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60076.3698
Preliminary Note: The following is very speculative! I’ve been writing occasionally on AI here, especially about how the advent of AI may change our conception of ourselves as agents (here, here, and here). …
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108748.369884
I consider applications of “AI extenders” to dementia care. AI extenders are AI-powered technologies that extend minds in ways interestingly different from old-school tech like notebooks, sketch pads, models, and microscopes. I focus on AI extenders as ambiance: so thoroughly embedded into things and spaces that they fade from view and become part of a subject’s taken-for-granted background. Using dementia care as a case study, I argue that ambient AI extenders are promising because they afford richer and more durable forms of multidimensional integration than do old-school extenders like Otto’s notebook. They can be tailored, in fine-grained ways along multiple timescales, to a user’s particular needs, values, and preferences—and crucially, they can do much of this self-optimizing on their own. I discuss why this is so, why it matters, and its potential impact on affect and agency. I conclude with some worries in need of further discussion.
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111076.369899
The article summarizes the present state of research into the conceptual foundations of the periodic table. We give a brief historical account of the development of the periodic table and periodic system, including the impact of modern physics due to the discoveries of Moseley, Bohr, modern quantum mechanics etc. The role of the periodic table in the debate over the reduction of chemistry is discussed, including the attempts to derive the Madelung rule from first principles. Other current debates concern the concept of an “element” and its dual role as simple substance and elementary substance and the question of whether elements and groups of elements constitute natural kinds. The second of these issues bears on the question of further debates concerning the placement of certain elements like H, He, La and Ac in the periodic table.
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129626.369911
A recent interviewer asked Tyler Cowen to explain falling birth rates, and he puckishly responded, “Do you have kids?” His point: Anyone who knows what kids are actually like can instantly understand why adults are reluctant to have them. …
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284075.369922
The advancement of and prospects for stem cell research raise a number of specific ethical issues. While navigating the ethical landscape of stem cell research is often challenging for biology researchers and biotechnology innovators, it is also difficult for the public and other persons of concern (from ethicists to policymakers) to grasp the technicalities of a burgeoning field that develops in many directions. Organoids are one of these new biotechnological constructs that are currently eliciting a rich debate in bioethics. In this guide, we argue that different types of organoids have different emerging properties with different ethical implications. Going from general properties to particular ones, we propose a typology of organoid technology and other associated biotechnology from a philosophical and ethical perspective. We point to relevant ethical issues and try to convey the sense of uncertainty peculiar to ongoing research and emerging technological objects.
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341735.369933
The range of animal practices potentially classified as medical varies widely both functionally and mechanistically, and there is no agreed upon definition of medicine that can help determine which cases ought to count as such. In this paper, we argue that all available definitions are fatally flawed and defend our own characterisation of medicine, which incorporates both functional and mechanistic constraints. We apply our definition to the available evidence and determine which animal behaviours show a mere difference of degree with paradigmatic medical practices—and should thus be seen as medicine proper—and which should be excluded from this nomenclature.
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371237.369943
[Editor’s Note: The following new entry by Mark Wrathall replaces the
former entry
on this topic by the previous author.]
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is a central figure in the
development of twentieth-century European Philosophy. His magnum
opus, Being and Time (1927), and his many essays and
lectures, profoundly influenced subsequent movements in European
philosophy, including Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy,
Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, Simone de Beauvoir’s
feminism, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception,
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Jacques Derrida’s
deconstruction, Michel Foucault’s post-structuralism, Gilles
Deleuze’s metaphysics, the Frankfurt School, and critical
theorists like Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas,
and Georg Lukács.
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431197.369953
laying down a program for this study. It is written for everyone who is curious about the world of symbols that surrounds us, in particular researchers and students in philosophy, history, cognitive science, and mathematics education. The main characteristics of mathematical notations are introduced and discussed in relation to the intended subject matter, the language in which the notations are verbalized, the cognitive resources needed for learning and understanding them, the tasks that they are used for, their material basis, and the historical context in which they are situated. Specific criteria for the design and assessment of notations are discussed, as well as ontological, epistemological, and methodological questions that arise from the study of mathematical notations and of their use in mathematical practice.
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550183.36997
This paper is a contribution to a symposium on Herman Cappelen’s 2023 book The Concept of Democracy: An Essay on Conceptual Amelioration and Abandonment. In that book, Cappelen develops a theory of abandonment—a theory of why and how to completely stop using particular linguistic expressions—and then uses that theory to argue for the general abandonment of the words “democracy” and “democratic”. In this paper, I critically discuss Cappelen’s arguments for the abandonment of “democracy” and “democratic” in political theory specifically.
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571220.36998
There’s something deeply wrong with the world, when the median US college graduate’s starting salary is a dozen times higher than the price to save another person’s entire life. The enduring presence of such low-hanging fruit reflects a basic societal failure to allocate resources in a way that reflects valuing those lives appropriately. …
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572463.36999
The article examines the question of priority and simultaneous discovery in the context of the discovery of the periodic system. It is argued that rather than being anomalous, simultaneous discovery is the rule. Moreover, I argue that the discovery of the periodic system by at least six authors in over a period of 7 years represents one of the best examples of a multiple discovery. This notion is supported by a new view of the evolutionary development of science through a mechanism that is dubbed Sci-Gaia by analogy with Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis.
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598974.370003
PEA Soup is pleased to introduce this month’s Ethics discussion, featuring Elselijn Kingma and Fiona Woollard’s paper Can You Do Harm to Your Fetus? Pregnancy, Barriers, and the Doing/Allowing Distinction, with a précis from Elizabeth Harman. …
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619633.370016
In metaethics, we ask various questions about ethics (or, more broadly, normativity): metaphysical questions like are there ethical (or normative) facts and properties, are they objective, and how do they relate to other kinds of facts and properties, epistemological questions like do we have ethical (or normative) knowledge and how so, and philosophy of mind and language questions like what are we doing when we make ethical (or normative) judgments, are we expressing beliefs that can be true or false or other kinds of attitudes that, strictly speaking, can’t be true or false, and are ethical judgments necessarily motivating?
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630195.37003
The Bayesian brain theory considers the brain as a generative model of its environment (Friston, 2010; Knill & Pouget, 2004). The model infers hidden (inaccessible directly to the brain) states of the environment as likely causes of the sensory input and thus represents the causal structure of the world around it. The input comes to the brain from both the body through interoception and from the external world through exteroception. The generative model makes inferences – that also can be viewed as predictions - about the incoming sensations based on previously learned beliefs or priors. These predictions are then compared to the actual sensory input, and the difference between the two generates a prediction error (PE). The model learns by refining itself through minimization of PE, thus increasing its accuracy. This process is thought of as belief updating according to Bayes theorem, where a prior belief, encoded as a probability distribution, is adjusted into a posterior one based on the likelihood probability distribution:
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630216.370042
The most common theoretical approaches to defining mental disorder are naturalism, normativism, and hybridism. Naturalism and normativism are often portrayed as diametrically opposed, with naturalism grounded in objective science and normativism grounded in social convention and values. Hybridism is seen as a way of combining the two. However, all three approaches share a common feature in that they conceive of mental disorders as deviations from norms. Naturalism concerns biological norms; normativism concerns social norms; and hybridism, both biological and social norms. This raises the following two questions: (a) Are biological and social norms the only sorts of norms that are relevant to considerations of mental disorder? (b) Should addressing norm deviations continue to be a major focus of mental healthcare? This paper introduces several norms that are relevant to mental disorder beyond the biological and social. I argue that mental disorders often deviate from individual, well-being, and regulatory norms. I also consider approaches which question mental healthcare’s focus on addressing norm deviations in the first place, including the neurodiversity paradigm, social model of disability, and Mad discourse. Utilizing these critical approaches, I contend that whether mental health intervention is justified depends, in part, on the type of norm deviation being intervened upon.
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630267.370054
I would like to begin this review by stating that this is an absolutely wonderful book that is full of gems about the elements and the periodic table. In my own 2007 book on the periodic table I concluded that we should perhaps think of the variety of tables that have appeared as spanning a spectrum running from the most abstract and ‘perfect’ tables such as Janet’s left-step table representation, to the unruly tables that emphasize the uniqueness of elements. To illustrate the latter category, I featured an image of Rayner-Canham’s table that is also the table shown on the front cover of his new book now under review. Rayner Canham’s book is all about the individuality of elements and how so many of the commonly held trends in the periodic table are far more complicated than we normally acknowledge.
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745767.370166
Prior research has unveiled a pathologization effect where individuals perceived as having bad moral character are more likely to have their conditions labeled as diseases and are less often considered healthy compared to those viewed as having a good moral character. Moreover, these individuals are perceived as less unlucky in their affliction and more deserving of it. This study explores the broader impacts of moral character on such judgments, hypothesizing that these effects reach deeper and extend to both negative and positive moral evaluations. The pathologization effect also raises concerns about potential discrimination and the overmedicalization of normal health variations, so we also examine whether providing more detailed descriptions of conditions mitigates the influence of judgments of moral character. The methodology and broader implications of our findings are discussed, emphasizing the need for a deeper understanding of how moral judgments might influence patient care.
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793736.370185
Questions about our knowledge of other minds have occupied far less philosophical attention than have questions about our knowledge of the material world. The major reason for this is the underlying assumption that the resources we should appeal to in explaining such knowledge are the same as those we appeal to in explaining our knowledge of the material world, namely observation and inference. Given this, accounting for our knowledge of other minds is not of much additional interest, epistemologically speaking. There can be debates about the kinds of inference required, and, indeed about whether perception on its own suffices for knowledge, but there is nothing fundamentally different here from debates and claims about our knowledge of the material world. Hence, it warrants only a page or two, or, at most, a chapter, in general treatises about our knowledge of the ‘external’ world. Call this the Nothing Special Claim.
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846053.370196
There is growing concern that inhabitants of wealthy societies are falling into an increasingly lonely condition (Holt-Lunstad et al, 2017). Social scientists have offered a variety of competing explanations for what is often characterized as an epidemic of loneliness (Umberson et. al, 2010; Bianchi and Vohs 2016). By ‘loneliness’ we mean unchosen social isolation and deprivation of subjectively desired goods that would typically result from social contact and close personal relationships. Loneliness is generally regarded as one of the worst misfortunes that can befall us, and it is accompanied by a range of terrible personal and social consequences. As such it would be good if AI technologies could help alleviate our increasingly lonely condition. Given the prevalence and harmfulness of loneliness it is tempting, for Bianchi and Vohs explain that income predicts the nature of social contact. “People with higher incomes spent less time with their families and neighbors and spent more time with their friends. These findings suggest that income is associated with how and with whom people spend their time” (Bianchi and Vohs 2016). Other factors that cause loneliness such as immigration, increased engagement with technology, race, educational level and so on have all been widely discussed. Given this large body of empirical evidence and variety of competing explanations, it is safe to assume that people are lonelier than they used to be decades ago in the United States.
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846073.370208
This article reviews Matthew Liao’s edited volume Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Liao’s volume consists of seventeen essays organized into four sections: Building Ethics into Machines, The Near Future of AI, The Long-Term Impact of Superintelligence, and Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness and Moral Status. The core arguments and issues discussed in Liao’s volume remain philosophically interesting. The book's insights into the theoretical foundations of AI ethics, the potential impact of superintelligence, and the moral status of AI, continue to be valuable contributions. What it is missing from this volume and what we have seen explored in detail in the intervening years is engagement with questions around the broader social impacts of AI. The main topics of recent work have been fairness and algorithmic bias, privacy, and the impacts on human interactions. In this review, I focus on some of the most interesting arguments from the volume and I make some suggestions about the ways that the field has changed in the years following its publication.
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863264.370219
Flannery O’Connor’s stories are, by her own account, “preoccupied with the grotesque.” The reason, some argue, is that the grotesque is fascinating to the southern imagination. And indeed her grotesques have many southern precedents, most notably those of William Faulkner, whose novel The Sound and the Fury is famously narrated in part by an idiot. …
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990732.370229
In Trump's Second Inaugural, he had this to say:
The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. …
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1019082.370242
This chapter explores the historical origins of the concept of ‘physicalism’ coined by Otto Neurath in the early 1930s. Neurath conceived physicalism as a methodological principle aimed at facilitating interdisciplinary communication and unification of the sciences, rather than as a metaphysical thesis about the nature of reality. His anti-metaphysical physicalism was rooted in Marxist ideals, seeking a common ‘thing-language’ to support collective deliberation and social progress. Neurath’s view differs markedly from how physicalism later came to serve as an ontological position. By examining Neurath’s relatively alien sociopolitical context, the chapter disentangles the various threads of physicalism’s origins – its ideological commitments, institutional incentives, and philosophical tenets. This historical analysis allows a nuanced understanding of what contemporary physicalism could and should entail, distinguishing its diverse motivations from Neurath’s anti-metaphysical, Marxist-inspired vision of intellectual work in service of social engineering and reform.
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1144011.370261
Many people believe that individual actors should and can respond to social and environmental problems by making ethical or conscientious decisions in the marketplace. They encourage consumers to purchase fair trade coffee, buy locally-grown produce, avoid shopping in stores with union-busting tactics, boycott exploitative soda manufacturers, and so on. In this paper I argue against the idea that demand-side decisions on the part of individual consumers can adequately capture the complicated moral dimensions of any given product. I argue this position by pointing to two intermingled features of consumer choice: value incommensurability and market indeterminacy.
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1205521.370289
There appears to be an epistemic gap between the personal and the impersonal. The apparent epistemic gap presents a challenge to reductionist views about personal identity according to which facts about personal identity are grounded in impersonal facts about physical and/or psychological continuity. I discuss and reject two strategies of trying to close the apparent epistemic gap, a phenomenalist and a Cartesian one. I then develop and motivate an alternative account of the epistemic gap based on the special perspecti-val character of inside imagination. The imagination-based account explains why there appears to be an epistemic gap between the personal and the impersonal and at the same time avoids a corresponding ontological gap.
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1317710.370317
This week represents the convergence of so many plotlines that, if it were the season finale of some streaming show, I’d feel like the writers had too many balls in the air. For the benefit of the tiny part of the world that cares what I think, I offer the following comments. …
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1495428.370336
Moral philosophers argue that mechanisms such as reciprocal altruism and indirect reciprocity can result in the evolution of shared interests and a ‘moral sense’ in humans. This article discusses the need to broaden that view when considering the consequences of genetic conflict, in particular, the conflict associated with mate selection. An alternative application of evolutionary arguments to morality has been suggested by biologists such as Richard Alexander, who argue that ethical, moral and legal questions arise purely out of conflicts of interest, and that moral systems (consisting of societal rules or laws) exist to ameliorate those conflicts. Following Alexander, a novel societal rule is proposed that could lessen the negative consequences to men of reproductive conflicts with women.
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1566411.370349
I'm not that interested in pragmatism per se. My interest in William James is because of his radical empiricism, not really his pragmatism. But I do want to clarify some things here. I want to explain what pragmatism is (namely a method), and show how even though James and Peirce agree about the method of pragmatism, the understanding diverges significantly. …
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1610710.37036
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
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1668415.370382
The relative virtues of 8- and 18-column periodic tables are discussed, followed by a brief mention of a 32-column table. Next, the left-step periodic table, as first introduced by Janet, is presented, as are the various attractive features of this representation. The advantages include what is termed here as the regularization of atomic number triads and a better rationalization of first-member anomalies. The distinction between simple substance and element is also explained as is the significance of this issue to the left-step table. Finally, I respond to some recent criticisms of previous work that I have published on atomic number triads of elements. It is becoming increasingly acknowledged that the discovery of the periodic table took place at the hands of at least six individuals working independently in different parts of the world (Scerri, A Tale of Seven Scientists, Oxford University Press, New York, 2016). In the intervening 150 or so years since the most well known of these tables were published, by Dmitri Mendeleev, at least 1000 periodic systems have appeared either in print form (Van Spronsen, The Periodic System of Chemical Elements. A History of the First Hundred Years, Elsevier, New York, 1969; Mazurs, Graphic Representations of the Periodic System during One Hundred Years, University Alabama Press, Alabama, 1974) or more recently on the Internet (Leach, https:// www. meta- synth esis. com/ webbo ok/ 35_ pt/ pt_ datab ase. php).