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108654.136674
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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393274.13687
The making of mistakes by organisms and other living systems is a theoretically and empirically unifying feature of biological investigation. Mistake theory is a rigorous and experimentally productive way of understanding this widespread phenomenon. It does, however, run up against the long-standing ‘functions’ debate in philosophy of biology. Against the objection that mistakes are just a kind of malfunction, and that without a position on functions there can be no theory of mistakes, we reply that this is to misunderstand the theory. In this paper we set out the basic concepts of mistake theory and then argue that mistakes are a distinctive phenomenon in their own right, not just a kind of malfunction. Moreover, the functions debate is, to a large degree, independent of the concept of biological mistakes we outline. In particular, although the popular selected effects theory may retain its place within a more pluralistic conception of biological function, there is also need for a more forward-looking approach, where a robust concept of normativity can be an important driver of future experimental work.
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630027.136899
Integrated Information Theory (IIT) intends to provide a principled theoretical approach able to characterize consciousness both quantitatively and qualitatively. By starting off identifying the fundamental properties of experience itself, IIT develops a formal framework that relates those properties to the physical substratum of consciousness. One of the central features of ITT is the role that information plays in the theory. On the one hand, one of the self-evident truths about consciousness is that it is informative. On the other hand, mechanisms and systems of mechanics can contribute to consciousness only if they specify systems’ intrinsic information. In this paper, we will conceptually analyze the notion of information underlying ITT. Following previous work on the matter, we will particularly argue that information within ITT should be understood in the light of a causal-manipulabilist view of information (López and Lombardi 2018), conforming to which information is an entity that must be involved in causal links in order to be precisely defined. Those causal links are brought to light by means of interventionist procedures following Woodward’s and Pearl’s version of the manipulability theories of causation.
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630101.13691
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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630122.13692
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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741447.136935
When you’re investigating reality as a scientist (and often as an ordinary person) you perform experiments. Epistemologists and philosophers of science have spent a lot of time thinking about how to evaluate what you should do with the results of the experiments—how they should affect your beliefs or credences—but relatively little on the important question of which experiments you should perform epistemologically speaking. …
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793642.136944
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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1018912.136953
This paper introduces the Global Philosophy symposium on Giuseppe Primiero’s book On the Foundations of Computing (2020). The collection gathers commentaries and responses of the author with the aim of engaging with some open questions in the philosophy of computer science. Firstly, this paper introduces the central themes addressed in Primiero’s book; secondly, it highlights some of the main critiques from commentators in order to, finally, pinpoint some conceptual challenges indicating future directions for the philosophy of computer science.
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1074790.136964
Good news for once! A faster Quantum Fourier Transform
In my last post, I tried to nudge the arc of history back onto the narrow path of reasoned dialogue, walking the mile-high tightrope between shrill, unsupported accusation and naïve moral blindness. …
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1205404.136973
Could we transfer you from your biological substrate to an electronic hardware by simulating your brain on a computer? The answer to this question divides optimists and pessimists about mind uploading. Optimists believe that you can genuinely survive the transition; pessimists think that surviving mind uploading is impossible. An influential argument against uploading optimism is the multiplicity objection. In a nutshell, the objection is as follows: If uploading optimism were true, it should be possible to create not only one, but multiple digital versions of you. However, you cannot literally become many. Hence, you cannot survive even a single instance of uploading, and optimism about uploading is misguided. In this paper, I will first spell out the multiplicity objection in detail and then provide a two-pronged defence against the objection. First, uploading pessimists cannot establish that uploading optimism has the contentious implication. Second, it is in fact plausible to think that we could become multiple distinct persons. Optimists’ hope for a digital afterlife is therefore not thwarted by the prospect of multiplicity.
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1205427.136991
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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1303447.13701
In this paper, I argue that facts about an individual’s sexual identity are partially or fully grounded in facts about their sexual orientation, where an individual’s sexual identity (e.g. being queer, being straight) has to do with the social position they occupy, and their sexual orientation (e.g. being homosexual, being heterosexual) has to do with the sexual dispositions they have. The main argument for this orientation-based theory is that it gets the right results in cases in which an individual hasn’t come out yet to themselves or others. I reply to Matthew Andler’s argument against the orientation-based theory, which is that it gets the wrong results in cases having to do with (a) intergenerational gay friendship and (b) “str8 dudes,” men who have sex with men but who present themselves online as straight. I also argue that, at least in the case of being queer, Andler’s own cultural theory is consistent with sexual identity facts being partially grounded in sexual orientation facts.
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1437619.137025
Since the early debates on teleosemantics, there have been people objecting that teleosemantics cannot account for evolutionarily novel contents such as “democracy” (e.g., Peacocke 1992). Most recently, this objection was brought up by Garson (2019) and in a more moderate form by Garson & Papineau (2019). The underlying criticism is that the traditional selected effects theory of functions on which teleosemantics is built is unable to ascribe new functions to the products of ontogenetic processes and thus unable to ascribe functions to new traits that appear during the lifetime of an individual organism. I will argue that this underlying thought rests on rather common misunderstandings of Millikan’s theory of proper functions, especially her notions of relational, adapted, and derived proper functions (Millikan 1984: Ch. 2). The notions of relational, adapted, and derived proper functions not only help us solve the problem of novel contents and can ascribe functions to the products of ontogenetic selection mechanisms but are indispensable parts of every selected effects theory.
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1771289.137045
We present the problem of perceptual agreement (of determinate color) and submit that it proves to be a serious and long overlooked obstacle for those insisting that colors are not objective features of objects, viz., nonobjectivist theories like C. L. Hardin’s (2003) eliminativism and Jonathan Cohen’s (2009) relationalism.
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1874592.137055
Wittgenstein distinguished between two uses of ‘I’, one “as object” and the other “as subject”, a distinction that Shoemaker elucidated in terms of a notion of immunity to error through misidentification (‘IEM’); in their use “as subject”, first-personal claims are IEM, but not in their use “as object”. Shoemaker argued that memory judgments based on “personal”, episodic memory are only de facto IEM, not strictly speaking IEM, while Gareth Evans disputed it. In the past two decades research on memory has produced very significant results, which have changed the philosophical landscape. As part of it, several new arguments have been made for and against the IEM of personal memories. The paper aims to defend the Shoemaker line by critically engaging with some compelling recent contributions.
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1874612.137067
Wittgenstein distinguished between two uses of “I”, one “as object” and the other “as subject”, a distinction that Shoemaker elucidated in terms of a notion of immunity to error through misidentification (“IEM”); first-personal claims are IEM in the use “as subject”, but not in the other use. Shoemaker argued that memory judgments based on “personal”, episodic memory are not strictly speaking IEM; Gareth Evans disputed this. Similar issues have been debated regarding self-ascriptions of conscious thoughts based on first- personal awareness, in the light of claims of “thought insertion” in schizophrenic patients. The paper aims to defend a Shoemaker-like line by critically engaging with some compelling recent contributions. Methodologically, the paper argues that to properly address these issues the all-inclusive term “thought” should be avoided, and specific types of thoughts countenanced.
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1889564.137075
David Hume famously remarked on a curious response we have to certain
works of art that cause us to feel unhappiness or distress:
It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a
well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other
passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more
they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the
spectacle; and as soon as the uneasy passions cease to operate, the
piece is at an end. (1757 [1987: 216])
This odd connection between the simultaneous pleasure and distress
caused by tragic drama is remarked upon in Aristotle’s
Poetics, the earliest philosophical attempt in the West to
construct an aesthetic theory.
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1994430.137084
The concept of "information" is one of the key words that describe modern society. It is used in a variety of settings, from daily life to academic research, and it is now difficult to understand modern society without it. On the other hand, the independent use of the concept in various situations has led to the polysemous nature of the concept, and even when the same term is used, it has different meanings in different areas of usage. The fragility of these conceptual foundations is one of the central concerns in the philosophy of information. Thus, the "analysis and organization of information concepts" emerges as an important task in the philosophy of information (cf. Adriaans and van Benthem eds. 2008; Floridi 2011). The importance of this task is not limited to simply analyzing and organizing concepts, but also includes resolving the differences that arise between different domains (concerning information concepts).
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2070706.137091
In the third scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Gavin Elster asks his old college pal Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) to spy on his wife, because, Elster says, in what we later learn is a set-up, he suspects she’s been possessed by a dead woman. …
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2300061.137101
Introduction: Cotard delusion—the delusional belief “I am dead”—is named after the French psychiatrist who first described it: Jules Cotard (1880, 1882). Ramachandran and Blakeslee (1998) proposed that the idea “I am dead” comes to mind when a neuropathological condition has resulted in complete abolition of emotional responsivity to the world. The idea would arise as a putative explanation: if “I am dead” were true, there would be no emotional responsivity to the world.
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2300127.137113
Introduction: People admitted to hospital as inpatients following head injury or stroke sometimes form the delusional belief that they are located somewhere else—often, near or in their home. This delusion was first described by Pick (1903), who named it “reduplicative paramnesia”; we argue instead for the term “location delusion”.
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2340734.137124
It has been argued that measurement-induced collapses in Orthodox Quantum Mechanics generates an intrinsic (or built-in) quantum arrow of time. In this paper, I critically assess this proposal. I begin by distinguishing between an intrinsic and non-intrinsic arrow of time. After presenting the proposal of a collapse-based arrow of time in some detail, I argue, first, that any quantum arrow of time in Orthodox Quantum Mechanics is non-intrinsic since it depends on external information about the measurement context, and second, that it cannot be global, but just local. I complement these arguments by assessing some criticisms and considerations about the implementation of time reversal in contexts wherein measurement-induced collapses work. I conclude that the quantum arrow of time delivered by Orthodox Quantum Mechanics is much weaker than usually thought.
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2588671.137134
Scientific theories always presuppose an ontology: a set of entities, relationships, and processes that together form the basic building blocks of theories. Chemistry has atoms, molecules, and ways of making and breaking bonds. Evolutionary biology has species and processes of reproduction, competition, and natural selection. A cognitive ontology is the set of entities presupposed by a theory in the behavioral and cognitive sciences. A theory that postulates a lexical and a phonological route for reading written words, for example, posits two decoding processes, each of which is part of a larger process of reading. Debates about the correct ontology are as old as cognitive theorizing itself, but the term cognitive ontology is usually discussed in the context of challenges to traditional ontologies stemming from neuroimaging research beginning in the early 2000s. The extent to which traditional cognitive theorizing must line up with discoveries in cognitive neuroscience remains a central question in the cognitive ontology debate.
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2588707.137142
An increasing number of authors are willing to attribute phenomenal consciousness to relatively simple organisms like insects. Yet it is not at all clear what functional role the substrates of consciousness would play. Here we argue phenomenal consciousness is a consequence of how mobile animals with spatial senses and a capacity for goal-directed behaviour resolve the complex problem of action selection. To adjudicate between possible goals an animal must use sensory inputs, representations of internal state, and stored knowledge of values to estimate expected value vectors for different options. Brains solve this problem by taking such heterogenous information and transform it into a common framework – a phenomenal interface - and then use this to compute multi-objective Q-values. We use insects to flesh out the details of the phenomenal interface. A consequence of this type of processing is that it naturally generates a distinction between self and non-self and a first-person perspective in which external stimuli have a subjective value. We discuss the consequences of this theory for understanding the evolution and distribution of phenomenal consciousness, and suggest an underappreciated problem that arises when thinking about how consciousness might have expanded and changed as it evolved from its simplest origins.
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2629071.13715
In this essay, I explore the idea of using large language models (LLMs) not as full models of general artificial intelligence themselves, but as components that can help bootstrap cognitive architectures comprised of other components to greater degrees of cognitive flexibility and agency. In particular, I explore the idea that LLMs could perform some of the roles that inner speech plays in human cognitive development and adult problem-solving. Researchers are currently exploring many questions of the form: can an LLM (such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or AnthropicAI’s Claude) have cognitive/mental property X (where X =… represent world models, reason, be conscious, exhibit theory of mind, communicate, and more). If instead of evaluating language models themselves as the sole bearer of X, we instead tried to use LLMs to play the role in the developmental process of acquiring X played by inner speech—as an internal, linguistically-vehicled coordinator and scaffold for diverse other processes—then the significance of research on LLMs as a path towards AI deserves fresh reevaluation, and a different research agenda for philosophically-motivated, deep-learning-based AI comes into focus.
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3205880.137167
Using the fiber bundle framework, this work investigates the conceptual and mathematical foundations of reference frames in General Relativity by contrasting two paradigms. The View from Nowhere interprets frame representations as perspectives on an invariant equivalence class, while the View from Everywhere posits each frame representation as constituting reality itself. This conception of reality is termed ”Relality.” The paper critically examines the philosophical and practical implications of these views, with a focus on reconciling theory with experimental practice. Central to the discussion is the challenge of providing a perspicuous characterisation of ontology. The View from Nowhere aligns with the so-called ‘sophisticated approach on symmetries’ and it complicates the empirical grounding of theoretical constructs. In contrast, the View from Everywhere offers a relational ontology that avoids the abstraction of equivalence classes.
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3240578.137178
Artifacts remain nebulous entities, notwithstanding their relevance to various domains such as engineering, art and archeology. In this paper we investigate the interconnection between artifacts and realizable entities, as illustrated by dispositions, functions, and roles within the framework of the upper ontology Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). More concretely, we propose the notions of canonical artifact (something that is intentionally produced for some purpose) and usefact (something that is intended to be used for some non-original purpose) which can correspond to various usages of the term “artifact”. We also characterized them in terms of intentional realizable entities and novel realizable entities: material canonical artifacts and material usefacts can be analyzed in terms of novel intentional realizable entities and a special kind of non-novel intentional realizable entities, respectively.
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3490853.137194
of which might even cause disastrous failures, meaningless sacrifices, or irreparable losses. Obviously, we cannot rewind time and change the past, but the idea of redemption suggests a possibility of salvaging bad episodes in our life. Despite the religious connotation, redemptive narratives are prevalent in secular movies, novels, and even real-life stories. While some philosophers in the literature on well-being mention or briefly discuss the idea of redemption, none of them has attempted to provide a systematic account of it. This by no means indicates that redemption has nothing philosophically interesting to theorize about. What does it mean to redeem the past in secular settings, and why does redemption even matter without the religious underpinnings?
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3490935.137202
In work on the imagination, it is a commonplace that imagination is heterogeneous, and that we must draw numerous important distinctions in order even to discuss it — conceding at least temporarily that there is an “it” to discuss. Besides a basic distinction between sensory and propositional or attitudinal imagination, we also find cross-cutting distinctions between creative and re-creative imagination, hypothetical and dramatic imagination, imagining as mental representation or as a constructive process, as well as distinctions between different kinds of imaginative use. We must also acknowledge, independently of these distinctions, that the range of activities taken to involve imagination is simply very broad. Standard examples in the literature run from basic quasi-sensory experiences such as imagining a red patch, to evaluating remote counterfactuals, engaging with narrative art, “mindreading,” empathy, planning one’s future, make-believe, fantasy, and more.
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4070601.137208
It is greatly to the credit of Anneli Je erson that she has managed to write a book on this oft-discussed topic that is actually interesting. It is also short and readable, twin virtues that make it an easy recommendation for anyone looking for a way into the debate or for a text to assign students. Je erson moves uently through the intellectual terrain, objecting to some versions of what ‘brain disorder’ might mean, before proposing her own version and then discussing the implications of her account for questions of agency and moral responsibility. This nal discussion on issues around moral responsibility is likely to make the book especially attractive for students and practitioners who want not just to learn about the metaphysics of psychopathology but also to get a wider sense of why it matters, and to connect the ontology with moral psychology. Philosophers of psychiatry are building connections with phenomenology and also looking for relevance in more applied areas, and the last chapter of the book will help anyone starting out to understand the literature connecting philosophical psychopathology with debates over agency and moral responsibility. I recommend that chapter heartily. Like much of the book, it is a model of clear, painstaking discussion of the issues, and you will bene t from reading it. I am going to focus, though, on the debate over whether mental disorders are brain disorders, which forms the core of the book.