the researchers in the framework of the theory of planned behavior. Findings show attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavior control of the respondents all have positive impacts on the personal observation of information ethics. In this regard, altruism, the secondary group, and the sense of security have greater influence than egoism, the primary group, and the consideration of self-efficacy. Implications of these findings and recommendations for cultivating computer ethics in Taiwan and elsewhere are discussed. (shrink)

ResumoNo início do século xviii, Isaac Newton publicou seu principal trabalho sobre óptica, o Opticks. Impregnado por uma perspectiva indutiva, o livro logo se tornou a principal referência para os estudos sobre a luz e as cores, sendo amplamente popularizado pelos seguidores de Newton. Neste artigo, analisamos como dois importantes livros contribuíram para essa popularização e também qual era a imagem de ciência que tencionavam propagar, o Élements de la philosophie de Newton de Voltaire e o Newtonianismo per le dame (...) de Algarotti. Será possível perceber que ambos os autores distorceram o conteúdo do livro de Newton, no intuito de propagar uma imagem idealizada das ideias newtonianas e da própria filosofia natural.In the beginning of 18th century, Newton published his main work about light and colors, the Opticks. Impregnated by an inductive perspective, the book became the major reference for the studies about light and colors, being widely popularized by Newton's followers. In this article, we analyze how two important works contributed to this process of popularization and also what image of science they intended to propagate: Voltaire's Elements of Newton's philosophie and Algarotti's Sir Isaac Newton's philosophy explain'd for the use of the ladies. We will be notice that both authors distorted the content of the Opticks, in order to propagate an idealized image of Newtonian ideas and natural philosophy itself. (shrink)

This paper offers some insights and clarifications of the paramount role that Mexico has had in the forging of first-order cybernetics. Our account starts with Arturo Rosenblueth as a key intellectual figure in the foundation and formation of the field. After revisiting a historical context of people and places, we proceed to a cultural and media archeological investigation that helps us obtain new insights into the ongoing effort to intertwine the complex intellectual networks across different countries in Latin America, North (...) America, and Europe. We then present cases and first-hand interviews to discuss the legacy of cybernetics in Mexico around institutions where Rosenblueth was affiliated, mainly the Institute of Cardiology and, later on, the CINVESTAV at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional. We claim that subjective affinities are as important as common scientific goals to establish and keep connections alive, necessary to the development of a research field. As the active compound in spicy peppers, capsaicin represents a local component to the definition of cybernetics. Ultimately, the paper aims to contribute to the research on the importance of cybernetics in Latin America. (shrink)

In the aftermath of World War II, the government of the United States provided considerable funding for military projects that promised to provide a technological edge during the nascent Cold War. The most famous example is likely the V-2 rocket-testing program that began in the late 1940s. The 67 rockets launched from White Sands developed a knowledge base that was critically important to the launch of the first U.S. satellite in 1958 and to the subsequent manned space program. Less well (...) known are the large-scale information technology projects, undertaken in the 1950s and early 1960s, that provided a significant catalyst for research into digital computing, information processing, and the. (shrink)

I trace the development of an emerging global Information and Computing Ethics , arguing that ethical pluralism – as found in both Western and Asian traditions – is crucial to such an ICE. In particular, ethical pluralism – as affiliated with notions of judgment , reson-ance, and harmony – holds together shared ethical norms alongside the irreducible differences that define individual and cultural identities. I demonstrate how such pluralism is already at work in both contemporary theory and praxis, including in (...) development projects in diverse cul-tures. I conclude with a number of resonances between this global pluralism and African thought and tradi-tions that thus suggest that such a pluralism may also succeed in the African context, as diverse African cultures and countries seek to benefit from ICTs while maintaining their cultural identities. (shrink)

A goal-oriented analysis of argument is presented based on Taylor's layered protocols, a theory of communication based on Powers' hierarchical perceptual control theory. Goals and beliefs are hierarchical, related in a precise way to sensory inputs an d motor outputs. This model is combined with Gilbert's theory of coalescent argumentation. Participants sketch out their own and their partner's goal diagrams as an aid to resolving the argument. For this to work, the argument must be viewed, not in pu rely linguistic (...) or logical terms, but in terms of the entire system of goals in which it is embedded. (shrink)

Both in biology and psychology there has been a tendency on the part of many investigators to focus solely on the mature organism and ignore development. There are many reasons for this, but an important one is that the explanatory framework often invoked in the life sciences for understanding a given phenomenon, according to which explanation consists in identifying the mechanism that produces that phenomenon, both makes it possible to side-step the development issue and to provide inadequate resources for actually (...) explaining development. When biologists and psychologists do take up the question of development, they find themselves confronted with two polarizing positions of nativism and empiricism. However, the mechanistic framework, insofar as it emphasizes organization and recognizes the potential for self-organization, does in fact provide the resources for an account of development which avoids the nativism-empiricism dichotomy. (shrink)

I am populating this file from the bottom up. Later years are still empty. Try stuff in or before 1998 for a start. My Oxford DPhil Thesis (1962) is the oldest item available here.

The paper presents the analysis of the philosophical roots of cybernetic thinking and its links to the important scientific trends. The programs launched by cybernetics have justified the accents placed on ‘intentionality’, ‘teleological worlds’, ‘worlds of the artificial’. The founder of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, emphasized what he called ‘human use’ or ‘human dimensions’ of cybernetics and its applications.