Desire satisfactionists are united by their belief that what makes someone well-off is the satisfaction of their desires. But this commitment obscures a number of underlying differences, since there are several theoretical choice points on the way to making this commitment precise. This article is about two of the most important choice points. The first concerns an epistemic requirement on well-being. Suppose that one's desire that P is satisfied. Must one also know (or believe, or justifiably believe) that one's desire (...) that P is satisfied in order to benefit from P? If so, there is an epistemic requirement on well-being. The second concerns the time at which one benefits. Well-being is a temporal phenomenon: given that one benefits from the satisfaction of one's desire that P, when does one benefit? Perhaps one benefits at the times at which one desires P, or the times at which P obtains, or both. I defend a view I call “concurrent awareness desire satisfactionism”: one benefits only at times at which both one desires P and P obtains (concurrence) and one benefits only if one is aware that one's desire is satisfied (awareness). I motivate this view by showing how it gives us solutions to many of the canonical problems facing desire satisfactionism. Then I put the two parts of the view together and explore some of its further implications. Ultimately, I conclude that well-being is an organic unity composed of a desiderative component, an epistemic component, and a worldly component, none of which are valuable on their own, but which are valuable when they are related in the right way. (shrink)

La concurrence fiscale internationale est une composante essentielle du paysage fiscal contemporain. Cet essai analyse les responsabilités de l’État dans ce contexte d’interdépendance des systèmes fiscaux. Il soutient que l’État a le devoir 1) de mettre en œuvre le projet collectif défini par sa population, 2) de respecter l’autonomie des autres États et 3) d’assister les pays démunis. Cette conceptualisation des responsabilités étatiques a des conséquences théoriques et pratiques. Du côté théorique, la conjonction des deux premières responsabilités pousse à (...) abandonner la notion traditionnelle de souveraineté́ comme non-ingérence. Aujourd’hui, une notion adéquate de la souveraineté́ doit être sensible aux externalités internationales produites par l’action d’un État. De plus, la conception de la souveraineté́ esquissée ici est compatible avec un impératif d’assistance envers les pays en voie de développement. Du côté pratique, le respect de ces responsabilités étatiques requiert un nouveau régime de coopération fiscale entre les pays. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is Ockham's stance on the question of divine concurrence---the question whether God is causally active in the causal happenings of the created world, and if so, what God's causal activity amounts to and what place that leaves for created causes. After discussing some preliminaries, I turn to presenting what I take to be Ockham's account. As I show, Ockham, at least in this issue, is rather conservative: he agrees with the majority of medieval thinkers (...) (including Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and others) that both God and created agents are causally active in the causal happenings of the world. Then I turn to some texts that may suggest otherwise; I argue that reading Ockham as either an occasionalist or a mere conservationist based on these texts originates from a misunderstanding of his main concern. I conclude with raising and briefly addressing some systematic worries regarding Ockham's account of concurrence. (shrink)

Visual illusions are systematic misperceptions that can help us glean the heuristics with which the brain constructs visual experience. In a recently discovered visual illusion (the “frame effect”), it has been shown that flashing a stimulus inside of a moving frame produces a large misperception of that stimulus's position. Across two experiments, we investigated a novel illusion (the “split stimulus effect”) where the symmetrical motion of two overlaid frames produces two simultaneous positional misperceptions of a single stimulus. That is, one (...) stimulus is presented but two are perceived. In both experiments, a single red dot was flashed when the moving frames reversed direction, and participants were asked to report how many dots they saw. Naïve participants sometimes reported seeing two dots when only one was presented, indicating spontaneous perception of the illusion. A Bayesian analysis of the population prevalence of this effect was conducted. The dependence of this effect on the frames’ speed, the dot's opacity, spatial attention, as the presence/absence of pre-flash motion (“postdiction”) was also investigated, and the features of this illusion were compared to similar motion position illusions within a predictive processing framework. In demonstrating this illusory “splitting” effect, this study is the first to show that it is possible to be simultaneously aware of two opposing perceptual predictions about a single object and provides evidence of the hyperpriors that limit and inform the structure of visual experience. (shrink)

The present text contains a critical edition of Peter of Palude’s question of divine concurrence, found in his Sentences commentary, book II, d. 1, q. 4. The question concerns whether God is immediately active in every action of a creature, and if yes, how we should understand this divine concurrence. Peter, just as elsewhere in his commentary, considers at length the opinions of other thinkers — especially those of Giles of Rome, Durand of St.-Pourçain, and Thomas Aquinas — (...) and develops his own answer as a response to theirs. Thus, while Giles maintained that God acts uniformly in every instance of natural causation just as the sun acts uniformly by giving the same light to everything, Peter (following Durand) argues that this is incompatible with the divine creation of multiple things. Second, while Durand maintained that God is only mediately active in the actions of creatures, Peter rejects this opinion because it cannot account for miracles contra naturam (such as the three young men in Nebuchadnezzar’s fire), and because he thinks that God’s immediate action follows from his immediate conservation of creatures. Third, Peter presents Aquinas’s position in detail, and defends it against Durand’s objections; according to this position, God immediately conserves and concurs with every creature, with an action that is numerically distinct from that of the secondary agent. Although as a result of his extensive borrowing, Peter’s text might not be regarded as immensely original, it provides an interesting case study of the Dominican reaction against Durand in the early 1300’s. (shrink)

Philosophers have become newly interested in the ethics of sex. One promising feature of this new discussion is that it has been broadening our moral lens to include individuals whose sexual interests have historically been denied or ignored. One such group is the elderly. Contrary to popular belief, many elderly people want to have sex and see it as a regular part of their lives. If society harbors ignorance about or prejudice against elderly sexuality, it harbors stronger views against the (...) sexual expression of elderly people with dementia. People with dementia are often prohibited by nursing‐home staff, sometimes in extreme ways, from having sex with their partners. This prohibition is at least partly motivated by the goal of protecting the vulnerable. However, cutting people with dementia off from sex has negative health effects and is a needless restriction of their autonomy. In this article, I argue that the expanding moral lens in sexual ethics should include the sexual expression of elderly individuals with dementia and that their sexual expression should be respected. Specifically, I argue that many people with dementia are competent to consent to sexual activity with their long‐term partners. (shrink)

In today’s digital economy, where applications must respond to millions of concurrent requests with minimal latency, event-driven architecture (EDA) has emerged as a foundational design paradigm for building responsive, scalable, and loosely coupled microservices. This paper explores the principles and practices of event-driven application design tailored specifically for high-concurrency microservices -/- operating in cloud-native environments. Traditional request- response models often struggle to handle load surges and fail to -/- decouple system components, leading to performance -/- bottlenecks and reduced fault tolerance. (...) In contrast, event- driven systems promote asynchronous communication using -/- message brokers, event queues, and reactive patterns that support non-blocking execution and elastic scaling. (shrink)

ABSTRACT‘Exaltation views’ of humility are grounded on a kenotic view of humility, such that divine blessing comes proportionate to the extent to which an agent humbles herself. This article rejects exaltation views of humility which define humility kenotically, justify their arguments from a divine hiddenness perspective, and which conclude that divine concurrence with evil is justified as long as all humble believers eventually are exalted and blessed. Rather, I will contend that exaltation views misunderstand the meaning of both ‘humility’ (...) and ‘exaltation,’ even from their own Christian standpoint. I ultimately offer an alternate response to the problem of evil based on an existentially grounded conception of ‘humility’, which provides for a transmuted turn away from individual kenotic acts and toward community to transform those who suffer from atrocities. (shrink)

This is a review of Gul A. Agha’s Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems (The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987), a part of the MIT Press Series in Artificial Intelligence, edited by Patrick Winston, Michael Brady, and Daniel Bobrow.

Many enthusiasts of theistic evolution willingly accept Aquinas’s distinction between primary and secondary causes, to describe theologically “the mechanics” of evolutionary transformism. However, their description of the character of secondary causes in relation to God’s creative action oftentimes lacks precision. To some extent, the situation within the Thomistic camp is similar when it comes to specifying the exact nature of secondary and instrumental causes at work in evolution. Is it right to ascribe all causation in evolution to creatures—acting as secondary (...) and instrumental causes? Is there any space for a more direct divine action in evolutionary transitions? This article offers a new model of explaining the complexity of the causal nexus in the origin of new biological species, including the human species, analyzed in reference to both the immanent and transcendent orders of causation. (shrink)

In this article it is argued that the optical metaphor and critical practice of diffraction further developed by Donna Haraway and Karen Barad might be no less significant than the widely spread notion of reflection, when the questions of various practices of knowledge are addressed. By considering Paul Ramsden’s approach to learning/teaching and its underlying theory in higher education alongside Karen Barad’s methodology of diffraction, it is shown that Ramsden’s understanding of learning/teaching is rather based on the theoretical assumptions of (...) diffractive practice. His notion that teaching/learning are closely related and actively shaping each other, and that learners are not disconnected from the environment and their previous experiences with the subject matter and learning process itself, adds to Barad’s onto-epistemological position that knowers know the world at the same time as being the part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity. Ramsden’s understanding of relation is diffractive, because it is not about predefined binary entities and their fixed identities, but about layers and entanglements of various previous experiences and reactions to the learning environment. In addition, looking at learning/teaching processes through a different perspective also leads to a different approach to teaching and other ways of problem-solving. Both Ramsden and Barad distrust homologies, analogies, and causality-based conceptions of knowledge sharing. Instead, the ability to respond to an always new learning/teaching environment is assessed, which implies a diffractive type of sensitivity to the context, iterative process of re-turning, and the creation of dangerously indeterminate relationships and commitments. In this way, some of Barad’s philosophical notions, i.e., the diffraction pattern, intra-activity, returning, and others, also may acquire new practical content. (shrink)

On an old narrative, dating back to Leibniz and developed in nineteenth-century historiography, occasionalism was revived in the early modern period as an ad hoc response to the problems of mind-body union and interaction arising from Descartes's metaphysics. According to Leibniz, Descartes gave up the struggle, leaving his disciples to iron out this most scandalous of wrinkles in his system. A line of followers—Clauberg, Geulincx, La Forge, Le Grand, Arnauld, Cordemoy, and above all, Malebranche—dusted off the discredited doctrine of occasionalism (...) in order to deal with the question of how unextended minds could interact with extended bodies. Plainly stated, the solution was as dissatisfying to Leibniz as it has... (shrink)

Bringing together two aspects of Thomas Aquinas's thought that have been studied separately: his theory of God's concurrence and his theory of instrumental causality, I show how he uses the latter (which I discuss first) to clarify the Proclusian principle that the first cause has a greater influence on an effect than the proximate causes. Thanks to this theory, Aquinas accounts for the fact that it is God who confers existence to every new being that is produced by natural (...) processes, without however negating the agency of secondary, created causes. (shrink)

I show that Leibniz’s account of divine concurrence is constrained in a surprising way by his commitment to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, where a sufficient reason for the existence of an entity or a state of affairs is understood to be the totality of requisites for its existence. I argue first that Leibniz endorses, in both his early and later metaphysics, the ‘totality of requisites’ conception of sufficient reason. I then show that this conception gives rise to a (...) distinctive and underappreciated logical redundancy problem. Finally, I show that the logical redundancy problem can be side-stepped if we attribute to Leibniz the view that the states of any created substance are caused by God in a single act. On this view, God’s concurrence with creaturely activity is irreducibly plural: the natural effects or states of any created substance are brought about together, as a collective. I show that there are both philosophical and textual grounds for attributing such a view to Leibniz. (shrink)

Psychology has always treated behavior and experience as embedded in a unidimensional flow in time, the “stream of behavior”. This means that events and actions occupy non-overlapping time-intervals in this stream. Nevertheless a phenomenological analysis reveals that the structure of lives is richer and far more interesting. Using Herbert Simon’s notion of near-decomposability, I describe the structure of lives as a composite of nearly independent strands that run concurrently, and are asynchronous. This is a “deep structure” of lives in contrast (...) to the current conception, which conceives of lives as “flat”. (shrink)

"Dieu fainéant? God and Bodies in Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz" Conservation, concurrence with secondary causes, and occasionalism are the three attitudes that God can have towards the created universe in early modern philosophy. The aim of this article is to show how and in what forms these three originally mediaeval theories had survived the seventeenth century in Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz. I argue that although it cannot always be unequivocally determined which of the three doctrines each of the thinkers (...) is indebted to, Descartes should nevertheless be interpreted as a concurrentist, Malebranche as an occasionalist, and Leibniz can be read as a mere conservationist. The conservation of substances in existence being nothing but a continual creation, we claim (against the famous thesis of Alexandre Koyré) that Leibniz’s God can be called neither Dieu fainéant nor God of the Sabbath day. (shrink)

: Serverless computing has revolutionized the way modern cloud-native applications are developed and deployed, offering a paradigm in which developers can focus solely on writing code without the burden of managing infrastructure. Among the various Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) offerings, AWS Lambda stands out as a widely adopted platform due to its automatic scaling, event-driven execution, and pay-per-use pricing model—making it ideal for applications ranging from microservices to complex event-driven workflows. However, serverless architectures present challenges in cold start latency, performance tuning, and (...) cost optimization, particularly when using heavyweight runtimes like Java or under sporadic invocation patterns. This study systematically evaluates AWS Lambda’s performance under varying load conditions by analyzing runtime performance (Java vs. Python), memory allocation, payload size, and traffic types including steady, burst, and spiky patterns. Key metrics such as cold start time, average execution duration, and cost per invocation are examined using real-world traffic simulations and observability tools like AWS CloudWatch and X-Ray. The findings demonstrate that tuning memory allocation, applying provisioned concurrency, and selecting lightweight runtimes can significantly improve latency and cost-efficiency. The paper concludes with best practices for serverless workload optimization, offering actionable insights for software architects and DevOps teams aiming to balance scalability, responsiveness, and operational cost in cloud-native deployments. (shrink)

This dissertation focuses on thread safety and concurrency management in the development of cloud native applications, and as such, highlights the necessity of strong policies to prevent the vulnerabilities that can lead to security breaches and deterioration of service delivery. Based on the review of the literature, this research identifies the existing thread-related problems and their solutions, and concludes that concurrency defects are widespread and affect various types of cloud-native applications. The results of the study show that poor thread management (...) increases the level of security threat, particularly in the healthcare sector where patient’s data is most sensitive. Through performance evaluations and analysis of the successful mitigation strategies, this study reveals how strengthening the thread safety can enhance the dependability of the cloud-native systems and protect important healthcare activities. In addition to the technical findings, the results of the study further indicate that better thread mitigation measures may improve the patient safety, the trust in the digital health solutions and the frameworks through which healthcare services are delivered. In this way, the research presented here contributes to the current discussion on the security of cloud-native healthcare applications, and paves the way for future work on the design of better, stronger and more robust digital health ecosystems. (shrink)

In July 2017, China’s State Council released the country’s strategy for developing artificial intelligence, entitled ‘New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan’. This strategy outlined China’s aims to become the world leader in AI by 2030, to monetise AI into a trillion-yuan industry, and to emerge as the driving force in defining ethical norms and standards for AI. Several reports have analysed specific aspects of China’s AI policies or have assessed the country’s technical capabilities. Instead, in this article, we focus on (...) the socio-political background and policy debates that are shaping China’s AI strategy. In particular, we analyse the main strategic areas in which China is investing in AI and the concurrent ethical debates that are delimiting its use. By focusing on the policy backdrop, we seek to provide a more comprehensive and critical understanding of China’s AI policy by bringing together debates and analyses of a wide array of policy documents. (shrink)

In the presently unfolding deepfake era, previously unrelated algorithmic superintelligence possibility claims cannot be scientifically analyzed in isolation anymore due to the connected inevitable epistemic interactions that have already commenced. For instance, deep-learning (DL) related algorithmic supremacy claims may intrinsically compete with both neuro-symbolic (NS) algorithmic and further quantum (Q) algorithmic superintelligence achievement claims. Concurrently, a variety of experimental combinations of DL, NS and Q directions are conceivable. While research on these three illustrative variants did not yet offer any clear (...) mutually applicable scientific definition of a purported supremacy level framed as goal, the currently most robust scientific evaluation frameworks would i.a. require a joint testing against pre-existing non-algorithmic supremacy baselines such as e.g. conscious supremacy and cellular supremacy. This autodidactic paper explains why, for scientific reasons, all algorithmic superintelligence achievement claims in the deepfake era can be condensed and subjected to a joint scientific evaluation framework comprising multiple successive civilization-level tasks of epistemic tunneling (ET). In light of this elusive requirement, recent claims of science automation are spurious and misleading. It is vital not to misapprehend algorithmic epistemic dark matter (EDM) mining and epistemic dark energy (EDE) generation as paradigm-shifting ET events. (shrink)

When you hallucinate an object, you are not in the normal sort of concurrent causal sensory interaction with that object. It's standardly further inferred that the hallucinated object does not actually exist. But the lack of normal concurrent causal sensory interaction does not imply that there does not exist an object that is hallucinated. It might be a past‐perceived object. In this paper, I argue that this claim holds for at least some interesting cases of hallucination. Hallucinations generated by misleading (...) cues (e.g. ‘seeing’ Kanizsa triangles), hallucinations of Charles Bonnet Syndrome patients, and dreams are experiences of past‐perceived objects. (shrink)

The ability to interact in a natural language profoundly changes devices’ interfaces and potential applications of speaking technologies. Concurrently, this phenomenon challenges our mainstream theories of knowledge, such as how to analyze linguistic outputs of devices under existing anthropocentric theoretical assumptions. In section 1, I present the topic of machines that speak, connecting between Descartes and Generative AI. In section 2, I argue that accepted testimonial theories of knowledge and justification commonly reject the possibility that a speaking technological artifact can (...) give testimony. In section 3, I identify three assumptions underlying the view that rejects conversational AIs – AI-based technologies that converse, as testifiers: conversational AIs (1) lack intentions, (2) cannot be normatively assessed, and (3) cannot constitute an object in trust relations, while humans can. In section 4, I propose the concept ‘AI-testimony’ for analyzing outputs of conversational AIs, suggesting three conditions for technologies to deliver AI-testimony: (1) content is propositional, (2) generated and delivered with no other human directly involved, (3) the output is perceived as phenomenologically similar to that of a human. I conclude that this concept overcomes the limitations of the anthropocentric concept of testimony, opening future directions of research without associating conversational AIs with human-like agency. (shrink)

What do we owe each other when we act together? According to normativists about collective action, necessarily something and potentially quite a bit. They contend that collective action inherently involves a special normative status amongst participants, which may, for example, involve mutual obligations to receive the concurrence of the others before leaving. We build on recent empirical work whose results lend plausibility to a normativist account by further investigating the specific package of mutual obligations associated with collective action according (...) to our everyday understanding. However, our results cast doubt on a proposed obligation to seek the permission of co-actors before exiting a collective action, and suggest instead that this obligation is a function of explicit promising. We then discuss how our results pave the path for a new normativism, a theory that neither under- nor overshoots the target given by our common conception of the interpersonal obligations present in collective action.*. (shrink)

We present a new argument in favor of the Awareness Principle, the principle that one is always aware of one’s concurrent conscious states. Informally, the argument is this: (1) Your conscious states are such that you can attend to them without undertaking any action _beyond mere shift of attention_; but (2) You cannot come to attend to something without undertaking any action beyond mere shift of attention unless you are already aware of that thing; so, (3) Your conscious states are (...) such that you are aware of them. We open by introducing more fully the Awareness Principle (§ 1) and explicating the crucial notion of “mere shift of attention” (§ 2). We then develop the argument more fully, first in an intuitive form (§ 3) and then more formally (§ 4), before replying to a series of objections (§§ 5–7). (shrink)

It remains controversial whether touch is a truly spatial sense or not. Many philosophers suggest that, if touch is indeed spatial, it is only through its alliances with exploratory movement, and with proprioception. Here we develop the notion that a minimal yet important form of spatial perception may occur in purely passive touch. We do this by showing that the array of tactile receptive fields in the skin, and appropriately relayed to the cortex, may contain the same basic informational building (...) blocks that a creature navigating around its environment uses to build up a perception of space. We illustrate this point with preliminary evidence that perception of spatiotemporal patterns on the human skin shows some of the same features as spatial navigation in animals. We argue (a) that the receptor array defines a ‘tactile field’, (b) that this field exists in a minimal form in ‘skin space’, logically prior to any transformation into bodily or external spatial coordinates, and (c) that this field supports tactile perception without integration of concurrent proprioceptive or motor information. The basic cognitive elements of space perception may begin at lower levels of neural and perceptual organisation than previously thought. (shrink)

This paper examines systematically which features of a life story (or history) make it good for the subject herself - not aesthetically or morally good, but prudentially good. The tentative narrative calculus presented claims that the prudential narrative value of an event is a function of the extent to which it contributes to her concurrent and non-concurrent goals, the value of those goals, and the degree to which success in reaching the goals is deserved in virtue of exercising agency. The (...) narrative value of a life is a simple sum of the values of individual events that comprise it. I claim that this view best explains and support common intuitions about the significance of the shape of a life. (shrink)

Observational learning can enhance the acquisition and performance quality of complex motor skills. While an extensive body of research has focused on the benefits of synchronous (i.e., concurrent physical practice) and non-synchronous (i.e., delayed physical practice) observational learning strategies, the question remains as to whether these approaches differentially influence performance outcomes. Accordingly, we investigate the differential outcomes of synchronous and non-synchronous observational training contexts using a novel dance sequence. Using multidimensional cross-recurrence quantification analysis, movement time-series were recorded for novice dancers (...) who either synchronised with (n = 22) or observed and then imitated (n = 20) an expert dancer. Participants performed a 16-count choreographed dance sequence for 20 trials assisted by the expert, followed by one final, unassisted performance trial. Although end-state performance did not significantly differ between synchronous and non-synchronous learners, a significant decline in performance quality from imitation to independent replication was shown for synchronous learners. A non-significant positive trend in performance accuracy was shown for non-synchronous learners. For all participants, better imitative performance across training trials led to better end-state performance, but only for the accuracy (and not timing) of movement reproduction. Collectively, the results suggest that synchronous learners came to rely on a realtime mapping process between visual input from the expert and their own visual and proprioceptive intrinsic feedback, to the detriment of learning. Thus, the act of synchronising alone does not ensure an appropriate training context for advanced sequence learning. (shrink)

Most advanced industrial societies are ‘work-centered,’ according high value and prestige to work. Indeed, belief in an interpersonal moral duty to work is encoded in both popular attitudes toward work and in policies such as ‘workfare’. Here I argue that despite the intuitive appeal of reciprocity or fair play as the moral basis for a duty to work, the vast majority of individuals in advanced industrialized societies have no such duty to work. For current economic conditions, labor markets, and government (...) policies entail that the conditions for a reciprocity-based argument to apply to most workers are not usually met. More specifically, many workers fail to provide valuable goods through working or their working does not result in net social benefit. Concurrently, many workers do not receive adequate benefits from working in that they neither have their basic needs met or do not even enjoy an improvement in welfare thanks to working. Hence, workers neither provide nor receive the benefits needed for a reciprocity-based duty to work to apply to them. Furthermore, these conditions are conditions over which workers themselves have very little control. Most workers therefore could not fulfill their ostensible duty to work even if they made conscientious efforts to do so. In most cases, a person who fails to work morally wrongs no one, and in the case of any particular individual or worker, the defeasible presumption ought to be that she has no duty to work. (shrink)

Phenomenal beliefs are beliefs about the phenomenal properties of one's concurrent conscious states. It is an article of common sense that such beliefs tend to be justified. Philosophers have been less convinced. It is sometimes claimed that phenomenal beliefs are not on the whole justified, on the grounds that they are typically based on introspection and introspection is often unreliable. Here we argue that such reasoning must guard against a potential conflation between two distinct introspective phenomena, which we call fact-introspection (...) and thing -introspection; arguments for the unreliability of introspection typically target only the former, leaving the reliability of the latter untouched. In addition, we propose a theoretical framework for understanding thing -introspection that may have a surprising consequence: thing -introspection is not only reliable, but outright infallible. This points at a potential line of defense of phenomenal-belief justification, which here we only sketch very roughly. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for a distinction between two scales of coordination in scientific inquiry, through which I reassess Georg Simon Ohm’s work on conductivity and resistance. Firstly, I propose to distinguish between measurement coordination, which refers to the specific problem of how to justify the attribution of values to a quantity by using a certain measurement procedure, and general coordination, which refers to the broader issue of justifying the representation of an empirical regularity by means of abstract mathematical (...) tools. Secondly, I argue that the development of Ohm’s measurement practice between the first and the second experimental phase of his work involved the change of the measurement coordination on which he relied to express his empirical results. By showing how Ohm relied on different calibration assumptions and practices across the two phases, I demonstrate that the concurrent change of both Ohm’s experimental apparatus and the variable that Ohm measured should be viewed based on the different form of measurement coordination. Finally, I argue that Ohm’s assumption that tension is equally distributed in the circuit is best understood as part of the general coordination between Ohm’s law and the empirical regularity that it expresses, rather than measurement coordination. (shrink)

Vietnam, with a geographical proximity and a high volume of trade with China, was the first country to record an outbreak of the new Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 or SARS-CoV-2. While the country was expected to have a high risk of transmission, as of April 4, 2020—in comparison to attempts to contain the disease around the world—responses from Vietnam are being seen as prompt and effective in protecting the interests of its citizens, (...) with 239 confirmed cases and no fatalities. This study analyzes the situation in terms of Vietnam’s policy response, social media and science journalism. A self-made web crawl engine was used to scan and collect official media news related to COVID-19 between the beginning of January and April 4, yielding a comprehensive dataset of 14,952 news items. The findings shed light on how Vietnam—despite being under-resourced—has demonstrated political readiness to combat the emerging pandemic since the earliest days. Timely communication on any developments of the outbreak from the government and the media, combined with up-to-date research on the new virus by the Vietnamese science community, have altogether provided reliable sources of information. By emphasizing the need for immediate and genuine cooperation between government, civil society and private individuals, the case study offers valuable lessons for other nations concerning not only the concurrent fight against the COVID-19 pandemic but also the overall responses to a public health crisis. (shrink)

The literature on algorithmic fairness has examined exogenous sources of biases such as shortcomings in the data and structural injustices in society. It has also examined internal sources of bias as evidenced by a number of impossibility theorems showing that no algorithm can concurrently satisfy multiple criteria of fairness. This paper contributes to the literature stemming from the impossibility theorems by examining how informational richness affects the accuracy and fairness of predictive algorithms. With the aid of a computer simulation, we (...) show that informational richness is the engine that drives improvements in the performance of a predictive algorithm, in terms of both accuracy and fairness. The centrality of informational richness suggests that classification parity, a popular criterion of algorithmic fairness, should be given relatively little weight. But we caution that the centrality of informational richness should be taken with a grain of salt in light of practical limitations, in particular, the so-called bias-variance trade off. (shrink)

Adolescents are routinely treated differently to adults, even when they possess similar capacities. In this article, we explore the justification for one case of differential treatment of adolescents. We attempt to make philosophical sense of the concurrent consents doctrine in law: adolescents found to have decision-making capacity have the power to consent to—and thereby, all else being equal, permit—their own medical treatment, but they lack the power always to refuse treatment and so render it impermissible. Other parties, that is, individuals (...) who exercise parental responsibility or a court, retain the authority to consent on an adolescent’s behalf. We explore four defences of the doctrine. We reject two attempts to defend the asymmetry in the power to consent to and refuse medical treatment by reference to transitional paternalism. We then consider and reject a stage of life justification. Finally, we articulate a justification based on the distinctiveness of adolescent well-being. (shrink)

The Western Philippines University – College of Education’s Project MATHEMATICS (Mathematics Enhanced Mentoring, Assistance, and Training to In-need and Challenged Students) was implemented as part of the Adopt-a-School Program to address the mathematical needs of Laura Vicuña Center – Palawan youths. To evaluate the extent of the project implementation, the study assessed its impact through the feedback gathered from the clients served. It specifically described the quality of project implementation, determined the attainment of project objectives, and enumerated client feedback. A (...) concurrent triangulation mixed-method research design was used with 32 clientele samples selected purposively. The study utilized a survey, problem set test, and focus-grouped interview to obtain data pertinent to the study’s objectives. The findings revealed an aspirational quality of the implemented project, improved mathematical performance, and the client’s desire for ongoing mentoring. The implications and limitations of the study are discussed, along with recommendations for future extension projects, monitoring and evaluation, and re-planning activities. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article examines the conception of elements in the natural philosophy of Nicolaus Taurellus (1547–1606) and explores the theological motivation that stands behind this conception. By some of his early modern readers, Taurellus may have been understood as a proponent of material atoms. By contrast, I argue that considerations concerning the substantiality of the ultimate constituents of composites led Taurellus to an immaterialist ontology, according to which elements are immaterial forms that possess active and passive potencies as well as motion (...) and extension. In Taurellus's view, immaterialism about elements provides support for the theological doctrine of creationex nihilo. As he argues, the ontology of immaterial forms helps to explicate a sense in which creatures are substances, not accidents of the divine substance. In particular, he maintains that immaterial forms stand in suitable relations of ontological dependence to God: creation dependence (since forms would not exist without the divine act of creation), but neither subsistence dependence (since forms continue to exist without continued divine agency) nor activity dependence (since forms are active without requiring divine concurrence). (shrink)

We analyze situations where either external structures mimic the conditions for judgement or internal states create a perception of judgement, despite the absence of the necessary structural completion defined by the Judgemental Triad (Constructivity, Coherence, Resonance). We explore how "simulated Resonance" can be engineered through political rhetoric, marketing, or AI outputs, creating a "false return" that lacks genuine subjective grounding. Concurrently, we examine how "perceived attribution" can arise internally from emotional impulses or ideological identification, decoupling subjective certainty from objective structural (...) validity. We argue that both external simulation and internal illusion lead to "hollow judgements" that undermine genuine meaning, prevent authentic Resonance, and pose significant ethical risks by masking the collapse of the judgemental structure itself. This analysis provides a typology of pseudo-judgemental phenomena and highlights the importance of structural awareness in discerning true attribution from its deceptive counterparts. (shrink)

Just as sadness is not always a symptom of mood disorder, irrational beliefs are not always symptoms of illness. Pathological irrational beliefs are distinguished from non-pathological ones by considering whether their existence is best explained by assuming some underlying dysfunctions. The features from which to infer the pathological nature of irrational beliefs are: un-understandability of their progression; uniqueness; coexistence with other psycho-physiological disturbances and/or concurrent decreased levels of functioning; bizarreness of content; preceding organic diseases known to be associated with irrational (...) beliefs; treatment response to medical intervention, etc. Severe irrationality is sometimes caused by normal human motivation rather than by mental or physical dysfunction. Pure forms of self-deception may satisfy the diagnostic criteria of delusional disorder, but there may be no evidence that suggests that they are caused by illness. Although those with pathological delusions do not recognize their delusions as symptomatic of illness, differentiating pathological beliefs from normal irrational beliefs is vitally important: If a belief is pathological, psychiatrists must seriously consider treating the patient against her will. If it is not pathological, conversely, involuntary treatments are prohibited because they offend her basic autonomy. (shrink)

The proposed system leverages Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) technologies to perform early lung cancer detection through the analysis of chest CT scan images. Designed as an AI-powered diagnostic aid, the system operates independently of human interpretation, enhancing speed and reliability in medical imaging evaluation. Built using Python-based technologies, the system utilizes TensorFlow and Keras frameworks for deep learning model development and training, supported by OpenCV for image pre-processing and visualization. The system processes CT scan slices to identify pulmonary nodules and (...) classifies them into benign or malignant categories using a trained CNN model. The detection pipeline includes grayscale normalization, image resizing, and segmentation procedures to enhance the visibility of lung tissues. The CNN model extracts spatial hierarchies of features through multiple convolutional and pooling layers, followed by fully connected layers for final classification. In cases where the system detects potential malignancy, it generates a detailed report including confidence scores, prediction labels, and scan timestamps. To maintain responsiveness and scalability, prediction requests are managed through concurrent processing threads, ensuring timely feedback even when multiple scans are evaluated in sequence. An alert throttling mechanism ensures the reduction of false positives by incorporating prediction stability checks over multiple frames or scans. (shrink)

Initially, astrobiology subsumed into philosophy. However, philosophy has increasingly subsumed into astrobiology concurrent with it steadily becoming an observational and experimental activity that mainly focuses on the link between life and the cosmos, rather than on extra-terrestrial life per se. However, the steadily increasing probability of locating such extra-terrestrial life and the questions this will lead to might require a refinement of astrobiology, with a bifurcation into astrobiology and astrophilosophy. There are many reasons for the emergence and necessity of astrobiology. (...) One barely realized reason for its emergence, I will argue, is the dawning realization that biology, until now, has been under a geocentric limitation, which has unavoidably pervaded the perception of life. Additionally, as astrobiology can be said to be a long last movement away from this limitation, astrophilosophy represents a movement away from that limitation because philosophy has, strictly speaking, been restrained by the frames for one species, Homo sapiens. Thus, philosophy has, strictly speaking, been anthropomorphic. Thus, when philosophy, like astrobiology, incorporates the Copernican principle, assuming that terrestrial life, and the thinking of Homo sapiens, is not privileged in the universe, astrophilosophy emerges. Astrobiology and astrophilosophy are not competitors but are rather two distinct but complementary activities that address questions with their own well-defined methods and rigor while still informing each other in an inter-dependent manner. Astrophilosophy concerns questions that are philosophical in nature but are procured by an astrobiological perspective. By including scenarios procured by astrobiology, a number of questions regarding value, rights, communication and intelligence that could arise in the interaction between Homo sapiens and extra-terrestrial life can be addressed. (shrink)

In an era of dramatic technological progress, the consequent economic transformations, and an increasing need for an adaptable workforce, the importance of education has risen to the forefront of the social discourse. The concurrent increase in the awareness of issues pertaining to social justice and the debate over what this justice entails and how it ought to be effected, feed into the education policy more than ever before. From the nexus of the aforementioned considerations, a concern over the so-called education (...) gap has emerged, with worldwide efforts to close it. I analyse the premises behind such efforts and demonstrate that they are founded upon fundamentally flawed ideas. I show that in a society in which education is delivered equitably, education gaps emerge naturally as a consequence of differentiation due to talents, the tendency for matched mate selection, and the heritability of intellectual traits. Hence, I issue a call for a refocusing of efforts from the ill-founded idea of closing the education gap, to the understanding of the magnitude of its unfair contributions, as well as to those social aspects which can modulate it in accordance to what a society deems fair according to its values. (shrink)

The history of evolution is a history of development from less to more complex organisms. This growth in complexity of organisms goes hand in hand with a concurrent growth in complexity of environments and of organism-environment relations. It is a concern with this latter aspect of evolutionary development that motivates the present paper. We begin by outlining a theory of organism-environment relations. We then show that the theory can be applied to a range of different sorts of cases, both biological (...) and non-biological, in which objects are lodged or housed within specific environments, or niches. Biological science is interested in types—for example in genotypes, phenotypes, and environment types—in regularities that can serve as the basis for the formulation of laws or general principles. Types, however, can exist only through their corresponding tokens. Our theory of token environments is meant to plug this gap and to provide a first step towards a general theory of causally relevant spatial volumes. (shrink)

*North American Society for Social Philosophy (NASSP) Book Award 2019.* -/- *International Studies Association (ISA) - International Ethics Section Book Award 2021.* -/- Although military mores have relied primarily on just war theory, the ethic of cooperation in warfare (ECW)—between enemies even as they are trying to kill each other—is as central to the practice of warfare and to conceptualization of its morality. Neither game theory nor unilateral moral duties (God-given or otherwise) can explain the explicit language of cooperation in (...) developing and enforcing principles of military ethics and the law of armed conflict. -/- The ethic of cooperation is borne of various motivations: reciprocity, self-preservation, and efficiency, to be sure, but also a sense of warrior honor and concern with human rights. This shared morality can persist despite making it more difficult for one side or the other to win and, unfortunately, its well-meaning motivations often lead to unintended tragic consequences. -/- This book explores three manifestations of this significant yet overlooked ethic of cooperation in warfare: (1) for a “fair fight,” (2) to protect classes of individuals (e.g., non-combatants or prisoners of war), and (3) to end the war quickly. Such cooperation can take unexpected forms, from ad hoc decisions on the battlefield to institutionalization in international law, and is the source of some critical tensions in one of the most significant developments in warfare in recent years: namely, how to handle terrorism or other forms of warfare that lie outside the purview of international law. -/- Each type of ECW raises questions internal to that ethic, such as inconsistencies in the concept of “parity” across different weapons bans, contradictions within the warrior ethic that heavily influence—and therefore confuse—notions of the “fair fight,” the disconnect between what protections a person receives and his responsibility for the war (e.g., political leaders), or the limited decisiveness of outcomes generated by very short wars. -/- Their simultaneous application also generates significant tensions and raises questions about the proper relationship of ECW to the immediate goal of war itself, which is to win, and thus yield either a political settlement or a justicial decision. For example, the ECWs for a “fair fight” and to protect classes of individuals can make it harder to win the war, but even more concerning is that they can also kill more people, which in the latter case contravenes its very purpose. -/- Human history is in some ways the story of trying to concurrently wage and tame war, and the architecture of warfare itself is informed by the ECW, in particular: (a) the political nature of war, (b) the abdication from jus ad bellum judgments in order to concentrate on justice within war (jus in bello), and (c) the ways in which modern nation-states collude to define “legitimacy” in war. -/- The combination of these three features leave questions of justicial right and responsibility for war disturbingly unresolved, it also generates new challenges in a geopolitical context in which cooperative and non-cooperative (e.g. contemporary terrorism) forms of warfare clash. (shrink)

Twin-earth thought experiments, standardly construed, support the externalist doctrine that the content of propositional attitudes involving natural-kind terms supervenes upon properties external to those who entertain them. But this doctrine in conjunction with a common view of self-knowledge might have the intolerable consequence that substantial propositions concerning the environment could be knowable a priori. Since both doctrines, externalism and privileged self-knowledge, appear independently plausible, there is then a paradox facing the attempt to hold them concurrently. I shall argue, however, that (...) externalist claims about the dependence of content on environmental factors presuppose certain theses about the semantics of natural-kind terms that, if sound, would make those claims eligible for empirical justification instead. In fact, that is the only interpretation of their epistemic status that could square with the standard conclusion from twin-earth cases. Furthermore, it can be shown to solve the paradox of externalism and self-knowledge in a more doxastically conservative way--accommodating precisely each of the well-accepted intuitions about knowledge, closure and the individuation of content given up by available competitors. (shrink)

This paper presents a view of nature as a network of infocomputational agents organized in a dynamical hierarchy of levels. It provides a framework for unification of currently disparate understandings of natural, formal, technical, behavioral and social phenomena based on information as a structure, differences in one system that cause the differences in another system, and computation as its dynamics, i.e. physical process of morphological change in the informational structure. We address some of the frequent misunderstandings regarding the natural/morphological computational (...) models and their relationships to physical systems, especially cognitive systems such as living beings. Natural morphological infocomputation as a conceptual framework necessitates generalization of models of computation beyond the traditional Turing machine model presenting symbol manipulation, and requires agent-based concurrent resource-sensitive models of computation in order to be able to cover the whole range of phenomena from physics to cognition. The central role of agency, particularly material vs. cognitive agency is highlighted. (shrink)

In paradigmatic Confucian (Ruist) discourses, emotion (qing) has been depicted as co-arising with human nature (xing) and an irreducible constitutive source of human practices and their interpretation. The affects are concurrently naturally arising and alterable through how individuals react and respond to them and how they are or are not cultivated. That is, emotions are relationally mediated realities given in and transformed through how they are felt, understood, interpreted, and acted upon. Confucian discourses have elucidated the ethical character of the (...) emotions and sought to understand and cultivate emotional life as a hermeneutical and ethical task in establishing expectable patterns of human flourishing that orient virtues, roles, and relations. In this chapter, I explore the extent to which classical Ruist and Neo-Confucian discourses offer hermeneutical models for interpreting the complex interconnections between moral psychology and their mediations in the ethical life world. By examining a range of Confucian sources, the author argues that Confucian “moral psychologies” clarify affective dimensions of human existence within the interpersonal nexus of ethical life and indicate ways of cultivating affective awareness for relationally understanding and interpreting others, one’s world, and oneself. (shrink)

This paper reconciles an inconsistency between the benefits of mind wandering and a prominent conception of attention in philosophy and cognitive psychology, namely, the prioritization view. Since we prioritize the information in a task less if we are doing it while mind wandering compared to solely concentrating on it, why does our performance in the task sometimes improve when we are mind wandering? To explain this, we offer a conception of diffuse attention that generalizes from external to internal forms of (...) attention and captures deep commonalities between the two (Chun et al. 2011). We conceptualize mind wandering as an instance of internal diffuse attention that also induces diffuse attention in other concurrent tasks. Moreover, pace the prioritization view, certain tasks are in fact better performed with diffuse attention, which prioritizes information less than focused attention. Our account of mind wandering as an instance of the more general category of diffuse attention improves upon current leading philosophical views of mind wandering (such as Irving 2016) by better explaining the interaction between mind wandering and other tasks. (shrink)

The Dominican Pedro de Ledesma was a member of the School of Salamanca, professor of Theology in the late 16th and early 17th century. Here we investigate for the first time his contribution to the «de auxiliis» controversy, in which mainly the Dominicans and the Jesuits contended about human free will and God’s influence on it. Among the various theological problems involved, this thesis examines the nature of the divine concurrence in free human action and, in particular, divine (...) class='Hi'>concurrence in actual efficacious grace. Ledesma focuses his contribution to this debate on the real (and not only moral) difference between sufficient and efficacious grace. Another original feature of his conception of divine concurrence and efficacious grace are the target of his attacks, since he does not only dispute the theology of the Jesuit Luis de Molina, but also that of several Dominicans, such as Juan Vicente de Astorga; likewise, he opposes Pedro de Herrera and Diego Álvarez with a less sophisticated conception of «physical premotion» than theirs. This thesis updates Ledesma’s intellectual biography and contains the most complete list of his manuscript work to date. Ledesma’s ideas are studied on the basis of three documents: first, his unpublished lectures of 1590 on divine concurrence; second, the report on Molina’s Concordia sent to the Inquisition in 1594 (a manuscript hitherto neglected, and transcribed in the Appendix); third, the book on the dispute completed in 1601 and published in 1611. (shrink)

We evaluated the reliability, validity, and differential item functioning (DIF) of a shorter version of the Defining Issues Test-1 (DIT-1), the behavioral DIT (bDIT), measuring the development of moral reasoning. 353 college students (81 males, 271 females, 1 not reported; age M = 18.64 years, SD = 1.20 years) who were taking introductory psychology classes at a public University in a suburb area in the Southern United States participated in the present study. First, we examined the reliability of the bDIT (...) using Cronbach’s α and its concurrent validity with the original DIT-1 using disattenuated correlation. Second, we compared the test duration between the two measures. Third, we tested the DIF of each question between males and females. Findings reported that first, the bDIT showed acceptable reliability and good concurrent validity. Second, the test duration could be significantly shortened by employing the bDIT. Third, DIF results indicated that the bDIT items did not favour any gender. Practical implications of the present study based on the reported findings are discussed. (shrink)

Item response theory (IRT) is a modern psychometric framework for estimating respondents’ latent traits (e.g., ability, attitude, and personality) based on their responses to a set of questions in psychological tests. The current study adopted an item response tree (IRTree) method, which combines the tree model with IRT models for handling the sequential process of responding to a test item, to score individual moral inclination for the CNI test—a broadly adopted model for examining humans’ moral decision-making with three parameters generated: (...) sensitivity to moral norms, sensitivity to consequences, and inaction preference. Compared to previous models for the CNI test, the resulting EIRTree-CNI Model is able to generate individual scores without increasing the number of items (thus, less subject fatigue or compromised response quality) or employing a post hoc approach that is deemed statistically suboptimal. The model fits the data well, and the subsequent test also supported the concurrent validity and the predictive validity of the model. Limitations are discussed further. (shrink)

This paper contributes to a growing body of literature focusing on Anton Wilhelm Amo’s account of the mind-body relation. The first aim of this paper is to provide an overview of that literature, bringing together several interpretations of Amo’s account of the mind-body relation and providing a comprehensive overview of where the debate stands so far. Doing so reveals that commentary is split between those who take Amo to adopt a Leibnizian account of pre-established harmony between mind and body (Smith (...) 2015, Emma-Adamah 2015) and those who argue that Amo adopts a theory of occasional causation (Meyns 2019, Walsh 2019). Both views deny that the body is the efficient cause of the mind’s ideas but while the Leibnizian account holds that ideas exist innately in the mind, the occasional causation account maintains that the body is their occasional cause. That is, on this reading of Amo, sensations in the body are the ‘occasion’ on which the mind efficiently causes its own ideas. The second aim of this paper – which promises to take this interpretative debate in a new direction – is to demonstrate that we should in fact attribute to Amo a specific version of occasional causation known as 'concurrentism'. Concurrentism is the view that, while the mind does efficiently cause its own ideas, it can only do so with the assistance (or ‘concurrence’) of God. In other words, on this view, God makes possible the efficient causal activity of the human mind in generating ideas, in response to ‘occasions’ in the body. (shrink)