Which artificial intelligence (AI) systems are agents? To answer this question, I propose a multidimensional account of agency. According to this account, a system's agency profile is jointly determined by its level of goal-directedness and autonomy as well as is abilities for directly impacting the surrounding world, long-term planning and acting for reasons. Rooted in extant theories of agency, this account enables fine-grained, nuanced comparative characterizations of artificial agency. I show that this account has multiple important virtues and is more (...) informative than alternatives. More speculatively, it may help to illuminate two important emerging questions in AI ethics: 1. Can agency contribute to the moral status of non-human beings, and how? 2. When and why might AI systems exhibit power-seeking behaviour and does this pose an existential risk to humanity? (shrink)

All else being equal, most of us typically prefer to have positive experiences in the future rather than the past and negative experiences in the past rather than the future. Recent empirical evidence tends not only to support the idea that people have these preferences, but further, that people tend to prefer more painful experiences in their past rather than fewer in their future (and mutatis mutandis for pleasant experiences). Are such preferences rationally permissible, or are they, as time-neutralists contend, (...) rationally impermissible? And what is it that grounds their having the normative status that they do have? We consider two sorts of arguments regarding the normative status of future-biased preferences. The first appeals to the supposed arbitrariness of these preferences, and the second appeals to their upshot. We evaluate these arguments in light of the recent empirical research on future-bias. (shrink)

According to an orthodox view, the capacity for conscious experience (sentience) is relevant to the distribution of moral status and value. However, physicalism about consciousness might threaten the normative relevance of sentience. According to the indeterminacy argument, sentience is metaphysically indeterminate while indeterminacy of sentience is incompatible with its normative relevance. According to the introspective argument (by François Kammerer), the unreliability of our conscious introspection undercuts the justification for belief in the normative relevance of consciousness. I defend the normative relevance (...) of sentience against these objections. First, I demonstrate that physicalists only have to concede a limited amount of indeterminacy of sentience. This moderate indeterminacy is in harmony with the role of sentience in determining moral status. Second, I argue that physicalism gives us no reason to expect that introspection is unreliable with respect to the normative relevance of consciousness. (shrink)

Numerous authors have expressed concern that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) poses an existential risk to humanity. These authors argue that we might build AI which is vastly intellectually superior to humans (a ‘superintelligence’), and which optimizes for goals that strike us as morally bad, or even irrational. Thus, this argument assumes that a superintelligence might have morally bad goals. However, according to some views, a superintelligence necessarily has morally adequate goals. This might be the case either because abilities for moral (...) reasoning and intelligence mutually depend on each other, or because moral realism and moral internalism are true. I argue that the former argument misconstrues the view that intelligence and goals are independent, and that the latter argument misunderstands the implications of moral internalism. Moreover, the current state of AI research provides additional reasons to think that a superintelligence could have bad goals. (shrink)

It has widely been assumed, by philosophers, that our first-person preferences regarding pleasurable and painful experiences exhibit a bias toward the future (positive and negative hedonic future-bias), and that our preferences regarding non-hedonic events (both positive and negative) exhibit no such bias (non-hedonic time-neutrality). Further, it has been assumed that our third-person preferences are always time-neutral. Some have attempted to use these (presumed) differential patterns of future-bias—different across kinds of events and perspectives—to argue for the irrationality of hedonic future-bias. This (...) paper experimentally tests these descriptive hypotheses. While as predicted we found first-person hedonic future-bias, we did not find that participants were time-neutral in all other conditions. Hence, the presumed asymmetry of hedonic/non-hedonic and first/third-person preferences cannot be used to argue for the irrationality of future-bias, since no such asymmetries exist. Instead, we develop a more fine-grained approach, according to which three factors—positive/negative valence, first/third-person, and hedonic/non-hedonic—each independently influence, but do not determine, whether an event is treated in a future-biased or time-neutral way. We discuss the upshots of these results for the debate over the rationality of future-bias. (shrink)

Which animals have conscious experiences? Many different, diverse and unrelated behaviors and cognitive capacities have been proposed as tests of the presence of consciousness in an animal. It is unclear which of these tests, if any, are valid. To remedy this problem, I develop a list consisting of eight desiderata which can be used to assess putative tests of animal consciousness. These desiderata are based either on detailed analogies between consciousness-linked human behavior and non-human behavior, on theories of consciousness or (...) on methods from human consciousness science. If a test or set of tests satisfies more of these desiderata, passing it provides stronger evidence of consciousness. Moreover, one can design future tests of animal consciousness with the intention of satisfying these desiderata to ensure their evidential strength. (shrink)

This essay ties together some main strands of the author’s research spanning the last quarter-century. Because of its broad scope and space limitations, he prescinds from detailed arguments and instead intuitively motivates the general points which are supported more fully in other publications to which he provides references. After an initial delineation of several distinct notions of meaning, the author considers such a notion deriving from the evolutionary biology of communication that he terms ‘organic meaning’, and places it in the (...) context of evolutionary game theory. That provides a framework for a special type of organic meaning found in the phenomenon of expression, of which the author here offers an updated characterization while highlighting its wide philosophical interest. Expression in turn generalizes to a paradigmatic form of human communication—conversation—and section 4 provides a taxonomy of conversation-types while arguing that attention to such types helps to sharpen predictions of what speakers say rather than conversationally implicate. We close with a view of fictional discourse on which authors of fictional works are engaged in conversation with their readers, and can provide them with knowledge in spite of the fictional character of their conversation. Such knowledge includes knowledge of how an emotion feels and is thus a route to empathy. (shrink)

I present two arguments for the view that it is nomologically possible that some non-biological creatures are conscious, including conventional, silicon-based AI systems. They assume the iterative natural kind (INK) strategy, according to which one should investigate consciousness by treating it as a natural kind which iteratively explains observable patterns and correlations between potentially consciousness-relevant features. Both arguments are based on the insight that we can already anticipate that future developments would give us reasons to attribute consciousness to some non-biological (...) creatures. According to the first argument, the fact that we can predict that ordinary people would be compelled to attribute consciousness to some possible non-biological creatures supports the view that these creatures are conscious. According to the second argument, an idealized scientific investigation – based on the INK strategy – would deliver the result that some possible non-biological creatures are conscious, and the outcome of such an ideal application corresponds to what is actually the case. My argument for the former premise is based on the claim that theoretical virtues and pre-theoretical principles support attributing consciousness to psychological duplicates, i.e., non-biological creatures which share the coarse-grained functional organization of humans. Finally, I argue that my second argument can be generalized beyond the INK strategy. (shrink)

Implementationalism maintains that conventional, silicon-based artificial systems are not conscious because they fail to satisfy certain substantive constraints on computational implementation. In this article, we argue that several recently proposed substantive constraints are implausible, or at least are not well-supported, insofar as they conflate intuitions about computational implementation generally and consciousness specifically. We argue instead that the mechanistic account of computation can explain several of the intuitions driving implementationalism and noncomputationalism in a manner which is consistent with artificial consciousness. Our (...) argument provides indirect support for computationalism about consciousness and the view that conventional artificial systems can be conscious. (shrink)

This paper empirically investigates whether people’s implicit decision theory is more like causal decision theory or more like a non-causal decision theory (such as evidential decision theory). We also aim to determine whether implicit causalists, without prompting and without prior education, make a distinction that is crucial to causal decision theorists: preferring something _as a news item_ and preferring it _as an object of choice_. Finally, we investigate whether differences in people’s implicit decision theory correlate with differences in their level (...) of _future bias_: the preference for positively valenced events to be located in the future and not the past, and negatively valenced events to be located in the past and not the future. We find that people are overwhelmingly non-causalists. We also find that implicit causalists _do not_ make the distinction between news items and objects of choice, and that there is little to no correlation between people’s future bias and their implicit decision theory. We end by discussing the philosophical upshots of this work. (shrink)

Roughly, empirical AI alignment research (AIA) is an area of AI research which investigates empirically how to design AI systems in line with human goals. This paper examines the role of non-epistemic values in AIA. It argues that: (1) Sciences differ in the degree to which values influence them. (2) AIA is strongly value-laden. (3) This influence of values is managed inappropriately and thus threatens AIA’s epistemic integrity and ethical beneficence. (4) AIA should strive to achieve value transparency, critical scrutiny (...) from inside and outside the discipline – involving the public –, and to empower actors without strong commercial interests. (shrink)

Scientific method interests the linguist not only as it interests every scientific worker, but also in a special way, because the scientist, as part of his method, utters certain very peculiar speech-forms. The linguist naturally divides scientific activity into two phases: the scientist performs “handling” actions and utters speech. The speech-forms which the scientist utters are peculiar both in their form and in their effect upon hearers.

This article develops a view of shape representation both in visual experience and in subpersonal visual processing. The view is that, in both cases, shape is represented in a ‘layered’ manner: an object is represented as having multiple shape properties, and these properties have varying degrees of abstraction. I argue that this view is supported both by the facts about visual phenomenology and by a large collection of evidence in perceptual psychology. Such evidence is provided by studies of shape discriminability, (...) apparent motion, multiple-object tracking, and structure-from-motion. Recent neuroscientific work has also corroborated this psychophysical evidence. Finally, I draw out implications of the layered view for processes of concept acquisition. 1 Introduction2 Metric Properties andShape Properties3 Metric Views4 Against Metric Views of Visual Shape Experience5 The Visual System Uses Abstract Shape Properties6 Against Metric Views of Visual Shape Representation7 Neural Underpinnings of Abstract Shape Perception8 Implications. (shrink)

Sensorimotor enactivism is the view that the content and the sensory modality of perceptual experience are determined by implicit knowledge of lawful regularities between bodily movements and patterns of sensory stimulation. A proponent of the explanatory argument for sensorimotor enactivism holds that this view is able to provide an intelligible explanation for why certain material realizers give rise to certain perceptual experiences, while rival accounts cannot close this “explanatory gap”. However, I argue that the notion of the “material realizer” of (...) perceptual experience is ambiguous. On a narrow construal, the explanatory gap cannot be bridged, not even by enactivism. On a wide construal, enactivism gets a grip on the explanatory gap, but to the same extent do established theories of consciousness. Thus, on both horns of the dilemma, the explanatory power of enactivism is not superior to more traditional theories of conscious experience. (shrink)

This article offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of Eric Heinze’s book Hate Speech and Democratic Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2016). Heinze’s project is to formulate and defend a more theoretically complex version of the idea (also defended by people like Ronald Dworkin and James Weinstein) that general legal prohibitions on hate speech in public discourse compromises the state’s democratic legitimacy. We offer a detailed synopsis of Heinze’s view, highlighting some of its distinctive qualities and strengths. We then develop a (...) critical response to this view with three main focal points: (1) the characterisation of democratic legitimacy as something distinct from (and whose demands aren’t identical with those of) legitimacy per se; (2) the claim that the requirements of democracy are hypothetical, rather than categorical, imperatives; and relatedly (3) the question of how we should reconcile the requirements of democratic legitimacy with the costs that may follow from prioritising democratic legitimacy. We argue that there are significant difficulties for Heinze’s account on all three fronts. (shrink)

Recent debates between proponents of the modern evolutionary synthesis (the standard model in evolutionary biology) and those of a possible extended synthesis are a good example of the fascinating tangle among empirical, theoretical, and conceptual or philosophical matters that is the practice of evolutionary biology. In this essay, we briefly discuss two case studies from this debate, highlighting the relevance of philosophical thinking to evolutionary biologists in the hope of spurring further constructive cross-pollination between the two fields.

L'Entente sur les tiers pays sûrs ratifiée par le Canada et les États-Unis en 2002 a transformé la conception de la souveraineté territoriale canadienne, tel qu'en témoigne le traitement accordé aux demandeur-euse-s d'asile ces dernières années. Arguant à l'effet que l'État canadien adopte une conception de la souveraineté territoriale étanche qui permet l'exercice d'un droit de sélection depuis la mise en place de l'ETPS, cet article propose de repenser un devoir politique d'accueil. La première partie de cet article examine la (...) dynamique d'externalisation de la migration à laquelle participe le Canada. La seconde partie propose une analyse du cadre normatif développé par l'ETPS justifié par un droit de « choisir » les réfugié-e-s. La troisième partie propose une critique du modèle d'exclusion à l'oeuvre derrière l'ETPS et propose à cette fin de penser la responsabilité canadienne en tant que devoir politique à l'égard des populations qui demandent l'asile. (shrink)

The paper, Some Indigenous Solutions to African Environmental Problems: An Appraisal, is written to examine the relevance of African Environmental Philosophies to addressing African environmental problems. African environmental problems include: water pollution, air pollution, land pollution, climate change, flood and many more. Researchers have shown that these problems are caused by phenomena like coal mining, nuclear waste, deforestation, overfishing, wars, etc. It is a known fact that attempts have been made over the years to resolve these problems, with pockets of (...) successes, yet more needs to be done. Nigeria’s Niger Delta Development Commission, Kenya’s Bio-safty Act 2009, The National Environment Policy of Ghana, Oil Pipeline Act 2004, Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection Act 2004 are a good example of such attempts with pockets of successes and challenges. This work uses the methods of rational speculation and critical analysis to examine aboriginal approaches to resolving African environmental challenges as recorded in Mark Omorovie Ikeke’s Philosophical Consciences, Caroline N. Mbonu’s Ecospiritualism, Thaddeus Metz’s Model Relationalism, and Chimakonam Jonathan Okeke’s Ohanifism. This work charged African environmental policymakers, Lecturers, and Students with the responsibility to understand and apply the theoretical foundation for sustainable living as recorded in the above philosophies. This is the time when Africans must use indigenous African methods and principles to proffer solutions to African environmental problems. (shrink)

The comprehension of anaphoric relations may be guided not only by discourse, but also syntactic information. In the literature on online processing, however, the focus has been on audible pronouns and descriptions whose reference is resolved mainly on the former. This paper examines one relation that both lacks overt exponence, and relies almost exclusively on syntax for its resolution: adjunct control, or the dependency between the null subject of a non-finite adjunct and its antecedent in sentences such as Mickey talked (...) to Minnie before ___ eating. Using visual world eyetracking, we compare the time course of interpreting this null subject and overt pronouns (Mickey talked to Minnie before he ate). We show that when control structures are highly frequent, listeners are just as quick to resolve reference in either case. When control structures are less frequent, reference resolution based on structural information still occurs upon hearing the non-finite verb, but more slowly, especially when unaided by structural and referential predictions. This may be due to increased difficulty in recognizing that a referential dependency is necessary. These results indicate that in at least some contexts, referential expressions whose resolution depends on very different sources of information can be resolved approximately equally rapidly, and that the speed of interpretation is largely independent of whether or not the dependency is cued by an overt referring expression. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 241-243, June 2012.

Consciousness has appeared as a term and a problem in modern science. Most scientists believe that it can be accommodated and explained by existing scientific principles. But I say it cannot, that it points beyond present day science to a whole new view of the Universe, in which Consciousness, and not matter, or matter/energy, is the true basis of the Universe. Consciousness is for modern science exactly what Light was for classical physics, all of our concepts for Reality must change. (...) And I go on to lay out my arguments for this new principle Consciousness, and what it real means, for our ideas about the Universe, the Earth, Ourselves and Spirit. In a nutshell, the hard problem of Consciousness the mind/body problem and the near-death experience are so hard they cannot be explained by any present day scientific principles and therefore call all of modern science into question. My arguments are up on PhilPapers and on the Galileo Commission's website. What I now want to do is work out the implications of Consciousness as the basic new principle, for how we deal with monumental issues now facing us in these times. Here are a series of articles about my themes. (shrink)

Philosophers working on time-biases assume that people are hedonically biased toward the future. A hedonically future-biased agent prefers pleasurable experiences to be future instead of past, and painful experiences to be past instead of future. Philosophers further predict that this bias is strong enough to apply to unequal payoffs: people often prefer less pleasurable future experiences to more pleasurable past ones, and more painful past experiences to less painful future ones. In addition, philosophers have predicted that future-bias is restricted to (...) first-person preferences, and that people’s third-person preferences are time-neutral. Philosophers disagree vigorously about the normative status of these preferences—i.e., they disagree about whether first-person future-bias is rationally permissible. Time-neutralists, for example, have appealed to the predicted asymmetry between first- and third-person preferences to argue for the rational impermissibility of future-bias. We empirically tested these predictions, and found that while people do prefer more past pain to less future pain, they do not prefer less future pleasure to more past pleasure. This was so in both first and third-person conditions. This suggests that future-bias is typically non-absolute, and is more easily outweighed in the case of positive events. We connect this result to the normative debate over future-bias. (shrink)

In recent years, a disagreement has erupted between two camps of philosophers about the rationality of bias toward the near and bias toward the future. According to the traditional hybrid view, near bias is rationally impermissible, while future bias is either rationally permissible or obligatory. Time neutralists, meanwhile, argue that the hybrid view is untenable. They claim that those who reject near bias should reject both biases and embrace time neutrality. To date, experimental work has focused on future-directed near bias. (...) The primary aim of this paper is to shed light on the debate by investigating past-directed near bias. If people treat the past and future differently with respect to near bias, by being future-directed but not past-directed near biased, then this supports a particular version of the hybrid view: temporal metaphysic hybridism. If people treat the past and future the same with respect to near bias, then this supports a simple version of time neutralism, which explains both future bias and near bias in terms of the functioning of a single mechanism: the anticipatory/retrospectory mechanism. Our results undermine the claim that people are future-directed, but not past-directed, near biased, and hence do not support temporal metaphysic hybridism. They also fail to support simple time-neutralism; instead, they suggest that there are multiple mechanisms that differently shape future- and past-directed preferences. (shrink)

Many philosophers have assumed that our preferences regarding hedonic events exhibit a bias toward the future: we prefer positive experiences to be in our future and negative experiences to be in our past. Recent experimental work by Greene et al. (ms) confirmed this assumption. However, they noted a potential for some participants to respond in a deviant manner, and hence for their methodology to underestimate the percentage of people who are time neutral, and overestimate the percentage who are future biased. (...) We aimed to replicate their study using an alternative methodology that ensures there are no such deviant responses, and hence more accurately tracks future bias and time neutrality. Instead of finding more time neutrality than Greene et al., however, we found vastly more past bias. Our explanation for this surprising finding helps to reveal the rationale behind both future and past biased preferences, and undermines the generalisability of one of the most influential motivations for the rationality of hedonic future bias: Parfit’s My Past or Future Operations. (shrink)

Many epistemologists are attracted to the claim that knowledge possession excludes luck. Virtue epistemologists attempt to clarify this idea by holding that knowledge requires apt belief: belief that is true because of an agent's epistemic virtues, and not because of luck. Thinking about aptness may have the potential to make progress on important questions in epistemology, but first we must possess an adequate account of when a belief is true because of luck. Existing treatments of aptness assume a simple and (...) natural view of luck attribution, according to which the success of a performance is attributable to luck if one of the principal causes of the success is a lucky event. I show that this view is false, and should be replaced. This has major implications for virtue-theoretic accounts of knowledge, as well as the role of luck in epistemology more generally. (shrink)

Many claims about conceptual matters are often represented as, or inferred from, claims about the meaning, reference, or mastery, of words. But sometimes this has led to treating conceptual analysis as though it were nothing but linguistic analysis. We canvass the most promising justifications for moving from linguistic premises to substantive conclusions. We show that these justifications fail and argue against current practice (in metaethics and elsewhere), which confuses an investigation of a word’s meaning, reference, or competence conditions with an (...) analysis of some concept or property associated with that word. (shrink)

When we perceive an object, we perceive the object from a perspective. As a consequence of the perspectival nature of perception, when we perceive, say, a circular coin from different angles, there is a respect in which the coin looks circular throughout, but also a respect in which the coin's appearance changes. More generally, perception of shape and size properties has both a constant aspect—an aspect that remains stable across changes in perspective—and a perspectival aspect—an aspect that changes depending on (...) one's perspective on the object. How should we account for the perspectival aspect of spatial perception? We present a framework within which to discuss the perspectival aspect of perception and put forward three desiderata that any account of the perspectival aspect of perception should satisfy. We discuss views on which the perspectival aspect of perception is analyzed in terms of constitutively mind-dependent appearance properties as well as views on which the perspectival aspect of perception is analyzed in terms of representations of mind-independent perspectival properties. (shrink)

Philosophy has been a public endeavor since its origins in ancient Greece, India, and China. However, recent years have seen the development of a new type of public philosophy conducted by both academics and non- professionals. The new public philosophy manifests itself in a range of modalities, from the publication of magazines and books for the general public to a variety of initiatives that exploit the power and flexibility of social networks and new media. In this paper we examine the (...) phenomenon of public philosophy in its several facets, and investigate whether and in what sense it is itself a mix of philosophical practice and teaching. We conclude with a number of suggestions to academic colleagues on why and how to foster further growth of public philosophy for the benefit of society at large and of the discipline itself. (shrink)

Some Radical New Ideas About Consciousness Consciousness and the Cosmos: A New Copernican Revolution -/- Consciousness is our new frontier in modern science. Most scientists believe that it can be accomodated, explained, by existing scientific principles. I say that it cannot. That it calls all existing scientific principles into question. That consciousness is to modern science just exactly what light was to classical physics: All of our fundamental assumptions about the nature of Reality have to change. And I go on, (...) in this work,to spell out a whole new view of Reality, and of the Universe. -/- And so, we'll have some fun! -/- Modern science is already in deep trouble... -/- Lorna Green. (shrink)

The ability to perceive the shapes of things as enduring through changes in how they stimulate our sense organs is vital to our sense of stability in the world. But what sort of capacity is shape constancy, and how is it reflected in perceptual experience? This paper defends a pluralist account of shape constancy: There are multiple kinds of shape constancy centered on geometrical properties at various levels of abstraction, and properties at these various levels feature in the content of (...) perceptual experience, governing patterns of apparent shape similarity. I propose that the varieties of shape constancy are subserved by the syntactic complexity of perceptual shape representations. By assigning discrete constituents to various abstract shape parameters, these representations attune us to the preservation of certain abstract shape properties through changes in more determinate shape properties. Finally, I draw broader lessons concerning the nature and function of perceptual constancy. (shrink)

Until recently, philosophers debating the rationality of time-biases have supposed that people exhibit a first-person hedonic bias toward the future, but that their non-hedonic and third-person preferences are time-neutral. Recent empirical work, however, suggests that our preferences are more nuanced. First, there is evidence that our third-person preferences exhibit time-neutrality only when the individual with respect to whom we have preferences—the preference target—is a random stranger about whom we know nothing; given access to some information about the preference target, third-person (...) preferences mirror first-person preferences. As a result, the simulation hypothesis has been proposed, according to which third-person preferences will mirror first-person preferences when we can simulate the mental states of the preference target. Second, there is evidence that we prefer negative hedonic events to be in our past (we are first-person negatively hedonically future-biased) only when we view future events as fixed and in no way under our control. By contrast, when we perceive it to be within our power to mitigate the badness of future events, we are first-person negatively hedonically past-biased. This is the mitigation hypothesis. We distinguish two versions of the mitigation hypothesis, the squirrelling version and the heuristic version. We ran a study which tested the simulation hypothesis, and which aimed to determine whether the squirrelling or the heuristic version of the mitigation hypothesis enjoys more empirical support. We found support for the heuristic version of the hypothesis, but no support for the squirrelling version. (shrink)

Standard theories of rational decision making and rational preference embrace the idea that there is something special about the present. Standard decision theory, for example, demands that agents privilege the perspective of the present (i.e., the time of decision) in evaluating what to do. When forming preferences, most philosophers believe that a similar focus on the present is justified, at least in the sense that rationality requires or permits future experiences to be given more weight than past ones. In this (...) dissertation, I examine such theories in light of the expected success of the agents who follow them. In Chapters 2 and 3, I show that this bias toward the present is a liability: it tends to make agents less successful than they might otherwise be. I also show how these problems can be avoided: In the case of rational decision making, we must privilege the beginning rather than the present (what I call “inceptive maximization”). In the case of rational preferences, we must be completely temporally neutral. -/- In chapters 4 and 5 I introduce a larger framework in which to interpret these results. My core thesis is that practical rationality is a form of conditional reliability. Practically rational decisions, preferences, intentions, or other relevant factors reliably produce whatever we take to be of value, conditional on an agent’s beliefs. This focus on value-conduciveness is thus the analog of the focus on truth-conduciveness in reliability theories of epistemic norms. Like reliabilism in epistemology, I show that practical reliabilism is supported by a methodologically naturalistic approach to normativity. In this way and others, I argue that epistemic and practical reliabilism interconnect to create an overarching theory of normativity. (shrink)

Some Scenarios for What is Coming Down on Us .

Building on recent formal work by Aleks Knoks, we explore how the idea that certain epistemic norms may be indeterminate could be implemented in a default logic.

Future-biased individuals systematically prefer pleasures to be in the future and pains to be in the past. Empirical research shows that negative future-bias is robust: people prefer more past pain to less future pain. Is positive future-bias robust or fragile? Do people only prefer pleasures to be located in the future, compared to the past, when those pleasures are of equal value, or do they continue to prefer that pleasures be located in the future even when past pleasures outweigh future (...) ones? Some arguments against the rationality of future-bias require positive future-bias to be robust, while others require it to be fragile. We empirically investigate and show that positive future-bias is robust. (shrink)

Perceptual representations pick out individuals and attribute properties to them. This paper considers the role of perceptual attribution in determining or guiding perceptual reference to objects. We consider three extant models of the relation between perceptual attribution and perceptual reference–all attribution guides reference, no attribution guides reference, or a privileged subset of attributions guides reference–and argue that empirical evidence undermines all three. We then defend a flexible-attributives model, on which the range of perceptual attributives used to guide reference shifts adaptively (...) with context. This model underscores the remarkable and dynamic intelligence of our perceptual capacities. We elucidate implications of the model for the boundary between perception and propositional thought. (shrink)

The great philosophers missed it, and here are the reasons why, how to bring them all up to date, a woman's take on things, with new categories and concepts, like love, oneness, the feminine, the earth, Spirit, the end of the old order, and the beginning of the new.

I am proposing a new Copernican revolution, that Consciousness and not matter is the true basis of the universe. Here is an account of my graduate student days at the Rockefeller University as a woman pioneer in science, and a sense of what I am really about in all of my works. I am giving a woman's take on the universe.

Recently, a number of cases have been proposed which seem to show that – contrary to widely held opinion – a subject can inferentially come to know some proposition p from an inference which relies on a false belief q which is essential. The standard response to these cases is to insist that there is really an additional true belief in the vicinity, making the false belief inessential. I present a new kind of case suggesting that a subject can inferentially (...) come to know a proposition from an essential false belief where no truth in the vicinity seems to be present. (shrink)

Jus post Bellum is, like Jus ad Bellum and Jus in Bello, a part of just war theory. Jus post Bellum is distinguished from the other parts of just war theory by being primarily concerned with the principles necessary for securing a just and lasting peace after the end of a war. Traditionally, jus post bellum has focused primarily on three goals: [1] compensating those who have been the victims of unjust aggression, while respecting the rights of the aggressors, [2] (...) punishing and rehabilitating those guilty of war crimes and other violations of the principles of Jus ad Bellum and Jus in Bello and [3] developing measures that will prevent future war and violence (Orend 2000 and May 2012). In this chapter, I outline an account of political forgiveness and explain the role that political forgiveness can have in promoting the goals of jus post bellum. My conception of political forgiveness requires some unpacking. Let me begin with individual forgiveness, which I understand along familiar Butlerian lines as the renunciation of resentment (Butler, Sermon IX in McNaughton 2017: 75-83), though with a bit of a twist. More exactly, ● An individual, I, forgives J for doing F if and only if I renounces all her own warrant for resenting J for doing F. Resentment is a judgment-sensitive attitude, and, therefore, it tends to track judgments concerning its warrant (Scanlon 1998: 20 and Smith 2015). In cases of perfect forgiveness, I’s renunciation causes her to cease feeling resentment toward J for doing F, though, of course, less perfect cases are possible. I reject the idea that there is a sharp discontinuity between individual and political forgiveness, a position argued for by, e.g., Peter Digeser (1998 and 2001). By contrast, I understand political forgiveness as the renunciation of resentment by the relevant political body in question. With greater precision, ● A sovereign political body, P, forgives J for doing F if and only if P renounces all warrant that its citizens have for resenting, as part of their public lives, J for doing F. A little more explanation is in order. Sovereign political bodies, such as national governments, claim degrees of control over the lives of their citizens, in both their public and their private aspects, though the claims with respect to the former tend to be considerably more expansive than the claims with respect to the latter. I assume here that, at least in the case of legitimate governments, these claims of control are often valid. Such governments may reasonably renounce certain grounds for motivating action in the public sphere. For example, governments may renounce all warrant that its citizens have, as part of their public lives, for hating members of marginalized groups. In practice, this means that, while citizens might continue to act in their private lives out of hatred for members of these groups, their appeal to this hatred is seen by the state as irrelevant to matters of law and public policy as well as being wholly out-of-place in public discourse. Political forgiveness toward J for doing F, as I understand it, involves an analogous rejection of resentment, on the part of citizens in their public lives, toward J for doing F. I turn now to the matter of how political forgiveness supports securing a just and lasting peace between former belligerents. With respect to the first goal of jus post bellum, political forgiveness helps to balance compensation for victims and respect for the rights of defeated aggressors by countering the all-too-human tendency to overvalue harms done to oneself and to members of one’s group. As regards the second goal, political forgiveness plays a similar role but also provides a model for rehabilitation by exemplifying among the victorious the behavior to be emulated by the vanquished. Finally, political forgiveness promotes the third goal of jus post bellum by providing a space for nations to meet as moral equals rather than allowing one nation to have the moral high ground over the other. None of this, of course, means that political forgiveness should be unearned or that it should be confused with condonation (Kolnai 1973 and Pettigrove 2004). However, the question of what is required to put oneself in a position to be forgiven as part of jus post bellum is a matter that goes beyond the scope of this chapter. (shrink)

The UN Convention against Torture defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person” by someone acting in an official capacity for purposes such as obtaining a confession or punishing or intimidating that person.1 It is unethical for healthcare professionals to participate in torture, including any use of medical knowledge or skill to facilitate torture or allow it to continue, or to be present during torture.2-7 Yet medical participation (...) in torture has taken place throughout the world and was a prominent feature of the US interrogation practice in military and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) detention facilities in the years after the attacks of 11 September 2001.8-11 Little attention has been paid, however, to how a regime of torture affects the ability of health professionals to meet their obligations regarding routine clinical care for detainees. -/- The 2016 release of previously classified portions of guideline from the CIA regarding medical practice in its secret detention facilities sheds light on that question. These show that the CIA instructed healthcare professions to subordinate their fundamental ethical obligations regarding professional standards of care to further the objectives of the torturers. (shrink)

A prominent view holds that perception and memory are distinguished at least partly by their temporal orientation: Perception functions to represent the present, while memory functions to represent the past. Call this view perceptual presentism. This chapter critically examines perceptual presentism in light of contemporary perception science. I adduce evidence for three forms of perceptual sensitivity to the past: (i) shaping perception by past stimulus exposure, (ii) recruitment of mnemonic representations in perceptual processing, and (iii) perceptual representation of present objects (...) as possessing past properties. I argue that forms (i) and (ii) are consistent with perceptual presentism, while form (iii) poses a genuine threat to the view. While the empirical case for form (iii) remains inconclusive, I suggest that the most serious challenges to perceptual presentism derive from representations that integrate mnemonic and present-tensed elements in the performance of canonical perceptual functions, such as perceiving object continuity over time. (shrink)

That dao and being are correct as written about by Laozi and Heidegger respectively is exposed through eight perspectives.

One recently proposed solution to the Liar paradox is the contextual theory of truth. Tyler Burge (1979) argues that truth is an indexical notion and that the extension of the truth predicate shifts during Liar reasoning. A Liar sentence might be true in one context and false in another. To many, contextualism seems to capture our pre-theoretic intuitions about the semantic paradoxes; this is especially due to its reliance on the so-called Revenge phenomenon. I, however, show that Super-Liar sentences (where (...) a Super-Liar sentence is a sentence which says of itself that it is not true in any context) generate a significant problem for Burge’s contextual theory of truth. (shrink)