Results for 'Organism-machine metaphor'

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  1. The mismeasure of machine: Synthetic biology and the trouble with engineering metaphors.Maarten Boudry & Massimo Pigliucci - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (4):660-668.
    The scientific study of living organisms is permeated by machine and design metaphors. Genes are thought of as the ‘‘blueprint’’ of an organism, organisms are ‘‘reverse engineered’’ to discover their functionality, and living cells are compared to biochemical factories, complete with assembly lines, transport systems, messenger circuits, etc. Although the notion of design is indispensable to think about adaptations, and engineering analogies have considerable heuristic value (e.g., optimality assumptions), we argue they are limited in several important respects. In (...)
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  2. Why Machine-Information Metaphors are Bad for Science and Science Education.Massimo Pigliucci & Maarten Boudry - 2011 - Science & Education 20 (5-6):471.
    Genes are often described by biologists using metaphors derived from computa- tional science: they are thought of as carriers of information, as being the equivalent of ‘‘blueprints’’ for the construction of organisms. Likewise, cells are often characterized as ‘‘factories’’ and organisms themselves become analogous to machines. Accordingly, when the human genome project was initially announced, the promise was that we would soon know how a human being is made, just as we know how to make airplanes and buildings. Impor- tantly, (...)
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  3. The Machine Conception of the Organism in Development and Evolution: A Critical Analysis.Daniel J. Nicholson - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 48:162-174.
    This article critically examines one of the most prevalent metaphors in modern biology, namely the machine conception of the organism (MCO). Although the fundamental differences between organisms and machines make the MCO an inadequate metaphor for conceptualizing living systems, many biologists and philosophers continue to draw upon the MCO or tacitly accept it as the standard model of the organism. This paper analyses the specific difficulties that arise when the MCO is invoked in the study of (...)
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  4. Reconceptualizing the Organism: From Complex Machine to Flowing Stream.Daniel J. Nicholson - 2018 - In Daniel J. Nicholson & John Dupré (eds.), Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter draws on insights from non-equilibrium thermodynamics to demonstrate the ontological inadequacy of the machine conception of the organism. The thermodynamic character of living systems underlies the importance of metabolism and calls for the adoption of a processual view, exemplified by the Heraclitean metaphor of the stream of life. This alternative conception is explored in its various historical formulations and the extent to which it captures the nature of living systems is examined. Following this, the chapter (...)
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  5. Organisms ≠ Machines.Daniel J. Nicholson - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (4):669-678.
    The machine conception of the organism (MCO) is one of the most pervasive notions in modern biology. However, it has not yet received much attention by philosophers of biology. The MCO has its origins in Cartesian natural philosophy, and it is based on the metaphorical redescription of the organism as a machine. In this paper I argue that although organisms and machines resemble each other in some basic respects, they are actually very different kinds of systems. (...)
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  6. On Being the Right Size, Revisited: The Problem with Engineering Metaphors in Molecular Biology.Daniel J. Nicholson - 2020 - In Sune Holm & Maria Serban (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on the Engineering Approach in Biology: Living Machines? New York: Routledge. pp. 40-68.
    In 1926, Haldane published an essay titled 'On Being the Right Size' in which he argued that the structure, function, and behavior of an organism are strongly conditioned by the physical forces that exert the greatest impact at the scale at which it exists. This chapter puts Haldane’s insight to work in the context of contemporary cell and molecular biology. Owing to their minuscule size, cells and molecules are subject to very different forces than macroscopic organisms. In a sense, (...)
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  7. Mind as Machine: The Influence of Mechanism on the Conceptual Foundations of the Computer Metaphor.Pavel Baryshnikov - 2022 - RUDN Journal of Philosophy 26 (4):755-769.
    his article will focus on the mechanistic origins of the computer metaphor, which forms the conceptual framework for the methodology of the cognitive sciences, some areas of artificial intelligence and the philosophy of mind. The connection between the history of computing technology, epistemology and the philosophy of mind is expressed through the metaphorical dictionaries of the philosophical discourse of a particular era. The conceptual clarification of this connection and the substantiation of the mechanistic components of the computer metaphor (...)
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  8. Wired Bodies. New Perspectives on the Machine-Organism Analogy.Luca Tonetti & Cilia Nicole (eds.) - 2017 - Rome, Italy: CNR Edizioni.
    The machine-organism analogy has played a pivotal role in the history of Western philosophy and science. Notwithstanding its apparent simplicity, it hides complex epistemological issues about the status of both organism and machine and the nature of their interaction. What is the real object of this analogy: organisms as a whole, their parts or, rather, bodily functions? How can the machine serve as a model for interpreting biological phenomena, cognitive processes, or more broadly the social (...)
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  9. Life and Mind: The Common Tetradic Structure of Organism and Consciousness – a Phenomenological Approach.Christoph Hueck - 2024 - Dialectical Systems: A Forum in Biology, Ecology, and Cognitive Science.
    The question of the holistic structure of an organism is a recurring theme in the philosophy of biology and has been increasingly discussed again in recent years. Organisms have recently been described as complex systems that autonomously create, maintain and reproduce themselves while constantly interacting with their environment. Key focal points include their autopoiesis, autonomy, agency and teleological structure. This perspective marks a significant advancement from the 20th-century viewpoint, which predominantly saw organisms as genetically programmed, randomly generated and blindly (...)
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  10. “Man-Machines and Embodiment: From Cartesian Physiology to Claude Bernard’s ‘Living Machine’”.Charles T. Wolfe & Philippe Huneman - 2017 - In Justin E. H. Smith (ed.), Embodiment: A History. New York: Oxford University Press.
    A common and enduring early modern intuition is that materialists reduce organisms in general and human beings in particular to automata. Wasn’t a famous book of the time entitled L’Homme-Machine? In fact, the machine is employed as an analogy, and there was a specifically materialist form of embodiment, in which the body is not reduced to an inanimate machine, but is conceived as an affective, flesh-and-blood entity. We discuss how mechanist and vitalist models of organism exist (...)
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  11. The Turing Machine on the Dissecting Table.Jana Horáková - 2013 - Teorie Vědy / Theory of Science 35 (2):269-288.
    Since the beginning of the twenty-first century there has been an increasing awareness that software rep- resents a blind spot in new media theory. The growing interest in software also influences the argument in this paper, which sets out from the assumption that Alan M. Turing's concept of the universal machine, the first theoretical description of a computer program, is a kind of bachelor machine. Previous writings based on a similar hypothesis have focused either on a comparison of (...)
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  12. Machine-Believers Learning Faiths & Knowledges: The Gospel According to Chat GPT.Virgil W. Brower - 2021 - Internationales Jahrbuch Für Medienphilosophie 7 (1):97-121.
    One is occasionally reminded of Foucault's proclamation in a 1970 interview that "perhaps, one day this century will be known as Deleuzian." Less often is one compelled to update and restart with a supplementary counter-proclamation of the mathematician, David Lindley: "the twenty-first century would be a Bayesian era..." The verb tenses of both are conspicuous. // To critically attend to what is today often feared and demonized, but also revered, deployed, and commonly referred to as algorithm(s), one cannot avoid the (...)
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  13. Automata, man-machines and embodiment: deflating or inflating Life?Charles T. Wolfe - forthcoming - In A. Radman & H. Sohn (eds.), Critical and Clinical Cartographies: Architecture, Robotics, Medicine, Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press.
    Early modern automata, understood as efforts to ‘model’ life, to grasp its singular properties and/or to unveil and demystify its seeming inaccessibility and mystery, are not just fascinating liminal, boundary, hybrid, crossover or go-between objects, while they are all of those of course. They also pose a direct challenge to some of our common conceptions about mechanism and embodiment. They challenge the simplicity of the distinction between a purported ‘mechanistic’ worldpicture, its ontology and its goals, and on the other hand (...)
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  14. An analysis of Kafka’s Penal Colony and Duchamp’s The Large Glass Through the Concepts of Abstract- Machines and Energeia.Atilla Akalın - 2017 - Medeniyet Art, IMU Art, Design and Architecture Faculty Journal, 3 (1):29-44.
    This study aims to grasp the two distinct artworks one is from the literary field: Penal Colony, written by F. Kafka and the other one is from painting: The Large Glass, designed by M. Duchamp. This text tries to unravel the similarities betwe- en these artworks in terms of two main significations around “The Officer” from Penal Colony and “The Bachelors” from The Large Glass. Because of their vital role on the re-production of status-quo, this text asserts that there is (...)
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  15. Spinoza and the Theory of Organism.Hans Jonas - 1965 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 3 (1):43-57.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spinoza and the Theory of Organism HANS JONAS I CARTESIANDUALISMlanded speculation on the nature of life in an impasse: intelligible as, on principles of mechanics, the correlation of structure and function became within the res extensa, that of structure-plus-function with feeling or experience (modes of the res cogitans) was lost in the bifurcation, and thereby the fact of life itself became unintelligible at the same time that the (...)
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  16. Darmok and Jalad on the Internet: the importance of metaphors in natural languages and natural language processing.Kristina Šekrst - 2023 - In Amy H. Sturgis & Emily Strand (eds.), Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier. Vernon Press. pp. 89-117.
    In a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, Cpt. Picard is captured and trapped on a planet with an alien captain who speaks a language incompatible with the universal translator, based on their societal historical metaphors. According to Shapiro (2004), the concept of a universal translator removes everything alien from alien languages, and since the Tamarian language refers only to their historical and cultural archetypes, Picard can only establish dialogue by invoking human analogues, such as Gilgamesh. The purpose of this (...)
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  17. Philosophy and Science, the Darwinian-Evolved Computational Brain, a Non-Recursive Super-Turing Machine & Our Inner-World-Producing Organ.Hermann G. W. Burchard - 2016 - Open Journal of Philosophy 6 (1):13-28.
    Recent advances in neuroscience lead to a wider realm for philosophy to include the science of the Darwinian-evolved computational brain, our inner world producing organ, a non-recursive super- Turing machine combining 100B synapsing-neuron DNA-computers based on the genetic code. The whole system is a logos machine offering a world map for global context, essential for our intentional grasp of opportunities. We start from the observable contrast between the chaotic universe vs. our orderly inner world, the noumenal cosmos. So (...)
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  18. Is the Cell Really a Machine?Daniel J. Nicholson - 2019 - Journal of Theoretical Biology 477:108–126.
    It has become customary to conceptualize the living cell as an intricate piece of machinery, different to a man-made machine only in terms of its superior complexity. This familiar understanding grounds the conviction that a cell's organization can be explained reductionistically, as well as the idea that its molecular pathways can be construed as deterministic circuits. The machine conception of the cell owes a great deal of its success to the methods traditionally used in molecular biology. However, the (...)
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  19. Gentzen’s “cut rule” and quantum measurement in terms of Hilbert arithmetic. Metaphor and understanding modeled formally.Vasil Penchev - 2022 - Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics eJournal 14 (14):1-37.
    Hilbert arithmetic in a wide sense, including Hilbert arithmetic in a narrow sense consisting by two dual and anti-isometric Peano arithmetics, on the one hand, and the qubit Hilbert space (originating for the standard separable complex Hilbert space of quantum mechanics), on the other hand, allows for an arithmetic version of Gentzen’s cut elimination and quantum measurement to be described uniformy as two processes occurring accordingly in those two branches. A philosophical reflection also justifying that unity by quantum neo-Pythagoreanism links (...)
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  20. And Then the Hammer Broke: Reflections on Machine Ethics from Feminist Philosophy of Science.Andre Ye - forthcoming - Pacific University Philosophy Conference.
    Vision is an important metaphor in ethical and political questions of knowledge. The feminist philosopher Donna Haraway points out the “perverse” nature of an intrusive, alienating, all-seeing vision (to which we might cry out “stop looking at me!”), but also encourages us to embrace the embodied nature of sight and its promises for genuinely situated knowledge. Current technologies of machine vision – surveillance cameras, drones (for war or recreation), iPhone cameras – are usually construed as instances of the (...)
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  21. Understanding life through metaphors. [REVIEW]Bartlomiej Swiatczak - 2022 - Metascience 2022:1-3.
    There is a deep-seated neopositivist view which regards the language of science as a neutral medium of communication, radically different from indirect symbolic forms of discourse characteristic of arts and humanities. But naturalists, like poets and social scientists, also draw on the dominant images in their culture to organize their thoughts and simplify complex concepts. By conceptualizing one thing in terms of another, metaphors in science not only aid mutual communication between researchers but also structure their understanding of experience and (...)
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  22. From Computer Metaphor to Computational Modeling: The Evolution of Computationalism.Marcin Miłkowski - 2018 - Minds and Machines 28 (3):515-541.
    In this paper, I argue that computationalism is a progressive research tradition. Its metaphysical assumptions are that nervous systems are computational, and that information processing is necessary for cognition to occur. First, the primary reasons why information processing should explain cognition are reviewed. Then I argue that early formulations of these reasons are outdated. However, by relying on the mechanistic account of physical computation, they can be recast in a compelling way. Next, I contrast two computational models of working memory (...)
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  23. Teleomechanism redux? The conceptual hybridity of living machines in early modern natural philosophy.Charles T. Wolfe - manuscript
    We have been accustomed at least since Kant and mainstream history of philosophy to distinguish between the ‘mechanical’ and the ‘teleological’; between a fully mechanistic, quantitative science of Nature exemplified by Newton and a teleological, qualitative approach to living beings ultimately expressed in the concept of ‘organism’ – a purposive entity, or at least an entity possessed of functions. The beauty of this distinction is that it seems to make intuitive sense and to map onto historical and conceptual constellations (...)
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  24. Connectionist models of mind: scales and the limits of machine imitation.Pavel Baryshnikov - 2020 - Philosophical Problems of IT and Cyberspace 2 (19):42-58.
    This paper is devoted to some generalizations of explanatory potential of connectionist approaches to theoretical problems of the philosophy of mind. Are considered both strong, and weaknesses of neural network models. Connectionism has close methodological ties with modern neurosciences and neurophilosophy. And this fact strengthens its positions, in terms of empirical naturalistic approaches. However, at the same time this direction inherits weaknesses of computational approach, and in this case all system of anticomputational critical arguments becomes applicable to the connectionst models (...)
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  25. The social in the platform trap: Why a microscopic system focus limits the prospect of social machines.Markus Luczak-Roesch & Ramine Tinati - 2017 - Discover Society 40.
    “Filter bubble”, “echo chambers”, “information diet” – the metaphors to describe today’s information dynamics on social media platforms are fairly diverse. People use them to describe the impact of the viral spread of fake, biased or purposeless content online, as witnessed during the recent race for the US presidency or the latest outbreak of the Ebola virus (in the latter case a tasteless racist meme was drowning out any meaningful content). This unravels the potential envisioned to arise from emergent activities (...)
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  26. Fare e funzionare. Sull'analogia di robot e organismo.Fabio Fossa - 2018 - InCircolo - Rivista di Filosofia E Culture 6:73-88.
    In this essay I try to determine the extent to which it is possible to conceive robots and organisms as analogous entities. After a cursory preamble on the long history of epistemological connections between machines and organisms I focus on Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, where the analogy between modern machines and organisms is introduced most explicitly. The analysis of issues pertaining to the cybernetic interpretation of the analogy serves then as a basis for a critical assessment of its reprise in contemporary (...)
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  27. Life and consciousness – The Vedāntic view.Bhakti Niskama Shanta - 2015 - Communicative and Integrative Biology 8 (5):e1085138.
    In the past, philosophers, scientists, and even the general opinion, had no problem in accepting the existence of consciousness in the same way as the existence of the physical world. After the advent of Newtonian mechanics, science embraced a complete materialistic conception about reality. Scientists started proposing hypotheses like abiogenesis (origin of first life from accumulation of atoms and molecules) and the Big Bang theory (the explosion theory for explaining the origin of universe). How the universe came to be what (...)
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  28. Technological Stripping and Meaning Production in 'Duchamp’s The Large Glass'.Monika Wludzik - 2014 - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies (2):193-206.
    The scope of the essay is limited by the ideas behind the mechanisation of desire as conceptualised in The Large Glass by Marcel Duchamp. This glass-based installation depicts a convoluted mechanism, as the full-title of the work suggests, representing The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. Using tropes and figures from his earlier studies, the artist designed a machine for the production of desire, rendering the unconscious mechanical and dynamic. The paper aims to present selected aspects of the (...)
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  29. Teorija Funkcionalnog Izomorfizma U Filozofiji Uma.Karlo Gardavski - 2020 - Sophos: A Young Researchers’ Journal 13:153 - 167.
    The topic of this paper is a presentation of an alternative theory in the field of philosophy of mind, which was created by the development of cognitive sciences and computer technologies of the twentieth century. Of particular importance is Turnig’s machine whose study at the logical level has contributed to new ways of understanding the mental. A theory such as functionalism (Putnam) does not study the mental in the same way as dualists and materialists do in the philosophical tradition. (...)
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  30. Ageing and the goal of evolution.Justin Garson - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (1):1-16.
    There is a certain metaphor that has enjoyed tremendous longevity in the evolution of ageing literature. According to this metaphor, nature has a certain goal or purpose, the perpetuation of the species, or, alternatively, the reproductive success of the individual. In relation to this goal, the individual organism has a function, job, or task, namely, to breed and, in some species, to raise its brood to maturity. On this picture, those who cannot, or can no longer, reproduce (...)
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  31. Psychopower and Ordinary Madness: Reticulated Dividuals in Cognitive Capitalism.Ekin Erkan - 2019 - Cosmos and History 15 (1):214-241.
    Despite the seemingly neutral vantage of using nature for widely-distributed computational purposes, neither post-biological nor post-humanist teleology simply concludes with the real "end of nature" as entailed in the loss of the specific ontological status embedded in the identifier "natural." As evinced by the ecological crises of the Anthropocene—of which the 2019 Brazil Amazon rainforest fires are only the most recent—our epoch has transfixed the “natural order" and imposed entropic artificial integration, producing living species that become “anoetic,” made to serve (...)
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  32. A Mathematical Model of Quantum Computer by Both Arithmetic and Set Theory.Vasil Penchev - 2020 - Information Theory and Research eJournal 1 (15):1-13.
    A practical viewpoint links reality, representation, and language to calculation by the concept of Turing (1936) machine being the mathematical model of our computers. After the Gödel incompleteness theorems (1931) or the insolvability of the so-called halting problem (Turing 1936; Church 1936) as to a classical machine of Turing, one of the simplest hypotheses is completeness to be suggested for two ones. That is consistent with the provability of completeness by means of two independent Peano arithmetics discussed in (...)
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  33. Streaching the notion of moral responsibility in nanoelectronics by appying AI.Robert Albin & Amos Bardea - 2021 - In Robert Albin & Amos Bardea (eds.), Ethics in Nanotechnology Social Sciences and Philosophical Aspects, Vol. 2. Berlin: De Gruyter. pp. 75-87.
    The development of machine learning and deep learning (DL) in the field of AI (artificial intelligence) is the direct result of the advancement of nano-electronics. Machine learning is a function that provides the system with the capacity to learn from data without being programmed explicitly. It is basically a mathematical and probabilistic model. DL is part of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks, simply called neural networks (NNs), as they are inspired by the biological NNs (...)
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  34. Dissolving the Grounding Problem: How the Pen is Mightier than the Sword.Nancy Salay - 2017 - In R. Catrambone & S. Ohlsson (eds.), Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
    The computational metaphor for mind is still the central guiding idea in cognitive science despite many insightful and well-founded rejections of it. There is good reason for its staying power: when we are at our cognitive best, we reason about our world with our concepts. But the challengers are right, I argue, in insisting that no reductive account of that capacity is forthcoming. Here I describe an externalist account that grounds representations in organism-level engagement with its environment, not (...)
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  35. A reflexive dispositional analysis of mechanistic perception.John Dilworth - 2006 - Minds and Machines 16 (4):479-493.
    The field of machine perception is based on standard informational and computational approaches to perception. But naturalistic informational theories are widely regarded as being inadequate, while purely syntactic computational approaches give no account of perceptual content. Thus there is a significant need for a novel, purely naturalistic perceptual theory not based on informational or computational concepts, which could provide a new paradigm for mechanistic perception. Now specifically evolutionary naturalistic approaches to perception have been—perhaps surprisingly—almost completely neglected for this purpose. (...)
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  36. AI, Situatedness, Creativity, and Intelligence; or the Evolution of the Little Hearing Bones.Eric Dietrich - 1996 - J. Of Experimental and Theoretical AI 8 (1):1-6.
    Good sciences have good metaphors. Indeed, good sciences are good because they have good metaphors. AI could use more good metaphors. In this editorial, I would like to propose a new metaphor to help us understand intelligence. Of course, whether the metaphor is any good or not depends on whether it actually does help us. (What I am going to propose is not something opposed to computationalism -- the hypothesis that cognition is computation. Noncomputational metaphors are in vogue (...)
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  37. The Explanatory Role of Umwelt in Evolutionary Theory: Introducing von Baer's Reflections on Teleological Development.Tiago Rama - 2024 - Biosemiotics 1:1-26.
    Abstract: This paper argues that a central explanatory role for the concept of Umwelt in theoretical biology is to be found in developmental biology, in particular in the effort to understand development as a goal-directed and adaptive process that is controlled by the organism itself. I will reach this conclusion in two (interrelated) ways. The first is purely theoretical and relates to the current scenario in the philosophy of biology. Challenging neo-Darwinism requires a new understanding of the various components (...)
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  38. Information Theory is abused in neuroscience.Lance Nizami - 2019 - Cybernetics and Human Knowing 26 (4):47-97.
    In 1948, Claude Shannon introduced his version of a concept that was core to Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, namely, information theory. Shannon's formalisms include a physical framework, namely a general communication system having six unique elements. Under this framework, Shannon information theory offers two particularly useful statistics, channel capacity and information transmitted. Remarkably, hundreds of neuroscience laboratories subsequently reported such numbers. But how (and why) did neuroscientists adapt a communications-engineering framework? Surprisingly, the literature offers no clear answers. To therefore first answer (...)
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  39. Was Canguilhem a Biochauvinist? Goldstein, Canguilhem and the Project of Biophilosophy.Charles Wolfe - 2015 - In Darian Meacham (ed.), Medicine and Society, New Continental Perspectives (Dordrecht: Springer, Philosophy and Medicine Series, 2015). Springer.
    Georges Canguilhem is known to have regretted, with some pathos, that Life no longer serves as an orienting question in our scientific activity. He also frequently insisted on a kind of uniqueness of organisms and/or living bodies – their inherent normativity, their value-production and overall their inherent difference from mere machines. In addition, Canguilhem acknowledged a major debt to the German neurologist-theoretician Kurt Goldstein, author most famously of The Structure of the Organism in 1934; along with Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem was (...)
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  40. A Cognitive Computation Fallacy? Cognition, Computations and Panpsychism.John Mark Bishop - 2009 - Cognitive Computation 1 (3):221-233.
    The journal of Cognitive Computation is defined in part by the notion that biologically inspired computational accounts are at the heart of cognitive processes in both natural and artificial systems. Many studies of various important aspects of cognition (memory, observational learning, decision making, reward prediction learning, attention control, etc.) have been made by modelling the various experimental results using ever-more sophisticated computer programs. In this manner progressive inroads have been made into gaining a better understanding of the many components of (...)
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  41. Phenomenological physiotherapy: extending the concept of bodily intentionality.Jan Halák & Petr Kříž - 2022 - Medical Humanities 48 (4):e14.
    This study clarifies the need for a renewed account of the body in physiotherapy to fill sizable gaps between physiotherapeutical theory and practice. Physiotherapists are trained to approach bodily functioning from an objectivist perspective; however, their therapeutic interactions with patients are not limited to the provision of natural-scientific explanations. Physiotherapists’ practice corresponds well to theorisation of the body as the bearer of original bodily intentionality, as outlined by Merleau-Ponty and elaborated upon by enactivists. We clarify how physiotherapeutical practice corroborates Merleau-Ponty’s (...)
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  42. Reflections on a theory of organisms: holism in biology.Walter M. Elsasser - 1987 - Baltimore, Md: Published for the Johns Hopkins Dept. of Earth and Planetary Sciences by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
    Are living organisms--as Descartes argued--just machines? Or is the nature of life such that it can never be fully explained by mechanistic models? In this thought-provoking and controversial book, eminent geophysicist Walter M. Elsasser argues that the behavior of living organisms cannot be reduced to physico-chemical causality. Suggesting that molecular biology today is at the same point as Newtonian physics on the eve of the quantum revolution, Elsasser lays the foundation for a theoretical biology that points the way toward a (...)
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  43. Sintonizando com o mundo: uma abordagem ecológica das habilidades sensoriomotoras.Eros Carvalho - 2020 - In Giovanni Rolla & Gerson Albuquerque de Araújo Neto (eds.), Ciência e Conhecimento. Editora da Universidade Federal do Piauí. pp. 81-108.
    In this chapter, I put forward and sustain an articulation of the notion of bodily skill based on ecological psychology, and I show how it is relevant for the debate between Dreyfus and McDowell about skillful coping and also for the debate about whether know-how is reducible or not to propositional knowledge. The right metaphor to understand bodily skills is not the computer metaphor but the radio metaphor. These skills result from a process of organism attunement (...)
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  44. A Democratic Theory of Life.Hans Asenbaum, Reece Chenault, Christopher Harris, Akram Hassan, Curtis Hierro, Stephen Houldsworth, Brandon Mack, Shauntrice Martin, Chivona Newsome, Kayla Reed, Tony Rice, Shevone Torres & I. I. Terry J. Wilson - 2023 - Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 70 (176):1-33.
    In response to its current crisis, scholars call for the revitalisation of democracy through democratic innovations. While they make ample use of life metaphors describing democracy as a living organism, no comprehensive understanding of ‘life’ has been established within democratic theory. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement articulates the urgency of refocusing on life and its meaning through radical democratic practice. This article employs a grounded theory approach, enriched with participatory methods, to develop a radical democratic concept of life (...)
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  45. The leopard does not change its spots: naturalism and the argument against methodological pluralism in the sciences.Jonas Ahlskog & Giuseppina D'Oro - 2022 - In Adam Tamas Tuboly (ed.), The history of understanding in analytic philosophy: around logical empiricism. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 185-208.
    This paper sets out to undermine the view that a commitment to the early modern conception of the mind as immortalized in Ryle’s metaphor of the (Cartesian) ghost in the machine and in Quine’s metaphor of the (Lockean) myth of the museum is required to articulate a defence of the sui generis character of humanistic explanations. These powerful metaphors have not only contributed to undermining the claim for methodological pluralism by caricaturizing the arguments for disunity in the (...)
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  46. “Was Canguilhem a biochauvinist? Goldstein, Canguilhem and the project of ‘biophilosophy’".Charles Wolfe - 2015 - In Darian Meacham (ed.), Medicine and Society, New Continental Perspectives (Dordrecht: Springer, Philosophy and Medicine Series, 2015). Springer. pp. 197-212.
    Canguilhem is known to have regretted, with some pathos, that Life no longer serves as an orienting question in our scientific activity. He also frequently insisted on a kind of uniqueness of organisms and/or living bodies – their inherent normativity, their value-production and overall their inherent difference from mere machines. In addition, Canguilhem acknowledged a major debt to the German neurologist-theoretician Kurt Goldstein, author most famously of The Structure of the Organism in 1934; along with Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem was the (...)
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  47. Sensibility as vital force or as property of matter in mid-eighteenth-century debates.Charles T. Wolfe - 2013 - In Henry Martyn Lloyd (ed.), The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment. Springer Cham. pp. 147-170.
    Sensibility, in any of its myriad realms – moral, physical, aesthetic, medical and so on – seems to be a paramount case of a higher-level, intentional property, not a basic property. Diderot famously made the bold and attributive move of postulating that matter itself senses, or that sensibility (perhaps better translated ‘sensitivity’ here) is a general or universal property of matter, even if he at times took a step back from this claim and called it a “supposition.” Crucially, sensibility is (...)
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  48. Abstraction and the Environment.Louis Caruana - manuscript
    The way we understand the environment is analogous to the way we draw a map. Drawing insights from this analogy, this paper shows how the abstraction that occurs in ecological explanation can lead to damaging distortion. It is mistaken, therefore, to assume that by abstraction we can easily determine the correct variables for controlling a given ecosystem as if it were ideally closed. Recent work shows that the environment is a global composite with a very high degree of internal dependence (...)
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  49. Why Gaia?Massimo Pigliucci - 2014 - Ethics and the Environment 19 (2):117.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Gaia?Massimo Pigliucci (bio)The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet, Michael Ruse, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 272 pages.“The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet tells a story that comes out of the 1960s, a story that reflects all of the beliefs and enthusiasms and tensions of that decade.” So begins Michael Ruse’s fascinating, if at times puzzling, exploration of James Lovelock’s famous idea that our (...)
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  50. Mental mechanisms and psychological construction.Mitchell Herschbach & William Bechtel - 2014 - In Lisa Feldman Barrett & James A. Russell (eds.), The Psychological Construction of Emotion. Guilford Press. pp. 21-44.
    Psychological construction represents an important new approach to psychological phenomena, one that has the promise to help us reconceptualize the mind both as a behavioral and as a biological system. It has so far been developed in the greatest detail for emotion, but it has important implications for how researchers approach other mental phenomena such as reasoning, memory, and language use. Its key contention is that phenomena that are characterized in (folk) psychological vocabulary are not themselves basic features of the (...)
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