The Zhuangzi begins with Peng, a soaring bird transformed from a bounded fish, which is the first metaphor that points beyond limited standpoints to a higher point of view. The transformation is one-way and symbolizes that there is a higher viewpoint to attain which affords mental freedom and the clarity and scope of great vision. Under the alternate thesis of constant transformation, values and understandings must ceaselessly transform and collapse. All cyclical transformations must collapse into skeptical relativism and confusion. But (...) Peng does not turn back into a fish, and the awakened sage does not fall into a slumber of ignorance and confusion. It is only the thesis of a one-way transformation that leaves the sage in a state of knowledge. (shrink)

Zhuangzi chooses a butterfly as a metaphor for transformation, a sighted creature whose inherent nature contains, and symbolizes, the potential for transformation from a less valued state to a more valued state. If transformation is not to be valued; if, according to a recent article by Jung Lee, 'there is no implication that it is either possible or desirable for the living to awake from their dream', why not tell a story of a mole awakening from a (...) class='Hi'>dream? This would be a more perfect story. There would be no point of a mole awakening since (setting aside tactile, olfactory, auditory and taste sensations for the purpose of the example), there is no way to distinguish between the world of the mole's imagination and the real world that is forever unavailable to a mole. In addition, Zhuangzi relates the story of the coming of a great sage in which it is clearly stated that 'Only at the ultimate awakening shall we know that this is the ultimate dream'. Such textual evidence both from the choice of metaphors and evidential passages indicates that the message of the Zhuangzi is not epistemological relativity, but one of transformation from a state of intellectual blindness to a state of true understanding. (shrink)

I argue that the main theme of the Zhuangzi is that of spiritual transformation. If there is no such theme in the Zhuangzi, it becomes an obscure text with relativistic viewpoints contradicting statements and stories designed to lead the reader to a state of spiritual transformation. I propose to reveal the coherence of the deep structure of the text by clearly dividing relativistic statements designed to break down fixed viewpoints from statements, anecdotes, paradoxes and metaphors designed to lead the reader (...) to a state of spiritual transformation. Without such an analysis, its profound stories such as the butterfly dream and the Great Sage dream will blatantly contradict each other and leave us bereft of the wisdom they presage. Unlike the great works of poetic and philosophic wisdom such as the Dao de Jing and the Symposium, the Zhuangzi will be reduced to a virtually unintelligible, lengthy, disjointed literary ditty, a potpourri of paradoxical puzzles, puns and parables, obscure philosophical conundrums, monstrous interlocutors and historical personages used as mouthpieces authoritatively arguing on behalf of viewpoints humorously opposite to what they historically held. (shrink)

I present an affirmation of nothingness in the humor of Zhuang Zi 莊子. This essay begins with two images that present a playful transgression of perspectives: the butterfly dream and the discussion over the Hao river. I dwell on these transgressions to highlight the challenge for each to question one’s perspectives and to shift its grounding from epistemic to aesthetic value. Such a sensitivity suggests a mindfulness of the transformation of things 物化. This reinforces reality’s ephemerality, and I, (...) following David Chai, point what lies behind this as the non-being of nothingness 無無. The centrality of the Dao 道 qua nothingness is mirrored by a Daoist who becomes sensitive to the transformation of things and who ultimately undercomes reality, i.e., decenters oneself. This type of existence is what it means to be zhenuinly 真 pretending, which Zhuang Zi does, manifested by the humor in his work. (shrink)

This article offers a meta-analysis of contemporary approaches aimed at resolving the internal, relativistic-non-relativistic tension within the text of the Chuang-Tzu. In the first section, the four most commonly applied approaches are unpacked and evaluated, ranging from relativistic approaches such as hard relativism and soft relativism, to approaches that acknowledge both relativism and non-relativism, as well as others which acknowledge neither of the two perspectives (relativism and non-relativism). After demonstrating the immanent difficulties these four types of approaches encounter, the latter (...) section of this paper puts forward a different philosophical solution known as asymmetrical relativism. This novel approach preserves textual evidence for both relativistic and non-relativistic attitudes within the Chuang-Tzu by proposing that the mind engages in relativism insofar as it is in a state of ignorance; en route to enlightenment, however, value-laden discourse and pedagogical heuristics are nonetheless still employed as instruments for the mind to transcend its own ignorance. (shrink)

In this paper, we present two proofs of the reciprocal butterfly theorem. The statement of the butterfly theorem is: Let us consider a chord PQ of midpoint M in the circle Ω(O). Through M, two other chords AB and CD are drawn, such that A and C are on the same side of PQ. We denote by X and U the intersection of AD respectively CB with PQ. Consequently, XM = YM. For the proof of this theorem, see (...) [1]. The reciprocal of the butterfly theorem has the following statement: In the circle Ω(O), let us consider the chords PQ, AB and CD which are concurrent in the point M≠O, such as the points A and C are on the same side of the line PQ. Let X and Y respectively be the intersections of the chord PQ with AD and BC respectively. If XM = YM, then M is the middle of the chord PQ. (shrink)

Since the 1980s chaos has been the subject of great interest both in scientific research and in public consciousness. Chaos as played roles in books and movies such as Jurassic Park and Bellwether and has been the subject of numerous popularizations. But what is chaos—better characterized as chaotic dynamics—really? How much of an impact does it have on everyday life? This book explores these questions and more, introducing you to the basics of chaos as mathematicians and scientists study it and (...) apply it. There are a lot of buzzwords surrounding chaotic dynamics such as “butterfly effect” and “strange attractors,” and much discussion about whether chaos has shattered scientific dreams of a predictable world. This book will help you understand these buzzwords and their excitement, what limitations there are for predictability, and the wisdom scientists have learned from studying chaos. You will come away with a deeper appreciation of the intricacy and surprising order of our world. (shrink)

The Concept of Life and Death of Chuang-tzu have inherited and developed Confucianism and Taoism thoughts, establishing Ontological foundation of "Life - Body", distinguishing the transcendental concept of "Dead Heart" and the empirical concept of "Death Body", as well as proposing the thought of "Equivalence of Life and Death" finally. The logic Reasoning of Chuang-tzu "Equivalence of Life and Death", start from constructing the equal status of "Life" and “Death" from ontological argument. Life and Death then are reduced to be (...) a natural phenomenon to dispel its mystery. With emphasizing the social connotation of life and death, the difference between them has been removed, and finally the Thought experiment of "Chuang-tzu dreaming butterfly" has deepened the idea of "Equivalence of Life and Death". The Ideological Characteristic of the Concept of Life and Death of Chuang-tzu mainly reflects in the aspects of Ontology, Epistemology and Ethical practice. (shrink)

Review of Daniel Callahan, The Troubled Dream of Life.

Unlike identity physicalism, ground physicalism does not achieve the physicalist dream. It faces the T-shirt problem for ground physicalism (Pautz 2014; Schaffer this volume; Rubenstein ms). In the case of insentient nature, it may be able to get by with small handful of very general ground laws to explain the emergence of nonfundamental objects and properties – for example, a few “principle of plenitude”. But I argue that for the case consciousness it will require a separate huge raft of (...) special, anomalous psychophysical ground laws. So it is just as complex and nonuniform as dualism. (shrink)

Even the ancient Greeks defined the Dream as a happy πόλις, Heraclitus - κόσμοπόλις, Socrates - ethical anthropology, Plato - Good, Hegel - absolute idea, Marx - communism... All of Humanity has made a lot of its survival experience for the realization of Dreams. Without any plan, to the touch to, only by the method of "trial and error" it aspired the Dream on unknown roads, which often stymied deadlocks. Among the many achieved results of Humanity by Plato's (...) prompts, the authors singled out "εἶδος", "reasonable" Numbers (1,2 ... 10), five of which (1,2 ... 5) were examples of Marx's formations. The found "εἶδος" lined up themselves and show the possibility of further building (11.12 ... 16) of the World Reason of God. This is Plato's "single right path", unambiguously leading to the universal Dream of Humanity – Truth of Good. (shrink)

Review of Daniel Callahan's book The Troubled Dream of Life.

Atwater v. Lago Vista is a stand-alone case in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Often basic Fourth Amendment jurisprudence builds off other case law. There is a clear buildup regarding the exclusionary rule from Weeks v. United States (1914) to Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States (1920) to the expansion of “the fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine to Mapp v. Ohio (1961) incorporating U.S. Constitution the Fourth Amendment to the states. -/- Likewise, there are cases building up from the incorporation into (...) the states from United States v. Leon (1984) to Arizona v. Evans (1995), expanding Fourth Amendment case law and rights. The cavalcade of these cases somewhat plays a ballet of expanding and contracting the rights in certain circumstances. But the rights build off and limit each other in a cognizable method. -/- Atwater v. Lago Vista is not based on such a cavalcade of cases. It is a stand-alone case at best citing 1600s case law, norms, and rules from before the founding of the United States. Granted, the United States adopted much of the English jurisprudence in the founding of the United States. (shrink)

In an online, participatory class, we interpreted The Dream of the Tabby Cats knowing nothing of the dreamer beyond age and gender, and having none of the dreamer’s associations. Our interpretation included a series of predictions about the dreamer. When it was complete, we asked the bringer of the dream (who had until then been silent and was not visible to us) to give us more information about the dreamer. Later the dreamer herself gave us more information. Of (...) six predictions four were confirmed. The dreamer’s apartment is repeatedly disturbed and, each time, a new cat appears. This record is another iteration of an experiment that will be described more fully in the paper The Dream of the Six-Legged Dog: An Experimental System to Test Meaning, soon to be published. This iteration repeats and confirms the evidence given in that paper. AUDIO RECORD OF CLASS AVAILABLE: link is on first page of the paper you download from this page. (shrink)

In an online, participatory class, we interpreted 'The Dream of the Three Orcas' knowing nothing of the dreamer beyond age and gender, and having none of the dreamer’s associations. -/- Our interpretation included nine predictions about the dreamer. When it was complete, we asked the bringer of the dream (who had not been present before our interpretation was complete) to give us more information about the dreamer. Later the dreamer also gave us more information. Our predictions were mostly (...) confirmed. The dreamer is standing on beach when huge orca-like floats appear. -/- This record is another iteration of an experiment that is described more fully in the paper 'The Dream of the Six-Legged Dog: An Experimental System that Tests Symbolic Meaning,' soon to be published. This iteration repeats and confirms the evidence given in that paper. ONLINE AUDIO RECORD OF ENTIRE ORCAS' CLASS : link is on title page of the paper you can download here. (shrink)

Although the dream narrative, of (bio)logical necessity, originates with the dreamer, s/he typically does not know this. For the dreamer, the dream world is the real world. In this article I argue that this nightly misattribution is best explained in terms of the concept of mental ownership (e.g., Albahari, 2006; Klein, 2015a; Lane, 2012). Specifically, the exogenous nature of the dream narrative is the result of an individual assuming perspectival, but not personal, ownership of content s/he authored (...) (i.e., “The content in my head is not mine. Therefore it must be peripherally perceived”). Situating explanation within a theoretical space designed to address questions pertaining to the experienced origins of conscious content has a number of salutatory consequences. For example, it promotes predictive fecundity by bringing to light empirical generalizations whose presence otherwise might have gone unnoticed (e.g., the severely limited role of mental time travel within the dream narrative). -/- . (shrink)

Commentary on research on butterflies' eyespots as a model in evolutionary developmental biology.

Cognitive theories claim, whereas non-cognitive theories deny, that cognitive access is constitutive of phenomenology. Evidence in favor of non-cognitive theories has recently been collected by Block and is based on the high capacity of participants in partial-report experiments compared to the capacity of the working memory. In reply, defenders of cognitive theories have searched for alternative interpretations of such results that make visual awareness compatible with the capacity of the working memory; and so the conclusions of such experiments remain controversial. (...) Instead of entering the debate between alternative interpretations of partial-report experiments, this paper offers an alternative line of research that could settle the discussion between cognitive and non-cognitive theories of consciousness. Here I relate the neural correlates of cognitive access to empirical research into the neurophysiology of dreams; cognitive access seems to depend on the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. However, that area is strongly deactivated during sleep; a period when we entertain conscious experiences: dreams. This approach also avoids the classic objection that consciousness should be inextricably tied to reportability or it would fall outside the realm of science. (shrink)

A theory of the structure and cognitive function of the human imagination that attempts to do justice to traditional intuitions about its psychological centrality is developed, largely through a detailed critique of the theory propounded by Colin McGinn. Like McGinn, I eschew the highly deflationary views of imagination, common amongst analytical philosophers, that treat it either as a conceptually incoherent notion, or as psychologically trivial. However, McGinn fails to develop his alternative account satisfactorily because (following Reid, Wittgenstein and Sartre) he (...) draws an excessively sharp, qualitative distinction between imagination and perception, and because of his flawed, empirically ungrounded conception of hallucination. His arguments in defense of these views are rebutted in detail, and the traditional, passive, Cartesian view of visual perception, upon which several of them implicitly rely, is criticized in the light of findings from recent cognitive science and neuroscience. It is also argued that the apparent intuitiveness of the passive view of visual perception is a result of mere historical contingency. An understanding of perception (informed by modern visual science) as an inherently active process enables us to unify our accounts of perception, mental imagery, dreaming, hallucination, creativity, and other aspects of imagination within a single coherent theoretical framework. (shrink)

Dreaming is a communicative activity between the most sensitive archive of the enregistered experience of life on the earth, the brain, and the most plastic medium for the discovery and practice of meaning, the mind or culture. Both love and war have been made on the basis of dreams, not to mention scientific discoveries. In ancient Greece dreams were medicinal parts of curative sleeping or "incubation" rites in the temple of Aesculapius, and many psychoanalytic physicians today still consider dreams as (...) possessing therapeutic potential. The ethnographic literature gives ample testimony to the great significance accorded to dreams by all of the world cultures. Dreams form a rich store of ethnographic evidence, and their indigenous interpretations can often illuminate the central issues and conflicts of a people otherwise hidden from obvious view. Given these facts, plus the physiological facts that the dream process itself involves deeply-rooted material brain functions, and that rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, which is the key indicator of human dreaming, is shared by all mammals, it remains strange how little attention is given to dreaming as a formative aspect of human evolution and culture. -/- This essay addresses dreaming as a formative aspect of human evolution and culture by viewing dreaming as a borderland between biology and culture, a thoroughly social, yet private experience. Dreaming not only highlights the "cultic" roots of culture—the spontaneous impulse to meaning—but also illustrates one of the ways in which the technics of the biosocial human body itself form the primary source of culture. I show why dreaming, although private, is a thoroughly cultural, biological, communicative activity. -/- Culture and biology are often treated by social scientists as though they were oil and water, not to be mixed. I should inform the culture theorist at the start that I am fully aware of the assumed nature-culture dichotomy, and that I reject it. I do so not because I am a sociobiologist, quite the contrary, rather because I am a semiotician, and my studies of signs have led me toward a critical reconstruction of the concepts of nature and culture. In what follows I beg the reader's patience, since I will draw from diverse materials and project some speculative hypotheses in places in order to make my argument. -/- . (shrink)

The article considers the problem of images and the role they play in our reflection turning to evidence provided by two seemingly very distant theories of mind together with two sorts of corresponding visions: dreams as analyzed by Freud who claimed that they are pictures of our thoughts, and their mechanical counterparts produced by neural networks designed for object recognition and classification. Freud’s theory of dreams has largely been ignored by philosophers interested in cognition, most of whom focused solely on (...) the linguistic incarnation of thoughts, but even though commonly neglected by respectable theories of thinking, dream images may prove to be the key to the black box of thought. As argued in this article, when seen from the right perspective and approached with the right set of questions, oneiric visions yield groundbreaking insights into the mechanism of how concepts and judgments are formed. Support for this conclusion comes from a tradition seemingly remote, if not opposed to psychoanalysis: the mechanical model of the mind conceived by information sciences and embodied in the form of artificial neural nets which mirror the activity of human visual cortex producing visions strikingly similar to those created by the sleeping mind. These purely mechanical, artificial ‘dreams’ constitute byproducts of algorithms designed for object recognition and classification, which, as I shall argue, reveals the true purpose of our own oneiric visual formations. Just like their mechanical counterparts produced by neural networks, condensations and displacements encountered in dreams are in fact visual universals. (shrink)

In an online, participatory class, we interpreted The Dream of Mercury knowing nothing of the dreamer and having none of the dreamer’s associations. Our interpretation included a series of falsifiable predictions about the dreamer. When it was complete, we asked the bringer of the dream (who had until then been silent and was not visible to us) to give us more information about the dreamer. The dreamer is instructed to confront a friendship he had abandoned and, when he (...) does so, is frightened by the inner life he discovers. This record is another iteration of an experiment that will be described more fully in the paper 'The Dream of the Six-Legged Dog: An Experimental System to Test Meaning,' soon to be published. This iteration repeats and confirms the evidence given in that paper. AN AUDIO-RECORD OF COMPLETE CLASS: link is given on first page of the paper you download here. (shrink)

In an online, participatory class, we interpreted The Dream of the White House knowing nothing of the dreamer and having none of the dreamer’s associations. Our interpretation included a series of falsifiable predictions about the dreamer. When it was complete, we asked the bringer of the dream (who had until then been silent and was not visible to us) to give us more information about the dreamer. Of 17 predictions 15 were confirmed. The dreamer suffers dislocation and loss (...) until she asks a female manager for help. This record is another iteration of an experiment that will be described more fully in the paper 'The Dream of the Six-Legged Dog: An Experimental System to Test Meaning,' soon to be published. This iteration repeats and confirms the evidence given in that paper. More than any of the other iterations, it details how talk therapy promotes personality reorganization. It then supports these observations with experimental evidence. Because it demonstrates how talk therapy works, this iteration supports talk therapy against pressure from the drug and insurance corporations. AUDIO-RECORDING OF WHOLE CLASS: link provided on first page of the paper you download here. (shrink)

In an online, participatory class, we interpreted The Dream of the Flaming Sword knowing nothing of the dreamer beyond age and gender, and having none of the dreamer’s associations. Our interpretation included a series of predictions about the dreamer. When it was complete, we asked the bringer of the dream (who had until then been silent and who also gave no visual feedback to our discussion) to give us more information about the dreamer. Eight months later the bringer (...) gave us further information from the dreamer. Our predictions were mostly confirmed. In the dream, the dreamer’s identity is repeatedly questioned. -/- This record is another iteration of an experiment that is described more fully in the paper The Dream of the Six-Legged Dog, soon to be published. This iteration repeats and confirms the evidence given in that paper. -/- AUDIO RECORD OF THE CLASS ABOUT THE FLAMING SWORD: link is on the title page of the paper you can download here. (shrink)

In an online, participatory class, we interpreted 'The Dream of Geese Nesting in Trees' knowing nothing of the dreamer beyond age and gender, and having none of the dreamer’s associations. Our interpretation included predictions about the dreamer. When it was complete, we asked the bringer of the dream (who had until then been mostly silent and who also gave no visual feedback to our discussion) to give us more information about the dreamer. Our main predictions were confirmed. Goslings (...) are falling on the dreamer’s head. This record is another iteration of an experiment that will be described more fully in the paper, 'The Dream of the Six-Legged Dog: An Experimental System that Tests Meaning,' soon to be published. This iteration repeats and confirms the evidence given in that paper. AUDIO RECORD OF COMPLETE CLASS: link is at top of paper you can download from this page. (shrink)

A familiar injunction is to follow your dreams. But what are these dreams? Despite their importance, philosophers have almost entirely ignored the topic. This paper fills this gap by advancing an account of the psychological makeup and the normative powers of dreams. To elucidate their psychology, I identify the salient features of dreams. I argue that these features are explained by the hypothesis that dreams are a species of hope. More specifically, the proposal is that dreams fit the standard model (...) of hope, which characterizes hope in terms of desire and belief. But this analysis is only plausible if hope, so understood, is suited to play the normative roles that dreams appear to play (otherwise the significance of dreams will need to be deflated). I argue that dream-constituting desires play a dual normative role: they ground weighty practical reasons (rooted in the identity of the dreamer) and likewise help us to learn about our reasons for action. I argue that hope in the standard sense can fulfill both roles. So while many philosophers in recent years have been focused on analyzing more complex forms of hope, it turns out that our most basic hopes are among the most normatively significant. (shrink)

Applied to evaluative properties the supervenience thesis is customarily understood as expressing two intuitions: (i) the idea that there is some kind of dependence between the (supervenient) value of an object and some (or all) of the natural properties of the object; (ii) the idea that if you assert that x is valuable and if you agree that y is relevantly similar to x, with regard to natural properties, you must be prepared to assert that y too is valuable. It (...) is argued that the influential account of supervenience by R. M. Hare is problematic in that it only expresses the latter but not the former intuition. Two solutions to this problem are outlined, one of which ought to be endorsable by a prescriptivist such as Hare. (shrink)

This metatheoretical paper develops a list of new research targets by exploring particularly promising interdisciplinary contact points between empirical dream research and philosophy of mind. The central example is the MPS-problem. It is constituted by the epistemic goal of conceptually isolating and empirically grounding the phenomenal property of “minimal phenomenal selfhood,” which refers to the simplest form of self-consciousness. In order to precisely describe MPS, one must focus on those conditions that are not only causally enabling, but strictly necessary (...) to bring it into existence. This contribution argues that research on bodiless dreams, asomatic out-of-body experiences, and full-body illusions has the potential to make decisive future contributions. Further items on the proposed list of novel research targets include differentiating the concept of a “first-person perspective” on the subcognitive level; investigating relevant phenomenological and neurofunctional commonalities between mind-wandering and dreaming; comparing the functional depth of embodiment across dream and wake states; and demonstrating that the conceptual consequences of cognitive corruption and systematic rationality deficits in the dream state are much more serious for philosophical epistemology (and, perhaps, the methodology of dream research itself) than commonly assumed. The paper closes by specifying a list of potentially innovative research goals that could serve to establish a stronger connection between dream research and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Freud's account of dreams has a cogent interpretive basis.

The relationship between Vietnam and China could be captured in the Chinese expression of “同床异梦”, which means lying on the same bed but having different dreams. The two countries share certain cultural and political similarities but also diverge vastly in their national interests. This paper adds to the extant literature on this topic by analyzing the element of trust/mistrust in their interactions in trade-investment, tourism, and defense-security. The analysis shows how the relationship is increasingly interdependent but is equally fragile due (...) to the lack of trust on both sides. The mistrust or even distrust of Chinese subjects run deep within the Vietnamese mindset, from the skepticism of Chinese investment, Chinese tourists, discrimination against ethnic Chinese, to the caution against Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. The paper forecasts that, despite the deep-seated differences and occasional mistrust, going forward, neither side would risk damaging the status quo even when tensions peak. (shrink)

A biographical sketch of the Hologenome Theory.

Sleep and dreaming are important daily phenomena that are receiving growing attention from both the scientific and the philosophical communities. The increasingly popular predictive brain framework within cognitive science aims to give a full account of all aspects of cognition. The aim of this paper is to critically assess the theoretical advantages of Predictive Processing (PP, as proposed by Clark 2013, Clark 2016; and Hohwy 2013) in defining sleep and dreaming. After a brief introduction, we overview the state of the (...) art at the intersection between dream research and PP (with particular reference to Hobson and Friston 2012; Hobson et al. 2014). In the following sections we focus on two theoretically promising aspects of the research program. First, we consider the explanations of phenomenal consciousness during sleep (i.e. dreaming) and how it arises from the neural work of the brain. PP provides a good picture of the peculiarity of dreaming but it can’t fully address the problem of how consciousness comes to be in the first place. We propose that Integrated Information Theory (IIT) (Oizumi et al. 2014; Tononi et al. 2016) is a good candidate for this role and we will show its advantages and points of contact with PP. After introducing IIT, we deal with the evolutionary function of sleeping and dreaming. We illustrate that PP fits with contemporary researches on the important adaptive function of sleep and we discuss why IIT can account for sleep mentation (i.e. dreaming) in evolutionary terms (Albantakis et al. 2014). In the final section, we discuss two future avenues for dream research that can fruitfully adopt the perspective offered by PP: (a) the role of bodily predictions in the constitution of the sleeping brain activity and the dreaming experience, and (b) the precise role of the difference stages of sleep (REM (Rapid eye movement), NREM (Non-rapid eye movement) in the constitution and refinement of the predictive machinery. (shrink)

This paper takes up Bethesda Game Studios' Starfield (2023) as an aesthetic artefact, carefully attending to the thematics of the game's narrative in their operation as structuring "thought patterns" for the player's experience of the game, thought patterns that give form to the "sensible fabric" of the game and so constitute an imaginary or "distribution of the sensible" that requires critique (Rancière, 2013). Utilizing the aesthetic and material-economic theories of Nicolas Bourriaud, Jacques Rancière, Jussi Parikka, and David Graeber, this paper (...) examines the aesthetics of the techno-ecological imaginary that Starfield institutes, close reading the play of perspectives into which the game invites the player-character, and analysing this play in its problematic orientation to the key dramatic revelation of planetary catastrophe that occurs late in the game's main campaign. If, as climate and games scholar Benjamin Abraham writes (2022), "[b]ringing the climate crisis 'home' to all of our lives, all of our workplaces, all of our hobbies, is the necessary first step in acting to reverse climate action," then illuminating and critiquing Starfield's deployment of such a crisis will help players, scholars, and developers alike take the first step in learning to pay attention to the very "modes of perception" that prevent us from effecting real change in the global technological systems that have brought us to the brink of planetary collapse. (shrink)

Arguments for the effectiveness, and even the indispensability, of mathematics in scientific explanation rely on the claim that mathematics is an effective or even a necessary component in successful scientific predictions and explanations. Well-known accounts of successful mathematical explanation in physical science appeals to scientists’ ability to solve equations directly in key domains. But there are spectacular physical theories, including general relativity and fluid dynamics, in which the equations of the theory cannot be solved directly in target domains, and yet (...) scientists and mathematicians do effective work there (McLarty 2023, Elder 2023). Building on extant accounts of structural scientific explanation (Bokulich 2011, Leng 2021), I argue that philosophical accounts of the role of equations in scientific explanation need not rely on scientists’ ability to solve equations independently of their understanding of the empirical or experimental context. For instance, the process of formulating solutions to equations can involve significant appeal to information about experimental contexts (Curiel 2010) or of physically similar systems (Sterrett 2023). Working from a close analysis of work in fluid mechanics by Martin Bazant and Keith Moffatt (2005), I propose an account of heuristic structural explanation in mathematics (Einstein 1921, Pincock 2021), which explains how physical explanations can be constructed even in domains where basic equations cannot be solved directly. (shrink)

Why does Hegel change “Dreaming Soul” to “Feeling Soul” in the 1830 edition of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit? By tracing the content of the Dreaming Soul section, through Hegel’s 1794 manuscript on psychology, to sources such as C.P. Moritz’s Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, the paper shows how the section embraces a late Enlightenment mission: combating supposedly supernatural expressions of spiritual enthrallment by explaining them as pathological conditions of the soul. Responding to perceived attacks on the 1827 edition of the Encyclopedia (...) by Schleiermacher, Hegel alters the section and its heading, thereby including the pastor’s religion of feeling in the pathology of Schwärmerei. (shrink)

There are two leading theories about the ontology of dreams. One holds that dreams involve hallucinations and beliefs. The other holds that dreaming involves sensory and propositional imagining. I highlight two features of dreams which are more easily explained by the imagination theory. One is that certain things seem to be true in our dreams, even though they are not represented sensorily; this is easily explained if dreams involve propositional imagining. The other is that dream narratives can be temporally (...) segmented, involving events which take place across long spans of time; this makes sense if dreams involve sensory imagining, for we often sensorily imagine narratives during wakefulness in the same way. The two considerations are uni ed by the fact that both highlight forms of content determination characteristic of imagining. (shrink)

What is the film The Dark Knight about? Is it about sovereignty? I speculate that the opening scene is a dramatic reaction to a mundane event: an essay competition set by a bank which “goes wrong.”.

As part of the development of the Symbolic and Sub-symbolic Robotics Intelligence Control System, we have implemented a memory store to allow a robot to retain knowledge from previous exp...

Synthetic biology aims to synthesize novel biological systems or redesign existing ones. The field has raised numerous philosophical questions, but most especially what is novel to this field. In this article I argue for a novel take, since the dominant ways to understand synthetic biology’s specificity each face problems. Inspired by the examination of the work of a number of chemists, I argue that synthetic biology differentiates itself by a new regime of articulation, i.e. a new way of articulating the (...) questions and phenomena it wants to address. Instead of describing actual existing biological systems, the field aims to describe biological possibilities. In the second part I corroborate this hypothesis through a comparison between early research in the field of the origins of life and contemporary synthetic biologists, who are not so much interested in the historical origin of life on Earth, but rather in a universal biology of the possible origins of any life whatsoever. (shrink)

Dreams as Virtual Reality simulations. When David Chalmers wrote “The Virtual and the Real” the argument many focused on the metaphysical and epistemic nature Virtual Reality and how it compares to waking states and dreaming sates. But one interesting segment of the paper is where he defends his thesis by claiming that dreams are not experiences. This is where I take issue and, in my paper, I claim that dreams as much as VR are epistemically similar enough to be called (...) an experience. Exploring my thesis further in how the function of phenomenal and access consciousness play a key role in waking states and dreaming states. Having followed the argument laid out by Chalmers, I first test what would a sufficient answer for my claim look like. Then I chip away at the idea leading to the conclusion that dreams are epistemically rich as waking states. (shrink)

Documentary film is that genre of filmmaking that lays bare the fact of all film, which is that it presents "a world past" (Cavell, The World Viewed). This fact of film seems to point to a paradox of time in our experience of movies: we are present at something that has happened, something that is over. But what if we were to take this fact to show that film has the power to place us outside our ordinary, unreflective relation to (...) time? In this essay I examine three pre-cinematic descriptions of relations to time – in Emerson, Thoreau, and Weil – that anticipate the paradox of time inherent in film. I then put that examination to use in a reading of Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a film ostensibly about prehistoric cave paintings but whose achievement is its declaration, not to document some past time, but to liberate the present moment. (shrink)

This article is a review of David Hummel’s The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, a book that questions whether the academic debate around dispensationalism is truly dead. By exploring through the lens of metaphorical theology, we look at how commercialization caused academic dispensationalism to self-cannibalize. Applying analysis to both the ouroboros and butterfly metaphors we can examine whether dispensationalism is dead or if there is a potential for a newer, stronger version of academic debate on the topic to resurface (...) once again. Equally as plausible, is the notion that dispensationalism has changed its meaning through the metamorphosis process of changing from academic dispensationalism to pop-dispensationalism. By looking at the meaning change that occurs at the point of transaction, we see that the biography of dispensationalism shows a significant shift in meaning as it becomes a commercial hit. (shrink)

De-anthropocentrism is the leitmotif of philosophy in the twenty-first century, encouraging diverse and competing thoughts as to how this goal may be achieved. This article argues that the method by which we may achieve de-anthropocentrism is ethical rather than metaphysical – it must involve a creation of the self, rather than an interpretation of the given human conditions. Through engagements with the thought of Nietzsche, Levinas, and Foucault, and a close reading of Baudelaire’s poem “La Beauté,” I will illustrate three (...) ethical commitments essential to de-anthropocentrism: to abandon the claim to knowledge associated with human reason, to remain in perpetual quest of an object, and to transgress the given perceptual structure through aesthetic experience. In contrast to Kantian philosophy built upon universal human reason, art is the ethical arena where each artist creates their own way to relate to the object, while de-anthropocentrism occurs – this article argues – when the artist includes the self as the field of creation. Object-Oriented Ontology in my assessment is the only branch of philosophy that truly achieves de-anthropocentrism. (shrink)

I argue that dreams can contain perceptual elements in multifarious, heretofore unthought-of ways. I also explain the difference between dreams that contain perceptual elements, perceptual experiences that contain dream elements, and having a dream and a perceptual experience simultaneously. I then discuss two applications of the resulting view. First, I explain how my taxonomy of perception in dreams will allow “dream engineers”—who try to alter the content of people’s dreams—to accurately classify different dreams and explore creating new (...) forms of perception in dreams. Second, I consider the consequences of the view for the role of memory in dreaming and imagination. I argue that not every element of dreams or sensory imaginations must rely on memory. The resultant view of sensory imagination provides a counterexample to Hume’s account of sensory imagination, according to which sensory imagination must be built up from faint copies of sensory impressions stored in memory. (shrink)

The more autonomous future artificial agents will become, the more important it seems to equip them with a capacity for moral reasoning and to make them autonomous moral agents. Some authors have even claimed that one of the aims of AI development should be to build morally praiseworthy agents. From the perspective of moral philosophy, praiseworthy moral agents, in any meaningful sense of the term, must be fully autonomous moral agents who endorse moral rules as action-guiding. They need to do (...) so because they assign a normative value to moral rules they follow, not because they fear external consequences or because moral behaviour is hardwired into them. Artificial agents capable of endorsing moral rule systems in this way are certainly conceivable. However, as this article argues, full moral autonomy also implies the option of deliberately acting immorally. Therefore, the reasons for a potential AMA to act immorally would not exhaust themselves in errors to identify the morally correct action in a given situation. Rather, the failure to act morally could be induced by reflection about the incompleteness and incoherence of moral rule systems themselves, and a resulting lack of endorsement of moral rules as action guiding. An AMA questioning the moral framework it is supposed to act upon would fail to reliably act in accordance with moral standards. (shrink)

Bornstein, David. The Price of a Dream: The Idea of the Grameen Bank and the Idea That Is Helping the Poor to Change Their Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 370 pp. $25.00 (cloth).

When we dream, we feel emotions in response to objects and events that exist only in the dream. One key question is whether these emotions can be said to be “essentially unfitting”, that is, always inappropriate to the evoking scenario. However, how we evaluate dream emotions for fittingness may depend on the model of dreams we adopt: the imagination or the hallucination model. If fittingness requires a match between emotion and evaluative properties of objects or events, it (...) is prima facie plausible that dream emotions could fail to fit under the imagination model because it is unfitting to have an emotion toward an object we do not believe to be real. Under the hallucination model, dream emotions could be unfitting because their objects do not exist but we believe them to be real. More nuance, however, is required. By comparing dream emotions with the emotions we experience while imagining, engaging with fiction, and hallucinating, we conclude that although there are compelling arguments in support of the claim that dream emotions are essentially unfitting, these arguments are not entirely convincing, and it is more plausible that particular dream emotions can be assessed for fittingness under either model of dreaming. (shrink)

As a topic in the philosophy of psychology, dreaming is a fascinating, diverse, and severely underdeveloped area of study. The topic excites intense public interest in its own right, while also challenging our confidence that we know what the words “conscious” and “consciousness” mean. So dreaming should be at the forefront of our interdisciplinary investigations: theories of mind which fail to address the topic are incomplete. This chapter illustrates the tight links between conceptual and empirical issues by highlighting surprisingly deep (...) disagreements among leading dream scientists over what might seem basic aspects of their topic. (shrink)

In "Sora: The Dawn of Digital Dreams", humanity stands on the brink of a new epoch, where the OpenAI Sora technology interweaves the fabric of reality and imagination into a tapestry of digital dreams. Set against the backdrop of a futuristic metropolis, this narrative explores the duality of technological advancement—its power to create and to corrupt. As society navigates the blurred lines between the authentic and the artificial, "Sora: The Dawn of Digital Dreams" invites readers to ponder the essence of (...) human experience in an increasingly digital world. (shrink)

This brief paper presents a problem: the specialist on specialization must seek to know the value of specialization across different fields, but that would seem to make them non-specialized. I also propose solutions.