Based on questions about herself, the character Motoko, in the film Ghost in the Shell, wonders about her continuity over time and her human condition and as a person. Similarly, it is possible to entertain some scenarios in which the addition of elements external to the body produces a similar tension with respect to human persons. One of these scenarios is that of natural cyborgs, as understood by Andy Clark. Based on the notion of natural cyborgs, through the coupling of (...) elements external to the body, not as artificial implants, but within a systemic whole for the realization of cognitive processes and mental states, it is possible to question the maintenance of personal identity and status as a person, as these external elements are increasingly dependent. This is especially true with Alzheimer’s patients. In this work, some notions are minimally clarified, such as extended mind, natural cyborgs and personal identity, which support the further discussion on the possibility of maintaining the personal identity and the status as a person for Alzheimer’s patients, along the progressive process of cognitive deterioration, through the understanding that they are natural cyborgs. (shrink)

In this article it is defended that the notion known as “The mark of the cognitive” is better characterized as a process that performs the function of generating intelligent behavior, in a flexible and adaptive way, capable of adapting to circumstances, given it is a context sensitive process. For that, some relevant definitions of cognition are examined. In the end, it is pointed out that the definition of the mark of cognition as a context-sensitive process takes into account several factors (...) that were added as constitutive parts of cognitive phenomena over the years, especially the 4E Cognition, which cannot be satisfactorily accommodated alongside the preceding notions of cognition. Accordingly, this essay shouldn’t be mistaken merely as an exercise in intellectual history, but as a brief and accessible attempt to advance the debate. (shrink)

Este livro é o resultado do II Encontro Nacional de Pesquisadores em Filosofia e Psicanálise, realizado em 2006 na Universidade de São Paulo, e reúne vários pesquisadores em torno de três temas - a filosofia após Freud, os problemas ...

In this essay, I discuss in detail two of the earliest such documentaries: Death Mills (1945), directed by Billy Wilder; and Nazi Concentration Camps (1945), directed by George Stevens. Both film-makers were able to get direct footage of the newly-liberated concentration camps from the U.S. Army. Wilder served as a Colonel in the U.S. Army’s Psychological Warfare department in 1945 and was tasked with producing a documentary on the death camps as well as helping to restart Germany’s film industry. I (...) next review the great French Holocaust documentary Night and Fog (1955), directed by Alain Resnais. This was a widely acclaimed film, winning the Prix Jean Vigo in 1956. Resnais employed a camp survivor (Jean Cayrol) to write the dialogue, and it is powerful, indeed, truly lyrical in places. The last film I review in the essay is a generally overlooked British Thames Television documentary, Genocide: 1941-1945 (1974), directed by Michael Darlow (and narrated by Sir Laurence Oliver). It was the first of the major Holocaust documentaries to focus on the point that the Nazi genocide targeted first and foremost the Jewish people, and to explore the development of Nazi racial theory, and the rise of the SS. (shrink)

In this paper, I reject that animal reasoning, negation in particular, necessarily involves the representation of absences, as suggested by Bermúdez (2003, 2006, 2007), since this would still work as a logical negation (unavailable for non-linguistic creatures). False belief, pretense, and communication experiments show that non-human animals (at least some primates) have difficulties representing absent entities or properties. I offer an alternative account resorting to the sub-symbolic similarity judgments proposed by Vigo & Allen (2009) and expectations: animal proto-negation takes (...) place through the incompatibility between an expected and the actual representation. Finally, I propose that the expectation paradigm be extrapolated to other experi-ments in cognitive psychology (both with pre-linguistic children and animals) in order to design fair experiments that test other minds considering their true abilities. (shrink)