The ever-evolving ways attacker continues to improve their phishing techniques to bypass existing state-of-the-art phishing detection methods pose a mountain of challenges to researchers in both industry and academia research due to the inability of current approaches to detect complex phishing attack. Thus, current anti-phishing methods remain vulnerable to complex phishing because of the increasingly sophistication tactics adopted by attacker coupled with the rate at which new tactics are being developed to evade detection. (...) In this research, we proposed an adaptable framework that combines Deep learning and Randon Forest to read images, synthesize speech from deep-fake videos, and natural language processing at various predictions layered to significantly increase the performance of machine learning models for phishing attack detection. (shrink)

Web page phishing is a type of phishing attack that targets websites. In a web page phishing attack, the attacker creates a fake website that looks like a legitimate website, such as a bank or credit card company website. The attacker then sends a fraudulent message to the victim, which contains a link to the fake website. When the victim clicks on the link, they are taken to the fake website and tricked into entering their personal information.Web (...) page phishing attacks are a serious threat to online security. They can be very effective, as they often look very convincing. To protect yourself from web page phishing attacks, you should be suspicious of any emails or messages that ask for your personal information. Do not click on links in emails or messages from unknown senders. If you are unsure whether a website is legitimate, do not enter your personal information. Therefore, in this study, we present a novel approach to detect whether a web page is phishing or legitimate using a neural network model. (shrink)

Introspection is a fundamental part of our mental lives. Nevertheless, its reliability and its underlying cognitive architecture have been widely disputed. Here, I propose a principled way to model introspection. By using time-tested principles from signal detection theory (SDT) and extrapolating them from perception to introspection, I offer a new framework for an introspective signal detection theory (iSDT). In SDT, the reliability of perceptual judgments is a function of the strength of an internal perceptual response (signal- to-noise (...) ratio) which is, to a large extent, driven by the intensity of the stimulus. In parallel to perception, iSDT models the reliability of introspective judgments as a function of the strength of an internal introspective response (signal-to-noise ratio) which is, to a large extent, driven by the intensity of conscious experiences. Thus, by modelling introspection after perception, iSDT can calibrate introspection’s reliability across a whole range of contexts. iSDT offers a novel, illuminating way of thinking about introspection and the cognitive processes that support it. (shrink)

The study aimed to identify the effect of applying detection and prevention tools for career fraud in combating and preventing fraud and reducing its risks through an applied study on Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza Strip, Palestine. To achieve the objectives of the study, the researchers used the questionnaire as a main tool to collect data, and the descriptive and analytical approach to conducting the study. The study population consisted of (501) supervisory employees working at MOH in Gaza (...) Strip, Palestine. The researchers used the stratified random sample method and the multiple regression method to measure the effect. The study concluded a set of results, the most important of which is a positive evaluation among respondents about the levels of application of tools to detect and prevent job fraud within MOH, and the presence of a high interest in tools to prevent job fraud during the implementation of its various work. The study recommended the necessity for the Palestinian National Authority to develop and approve laws regulating health sector, so that those laws guarantee the prevention of conflicts of interest, especially for the category of doctors, by preventing job duplication of doctors working in the government sector. Also study recommended the need for MOH to adopt principles of health sector governance and begin immediately to implement them. This process to ensure transparency, disclosure and accountability in the business framework in a manner that realizes the effective protection of stakeholders and does not compromise or discriminate in the application of these principles, which ensures that all forms of job fraud are organized in an organized manner and within fixed legal frameworks. (shrink)

Study shows that mask-wearing is a critical factor in stopping the COVID-19 transmission. By the time of this article, most states have mandated face masking in public space. Therefore, real-time face mask detection becomes an essential application to prevent the spread of the pandemic. This study will present a face mask detection system that can detect and monitor mask-wearing from camera feeds and alert when there is a violation. The face mask detection algorithm uses a haar cascade (...) classifier to find facial features from the camera feed and then utilizes it to detect the mask-wearing status. With the increasing number of cases all over the world, a system to replace humans to check masks on the faces of people is greatly needed. This system satisfies that need. This system can be employed in public places like transport stations and malls. It will be of great help in companies and huge establishments where there will be a lot of workers. Alongside this, we have used basic concepts of transfer learning in neural networks to finally output the presence or absence of a face mask in an image or a video stream. Experimental results show that our model performs well on the test data with 100 percent and 99 percent precision and recall, respectively. We are making a savvy framework that will identify whether the specific user has worn the mask or not and further tell the accuracy level of the detection. Our framework will be python and AI-based which will be safe and quick for implementation. This system will be of great help there because it is easy to obtain and store the data of the employees working in that Company and will very easily find the people who are not wearing the mask and a will be sent to that respective person to take Precautions not wearing a mask. Potential delays are analyzed, and efforts are made to reduce them to achieve real-time detection. The experiment result shows that the presented system achieves a real-time 45fps 720p Video output, with a face mask detection response of 0.15s and the accuracy of detection 99%. (shrink)

Memory Detection Tests (MDTs) are a general class of psychophysiological tests that can be used to determine whether someone remembers a particular fact or datum. The P300 MDT is a type of MDT that relies on a presumed correlation between the presence of a detectable neural signal (the P300 “brainwave”) in a test subject, and the recognition of those facts in the subject’s mind. As such, the P300 MDT belongs to a class of brain-based forensic technologies which have proved (...) popular and controversial in recent years. With such tests increasingly being proffered for use in the courtroom — to either support or call into question testimony — it would behoove the legal system to have some systematic framework for ensuring that they are used responsibly. In this paper, I defend one such framework for ensuring that this is the case: the legitimacy enhancing test. According to this test, it is appropriate to make use of technologies such as the P300 MDT whenever doing so would (probably) enhance the legitimacy of the trial. I argue that this test addresses tensions between scientific and legal norms of evidence, and exhibits a number of additional virtues including unification, simplicity and flexibility. Although the test is defended by considering the example of the P300 MDT, its significance is much broader than that. If it has the virtues I claim for it, it should provide a general framework for the responsible use of technologies, and the responsible innovation of social epistemic systems. (shrink)

Perception is a first-person internal sensation induced within the nervous system at the time of arrival of sensory stimuli from objects in the environment. Lack of access to the first-person properties has limited viewing perception as an emergent property and it is currently being studied using third-person observed findings from various levels. One feasible approach to understand its mechanism is to build a hypothesis for the specific conditions and required circuit features of the nodal points where the mechanistic operation of (...) perception take place for one type of sensation in one species and to verify it for the presence of comparable circuit properties for perceiving a different sensation in a different species. The present work explains visual perception in mammalian nervous system from a first-person frame of reference and provides explanations for the homogeneity of perception of visual stimuli above flicker fusion frequency, the perception of objects at locations different from their actual position, the smooth pursuit and saccadic eye movements, the perception of object borders, and perception of pressure phosphenes. Using results from temporal resolution studies and the known details of visual cortical circuitry, explanations are provided for (a) the perception of rapidly changing visual stimuli, (b) how the perception of objects occurs in the correct orientation even though, according to the third-person view, activity from the visual stimulus reaches the cortices in an inverted manner and (c) the functional significance of well-conserved columnar organization of the visual cortex. A comparable circuitry detected in a different nervous system in a remote species-the olfactory circuitry of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster-provides an opportunity to explore circuit functions using genetic manipulations, which, along with high-resolution microscopic techniques and lipid membrane interaction studies, will be able to verify the structure-function details of the presented mechanism of perception. (shrink)

Create a novel network model for mobile ad hoc network (MANET) nodes and actors in wireless sensor networks to collaborate on event processing. There are two stages in the development of distributed algorithms: setup and negotiation. The first uses weighted proportional max-min fairness to initially allocate MANET nodes across event zones, whereas the latter uses a market-based method to re-distribute the number of MANET nodes based on existing and new events. A detection technique for malicious packet dropping attacks in (...) MANETs. The mechanism of the suggested approach is Collaborative Convolutional Neural Network (CCNN), which is based on the reputation value computed for that node by its neighbours. A node's reputation value is determined by its network packet forwarding behaviour. The reputation information is collected, saved, and transferred between nodes before being calculated under various scenarios. A network simulator was used to test the proposed protocol. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of its performance. Even in the presence of cryptographic procedures, our method incurs negligible network bandwidth and latency costs. Moreover, we demonstrate that the protection is still effective in the presence of misbehaving nodes and routing changes caused by mobility. While further research is needed to thoroughly evaluate our method, we feel that the concept of collaborative security in MANETs is a potential future area. (shrink)

To secure computers and information systems from attackers taking advantage of vulnerabilities in the system to commit cybercrime, several methods have been proposed for real-time detection of vulnerabilities to improve security around information systems. Of all the proposed methods, machine learning had been the most effective method in securing a system with capabilities ranging from early detection of software vulnerabilities to real-time detection of ongoing compromise in a system. As there are different types of cyberattacks, each of (...) the existing state-of-the-art machine learning models depends on different algorithms for training which also impact their suitability for detection of a particular type of cyberattack. In this research, we analyzed each of the current state-of-the art machine learning models for different types of cyberattack detection from the past 10 years with a major emphasis on the most recent works for comparative study to identify the knowledge gap where work is still needed to be done with regard to detection of each category of cyberattack. (shrink)

The Salivaomics Knowledge Base (SKB) is designed to serve as a computational infrastructure that can permit global exploration and utilization of data and information relevant to salivaomics. SKB is created by aligning (1) the saliva biomarker discovery and validation resources at UCLA with (2) the ontology resources developed by the OBO (Open Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry, including a new Saliva Ontology (SALO). We define the Saliva Ontology (SALO; http://www.skb.ucla.edu/SALO/) as a consensus-based controlled vocabulary of terms and relations dedicated to the salivaomics (...) domain and to saliva-related diagnostics following the principles of the OBO (Open Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry. The Saliva Ontology is an ongoing exploratory initiative. The ontology will be used to facilitate salivaomics data retrieval and integration across multiple fields of research together with data analysis and data mining. The ontology will be tested through its ability to serve the annotation ('tagging') of a representative corpus of salivaomics research literature that is to be incorporated into the SKB. Background Saliva (oral fluid) is an emerging biofluid for non-invasive diagnostics used in the detection of human diseases. The need to advance saliva research is strongly emphasized by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), and is included in the NIDCR's 2004- 2009 expert panel long-term research agenda [1]. The ability to monitor health status, disease onset, progression, recurrence and treatment outcome through noninvasive means is highly important to advancing health care management. Saliva is a perfect medium to be explored for personalized individual medicine including diagnostics, offering a non-invasive, easy to obtain means for detecting and monitoring diseases. Saliva testing potentially allows the patient to collect their own saliva samples at home, yielding convenience for the patient and savings in health costs, and facilitating multiple sampling. Specimen collection is less objectionable to patients and easier in children and elderly individuals. Due to these advantages. (shrink)

Since the sharing economy is a rather new phenomenon, there is still no official definition of it in the legal framework of Croatia. The continuous development of sharing economy started a few years after the 1998 global and domestic economic crisis stroked Croatia. Namely, a total of eight platforms in the sectors of transportation, accommodation, finance, and online skills could be identified. The total market share of these platforms amounts to estimated market revenue of roughly 106 million EUR. When (...) compared to the other EU Member States, it could be noticed that Croatia falls within the group of countries with a below-average performance by a number of platforms per 1 million population, as well as in the level of revenues compared to national GDP. Figures that are more promising can be detected regarding the collaborative economy’s contribution to national employment, which positions Croatia within the EU average. Future studies should explain in greater depth how the sharing economy poses several new challenges for regulators in Croatia and countries across the EU. In particular, policymakers must comprehend the big picture and provide regulatory guidelines to manage the long-term changes in job markets, public safety, competition, and digital trust. (shrink)

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects schemes, programs, data management, and operations, and as they continuously assist in the corporation, they may be a fresh entryway for cyber-attacks. Presently, illegal downloading and virus attacks pose significant threats to IoT security. These risks may acquire confidential material, causing reputational and financial harm. In this paper hybrid optimization mechanism and deep learning,a frame is used to detect the attack prevention in IoT. To develop a cybersecurity warning system in a huge data set, (...) the cybersecurity warning systems index system is first constructed, then the index factors are picked and measured, and finally, the situation evaluation is done.Numerous bio-inspired techniques were used to enhance the productivity of an IDS by lowering the data dimensionality and deleting unnecessary and noisy input. The Grey Wolf Optimization algorithm (GWO) is a developed bio-inspired algorithm that improves the efficacy of the IDS in detecting both regular and abnormal congestion in the network. The smart initialization step integrates the different pre-processing strategies to make sure that informative features are incorporated in the early development stages, has been improved. Researchers pick multi-source material in a big data environment for the identification and verification of index components and present a parallel reduction approach based on the classification significance matrix to decrease data underlying data characteristics. For the simulation of this situation, grey wolf optimization and whale optimization were combined to detect the attack prevention and the deep learning approach was presented. Utilizing system software plagiarism, the TensorFlow deep neural network is intended to classify stolen software. To reduce the noise from the signal and to zoom the significance of each word in the perspective of open-source plagiarism, the tokenization and weighting feature approaches are utilized. Malware specimens have been collected from the Mailing database for testing purposes. The experimental findings show that the suggested technique for measuring cyber security hazards in IoT has superior classification results to existing methods. Hence to detect the attack prevention in IoT process Whale with Grey wolf optimization (WGWO) and deep convolution network is used. (shrink)

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a global health problem with high morbidity and mortality rate, and it induces other diseases. There are no obvious incidental effects during the starting periods of CKD, patients routinely disregard to see the sickness. Early disclosure of CKD enables patients to seek helpful treatment to improve the development of this disease. AI models can effectively assist clinical with achieving this objective on account of their fast and exact affirmation execution. In this appraisal, proposed a Logistic (...) relapse framework for diagnosing CKD. Proposed calculation like NAIVE BAYES , DECISION TREE , KSTAR , LOGISITIC , AND SVM and look at these calculation and get the most noteworthy precision .AI store, which has an enormous number of missing qualities. Missing characteristics are for the most part found, taking everything into account, clinical conditions since patients might miss a couple of assessments for various reasons. By separating the misjudgements delivered by the set up models and proposed a fused model that unites determined backslide and sporadic woods by using perceptron. (shrink)

In today’s world, education is less being considered as an outcome, but more as a journey. As the adventurers, our students are facing more and more complex challenges. Previously, the socio-economic status of a student’s family seemed to be one of the biggest factors among inequality causes. Nowadays, the chaotic situation of today's VUCA world (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) is generating more and more types of inequity and inequality. Thus, the purpose of the study is to develop LERB - (...) a simple model to classify inequity and inequality, as a stepping-stone to build a gap detection framework. Through a structured literature review, the study identified the interconnection between equity and equality, as well as their transition toward students as an individual or as a group(s) and subgroup(s). The study can also be adapted to examine the correlation between different categories of equity, as well as to brainstorm and propose remedies to tackle those gaps. (shrink)

To find the neural substrates of consciousness, researchers compare subjects’ neural activity when they are aware of stimuli against neural activity when they are not aware. Ideally, to guarantee that the neural substrates of consciousness—and nothing but the neural substrates of consciousness—are isolated, the only difference between these two contrast conditions should be conscious awareness. Nevertheless, in practice, it is quite challenging to eliminate confounds and irrelevant differences between conscious and unconscious conditions. In particular, there is an often-neglected confound that (...) is crucial to eliminate from neuroimaging studies: task performance. Unless subjects’ task performance is matched (and hence perceptual signal processing is matched), researchers risk finding the neural correlates of perception, rather than conscious perception. Here, we discuss the theoretical motivations for the performance matching framework and review empirical demonstrations of, and theoretical inferences derived from, obtaining differences in consciousness while controlling for task performance. We summarize signal detection theoretic modeling frameworks that explain how it is that we can derive performance-matched differences in consciousness without the effect being trivially driven by differences in criterion setting, and also provide principles for designing experimental paradigms that yield performance-matched differences in awareness. Finally, we address potential technical and theoretical issues that stem from matching performance across conditions of awareness, and we introduce the notion of “triangulation” for designing comprehensive experimental sets that can better reveal the neural substrates of consciousness. (shrink)

The introspective devices framework proposed by Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) offers an attractive conceptual tool for evaluating and developing accounts of introspection. However, the framework assumes that different views about the nature of introspection can be easily evaluated against a set of common criteria. In this paper, I set out to test this assumption by analysing two formal models of introspection using the introspective device framework. The question I aim to answer is not only whether models (...) developed outside of philosophy can be successfully evaluated against the set of conceptual criteria proposed by Kammerer and Frankish, but also whether this kind of evaluation can reveal some limitations inherent to the framework. (shrink)

The internet has made the world more linked than ever before. While taking advantage of this online transition, cybercriminals target flaws in online systems, networks, and infrastructure. Businesses, government organizations, people, and communities all across the world, particularly in African countries, are all severely impacted on an economic and social level. Many African countries focused more on developing secure electricity and internet networks; yet, cybersecurity usually receives less attention than it should. One of Africa's major issues is the lack of (...) adequate digital security infrastructure, which has harmed businesses, governmental institutions, and individual communities more than it has helped. The majority of African countries operate without cybersecurity measures in place to combat cyberattacks. Only a few examples of today's cyber risks include digital extortion, business email intrusion, data breaches, online fraud, ransomware, and phishing, and new types of cybercrime are always developing. Due to the advent of new technology, cybercriminals have become more organized and quicker in their attacks and alliance creation. To maintain a secure digital environment for all internet users, this study focused on the challenges, solutions, and need for African countries to improve their online safety by tackling cybercrime, online fraud, and cybersecurity concerns. The objective of this study is to offer practical and long-term answers to the problems posed by cybercrime, with a continuing emphasis on enhancing online safety. It will assess the effectiveness of cutting-edge cybersecurity measures, legislative frameworks, and cross-border cooperative efforts, as well as potential areas for improvement. Additionally, the study will examine cutting-edge methods like blockchain technology, machine learning, and other cutting-edge methods that could improve our using digital defences to stop cybercrime. (shrink)

Search in an environment with an uncertain distribution of resources involves a trade-off between exploitation of past discoveries and further exploration. This extends to information foraging, where a knowledge-seeker shifts between reading in depth and studying new domains. To study this decision-making process, we examine the reading choices made by one of the most celebrated scientists of the modern era: Charles Darwin. From the full-text of books listed in his chronologically-organized reading journals, we generate topic models to quantify his local (...) (text-to-text) and global (text-to-past) reading decisions using Kullback-Liebler Divergence, a cognitively-validated, information-theoretic measure of relative surprise. Rather than a pattern of surprise-minimization, corresponding to a pure exploitation strategy, Darwin’s behavior shifts from early exploitation to later exploration, seeking unusually high levels of cognitive surprise relative to previous eras. These shifts, detected by an unsupervised Bayesian model, correlate with major intellectual epochs of his career as identified both by qualitative scholarship and Darwin’s own self-commentary. Our methods allow us to compare his consumption of texts with their publication order. We find Darwin’s consumption more exploratory than the culture’s production, suggesting that underneath gradual societal changes are the explorations of individual synthesis and discovery. Our quantitative methods advance the study of cognitive search through a framework for testing interactions between individual and collective behavior and between short- and long-term consumption choices. This novel application of topic modeling to characterize individual reading complements widespread studies of collective scientific behavior. (shrink)

Ensemble perception—the encoding of objects by their group properties—is known to be resistant to outlier noise. However, this resistance is somewhat paradoxical: how can the visual system determine which stimuli are outliers without already having derived statistical properties of the ensemble? A simple solution would be that ensemble perception is not a simple, one-step process; instead, outliers are detected through iterative computations that identify items with high deviance from the mean and reduce their weight in the representation over time. Here (...) we tested this hypothesis. In Experiment 1, we found evidence that outliers are discounted from mean orientation judgments, extending previous results from ensemble face perception. In Experiment 2, we tested the timing of outlier rejection by having participants perform speeded judgments of sets with or without outliers. We observed significant increases in reaction time (RT) when outliers were present, but a decrease compared to no-outlier sets of matched range suggesting that range alone did not drive RTs. In Experiment 3 we tested the timing by which outlier noise reduces over time. We presented sets for variable exposure durations and found that noise decreases linearly over time. Altogether these results suggest that ensemble representations are optimized through iterative computations aimed at reducing noise. The finding that ensemble perception is an iterative process provides a useful framework for understanding contextual effects on ensemble perception. (shrink)

According to the predictive coding theory of cognition , brains are predictive machines that use perception and action to minimize prediction error, i.e. the discrepancy between bottom–up, externally-generated sensory signals and top–down, internally-generated sensory predictions. Many consider PCT to have an explanatory scope that is unparalleled in contemporary cognitive science and see in it a framework that could potentially provide us with a unified account of cognition. It is also commonly assumed that PCT is a representational theory of sorts, (...) in the sense that it postulates that our cognitive contact with the world is mediated by internal representations. However, the exact sense in which PCT is representational remains unclear; neither is it clear that it deserves such status—that is, whether it really invokes structures that are truly and nontrivially representational in nature. In the present article, I argue that the representational pretensions of PCT are completely justified. This is because the theory postulates cognitive structures—namely action-guiding, detachable, structural models that afford representational error detection—that play genuinely representational functions within the cognitive system. (shrink)

The current assessment of behaviors in the inventories to diagnose autism spectrum disorders (ASD) focus on observation and discrete categorizations. Behaviors require movements, yet measurements of physical movements are seldom included. Their inclusion however, could provide an objective characterization of behavior to help unveil interactions between the peripheral and the central nervous systems. Such interactions are critical for the development and maintenance of spontaneous autonomy, self-regulation and voluntary control. At present, current approaches cannot deal with the heterogeneous, dynamic and stochastic (...) nature of development. Accordingly, they leave no avenues for real-time or longitudinal assessments of change in a coping system continuously adapting and developing compensatory mechanisms. We offer a new unifying statistical framework to reveal re-afferent kinesthetic features of the individual with ASD. The new methodology is based on the non-stationary stochastic patterns of minute fluctuations (micro-movements) inherent to our natural actions. Such patterns of behavioral variability provide re-entrant sensory feedback contributing to the autonomous regulation and coordination of the motor output. From an early age, this feedback supports centrally driven volitional control and fluid, flexible transitions between intentional and spontaneous behaviors. We show that in ASD there is a disruption in the maturation of this form of proprioception. Despite this disturbance, each individual has unique adaptive compensatory capabilities that we can unveil and exploit to evoke faster and more accurate decisions. Measuring the kinesthetic re-afference in tandem with stimuli variations we can detect changes in their micro-movements indicative of a more predictive and reliable kinesthetic percept. Our methods address the heterogeneity of ASD with a personalized approach grounded in the inherent sensory-motor abilities that the individual has already developed. (shrink)

We examine some of Connes’ criticisms of Robinson’s infinitesimals starting in 1995. Connes sought to exploit the Solovay model S as ammunition against non-standard analysis, but the model tends to boomerang, undercutting Connes’ own earlier work in functional analysis. Connes described the hyperreals as both a “virtual theory” and a “chimera”, yet acknowledged that his argument relies on the transfer principle. We analyze Connes’ “dart-throwing” thought experiment, but reach an opposite conclusion. In S , all definable sets of reals are (...) Lebesgue measurable, suggesting that Connes views a theory as being “virtual” if it is not definable in a suitable model of ZFC. If so, Connes’ claim that a theory of the hyperreals is “virtual” is refuted by the existence of a definable model of the hyperreal field due to Kanovei and Shelah. Free ultrafilters aren’t definable, yet Connes exploited such ultrafilters both in his own earlier work on the classification of factors in the 1970s and 80s, and in Noncommutative Geometry, raising the question whether the latter may not be vulnerable to Connes’ criticism of virtuality. We analyze the philosophical underpinnings of Connes’ argument based on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and detect an apparent circularity in Connes’ logic. We document the reliance on non-constructive foundational material, and specifically on the Dixmier trace −∫ (featured on the front cover of Connes’ magnum opus) and the Hahn–Banach theorem, in Connes’ own framework. We also note an inaccuracy in Machover’s critique of infinitesimal-based pedagogy. (shrink)

What is the rationale for the methodological innovations of experimental philosophy? This paper starts from the contention that common answers to this question are implausible. It then develops a framework within which experimental philosophy fulfills a specific function in an otherwise traditionalist picture of philosophical inquiry. The framework rests on two principal ideas. The first is Frank Jackson’s claim that conceptual analysis is unavoidable in ‘serious metaphysics’. The second is that the psychological structure of concepts is extremely intricate, (...) much more so than early practitioners of conceptual analysis had realized. This intricacy has implications for the activity of analyzing concepts: while the central, coarser, more prominent contours of a concept may be identified from the armchair, the finer details of the concept’s structure require experimental methods to detect. (shrink)

Abstract Derrida's deconstructive strategy of reading texts can be understood as a way of highlighting the irreducible plurality of discursive meaning that undermines the traditional Western “logocentric“ desire for an absolute point of reference. While his notion of logocentrism was modeled on Heidegger's articulation of the traditional ontotheological framework of Aristotelian metaphysics, Derrida detects a logocentric remnant in Heidegger's own interpretation of gathering ( Versammlung ) as the basic movement of λόγος, discursiveness. However, I suggest that Derrida here touches (...) upon a certain limit of deconstruction. As Derrida himself points out, the “decentering“ effect of deconstruction does not simply abolish the unifying and focalizing function of discourse. Insofar as deconstruction involves reading and interpreting, it cannot completely evade narrative focalization. Rather, both Heidegger and Derrida can be understood as addressing the radical contextuality of all discursive centers and focal points as well as the consequent impossibility of an ultimate and definitive meta narrative. (shrink)

[What It’s Like, or What It’s About? The Place of Consciousness in the Material World] Summary: The book is both a survey of the contemporary debate and a defense of a distinctive position. Most philosophers nowadays assume that the focus of the philosophy of consciousness, its shared explanandum, is a certain property of experience variously called “phenomenal character,” “qualitative character,” “qualia” or “phenomenology,” understood in terms of what it is like to undergo the experience in question. Consciousness as defined in (...) terms of its phenomenal aspect is often called “phenomenal consciousness.” The major issue that occupies most thinkers is whether this phenomenal character happens to be a physical property, or whether it is rather sui generis. Those who believe the former are materialists; those who conclude the latter are dualists. As the currently dominant metaphysic is materialism – also sometimes called physicalism – the challenge appears to be to slot phenomenal properties among the physical properties that ultimately make up the world. David Chalmers argued powerfully that we can go very far in situating many mental properties in the physical world – namely, the properties that can be understood in functional terms – but that phenomenal properties resist such a treatment. Chalmers calls this “the hard problem” of consciousness. But there are also some quite powerful positive arguments for dualism. The two most influential ones are the modal argument, also offered by Chalmers, and the knowledge argument invented by Frank Jackson. Chalmers invites us to conceive of creatures that are exactly like human beings – physically, functionally, behaviorally – only bereft of phenomenal consciousness. If such creatures are conceivable, says Chalmers, they are metaphysically possible. And if they are metaphysically possible, materialism is false. Jackson, for his part, suggests we imagine Mary who has spent her entire life inside a black-and-white room and has seen the world through a black-and-white TV screen. But she also happens to know everything there is to know about the physics of color. And yet, Jackson suggests that once Mary is finally released from her room and sees a lawn outside, she learns something new: that this is what it is like to experience green color. The current work on consciousness is by and large characterized by attempts to answer these two dualistic arguments. I try to make sense of the positions within the domain of philosophy of consciousness by means of two major distinctions that mutually intersect. First, there is a distinction between dualism and materialism. An apparent third alternative currently on offer, the so-called Russellian monism, is unstable, collapsing into either dualism (panpsychism) or materialism (Russellian physicalism). Materialism comes in two main flavors: either the a posteriori physicalism, which detects an epistemic gap between phenomenal and physical truths, hence denying that the former could be derived from the latter; or the a priori physicalism, which does not acknowledge any such obstacle. The second major distinction is between phenomenism and representationalism. It’s true that Ned Block, who introduced this contrast, meant to distinguish between two kinds of materialism. But I believe that the distinction actually intersects the one between materialism and dualism. We thus arrive at a table with six slots, representing six main positions in the philosophy of consciousness: (1) dualist phenomenism (Chalmers, the early Jackson, and Tyler Burge); (2) dualist representationalism (René Descartes); (3) aposteriori materialist phenomenism (Block); (4) a posteriori materialist representationalism (Michael Tye, Fred Dretske, David Rosenthal); (5) a priori materialist phenomenism (David Lewis); and (6) a priori materialist representationalism (Daniel Dennett, Derk Pereboom). However, this scheme is in fact somewhat misleading. It is true that Dennett is usually classified as an apriori materialist (or, more precisely an apriori materialist representationalist), but I believe that needs to be corrected. In order to understand why, I first analyze varieties of materialist representationalism in detail, in particular various construals of phenomenal character in terms of representation, or intentionality, which includes a discussion of the identity of its content (the issue of externalism). By contrast, Dennett rejects the concept of phenomenal character. Consciousness has no intrinsic, publicly inaccessible properties. On that ground, Dennett builds an empirical, fully functionalist theory of consciousness, which he also tries to integrate within a general Darwinian framework. From that point of view, one can contrast Dennettian and representationalist views on the issue of animal consciousness. In addition to his rejection of phenomenal character, Dennett also abstains from the regular metaphysical departure point of regular materialism. He does not so much ask how an enigmatic property of consciousness fits an antecedently characterized world, but rather how far we can investigate all aspects of the world, including consciousness, using the scientific method. He is thus a methodological naturalist, rather than a metaphysical materialist. While this approach removes obstacles to the science of consciousness, it does not solve what might be called “the hardest problem” – of intentionality, not phenomenal consciousness. The hardest problem consists in the fact that our intentional discourse involves conflicting commitments that prevent a coherent metaphysic of representational states. However, it does not follow that we should give up on this discourse as a theoretical means of reduction as well as a practical tool of explanation. But it might be that intentional discourse is a somewhat pseudo one. (shrink)

Thirty years ago Richard Rorty detected the similarities between Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953) and the philosophical framework of Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), the founder of pragmatism. Rorty tried to show that Peirce envisaged and repudiated in advance logical positivism and developed insights and a philosophical mood very close to the analytical philosophers influenced by the later Wittgenstein (Rorty 1961). In spite of that, the majority of scholars have considered both thinkers as totally alien. Some scholars have attributed the pragmatist (...) flavor of the Philosophical Investigations to the influence of Frank P. Ramsey, who awoke Wittgenstein from the dogmatic slumber of the Tractatus. Nevertheless, the real scope of the influence of American pragmatist philosophy in Wittgenstein's later thought is not clearly known. The purpose of my paper is not to describe the common themes between Wittgenstein and Peirce, but the way in which recent scholarship has established some links between both philosophers. -/- . (shrink)

This papers aims at clarifying some misunderstandings that seem to block an adequate account of de re thoughts within the Fregean framework. It is usually assumed that Fregean senses cannot be de re, or dependent upon objects. Contrary to this assumption, Gareth Evans and John McDowell have claimed that Fregean de re senses are not just possible, but in fact the most promising alternative for accounting for de re thoughts. The reasons blocking this alternative can be traced back to (...) Russellian considerations that contaminated the interpretation of Frege. This contaminated understanding is first detected in Tyler Burge’s distinction between de dicto and de re, then connected to the motivations behind David Kaplan’s notion of character, and finally found in John Searle’s descriptivist account. The difficulty in understanding de re thoughts is, roughly speaking, a side effect of the misunderstanding of the boundaries separating internal and external elements of thoughts, as well as the distinction between mental content and means of representation. (shrink)

Spanish Philosopher José Ortega y Gasset advanced a number of strong criticisms of American pragmatism, yet some pragmatist notions can also be detected in his own philosophy. Within Ortega’s pragmatist perspectivism one can locate the possibility of overcoming one of the principal perceived problems of pragmatism: namely, its tendency toward relativism. This paper focuses on the ways in which Ortega’s discussion of pragmatism pertains to history and historiography. Ortega’s position that history is written from a select number of perspectives is (...) congenial to pragmatist pluralism. What is recorded and continues to thrive in the annals of history is, within a pragmatist framework, whatever continues to be interesting, relevant, useful, and meaningful because it makes a difference – from and for these perspectives. The more of these perspectives we study, the closer we approach what, on Ortega’s view, constitutes the “eternal truth which every period has lived,” because materials initially gathered and framed for pragmatic reasons can later on provide important opportunities for the reflexive analysis of historical knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the relationship between social cognition and religious cognition. Many cognitive theories of religion claim that these two forms are somehow related, but the details are usually left unexplored and insights from theories of social cognition are not taken on board. I discuss the three main (groups of) theories of social cognition, namely the theory-theory, the simulation theory and enactivist theories. Secondly, I explore how these theories can help to enrich a number of cognitive theories of (...) religion. The theories I discuss are Stewart Guthrie’s anthropomorphism, Justin Barrett’s hyperactive agency detection device, Jesse Bering’s existential theory of mind, Pascal Boyer’s minds with full strategic access and Tanya Luhrmann’s porous theory of mind. Finally, I look at how enrichment with insights from social cognition can help to combine different existing theories of religious cognition into a unified framework. (shrink)

This article analyzes the role of entropy in Bayesian statistics, focusing on its use as a tool for detection, recognition and validation of eigen-solutions. “Objects as eigen-solutions” is a key metaphor of the cognitive constructivism epistemological framework developed by the philosopher Heinz von Foerster. Special attention is given to some objections to the concepts of probability, statistics and randomization posed by George Spencer-Brown, a figure of great influence in the field of radical constructivism.

Abstract Aim: The COVID-19 infection is transmitted either by human-to-human contact, social-physical contact, and respiratory droplets or by touching items touched by the infected. This has triggered some conflicted behaviors such as stigma, violence, and opposite behavior applause. The aim of this study is to explore several newspaper articles about stigma, violence, or insensitive behavior against healthcare professionals and to analyze the reason for these behaviors during these COVID-19 pandemics. Method: The website of the Turkish Medical Association "Press Releases News" (...) and online newspaper articles have been scanned using keywords and have been classified and analyzed according to the content of articles between the periods of March 11 to April 28, 2020. This is a qualitative study with content analysis. No official ethical permission was obtained as the study was conducted through open access internet news sites. Result: 16 reports were selected from online reports that matched the keywords of the study. 13 of these reports included desensitization, violence, lack of precaution, stigmatization, and applause, and 3 reports included doctors’ statements. After being categorized, content analyses were conducted. Conclusion: This study revealed the necessity of a multi-faceted evaluation of the problems faced by healthcare professionals who are at the forefront of the COVID-19 outbreak. This study has a primary role in the detection, diagnosis, and treatment of the pandemic and reveals that doctors are trying to fulfill their duties in an ethical framework despite stigmatized behavior. Authorities should provide various supports to protect healthcare professionals before, during, and after the epidemic for the success of the COVID-19 outbreak struggle. (shrink)

While representation learning techniques have shown great promise in application to a number of different NLP tasks, they have had little impact on the problem of ontology matching. Unlike past work that has focused on feature engineering, we present a novel representation learning approach that is tailored to the ontology matching task. Our approach is based on embedding ontological terms in a high-dimensional Euclidean space. This embedding is derived on the basis of a novel phrase retrofitting strategy through which semantic (...) similarity information becomes inscribed onto fields of pre-trained word vectors. The resulting framework also incorporates a novel outlier detection mechanism based on a denoising autoencoder that is shown to improve performance. An ontology matching system derived using the proposed framework achieved an F-score of 94% on an alignment scenario involving the Adult Mouse Anatomical Dictionary and the Foundational Model of Anatomy ontology (FMA) as targets. This compares favorably with the best performing systems on the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative anatomy challenge. We performed additional experiments on aligning FMA to NCI Thesaurus and to SNOMED CT based on a reference alignment extracted from the UMLS Metathesaurus. Our system obtained overall F-scores of 93.2% and 89.2% for these experiments, thus achieving state-of-the-art results. (shrink)

In recent years, multifetal pregnancy reduction (MFPR) has increasingly been the subject of debate in Norway, and the intensity reached a tentative maximum when Legislation Department delivered the interpretative statement § 2 - Interpretation of the Abortion Act in 2016 in response to the Ministry of Health (2014) requesting the Legislation Department to consider whether the Law on abortion allows for MFPR of healthy fetuses in multiple pregnancies. The Legislation Department concluded that current abortion laws allow MFPR within the (...) class='Hi'>framework the law otherwise stipulates. The debate has not subsided, and during autumn 2018, it was further intensified in connection with the Christian Democrat "crossroads" and signals from the Conservatives to consider removing §2.3c and to forbid MFPR. -/- Many of the arguments in the MFPR debate appear seemingly similar to arguments pending in the general abortion debate, and an analysis of what sets MFPR apart from other abortions is wanting. The aim of this article is, therefore, to examine whether there is a moral distinction between abortion and MFPR of healthy fetuses. We will cover the typical arguments of the Norwegian debate, and highlight them with scholarly articles from the literature. The most important arguments against MFPR that we have identified we have dubbed the harm argument, slippery-slope argument, intent argument, grief argument, psychological long-term effects for the woman and sorting argument. We conclude that counter-arguments do not measure up in terms of detecting a morally relevant difference between MFPR of healthy fetuses and abortions. Our conclusion is therefore that—despite what several debaters seem to think—there is no morally relevant difference between the two. Therefore, when we allow abortion, we should also allow MFPR. (shrink)

An intuitive conception of objectivity involves an ideal of neutrality—if we’re to engage in objective inquiry, we must try to sideline our prejudices, values, and politics, lest these factors taint inquiry and unduly influence our results. This intuition underlies various “purist” epistemological frameworks, which grant epistemic significance only to “epistemic factors” like evidence or the truth of a belief. Feminist epistemologists typically condemn purist frameworks as inimical to feminist aims. They argue that purist epistemology is divorced from the ineliminably social (...) and value-laden nature of our epistemic practices, and, moreover, that it abstracts away precisely those features that are needed to explain how power shapes knowledge. As they see it, purist frameworks simply lack the conceptual space needed to ask the right kinds of questions. Thus, they go in for “impurist” frameworks, which grant epistemic significance to “non-epistemic” factors, and so shed the confining constraints of purism. I turn the tables on the impurists—where they have connected purist norms with perniciously disengaged epistemology, I connect impurist norms with a creeping anxiety that is diminishing feminist epistemology’s political possibilities. First, I demonstrate that it’s increasingly common for impurist epistemologists to use moral considerations as a means to bypass the evidence, which betrays a lack of faith that the evidence will bear out feminist commitments. Second, I demonstrate that there is needless pessimism about our capacity to understand, as evidenced by the increasingly widespread idea that privileged social positions place robust limits on what people can know about oppression that they don’t personally experience. In both cases, moral and political considerations are invoked to give the illusion of being socially engaged, while in fact they allow people to give up on the difficult project of figuring things out. An extended case study on rape culture illustrates the stakes of doing inquiry that is only superficially socially engaged; I show that the two anxious traps I’ve identified have prevented contemporary feminist theorists from detecting and rooting out racist distortion in their accounts of rape culture because both traps interfere with a genuinely intersectional approach to feminist theorizing. (shrink)

In this article, we investigate how Big Tech companies have used the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic to increase their social, political, infrastructural, and epistemic power. We focus on four companies that were outspoken in their efforts to combat the virus: Alphabet (also known as Google), Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA). During the crisis, these companies evolved as adaptive entities that responded to the state of emergency by promptly rolling out various technological solutions, exemplifying what we call ‘pandemic solutionism’, that (...) is, the belief in the potential to solve the complex virological crisis of COVID-19 through the integration of digital tools. We identify the activities of GAFA in pandemic solutionism in five key areas that can be defined as the dominant realms of Big Tech’s involvement: (1) mapping COVID-19, (2) researching COVID-19, (3) tracing COVID-19, (4) treating COVID-19, and (5) managing COVID-19. In this context, we provide the first comprehensive overview of Big Tech’s multifaceted engagement in researching COVID-19 based on wearable technologies, which have been actively promoted as potentially beneficial tools for detecting the coronavirus since the beginning of the crisis. Additionally, through a critical mapping of the multiple activities of selected Big Tech players during the pandemic, it becomes evident how unexpected societal disruptions can lead to the increased dominance by these players. As we demonstrate, Big Tech companies have been able to present themselves as saviours capable of acting more promptly than the state, pushing pandemic solutionism and taking up tasks without being burdened by democratic deliberations. In doing so, they have manifested their infrastructural power, which frequently (such as with contact tracing) establishes the normative framework in which political and social actions take place. (shrink)

This paper shows the smart walking stick based on ultrasonic sensors and Arduino for outwardly debilitated individuals. There are roughly 37 million individuals over the globe who are visually impaired as indicated by the World Health Organization. Individuals with visual inabilities are regularly subjected to outer help which can be given by people, trained dogs, or electronic gadgets as supportive networks for basic assistance. Thus, this played as the motivation to develop a smart cane white stick to survive these restrictions (...) which includes ultrasonic sensors at particular positions to the stick that gave data about nature to the client by initiating the signal sound and vibrations. We proposed minimal effort and light weight framework structured with micro controller that processes signal and alerts the visually impaired person over any obstacle, water or dark areas through beeping sounds or vibrations. The system comprises of obstacle and moisture detection sensors for process of receiving, processing and sending signals to the alarm system which finally alerts the user for prompt action. The system was designed, programmed using Java language and tried for exactness by the visually impaired. Our gadget can recognize obstacle inside the separation of around 2m from the client. (shrink)

1 Introduction1 In the 1980s, hermeneutics was often incorporated into deconstructionism and literary theory. Rather than focus on authorial intentions, the nature of writing itself including codes used to construct meaning, socio-economic contexts and inequalities of power,2 Gadamer introduced a different perspective; the interplay between effects of history on a reader’s understanding and the tradition(s) handed down in writing. This interplay in which a reader’s prejudices are called into question and modified by the text in a fusion of understanding and (...) topic revitalized the study of the printed word. Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being also appealed to the post-modern antipathy toward modernity and metaphysics.3 If the truth and validity of interpretations are limited to communities of language, then our mode of being in history cannot but be historical. This point of view rendered Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutics vulnerable to the critique of moral and epistemological relativism. However, Gadamer’s theory of interpretation also stems from re-examination of the beginning of knowledge in the Pre-Socratics and Plato, and on this basis, is receptive to another dimension of inquiry than that which was trending in North America. -/- At the East-West Center, University of Hawai’i at Manoa in 1982, Chung-ying Cheng for the first time introduced onto-hermeneutics to an audience of esteemed philosophers including Li Zehou, Ren Jiyu, Feng Youlan, and Zhang Liwen.4 In contrast to schools of deconstruction and literary theory that had disengaged the interpreter from trans-historical sources of meaning and truth, Cheng explained that interpreters exist within a cosmological order inextricable from responsibility to harmonize Heaven and Earth in creative acts of interpretation. By integrating Chinese cosmology into hermeneutics through ontology, he tacitly challenged philosophers in the West to re-examine assumptions about humanity’s place in nature and by implication, Gadamer’s recovery of the beginnings of knowledge in Western philosophy. -/- Cheng’s Neo-Confucianism is inspired by the method and goals of Thomé H. Fang. The following words by Fang seem to prefigure, although in an indistinct and bundled way, aspects of Cheng’s philosophy including a Mencian theory of human nature, comprehensive observation, and creativity: “In the very process of living in concord with creative Nature, Man is charged with an ideal to be fully realized in the light of the principle of comprehensive harmony.”5 Like Fang, Cheng reinvigorates Chinese culture and language, but not solely in order to vindicate the insights of Neo-Confucianism. He has studied Western thought, from pragmatism and the analytic school to German idealism and phenomenology, to unlock and clarify philosophical concepts within the Yijing tradition and thereby render them intelligible to Anglophones. The result has been an awakening of Western scholars to the moral and cultural consequences of decoupling their thought from metaphysical foundations that are neither dogmatic nor doctrinal. -/- Not unlike the dialectic of Gadamer’s dialogue form, onto-generative hermeneutics integrates contrary positions on the same topic in order to blend both sides into a world philosophy, or as Cheng says, a “totalizing or integrative theory,”6 not to be confused with a theoretical rewording of a theory. On the contrary, the universal scope and relevance of hermeneutics stems from personal experience. Just as Gadamer, in response to faction and strife, immersed himself in Plato during the war years, and developed a method with which to harmonize opposites, so too, according to On-cho Ng, was Cheng moved by faction, strife and political persecution to develop a path toward unity.7 Gadamer taught at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and Cheng at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa among other institutions in North America. They facilitated trans-continental educational and cultural ties. Similar experiences yield similar insights irrespective of differences of time and place. Hence, authors in this issue who reside in Europe, China and North America, delineate the differences between Gadamer and Cheng, yet also, in light of Cheng’s onto-generative method and cosmology, develop integrative theories. Due to the page-budget restriction of the publisher, certain articles of this special theme will be subsequently published in the next issue. -/- 2 Integrative Theory This special issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy confirms a dimension of hermeneutics that Cheng has both motivated and inspired. The contributors do not abide by the conviction that since thought is mediated by language, interpretations cannot transcend culture. On the contrary, their research exemplifies the fruits of trans-historical onto-dialogical hermeneutics within limits defined by their field inquiry, organized into Parts I and II, around three themes: language, the philosophy of history and ethics. -/- Andrew Fuyarchuk introduces the theme of ontology in relation to Gadamer’s turn to language. Fuyarchuk argues that Chung-ying Cheng’s criticism of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is informed by Heidegger’s concept of Dasein and thereby overlooks how Gadamer’s Platonic-Pythagorean problem of the division between the One and Many is harmonized in the event of language, which in turn positions Gadamer in proximity to the presupposed grounds of receptivity in Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutics. Lauren Pfister’s contributing article addresses the year 2000 meeting between Cheng and Gadamer in Heidelberg and expands the transhistorical grounds of meaning in Gadamer to matters of theology. Pfister’s summary of the written Chinese record of their conversation indicates that Cheng does not address the role of Christian philosophy and hence, the role of the inner word in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. This is important not only for detecting changes in Cheng’s philosophical development, but also for modifying his hermeneutics along the lines of a living conversation, possibilities explored by Pfister in a sequel to the article submitted to this issue. Nevertheless, by raising the issue of how Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being extends possibilities in Cheng’s thought, Pfister anticipates the article by Katarina Gajdosova. She returns to the roots of Chinese thought during the Warring States period and broadens the meaning of names in recently excavated texts. Contrary to the conventions about how to understand terms, she appeals to both Heidegger’s ontology and Cheng’s notion of receptivity and creativity to reinterpret naming in relation to cosmology. Along the same lines, insofar as the event of Being is lingual, Jay Goulding captures its emergent structure in an evolving community of scholars and scholarship. He recalls his philosophical journey toward Cheng’s philosophy that begins in conversations with Gadamer at McMaster University in Hamilton, leads to Heidegger and Asian thought, expands into turning points with teachers and colleagues from various backgrounds that by increments contributed to Goulding’s formulation of “Daoist phenomenology.” -/- Although differing traditions guide their inquiries and research, Cheng and Gadamer recall the wisdom of the past to ameliorate the fragmentation in contemporary life. This leads them to re-examine the origins of philosophy; historical roots and thus sources of creative re-interpretations East and West whose affinities are developed in contributions by Hyun Höchsmann and Friederike Assandri. Höchsmann assesses convergences and divergences in the origins of Chinese and Western philosophy (Confucius and Socrates, the Yijing and Pre-Socratics) that culminates in pairing Gadamer’s understanding of paideia in the context of Plato’s political cosmology in the Timaeus with moral and social cultivation in The Western Inscription. She delineates the limits of this comparison which in turn justifies introducing Vattimo’s notion of locality. Assandri’s comparative analysis moves between India and China, Buddhism and Tang Daoism. Based on Gadamer’s argument that writing detaches concepts from their cultural moorings, she defines and applies three levels of understanding in onto-generative hermeneutics to Buddhist terms that were assimilated into the Benji Jing and in so doing clarifies essential dimensions of Daoism. -/- Contributions by Stephen Palmquist and Nicholas Brasovan position Cheng in relation to Kant and Gadamer by way of Aristotle’s ethics respectively. On the one hand, Palmquist plots Cheng’s evolving criticism of Kant’s moral philosophy and draws on crucial dimensions of Gadamer’s hermeneutics to reposition that criticism in a constructive relation to Kant’s emphasis on the philosophical conditions of morality while also indicating how religious dimensions of his thought answer Cheng’s concerns for lived moral action. For Palmquist, Gadamer enables a constructive criticism of Cheng. On the other hand, Brasovan compares Cheng’s Yijing-based account of moral deliberation with Gadamer’s Aristotelian-based ethics and reasons that in contrast to Cheng, Gadamer’s hermeneutical consciousness is disengaged from practical knowledge. For Brasovan, Cheng is a constructive critic of Gadamer. Palmquist and Brasovan’s divergent angles on Gadamer and Cheng map onto a dialectic of contrast and complementarity that constitutes the inner logic of Cheng’s philosophy. In other words, Gadamer and Cheng ought to be read alongside one another for the sake of removing discrepancies and contradictions, which constitutes the organic structure of their thinking. -/- 3 Our Mode of Being in History Is Not Historical The conversations between Cheng and Gadamer in this issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy pivot on language, philosophy of history and ethics within a comparative framework of analysis, but also explore the grounds that make the comparisons possible. Those grounds are informed by Chinese cosmology, and function to wrest Gadamer from the shadow of Heideggerian facticity and reposition him within the range of Cheng’s ideas about our place in nature that is embedded in his question about how mind emerges from inorganic matter.8 -/- For Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, human finitude, our ownmost individuating death ensures that hermeneutics is always open to the other as other, always on the way toward understanding the meaning of Being. To arrest the process in a concept of “the Absolute” cannot but represent someone’s point of view, and thereby render hermeneutics indistinguishable from ideology. However, insofar as finitude is defined by them in terms of an onto-theological concept of immorality, finitude is a metaphysical concept consistent with epistemologies and confuse beings with the meaning of Being. As a result, the celebrated political value of hermeneutics to always be on the way toward an understanding of the meaning of Being admits subtle variations on the same worldview that are insufficiently self-critical. -/- Gadamer scholars of Heidegger are right. A transformation in ethos and opening to the meaning of Being depends on awareness of finitude. Yet this awareness does not yield openness to more of the same, i.e., discourse structurally incapable of coming to unity but instead, for both Gadamer and Cheng, openness to a distinctly different ontological dimension of reality. As Sandra Wawrytko and So-Seong Park indicate,9 this ontological dimension is prefigured in the experience of being-as-a-whole or the totality of all possible relations in both Chinese totemic shamanistic rituals,10 and Greek Dionysian festivals.11 Through these religious experiences human ethos and therefore consciousness is expanded and elevated from being centered on one’s ownmost concerns toward an affinity with all sentient beings from insects and plants to animals. The channel for this affinity is an auditory disposition and hence, the emotions, compassion, and feeling response. -/- The capacity for an auditory disposition, or as Gadamer calls it, listening consciousness to respond to the inter-relationality and therefore inherent balance of nature is developed through music, song and dance of the religious rituals and festivals. They facilitate the unity of mind with nature. This use of music, that transforms ordinary consciousness, explains Cheng’s emphasis on the receptivity of feeling response in comprehensive observation, and Gadamer’s emphasis on openness to the other in attunement. However, an auditory disposition characteristic of pre-literate oral cultures that reveals the “All” need not rely on religion. As theorists about the evolution of language have explained,12 modern languages preserve their pre-historical past in music or prosody. That is to say, the song and dance that revealed the totality of inter-related beings to an ethos of comprehensive observation and attunement toward beings in classical civilizations is retained in the back-and-forth movement or rhythm of the dialogue form. Our mode of being in history is a mode of being in nature – through the music of language. -/- While alerting the reader to the limits of a nominalist interpretation, Gadamer expresses the inner law of the nature as follows: “in perishing there is always becoming, and in becoming there is always perishing.”13 Considered in process, opposites generate and blend into each other. This law of nature applies to everything.14 Hence, in a manner comparable to Pfister’s concluding insights, onto-dialogical hermeneutics is not only open to discrete events of otherness but moreover, to the moving structure of reality expressed, as Gajdosova suggests, in the existential moment of naming. Considered as interplay of tension and resolution with a life of its own, the dialectic of a dialogue is self-similar to the way in which an organism grows (by instinct). There is, therefore, a sense in which the art of interpretation extends the human mind into the eternal cycles of nature such that we participate in the articulation of the inner telos/homeostasis toward which all beings strive and importantly for Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, within the material limits of energy to which our embodied minds are self-evidently subject. In mortality there is always immortality. (shrink)

Abstract—Traffic clog is a serious issue in the majority of the urban areas over the world and it has turned into a bad dream for the residents. It is brought about by postponement in flag, improper planning of traffic flagging and so on. The postponement of traffic light is hard coded and it doesn't depend on traffic. In this manner for streamlining traffic control, there is an expanding request in precise snappy programmed framework. This paper is intended to build (...) up a thickness based powerful traffic flag control. The flag timing changes naturally on detecting the traffic thickness at the junction. The microcontroller utilized in this undertaking is ARDUINO. The framework contains IR sensors (transmitter and collector) which will be mounted. It gets initiated and gets the flag as the vehicles passes near to it. (shrink)

Suppose that, while you are dreamlessly asleep, the sizes of and distances between all objects in the world are uniformly multiplied. Would you be able to detect this global inflation? Intuitively, no. But would your experience of size remain accurate? Intuitively, yes. On these grounds, some have concluded that our experiences do not represent size and instead represent modes of presentation of size. We are, in this sense, ‘cut off’ from the sizes of things in the external world. Here, I (...) argue for a more modest conclusion: undetectable inflation reveals that our experiences represent only relative size. Call this view austere phenomenal relativism––or austere relativism, for short. I develop a framework to contrast austere relativism with its competitors, give an extended argument for the view, and then defuse a potential dilemma concerning the units in which our experiences represent size. (shrink)

Suppose that, while you are dreamlessly asleep, the sizes of and distances between all objects in the world are uniformly multiplied. Would you be able to detect this global inflation? Intuitively, no. But would your experience of size remain accurate? Intuitively, yes. On these grounds, some have concluded that our experiences do not represent size and instead represent modes of presentation of size. We are, in this sense, ‘cut off’ from the sizes of things in the external world. Here, I (...) argue for a more modest conclusion: undetectable inflation reveals that our experiences represent only relative size. Call this view austere phenomenal relativism––or austere relativism, for short. I develop a framework to contrast austere relativism with its competitors, give an extended argument for the view, and then defuse a potential dilemma concerning the units in which our experiences represent size. (shrink)

Abstract— Malware behavior was and still is a key solution, for top security appliances, to monitor algorithmic approaches when performing regular security tasks; scan, detection, cleaning and removal. And even for early actions; when building a security framework and securing all possible access points to all data sources. The first suspect in such scenario is the inner residents; appliances and system functions. Numerous are available at each operating system, and thus, the security is raised and set up frequently (...) with all nowadays, yet, still we are able to identify black wholes and back doors, even with the high security approaches applied at different levels and layers. In this research we are presenting an inevitable security thread, we face frequently in different scenarios, that are the key definition for successful security trespass, which we secure with an ameliorated security shell skeleton. Though the sysinternals are doing sufficient services to help administrators accomplish security tasks; automating administration within large scale environments. (shrink)

This is one of the best popular cosmology books ever written and Guth is now (2016) a top physics Professor at MIT. He tells the extremely complex story of inflation and related areas of particle physics in such an absorbing style that it reads like a detective novel-in fact, it is a detective novel-how he and others found out how the universe started! The interweaving of his personal story and that of many colleagues along with their photos and many wonderfully (...) clear diagrams allows just the right amount of relaxation from the intensity of the physics. In places the style reminds one of Watson´s famous book ``The Double Helix``. He tells how his work on magnetic monopoles and spontaneous symmetry breaking led to the discovery of the inflationary theory of the very early universe (ca. 10 to minus 35 seconds!). -/- Along the way you will learn many gems that should stay with you a long time such as: the observed universe(e.g., everything the Hubble telescope etc. can see out to ca. 15 billion light years when the universe began) is likely just a vanishingly tiny part of the entire inhomogeneous universe which is about 10 to the 23rd times larger; the big bang probably took place simultaneously and homogeneously in our observed universe; there probably have been and will continue to be an infinite number of big bangs in an infinite number of universes for an infinite time; when a bang happens, everything(space, time, all the elements) from the previous universe are destroyed; the stretching of space can happen at speeds much greater than the speed of light; our entire observed universe lies in a single bubble out of an endless number so there may be trillions of trillions just in our own entire(pocket) universe(and there may be an endless number of such); none of these infinite number of universes interact-i.e., we can never find out anything about the others; each universe started with its own big bang and will eventually collapse to create a new big bang; all this implies that the whole universe is fractal in nature and thus infinitely regresses to ever more universes(which can lead one to thinking of it as a giant hologram); disagreements between the endless(hundreds at least) variations of inflation are sometimes due to lack of awareness that different definitions of time are being used; some theories suggest that there was a first big bang but we can never find out what happened before it; nevertheless it appears increasingly plausible that there was no beginning but rather an eternal cycle of the destruction and creation, each being the beginning of spacetime for that universe; to start a universe you need about 25g of matter in a 10 to minus 26cm diameter sphere with a false vacuum and a singularity(white hole). -/- He deliberately spends little time on the endless variants of inflation such as chaotic, expanded and supernatural inflation or on dark matter´, supersymmetry and string theory, though they were well known at the time as you can find by reading other books such as Michio Kaku´s `Hyperspace` (see my review) and countless others. Of course much has happened since this book appeared but it still serves as an excellent background volume so cheap now it’s free for the cost of mailing. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019). (shrink)

Abstract: Sarcasm is commonly used in news and detecting sarcasm in headline news is challenging for humans and thus for computers. The media regularly seem to engage sarcasm in their news headline to get the attention of people. However, people find it tough to detect the sarcasm in the headline news, hence receiving a mistaken idea about that specific news and additionally spreading it to their friends, colleagues, etc. Consequently, an intelligent system that is able to distinguish between can sarcasm (...) none sarcasm automatically is very important. The aim of the study is to build a sarcasm model that detect headline news using machine and deep learning and attempt to understand how a computer learns the patterns of sarcasm. The dataset used in this study was collected from Kaggle depository. We examined 21 algorithms of machine learning and one deep learning algorithm for detecting sarcasm in headline news. The evaluation metric used in this study are Accuracy, F1-measure, Recall, Precision, and Time needed for training and evaluation. The deep learning model achieved accuracy (95.27%), recall (96.62%), precision (94.15%), F1-score (95.37%) and time needed to train the mode (400 seconds), with loss of around 0.3398. However, the algorithm of machine learning that achieved the highest F1-Score is Passive Aggressive Classifier. It was the top classier for sarcasm detection among the machine learning algorithms with accuracy (95.50%), recall (96.09 %), precision (94.30%), F1-score (95.19%) and time needed to train the mode (0.31 seconds). (shrink)

Abstract: Sarcasm is commonly used in news and detecting sarcasm in headline news is challenging for humans and thus for computers. The media regularly seem to engage sarcasm in their news headline to get the attention of people. However, people find it tough to detect the sarcasm in the headline news, hence receiving a mistaken idea about that specific news and additionally spreading it to their friends, colleagues, etc. Consequently, an intelligent system that is able to distinguish between can sarcasm (...) none sarcasm automatically is very important. The aim of the study is to build a sarcasm model that detect headline news using machine and deep learning and attempt to understand how a computer learns the patterns of sarcasm. The dataset used in this study was collected from Kaggle depository. We examined 21 algorithms of machine learning and one deep learning algorithm for detecting sarcasm in headline news. The evaluation metric used in this study are Accuracy, F1-measure, Recall, Precision, and Time needed for training and evaluation. The deep learning model achieved accuracy (95.27%), recall (96.62%), precision (94.15%), F1-score (95.37%) and time needed to train the mode (400 seconds), with loss of around 0.3398. However, the algorithm of machine learning that achieved the highest F1-Score is Passive Aggressive Classifier. It was the top classier for sarcasm detection among the machine learning algorithms with accuracy (95.50%), recall (96.09 %), precision (94.30%), F1-score (95.19%) and time needed to train the mode (0.31 seconds). (shrink)

Five aspects of visual change detection are reviewed. The first concerns the concept of change itself, in particular the ways it differs from the related notions of motion and difference. The second involves the various methodological approaches that have been developed to study change detection; it is shown that under a variety of conditions observers are often unable to see large changes directly in their field of view. Next, it is argued that this “change blindness” indicates that focused (...) attention is needed to detect change, and that this can help map out the nature of visual attention. The fourth aspect concerns how these results affect our understanding of visual perception—for example, the implication that a sparse, dynamic representation underlies much of our visual experience. Finally, a brief discussion is presented concerning the limits to our current understanding of change detection. (shrink)

The recent emergence of machine-manipulated media raises an important societal question: How can we know whether a video that we watch is real or fake? In two online studies with 15,016 participants, we present authentic videos and deepfakes and ask participants to identify which is which. We compare the performance of ordinary human observers with the leading computer vision deepfake detection model and find them similarly accurate, while making different kinds of mistakes. Together, participants with access to the model’s (...) prediction are more accurate than either alone, but inaccurate model predictions often decrease participants’ accuracy. To probe the relative strengths and weaknesses of humans and machines as detectors of deepfakes, we examine human and machine performance across video-level features, and we evaluate the impact of preregistered randomized interventions on deepfake detection. We find that manipulations designed to disrupt visual processing of faces hinder human participants’ performance while mostly not affecting the model’s performance, suggesting a role for specialized cognitive capacities in explaining human deepfake detection performance. -/- . (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines or software that work and reacts like humans, some of the computer activities with artificial intelligence are designed to include speech, recognition, learning, planning and problem solving. Deep learning is a collection of algorithms used in machine learning, it is part of a broad family of methods used for machine learning that are based on learning representations of data. Deep learning is used as a (...) technique to produce brain tumor detection and classification models using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) imaging for rapid and easy detection and identification of brain tumor. In this thesis, some ways and mechanisms will be reviewed to use deep learning techniques to produce a model for brain tumor detection. The goal is to find a good and effective way to detect brain tumor based on MRI to help the brain doctor in making decisions easily, accurately and rapidly. A recent report by the World Health Organization in February 2018 showed that the death rate from brain cancer or central nervous system (CNS) is the highest in the Asian continent. It is important to detect cancer early so that many of these lives can be saved. The model has been designed and implemented, including a dataset which consist of 10,000 images for brain tumor detection through the use of Deep learning algorithms based on neural networks. For testing, we have used our model, Inception, VGG16, MobileNet and ResNet models. The f-score accuracy we got for each model was as follows: Our model was 98.28, VGG16 was 99.86%, ResNet50 was 98.14%, MobileNet was 88,98%, and InceptionV3 was 99.88%. (shrink)

In his recent article "Carnapian Frameworks" (Synthese, 2021), Gabriel Broughton criticizes my discussions of Carnap on ontology and puts forward his own interpretation of what Carnap’s external/internal distinction amounts to. I here first argue that Broughton’s main claims about me are based on a misinterpretation. Then I turn to some issues of broader interest. I argue that Broughton’s own, potentially interesting interpretation of Carnap’s external/internal distinction does not work. And in light of Broughton’s discussion I present a sharpened version of (...) what I have earlier said about Carnap’s this distinction. (shrink)

COVID-19 often manifests with different outcomes in different patients, highlighting the complexity of the host-pathogen interactions involved in manifestations of the disease at the molecular and cellular levels. In this paper, we propose a set of postulates and a framework for systematically understanding complex molecular host-pathogen interaction networks. Specifically, we first propose four host-pathogen interaction (HPI) postulates as the basis for understanding molecular and cellular host-pathogen interactions and their relations to disease outcomes. These four postulates cover the evolutionary dispositions (...) involved in HPIs, the dynamic nature of HPI outcomes, roles that HPI components may occupy leading to such outcomes, and HPI checkpoints that are critical for specific disease outcomes. Based on these postulates, an HPI Postulate and Ontology (HPIPO) framework is proposed to apply interoperable ontologies to systematically model and represent various granular details and knowledge within the scope of the HPI postulates, in a way that will support AI-ready data standardization, sharing, integration, and analysis. As a demonstration, the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework were applied to study COVID-19 with the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), leading to a novel approach to rational design of drug/vaccine cocktails aimed at interrupting processes occurring at critical host-coronavirus interaction checkpoints. Furthermore, the host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) relevant to COVID-19 were predicted and evaluated based on prior knowledge of curated PPIs and domain-domain interactions, and how such studies can be further explored with the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework is discussed. (shrink)

Today’s everyone normal life can include a normal rate of playing computer games or video games; but what about an excessive or compulsive use of video games that impact on our life? Our kids, who usually spend a lot of time in playing video games will likely have a trouble in paying attention to their school lessons. In this paper, we introduce an expert system to help users in getting the correct diagnosis of the health problem of video game addictions (...) that range from (Musculoskeletal issues, Vision problems and Obesity). Moreover, this expert system provides information about the problem and tell us how we can solve it. SL5 Object expert system language was used to design and implement the expert system. (shrink)