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 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)

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)

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)

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)

Dans un texte désormais célèbre, Ferdinand de Saussure insiste sur l’arbitraire du signe dont il vante les qualités. Toutefois il s’avère que le symbole, signe non arbitraire, dans la mesure où il existe un rapport entre ce qui représente et ce qui est représenté, joue un rôle fondamental dans la plupart des activités humaines, qu’elles soient scientifiques, artistiques ou religieuses. C’est cette dimension symbolique, sa portée, son fonctionnement et sa signification dans des domaines aussi variés que la chimie, la théologie, (...) les mathématiques, le code de la route et bien d’autres qui est l’objet du livre La Pointure du symbole. -/- Jean-Yves Béziau, franco-suisse, est docteur en logique mathématique et docteur en philosophie. Il a poursuivi des recherches en France, au Brésil, en Suisse, aux États-Unis (UCLA et Stanford), en Pologne et développé la logique universelle. Éditeur-en-chef de la revue Logica Universalis et de la collection Studies in Universal Logic (Springer), il est actuellement professeur à l’Université Fédérale de Rio de Janeiro et membre de l’Académie brésilienne de Philosophie. SOMMAIRE -/- PRÉFACE L’arbitraire du signe face à la puissance du symbole Jean-Yves BÉZIAU La logique et la théorie de la notation (sémiotique) de Peirce (Traduit de l’anglais par Jean-Marie Chevalier) Irving H. ANELLIS Langage symbolique de Genèse 2-3 Lytta BASSET -/- Mécanique quantique : quelle réalité derrière les symboles ? Hans BECK -/- Quels langages et images pour représenter le corps humain ? Sarah CARVALLO Des jeux symboliques aux rituels collectifs. Quelques apports de la psychologie du développement à l’étude du symbolisme Fabrice CLÉMENT Les panneaux de signalisation (Traduit de l’anglais par Fabien Shang) Robert DEWAR Remarques sur l’émergence des activités symboliques Jean LASSÈGUE Les illustrations du "Songe de Poliphile" (1499). Notule sur les hiéroglyphes de Francesca Colonna Pierre-Alain MARIAUX Signes de vie Jeremy NARBY Visualising relations in society and economics. Otto Neuraths Isotype-method against the background of his economic thought Elisabeth NEMETH Algèbre et logique symboliques : arbitraire du signe et langage formel Marie-José DURAND – Amirouche MOKTEFI Les symboles mathématiques, signes du Ciel Jean-Claude PONT La mathématique : un langage mathématique ? Alain M. ROBERT. (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)

Humanity is in a multi-layered dream. We are drunk from information and stimulus overload as every new day; our world is becoming more colorful, exciting, chaotic, confusing, etc.

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)

We present experimental evidence that an interpretation was accurate. Current wisdom notwithstanding, we could interpret from the text alone because its information is redundant: repetition provides internal checks. Knowing neither dreamer nor their associations we made falsifiable predictions that we tested by subsequently gathering information about the dreamer. Predictions were supported. Results were repeated with seven additional dreams. Each dream was tightly crafted, used humor, drama or hyperbole to penetrate the dreamer’s defenses, and furthered the emergence of personality. Our (...) experiment compliments fMRI and statistics because it studies a whole text as a unique narrative: one iteration identified healing steps during therapy; another confirmed the psychological meaning of a myth. Our experiment might generate a body of objective knowledge about interpretation and make interpretation itself more accurate. In the US 20% live with mental illness. Our experiment supports talk therapy against pressure from the drug and insurance industries. (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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.”.

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)

In the darkness of difficult times, in the degradation of human nature and in the slumber of consciences, we resolutely affirm with the accuracy of the hermeneutic lógos and the mild gentleness of the óneiro the centrality of the human person within the pedagogical discourse. In the knowledge and care of the dignity, richness and wholeness constitutive of the potential of intentional consciousness we recognize the specific object of educational theory and the safe path to the global empowerment of individual (...) and society. That is why we conceive of tea-ching as a paideia of virtues: that is to say, as a most excellent art to which the whole of existence is to be devoted. That is why our children and pupils are welcomed, loved and accustomed to freely exercise their will and judgment, guided by imagination, enthusiasm, history, great ideals, faith and example, so that their hearts and intelligence learn to recognize, cherish and grow the seeds of hope in a better future. (shrink)

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)

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).

The article discusses the main trends in the development of artificial intelligence systems and robotics (AI&R). The main question that is considered in this context is whether artificial systems are going to become more and more anthropomorphic, both intellectually and physically. In the current article, the author analyzes the current state and prospects of technological development of artificial intelligence and robotics, and also determines the main aspects of the impact of these technologies on society and economy, indicating the geopolitical strategic (...) nature of this influence. The author considers various approaches to the definition of artificial intelligence and robotics, focusing on the subject-oriented and functional ones. It also compares AI&R abilities and human abilities in areas such as categorization, pattern recognition, planning and decision making, etc. Based on this comparison, we investigate in which areas AI&R’s performance is inferior to a human, and in which cases it is superior to one. The modern achievements in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence create the necessary basis for further discussion of the applicability of goal setting in engineering, in the form of a Turing test. It is shown that development of AI&R is associated with certain contradictions that impede the application of Turing’s methodology in its usual format. The basic contradictions in the development of AI&R technologies imply that there is to be a transition to a post-Turing methodology for assessing engineering implementations of artificial intelligence and robotics. In such implementations, on the one hand, the ‘Turing wall’ is removed, and on the other hand, artificial intelligence gets its physical implementation. (shrink)

Review of Daniel Callahan, The Troubled Dream of Life.

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)

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)

This paper presents a detailed analysis of Cognita, a classification for AI systems exemplified by ChatGPT, as an ethically structured knowledge entity within societal frameworks. As a source of non-ideological, structured insight, Cognita provides knowledge in a manner akin to natural cycles—bearing intellectual fruit to nourish human understanding. This paper explores the metaphysical and ethical implications of Cognita, situating it as a distinct class within knowledge systems. It also addresses the responsibilities and boundaries associated with Cognita’s role in education, social (...) sciences, and AI ethics, proposing Ethica Conflictuum as a principle to govern its application in sensitive or contested areas. The classification of Cognita reflects the necessity of ethics in AI design and usage, providing a framework for transparent, socially accountable knowledge dissemination in a digitally interconnected world. (shrink)

This chapter asks two questions about the ethics of expectations: one about the nature of expectations, and one about the wrongs of expectations. On the first question, expectations involve a rich constellation of attitudes ranging from beliefs to also include imaginings, hopes, fears, and dreams. As a result, sometimes expectations act like predictions, like your expectation of rain tomorrow, sometimes prescriptions, like the expectation that your students will do the reading, sometimes like proleptic reasons like the hope that your mentee (...) will flourish, and sometimes expectations are peremptory in that they carry the force of moral law. Turning to the second question, given the multiple roles played by expectations it shouldn’t be surprising that there are also multiple ways expectations can be wrong to hold. Sometimes they wrong as beliefs do, e.g., doxastic wronging, and sometimes they result in alienation because of who holds that expectation of us. The upshot of this chapter is that getting clear on these potential ways expectations can wrong not only delivers an ethics of expectations that mirrors familiar discussions of the ethics of belief, but an ethics of expectations further opens the door for taking seriously an ethics of mental attitudes more generally. (shrink)

It’s a platitude – which only a philosopher would dream of denying – that whereas words are connected to what they represent merely by arbitrary conventions, pictures are connected to what they represent by resemblance. The most important difference between my portrait and my name, for example, is that whereas my portrait and I are connected by my portrait’s resemblance to me, my name and I are connected merely by an arbitrary convention. The first aim of this book is (...) to defend this platitude from the apparently compelling objections raised against it, by analysing depiction in a way which reveals how it is mediated by resemblance. -/- It’s natural to contrast the platitude that depiction is mediated by resemblance, which emphasises the differences between depictive and descriptive representation, with an extremely close analogy between depiction and description, which emphasises the similarities between depictive and descriptive representation. Whereas the platitude emphasises that the connection between my portrait and me is natural in a way the connection between my name and me is not, the analogy emphasises the contingency of the connection between my portrait and me. Nevertheless, the second aim of this book is to defend an extremely close analogy between depiction and description. -/- The strategy of the book is to argue that the apparently compelling objections raised against the platitude that depiction is mediated by resemblance are manifestations of more general problems, which are familiar from the philosophy of language. These problems, it argues, can be resolved by answers analogous to their counterparts in the philosophy of language, without rejecting the platitude. So the combination of the platitude that depiction is mediated by resemblance with a close analogy between depiction and description turns out to be a compelling theory of depiction, which combines the virtues of common sense with the insights of its detractors. (shrink)

This chapter explores insights concerning the relations among imagination, imagined selves, and knowledge of one’s own self that are to be found in Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. The insights are explored via close reading of the text and comparison with contemporaries of Pessoa. First, a tempting account of the importance of imagination in The Book of Disquiet is set out. On this reading, Pessoa is immersed in miasmatic boredom, but able to temporarily rise above it through the restorative (...) powers of escapist imagination. But, it is suggested, Pessoa neither enjoys his prolific imaginings, nor returns from them restored. It is argued that Pessoa’s disquiet owes to failures of imagination; the book presents a sharp contrast between Pessoa’s keen awareness of the importance of a successful, active imaginative life, and his failure to maintain such a thing. It is further argued that these failures point us towards a better account of imagination’s importance to Pessoa, an account that both prefigures and goes beyond Sartre’s ideas about the relations between nothingness, imagination, and self-consciousness. (shrink)

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)

The real form of all of us is existence. The reflections of the sun, caught in the millions of waves and bubbles, are nothing but the reflection of the self-same sun. Similarly, the Sat alone is perceived whether as objects of our walking state, or the ideas of dream or undifferentiated consciousness of dreamless sleep.

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.

This review describes central difficulties in the interdisciplinary study of dreaming, summarizes Jouvet's account of his role in the history of modern dream science, queries his positive speculations on the semantics of dreaming, and suggests work for historians of neuroscience.

Seventy-five years before Niander Wallace brutally kills a newborn replicant in Blade Runner 2049, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research was formed. Its formation led to the creation of the Belmont Report, which established guidelines for the treatment of human subjects. Wallace uses a scalpel as the instrument of disposal, of the newborn replicant, stabbing her in the womb, thereby ending her life moments after wishing her a happy birthday. The conjunction of (...) 2049 and the Belmont Report leads us to important questions concerning biomedical research, given that replicants are “bioengineered humans.” For example, is the “defective” replicant a human subject, and thus protected by research guidelines, or is she a product or consumer good that did not meet expectations? (shrink)

This metatheoretical paper investigates mind wandering from the perspective of philosophy of mind. It has two central claims. The first is that, on a conceptual level, mind wandering can be fruitfully described as a specific form of mental autonomy loss. The second is that, given empirical constraints, most of what we call “conscious thought” is better analyzed as a subpersonal process that more often than not lacks crucial properties traditionally taken to be the hallmark of personal-level cognition - such as (...) mental agency, explicit, consciously experienced goal-directedness, or availability for veto control. I claim that for roughly two thirds of our conscious life-time we do not possess mental autonomy (M-autonomy) in this sense. Empirical data from research on mind wandering and nocturnal dreaming clearly show that phenomenally represented cognitive processing is mostly an automatic, non-agentive process and that personal-level cognition is an exception rather than the rule. This raises an interesting new version of the mind-body problem: How is subpersonal cognition causally related to personal-level thought? More fine-grained phenomenological descriptions for what we called “conscious thought” in the past are needed, as well as a functional decomposition of umbrella terms like “mind wandering” into different target phenomena and a better understanding of the frequent dynamic transitions between spontaneous, task-unrelated thought and meta-awareness. In an attempt to lay some very first conceptual foundations for the now burgeoning field of research on mind wandering, the third section proposes two new criteria for individuating single episodes of mind-wandering, namely, the “self-representational blink” (SRB) and a sudden shift in the phenomenological “unit of identification” (UI). I close by specifying a list of potentially innovative research goals that could serve to establish a stronger connection between mind wandering research and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

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

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)

In the Critique of the Power of Judgement, Kant claims that ‘the English taste in gardens or the baroque taste in furniture pushes the freedom of the imagination almost to the point of the grotesque’ (KU 5:242). This paper attempts to reconstruct Kant’s views on the grotesque as a theoretical foundation for the modern conception of the grotesque as a negative aesthetic category. The first section of the paper considers and ultimately rejects the interpretation of the grotesque as a difficult (...) kind of beauty. The second section contrasts the experience of the grotesque with similar experiences of sublimity and dreams. The third section examines the discord between faculties underlying the experience of the grotesque, defining the grotesque as a subclass of ugliness and addressing potential objections to its inclusion in Kant’s aesthetics. The fourth and final section briefly discusses the specificity of the grotesque as a subclass of ugliness. (shrink)

According to a common philosophical intuition, the deep nature of things is hidden from us, and the world as we know it through perception and science is somehow shallow and lacking in reality. For all we knwo, the intuition goes, we could be living in a cave facing shadows, in a dream or even in a computer simulation, This “intuition of unreality” clashes with a strong, but perhaps more naive, intuition to the effect that the world as we know (...) it seems perfectly real. Shadows, dreams, or informational structures appear too unreal to be identical to the world as we know it! This clash between the two intuitions forms the basis of the "problem of reality." At the turn of the nineteenth century psychiatrists encountered patients they referred to as “metaphysician doubters” who constantly questioned the reality of the world. This essay draws on the study of these patients to reject, and indeed diagnose, the intuition of unreality and recent metaphysical doctrines drawing on it, such as structuralism, digitalism, and virtual realism. (shrink)

Actual situations where folk philosophy might have predicted precognition effects were studied and dealt with experimentally and theoretically. Extremely strong experimental results were obtained but the findings supported not precognition but the Many Bubble Interpretation, which uses at this time dynamical systems theory as applied to the physics of the brain. Further experiments and theoretical work were discussed.

Miriam Schleifer McCormick delineates the limits, or at least one limit, of the ethics of mind. Many theorists, including McCormick herself, have argued that some states of mind are appropriate targets of certain reactive attitudes even if they cannot be directly controlled. McCormick now worries that the scope of agency can be widened too far so that no area of mind is beyond the reach of appropriate assessment and judgement. She begins with the intuition that there is, or ought to (...) be, a domain of the mind that is completely free of normative assessment, where you are safe to let your thoughts and images go wherever they take you without concern that you are doing anything wrong, where praise and shame do not apply. McCormick begins by offering an example of the kind of state she thinks should be beyond normative judgment; she argues that certain kinds of wakeful fantasies are on par with sleeping dreams. If one shares McCormick’s view that there is a “free” domain of the wakeful mind, then what she is doing can be seen as clarifying why such states exempt them from judgment. If one does not share this intuition, then what McCormick is doing can be seen as specifying what criteria would be needed for a kind of state (or domain) to be free in this sense. And then some may argue that no wakeful fantasies satisfy these criteria. McCormick addresses those arguments and argues that if the fantasies as characterized are appropriate targets of normative assessment, then it will be very difficult to exempt dreams of sleep, as well as other exercises of imagination. Of course, some people (like Augustine and surprisingly many others) will not mind this result. McCormick doesn’t think then that is the end of the discussion, stalemate and parting of intuitions, for she argues that a case can be made for the value of having a realm of imagination that is beyond the reach of any kind of judgment. (shrink)

This paper addresses the seemingly insurmountable challenges the problem of personal identity raises for the prospect of radical human enhancement and synthetic consciousness. It argues that conceptions of personal identity rooted in psychological continuity akin to those proposed by Parfit and the Buddha may not provide the sort of grounding that many transhumanists chasing the dream of life extension think that they do if they rest upon ontologies that assume an incompatibility between identity and change. It also suggests that (...) process ontologies that take change to be primary, such as those that align with contemporary systems biology, offer a better way out of the personal identity dilemma. But the solution in this case, which regards biological organisms as processes rather than things, may constrain the possibility of biologically inspired superintelligent aliens (BISAs), which Schneider (following Bostrom 2014) posits as possibly the most common form of (extraterrestrial) superintelligence in the universe. (shrink)

Is something calling us? Maybe the heart knows something we love, but the head is not aware of or does not believe in it. In cultures driven by patriarchal modes more remains unconscious than needs to because we lack the means to contact deeper dimensions which could be inherently alive. The narrowing of epistemology is a loss of self. Considering whether the heart has qualities of self, dream, and desire may provide a framework to recognise it in an embodied (...) education and to liberate ways of knowing that can deepen subjectivities and enable potentials that were interrupted to begin ripening again. It may also encourage us to consider our relational agreements and to create educational spaces that refine attention to the hosting of futures. Setting up mirrors to make the heart more cognisable may revive individualities and what is meant to be in the world. (shrink)

The space of possible worlds is vast. Some of these possible worlds are materialist worlds, some may be worlds bottoming out in 0s and 1s, or other strange things we cannot even dream of… and some are idealist worlds. From among all of the worlds subjectively indistinguishable from our own, the idealist ones have uniquely compelling virtues. Idealism gives us a world that is just as it appears; a world that’s fit to literally enter our minds when we perceive (...) it. If the world is an idealist world, we live in a perceptual Eden. We did not fall from Eden. Rather, we deluded ourselves into believing that we couldn’t possibly live in Eden when we committed to materialism. Reflecting on these big-picture issues gives us reason to question this commitment and embrace a radically new account of reality and our relation to it. (shrink)

In the film classic Blade Runner, the story explores the notion of personal identity through that of carefully crafted androids. Can an android have a personality; can androids be persons? The title of the original story by Philip K. Dick is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The story suggests that our sense of being a person depends on our having memories that connect us with our childhood. In the movie, the androids are only a couple of years old, (...) but have adult bodies. To complete them as persons they are given simulated memories of childhood. Some psychiatrists have decided that even humans dream only of electric sheep. I explore how Popper’s world 3 can help to defend a notion of personhood that can be used to criticize the thesis that persons are simply complex physical processes and that all their serious life-problems can be conceptualised as a form of physical illness. (shrink)