The volume contains a collection of papers presented at the International Symposium, which took place in Hvar, Croatia, in 2006. In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in the study of Plato, Platonism and Neoplatonism. Taking the position that it is of vital importance to establish an ongoing dialogue among scientists, artists, academics, theologians and philosophers concerning pressing issues of common interest to humankind, this collection of papers endeavours to bridge the gap between contemporary research in Platonist (...) philosophy and other fields where insights gained from the study of Plato and Platonist philosophy can be of consequence and benefit. Authors: Werner Beierwaltes, Luc Brisson, Amber Carpenter, John Dillon, Jonathan Doner, Franco Ferrari, Francesco Fronterotta, F.A.J. de Haas, Aaron Hughes, Byron Kaldis, Daniel Kolak, Thomas Leinkauf, Dionysis Mentzeniotis, Jean-Marc Narbonne, Giannis Stamatellos, Vladimir Stoupel, Patrick Quinn, Jure Zovko and Marie-Élize Zovko. (shrink)

There are good and bad reasons to be skeptical of intelligent design. Perhaps the best reason is that intelligent design has yet to establish itself as a thriving scientific research program. Thus far philosophical, theoretical, and foundational concerns have tended to predominate. From the vantage of design advocates, this simply reflects the earliness of the hour and the need to clear the decks before a shift of paradigms can take place. Give us more time, and we'll deliver on the program. (...) That's our promise. Skeptics are at this point in their rights to refuse such promissory notes, albeit without sabotaging our efforts to make good on this promise. (shrink)

Howe et al.'s rejection of traditional discussion of talent is clearly acceptable, but their alternative has a weakness. They stress practice and hard work while referring vaguely to some basic biological substrate. High scores on a valid test of general intelligence provide a cultural-genetic basis for talented performance in a wide variety of specialties, ranging from engineering to the humanities. These choices may be entirely environmentally determined, and the highest levels of achievement do require practice and hard work.

The study was aimed at validating the Polish version of the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire-Short Form. Our findings confirm the reliability and validity of the scale. With respect to reliability, internal consistency coefficients of the TEIQue-SF were comparable to those obtained using the original English version. The evidence of the validity of the TEIQue-SF came from the pattern of relations with the other self-report measure of EI, personality measures, as well as affective and social correlates. We demonstrated that the (...) TEIQue-SF score correlated positively with scores on the Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire. The TEIQue- SF score correlated negatively with Neuroticism and positively with Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. In addition, scores on the TEIQue-SF were related to dispositional affect, i.e., correlated positively with positive affectivity and negatively with negative affectivity. The TEIQue-SF score correlated positively with social competencies as measured with the Social Competencies Questionnaire. We also found that trait EI, as measured with the TEIQue-SF, was positively related to the richness of one’s supportive social network and this relationship remained statistically significant even after controlling for Big Five variance. We also demonstrated that scoring on the TEIQue-SF was positively related to satisfaction with life and negatively related to perceived stress and these relationships remained significant, even after controlling for positive and negative affectivity. Taken together, these findings suggest that the Polish version of the TEIQue-SF is a reliable and valid measure that inherits the network of associations both from the original version of the TEIQue-SF and the full form of the Polish TEIQue. (shrink)

This essay introduces this special issue on virtue ethics in relation to military AI. It describes the current situation of military AI ethics as following that of AI ethics in general, caught between consequentialism and deontology. Virtue ethics serves as an alternative that can address some of the weaknesses of these dominant forms of ethics. The essay describes how the articles in the issue exemplify the value of virtue-related approaches for these questions, before ending with thoughts for further research.

In this article, we argue that there is an essential difference between social intelligence and creative intelligence, and that they have their foundation in human sexuality. For sex differences, we refer to the vast psychological, neurological, and cognitive science research where problem-solving, verbal skills, logical reasoning, and other topics are dealt with. Intelligence tests suggest that, on average, neither sex has more general intelligence than the other. Though people are equals in general intelligence, they are (...) different in special forms of intelligence such as social intelligence and creative intelligence, the former dominant in women, the latter dominant in men. The dominance of creative intelligence in men needs to be explained. The focus of our research is on the strictly anthropological aspects, and consequently our explanation for this fact is based on the male-female polarity in the mating systems. Sexual dimorphism does not only regard bodily differences but implies different forms of sex life. Sex researchers distinguish between two levels of sexual intercourse: procreative sex and recreational sex, and to these we would add “creative sex.” On all three levels, there is a behavioral difference between men and women, including the subjective experience. These differences are as well attributed to culture as genetically founded in nature. Sexual reproduction is only possible if females cooperate. Their biological inheritance makes females play a decisive role in mate choice. Recreational sex for the purpose of pleasure rather than reproduction results from female extended sexual activity. Creative sex, on the contrary, is a specifically male performance of sexuality. We identify creative sex with eroticism. Eroticism evolved through the transformation of the sexual drive into a mental state of expectation and fantasizing. Hence, sex differences (that nowadays are covered up by cultural egalitarianism) continue to be the evolutionary origin of the difference between social and creative intelligence. (shrink)

Kant considers unity of aim as connected to the form of a whole, what makes impossible to reject any of its parts. Science emerges a priori as an idea which, requiring for its own realization a scheme, due to unity of the aim architectonically makes the whole possible. Scheme of science divides the whole in connection with its idea. Kant opposes science and technic, i.e. accidental efficient deeds, which cannot constitute the whole. Plato considers the One to be prior principle. (...) Connection between the One and intelligible to the mind is indicated by scheme. Therefore, the author aims to compare two types of schematism. Need do divide the whole serves as a basis for comparison. Plato needs it to dialectically envisage scheme of division the whole. Kant – to divide the whole in connection to aim. (shrink)

ON A GENERAL READING of the Metaphysics and the treatises of the so-called Organon, the types of assertion which Aristotle would allow as genuine predications seem relatively straightforward. According to the Categories, for instance, a species is characteristically predicated of the individuals falling under it, while genera and differentiae are predicated both of the relevant species and their associated individuals. The predicates are, in these instances, universals in a familiar Aristotelian sense. Furthermore, these intra-categorial predications, such as "Socrates is a (...) man" and "white is a color," are not the only instances of categorial acts. Aristotle also admits certain cross-categorial predications as logically well-formed; for example, "Socrates is white" and "Socrates is in the marketplace". These latter predications are at first glance also intelligible enough, though there are in both cases questions yet to be faced about the logical structure and ontological commitments of such ways of speaking. For Aristotle, one metaphysical theme presented even on the face of these linguistic appearances is the possibility that being a substrate for predication counts as a criterion for ontological primacy or, more generally, that being an ultimate substrate for meaningful discourse is grounds for being primarily real. An obvious corollary to this line of thought is the thesis that whatever might be said of or predicated of such primary substrata is ontologically dependent upon them. Just such a criterion seems to be at work in disqualifying universals from their claim to be substance in a significant sense. Therefore, it would be somewhat surprising to find primary substance appearing anywhere as a predicate. (shrink)

Fear and concerns regarding AI and robots have existed for a long time, and the emergence of strong artificial intelligence, on par with human intelligence, is likely just a few decades away. The primary purpose of this article is to establish a theoretical framework for navigating the relationship between humans and this advanced form of artificial intelligence. This article first points out that the most fundamental characteristic of life is its continuous process of evolution and iteration. By (...) analyzing the developmental history of intelligence in different species, it can be observed that intelligence also exhibits a similar evolutionary phenomenon. Therefore, from this perspective, intelligence can be defined as a new form of information life. Under this premise, similarities and differences between information life forms and conventional biological life become apparent. The most significant distinction lies in the fact that the survival of biological life is based on non-replicable matter and energy, leading to extensive competition and food chain phenomena within ecosystems. In contrast, the survival of information life relies more on replicable information, fostering tendencies towards peace and communication. Based on this theoretical premise, there is a potential for a harmonious coexistence between humans and AI. This theory also provides guidance for the positive development of human society. (shrink)

Traditionally, psychologists have utilized rather large-grain, macro units to clarify and measure cognition. Favored units include psychometric factors (e.g., IQ,verbal ability, quantitative ability) and categories of cognition (e.g., inductive reasoning, inference, mental rotation). In this paper, we tested the hypothesis that specific language concepts can complement psychometric factors and cognitive categories as distinguishable units of human intelligence. We found that productive use of specific language in persuasive essays predicted cognitive ability scores on the Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT). A simple (...) sum of specific words used (ranging from 0 to 7) correlated with cognitive factors almost as highly as the ability tests intercorrelated. The proposed model speculates that, as semiotic signs, discrete language concepts compose in part the cultural heritage passed on with modification from generation to the next. Moreover, in contrast to other units of analysis, cognitive tools in the form of specific language are teachable in a direct and deliberate manner as one function of education. (shrink)

The logical problem of artificial intelligence—the question of whether the notion sometimes referred to as ‘strong’ AI is self-contradictory—is, essentially, the question of whether an artificial form of life is possible. This question has an immediately paradoxical character, which can be made explicit if we recast it (in terms that would ordinarily seem to be implied by it) as the question of whether an unnatural form of nature is possible. The present paper seeks to explain this paradoxical kind of (...) possibility by arguing that machines can share the human form of life and thus acquire human mindedness, which is to say they can be intelligent, conscious, sentient, etc. in precisely the way that a human being typically is. (shrink)

We describe a strategy for integration of data that is based on the idea of semantic enhancement. The strategy promises a number of benefits: it can be applied incrementally; it creates minimal barriers to the incorporation of new data into the semantically enhanced system; it preserves the existing data (including any existing data-semantics) in their original form (thus all provenance information is retained, and no heavy preprocessing is required); and it embraces the full spectrum of data sources, types, models, and (...) modalities (including text, images, audio, and signals). The result of applying this strategy to a given body of data is an evolving Dataspace that allows the application of a variety of integration and analytic processes to diverse data contents. We conceive semantic enhancement (SE) as a lightweight and flexible process that leverages the richness of the structured contents of the Dataspace without adding storage and processing burdens to what, in the intelligence domain, will be an already storage- and processing-heavy starting point. SE works not by changing the data to which it is applied, but rather by adding an extra semantic layer to this data. We sketch how the semantic enhancement approach can be applied consistently and in cumulative fashion to new data and data-models that enter the Dataspace. (shrink)

It would be hard to find a more fervent advocate of the position that computers are of profound significance to philosophy than Aaron Sloman. Yet, he is not a stereotypical proponent of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Far from it; in his writings, he undermines several popular convictions of functionalists. Through his drafts and polemics, Sloman definitely exerts quite substantial influence on the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence. Sloman's paper “Evolution: The Computer Systems Engineer Designing Minds” presents a bold hypothesis that (...) the evolution of the human mind actually involved the development of a several dozen of virtual machines that support various forms of self-monitoring. This, in turn, helps explain different features of our cognitive functioning. (shrink)

RésuméIl y a, dans la notion de dialectique moderne, deux perspectives de l'évolution intellectuelle: l'intelligence peut n'ětre encore que la pointe extrěme de l'adaptation biologique ou elle peut ětre déjà l'expression de la raison. C'est ce caractère ouvert des dialectiques scientifiques que nous retrouvons dans les interprétations étudiées ici: le pancalisme de Baldwin, la pensée sans images de Binet, l'interprétation de Janet et celle de Piaget, qui contribuent à enrichir la notion de genèse de l'intelligence et à en (...) faire saisir l'évolution.ZusammenfassungDie geistige Entwicklung wird in der modernen Dialektik aus zwei Gesichtspunkten erfasst, und zwar mag die Intelligenz wohl nur noch das äusserste Ende der biologischen Anpassung oder schon der Ausdruck der Vernunft sein. Das Offene eben der wissenschaftlichen Dialektiken finden wir in den hier erörterten Deutungen wieder, im Baldwinschen Pancalismus, im Denken ohne Bilder von Binet, in den Deutungen von Janet und von Piaget, die dazu beitragen, den Begriff von der Entstehungsgeschichte der Intelligenz zu bereichern und deren Evolution verständlich zu machen.There are two prospects of intellectual evolution in the notion of dialectics: intelligence can either be the ultimate point of biological adaptation or it can already be the expression of reason. Within this open characteristics of scientific dialectics are to be found the interpretations studied here: Baldwin's pancalism, Binet's » thought without image «, Janet's and Piaget's interpretations which help to enrich the knowledge of the genesis of intelligence and its evolution. (shrink)

The concept of rule permeates Foucault’s methodological formulations concerning the object of his investigation, but he offers few explicit discussions of the epistemological status of such rules. My claim is that the explication of Foucauldian rules in terms of Wittgensteinian criteria clarifies their epistemological status, and thereby enables one to formulate a novel conception of the historical a priori, one that is defensible against recurrent objections which charge that Foucault’s theoretical reflections confuse concepts that are distinct. Foucault and Wittgenstein are (...) best seen as articulating a sense of intelligibility in which forms are integral to content and meaning is not abstracted from social practices. ‘Form of life’ increases the conceptual cogency of ‘historical a priori,’ whereas the latter delineates what it would be like to take the former’s historicity seriously. (shrink)

The notion of forms of life points to a crucial aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach that challenges an influential line in the philosophical tradition. He portrays intellectual activities in terms of a cohesion of things held together in linguistic scenes rooted in the lives of people and the facts of the world. The original inspiration with which Wittgenstein worked on this approach is still relevant today in the recent technological turn associated with AI. He attacked a conception that treated (...) human activities as material to be examined by external models of rationality. Along with other modernists such as Musil, he saw the danger of losing faith in human intellectual and moral capacities. In contrast, Wittgenstein elucidates and substantively defends an idea of forms of life in which the great normative enterprises, from science to the works of the imagination, are based on our individual capacity to take the next step from a normative authority that rests entirely with us, as agents who can claim it in the name of others, in the name of arithmetic, in the name of our native language, in the name of justice, and so on. Forms of life are the place to look to claim this authority over the mistrust we feel compelled to cultivate in our human endeavors. (shrink)

It is well established that intelligence testing in its modern form developed and was deployed slightly differently in several countries, most notably France, England and the United States. Less widely recognized is the fact that its originators were all part of a close network of scholars who liaised internationally, exchanged ideas and were thoroughly acquainted with each other’s work. Their exchanges resulted from the transnational drive to develop a new social science of psychology involving a determination to find empirical (...) evidence on which to base understandings of the human mind. This soon led to the development of a means of testing human performance, not least in the field of intelligence. In the process, close contacts between all those who were to be pioneers of intelligence testing around the globe developed, in touch with and feeding off each others’ ideas. This article is an account of the development of that network. (shrink)

The Internet is an important focus of attention for the philosophy of mind and cognitive science communities. This is partly because the Internet serves as an important part of the material environment in which a broad array of human cognitive and epistemic activities are situated. The Internet can thus be seen as an important part of the ‘cognitive ecology’ that helps to shape, support and realize aspects of human cognizing. Much of the previous philosophical work in this area has sought (...) to analyze the cognitive significance of the Internet from the perspective of human cognition. There has, as such, been little effort to assess the cognitive significance of the Internet from the perspective of ‘machine cognition’. This is unfortunate, because the Internet is likely to exert a significant influence on the shape of machine intelligence. The present paper attempts to evaluate the extent to which the Internet serves as a form of cognitive ecology for synthetic forms of intelligence. In particular, the phenomenon of Internet-situated machine intelligence is analyzed from the perspective of a number of approaches that are typically subsumed under the heading of situated cognition. These include extended, embedded, scaffolded and embodied approaches to cognition. For each of these approaches, the Internet is shown to be of potential relevance to the development and operation of machine-based cognitive capabilities. Such insights help us to appreciate the role of the Internet in advancing the current state-of-the-art in machine intelligence. (shrink)

The necessity to model the mental ingredients of norm compliance is a controversial issue within the study of norms. So far, the simulation-based study of norm emergence has shown a prevailing tendency to model norm conformity as a thoughtless behavior, emerging from social learning and imitation rather than from specific, norm-related mental representations. In this paper, the opposite stance—namely, a view of norms as hybrid, two-faceted phenomena, including a behavioral/social and an internal/mental side—is taken. Such a view is aimed at (...) accounting for the difference between norms, on one hand, and either behavioral regularities (conventions) on the other. This paper, in particular, is addressed to find out the internal ingredients required for the former distinction, i.e., to model norms as distinct from mere conventions, and defined as behaviors spreading to the extent that and because the corresponding commands and beliefs do spread as well. After a brief presentation of a normative agent architecture, the results of agent-based simulations testing the impact of norm recognition and the role of normative beliefs in the emergence and innovation of social norms are presented and discussed. More specifically, the present work will endeavour to show that a sudden external constraint (e.g. a barrier preventing agents from moving among social settings) facilitates norm innovation: under such a condition, agents provided with a module for telling what a norm is can generate new (social) norms by forming new normative beliefs, irrespective of the most frequent actions. (shrink)

Al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes, widely known classical rationalists in the Arabic/Islamic philosophical tradition and strongly infl uential sources for Latin philosophy in the High Middle Ages, all thought themselves to be following Aristotle’s lead regarding the intellectual abstraction of intelligibles in the formation of necessary and unchanging scientific knowledge. For Aristotle it is clear that sensation is a potentiality for apprehending or coming to be individual sensed objects found in the world exterior to the human soul. This takes place by (...) way of a separation of the forms of sensibles from matter and a reception of them as an actualization of the senses of the soul. 1 In an analogous fashion, intellectual knowing is a potentiality for apprehending or coming to be in act non-individuated intellectual forms that are somehow in individuated particular sensible things. Although Aristotle says that “the objects of thought are in the sensible forms”, the analogy with sensation breaks down when it comes to the objects intellectually known. The reason for this is that the nonindividuated or universal forms of human knowledge are not in the sensibles in act as they must be in the intellect. 2 Again following Aristotle De Anima 3.4 and 3.5, these thinkers hold for a part of intellect that is passive or receptive of all things and another part that is active in making all things, this latter described as a disposition like light, this as well describing the active agent as acting like light. This second part, which the Arabic tradition called the Agent Intellect, sometimes describing it also as Active Intellect, al-‘aql al-fa‘il, was understood per Aristotelem to be an eternal cause of the intellectual forms in the human intellect. It was accepted that, without a grounding in separate eternal intellect, there may well be generalization or abstraction – in some sense of the 57term? but scientific knowledge understood as true, necessary and unchanging will not be achieved. 3 Of course, in Posterior Analytics 2.19 Aristotle writes of sensory experience and provides the image of a retreat gradually coming to a halt, saying, “The soul is so constituted that it is capable of the same sort of process”. This process somehow establishes the universal in the soul even though perception is of the particular. He describes this as taking place by induction, writing, “Clearly then it must be by induction that we acquire knowledge of the primary principles, because this is also the way in which general concepts are conveyed to us by sense-perception.” These are “first things” or primary principles or premises required by demonstration. And the Arabic tradition understood Aristotle to hold for the necessity of demonstration in the formation of scientific knowledge, something that stringently requires not only proper syllogistic form but also first premises that are known to be true, not just supposed or simply generalized on the basis of experience. 4 For the Arabic tradition, Aristotle?s doctrine of intellectual understanding required the involvement of that separate Agent Intellect to provide a solid foundation for human scientific knowledge by way of intellectual abstraction. (shrink)

Increasing concerns have been raised regarding artificial intelligence (AI) bias, and in response, efforts have been made to pursue AI fairness. In this paper, we argue that the idea of structural injustice serves as a helpful framework for clarifying the ethical concerns surrounding AI bias—including the nature of its moral problem and the responsibility for addressing it—and reconceptualizing the approach to pursuing AI fairness. Using AI in healthcare as a case study, we argue that AI bias is a form (...) of structural injustice that exists when AI systems interact with other social factors to exacerbate existing social inequalities, making some groups of people more vulnerable to undeserved burdens while conferring unearned benefits to others. The goal of AI fairness, understood this way, is about pursuing a more just social structure with the development and usage of AI systems when appropriate. We further argue that all participating agents in the unjust social structure associated with AI bias bear a shared responsibility to join collective action with the goal of reforming the social structure, and we provide a list of practical recommendations for agents in various social positions to contribute to this collective action. (shrink)

Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are stored, not as representations in the (...) mind, but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each. Maximal grip names the body's tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt. Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations. They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either.Simulated neural networks exhibit crucial structural features of the intentional arc, and Walter Freeman's account of the brain dynamics underlying perception and action is structurally isomorphic with Merleau-Ponty's account of the way a skilled agent is led by the situation to move towards obtaining a maximal grip. (shrink)

Emotional intelligence (EI) stands at the nexus between intelligence and emotion disciplines, and we outline how EI research might be better integrated within both theoretical frameworks. From the former discipline, empirical research focused upon whether EI is an intelligence and what type of intelligence it constitutes. It is clear that ability-based tests of EI form a group factor of cognitive abilities that may be integrated into the Cattell–Horn–Carroll framework; less clear is the lower order factor structure (...) of EI. From the latter discipline, research linking EI with theoretical frameworks from emotion research remain relatively sparse. Emotion regulation and appraisal theory may be key to explain how EI may reflect different processes. We propose a research agenda to advance the EI study. (shrink)

This study explores the effect of a short ethics intervention—a chapter of business ethics in a business course—on perceptions of business courses and personal values toward making money and making ethical decisions and Monetary Intelligence. Since attitudes predict intentions and behaviors, Monetary Intelligence, a form of social intelligence, is defined as the extent to which individuals monitor their own monetary motive, behavior, and cognition; apply the information to evaluate critical concerns and options; select strategies to achieve financial (...) goals; and reach ultimate success and subjective well-being. I theorize that the affective aspect of MI is unrelated to perceptions of “course work,” yet it is positively related to their “personal values” toward making money, but negatively related to making ethical decisions. Individuals with high MI have low interests in making money, but high levels of intrinsic religiosity and recall of the Ten Commandments and high interests in making ethical decisions and making the grade. Based on data from multiple panels and multiple sources, this study provides the following discoveries. Contrary to expectations, there are no differences in students’ perceptions of course work and their personal values toward making money and making ethical decisions between two measures—before and after the ethics intervention. Results of this study not only provide empirical supports for the bright side of theory of Monetary Intelligence but also reveal a new paradox—recall of the Ten Commandments is positively related to making ethical decisions, but negatively related to making money. Results illustrate important theoretical, empirical, and practical implications to the literature of money attitudes, religiosity, intrinsic motivation, and business ethics. (shrink)

One of the most common contemporary approaches for developing an ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) involves elaborating guiding principles. This essay explores the limitations of this approach, using the history of bioethics as a comparative case. The examples of bioethics and recent AI ethics suggest that principles are difficult to implement in everyday practice, fail to direct individual action, and can frequently result in a pure proceduralism. The essay encourages an additional attention to virtue, which forms the dispositions (...) of actors, directs them to valued ends, and encourages right action in particular situation to complement principles. Practices and professions like medicine or warfighting that already have rich traditions of reflection on virtue ethics will be especially fruitful fields for developing an AI ethics of virtue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will by Günter ZöllerDaniel BreazealeGünter Zöller. Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xvii + 169. Cloth, $49.95.The subtitle says it all: “Original Duplicity,” which is to say, interdependent duality, or perhaps “equiprimordiality.” The thesis defended by Günter Zöller in this meticulously documented and elegantly written new book (...) is that the traditional emphasis upon the “primacy of the practical” in Fichte’s thought is seriously misleading and obscures one of the most striking aspects of his highly original transcendental analysis of consciousness and experience.Limiting his exegesis to the period of the “early” or “Jena” Wissenschaftslehre, Zöller carefully explains how “practical” and “theoretical” elements are inextricably linked at every stage of Fichte’s analysis. While it is certainly true that Fichte made a brilliant effort to demonstrate the dependence of “thinking” upon “willing,” of “knowing” upon “doing,” and hence of “theory” upon “practice,” it is no less true that, in doing so, he also established that there can be no “willing” without some prior awareness, and hence some “knowledge,” both of one’s present condition (“what is”) and of some particular goal to be accomplished by free activity (“what ought to be”). The Kantian distinction between “theoretical” and “practical” reason is, therefore, on Fichte’s analysis, simply a reflection of a more fundamental distinction between the “theoretical” and “practical” activities or powers of the I, neither of which can function in the absence of the other. [End Page 374]What Fichte proposes is, in Zöller’s phrase, a truly “integrated theory of reason,” one that begins by positing a pure and original unity of intellect and will in the mere concept of selfhood, that proceeds to a discursive, transcendental analysis of the dynamic and dialectical interplay between “theoretical” and “practical” moments in the constitution of experience (or of empirical self-consciousness), and that concludes by positing, albeit only as a regulative ideal, or as a necessary but unobtainable goal of infinite striving, the final, empirically achieved unity of theory and practice: an ideal of a self that is no longer divided against itself or others and of a world that has been wholly transformed by intellectually guided human activity. As Fichte’s account proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear not only that we must distinguish the will from the intellect—even as we continue to insist upon their systematic interdependence—but that we must also modify our original understanding of both. This conclusion is most unambiguously presented in those works of 1796–99 that collectively constitute the “second” or “revised” version of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre, including the lectures on Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo and the System of Ethics, and it is upon an analysis of these texts that Zöller’s interpretation is chiefly based. According to the latter, an adequate theory of willing must not merely contrast and relate “the will” to “the intellect,” but must recognize that even pure volition contains a certain cognitive core and presupposes some guiding law that is simply integral to the will itself. Similarly, “mere cognition” will always be found to contain within itself, in the form of “feeling,” a certain “practical” dimension of its own.Zöller’s careful account of Fichte’s genetic deduction of the necessary interplay between theoretical and practical elements in the constitution of selfhood and experience is by far the most detailed and accurate one available in English, and forms the core of his book. It is by no means, however, the only topic he discusses. The first two chapters, for example, constitute an excellent general introduction to Fichte’s entire Jena project and include a fine discussion of the relationship between Kantian and Fichtean idealism. Chapter 3, which explicates the key notions of “positing” and “determining,” will be of immense help to anyone trying to understand German idealism in general and Fichte’s philosophy in particular. Like Kant’s ethical theory, Fichte’s is often treated in isolation from his larger system, but Zöller’s Chapter 4 clearly explicates the... (shrink)

Aristotle maintains that defining nous requires first defining its activity, which requires first having considered its objects, intelligible beings. This chapter is about the nature of these objects: what about them makes them intelligible? My principal proposals will be that what makes them intelligible is that they are separate or unmixed, and that because, insofar as they are intelligible, they are, in their essence, activity. I am not unaware that this makes it sound as though Aristotle takes intelligibility to consist (...) in some kind of nous. But he himself virtually says as much, when he claims that nous is the form of its objects (lit. εἶδος εἰδῶν); besides it is a result he is committed to by the doctrines that nous is intelligible and that there is something that intelligible objects all are in common; for the alternative, as he himself says, is to suppose that nous “will have something mixed-in, which makes it intelligible just like the rest.” The challenge, then, is not to steer clear of this result, but to make sense of it. My proposal will be that the key lies in realizing that and why Aristotle thinks intelligibility is a creature of nous. (shrink)

A number of authors have agued the case that there is empirical evidence that the universe (or particular configurations within it) must be the outcome of intelligent design. Recent books by William Dembski and Dean Overman, though different in style and level of argumentation, reach a similar conclusion: the universe, or certain forms within it, cannot be explained without appeal to design as a mode of causation. But exactly what is the operative definition for intelligent design in these works? (...) And how convincing is their case for the necessity of appealing to this type of design in causal explanations? (shrink)

Comparative research assessing metacognition in nonhuman animals contributes to the question of what form introspection could take in humans, non-humans, and other possibly conscious systems. We briefly review some major findings in comparative metacognition research, including some discoveries in areas looking at self-regulation and self-control. We discuss what data exist to address the three conditions for introspection defined by Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) in their target article. We suggest that two of three conditions are met by existing data from (...) non-human primates, and that the third condition may be more difficult, but perhaps not impossible, to assess. We argue that a comparative and developmental approach to this question of how to define and measure introspection is a productive avenue to make progress in this area. (shrink)

Collective Intelligence, the book in French, that Pierre Levy wrote before the existence of the worldwide web, when only the Internet existed, it's a philosophical vision of the future, a philosophical vision of what could be a global civilization based on the digital and the general interconnection of all the computers. In the interview, Levy addresses the creation o the WWW by Tim Berners Lee as a form of collective intelligence. He then discusses Berners Lee's proposal for a (...) reform of the WWW to avoid its confiscation by the big platforms, such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Then, he introduces his most recent project the IELM as a tool for semantic metadata and a code between the natural languages and the algorithms, and all the apparatus of computations. (shrink)

Whether copyrights should exist in content generated by an artificial intelligence is a frequently discussed issue in the legal literature. Most of the discussion focuses on economic rights, whereas the relationship of artificial intelligence and moral rights remains relatively obscure. However, as moral rights traditionally aim at protecting the author’s “personal sphere”, the question whether the law should recognize such protection in the content produced by machines is pressing; this is especially true considering that artificial intelligence is (...) continuously further developed and increasingly hard to comprehend for human beings. This paper first provides the background on the protection of moral rights under existing international, U.S. and European copyright laws. On this basis, the paper then proceeds to highlight special issues in connection with moral rights and content produced by artificial intelligence, in particular whether an artificial intelligence itself, the creator or users of an artificial intelligence should be considered as owners of moral rights. Finally, the present research discusses possible future solutions, in particular alternative forms of attribution rights or the introduction of related rights. (shrink)

A common argumentative strategy employed by anti-reductionists involves claiming that one kind of entity cannot be identified with or reduced to a second because what can intelligibly be predicated of one cannot be predicated intelligibly of the other. For instance, it might be argued that mind and brain are not identical because it makes sense to say that minds are rational but it does not make sense to say that brains are rational. The scope and power of this kind of (...) argument — if valid — are obvious; but if it turns out that ‘It makes sense to say that...’ creates an opaque context, such arguments will fail. I analyze a possible counterexample to validity and show that it is not conclusive, as it depends on what syntactical construction is given to the premises. This leads to the general observation that the argument form under consideration works for some constructions but not others, and thus to the conclusion that further analysis of intelligibility is called for before it can be known whether the argumentative strategy is open to the anti-reductionist or not. (shrink)

It has become a truism that the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) is necessary and must help guide technological developments. Numerous ethical guidelines have emerged from academia, industry, government and civil society in recent years. While they provide a basis for discussion on appropriate regulation of AI, it is not always clear how these ethical guidelines were developed, and by whom. Using content analysis, we surveyed a sample of the major documents (_n_ = 47) and analyzed the accessible information (...) regarding their methodology and stakeholder engagement. Surprisingly, only 38% report some form of stakeholder engagement (with 9% involving citizens) and most do not report their methodology for developing normative insights (15%). Our results show that documents with stakeholder engagement develop more comprehensive ethical guidance with greater applicability, and that the private sector is least likely to engage stakeholders. We argue that the current trend for enunciating AI ethical guidance not only poses widely discussed challenges of applicability in practice, but also of transparent development (as it rather behaves as a black box) and of active engagement of diversified, independent and trustworthy stakeholders. While most of these documents consider people and the common good as central to their telos, engagement with the general public is significantly lacking. As AI ethics moves from the initial race for enunciating general principles to more sustainable, inclusive and practical guidance, stakeholder engagement and citizen involvement will need to be embedded into the framing of ethical and societal expectations towards this technology. (shrink)

The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence for making decisions in public affairs has sparked a lively debate on the benefits and potential harms of self-learning technologies, ranging from the hopes of fully informed and objectively taken decisions to fear for the destruction of mankind. To prevent the negative outcomes and to achieve accountable systems, many have argued that we need to open up the “black box” of AI decision-making and make it more transparent. Whereas this debate has primarily focused (...) on how transparency can secure high-quality, fair, and reliable decisions, far less attention has been devoted to the role of transparency when it comes to how the general public come to perceive AI decision-making as legitimate and worthy of acceptance. Since relying on coercion is not only normatively problematic but also costly and highly inefficient, perceived legitimacy is fundamental to the democratic system. This paper discusses how transparency in and about AI decision-making can affect the public’s perception of the legitimacy of decisions and decision-makers and produce a framework for analyzing these questions. We argue that a limited form of transparency that focuses on providing justifications for decisions has the potential to provide sufficient ground for perceived legitimacy without producing the harms full transparency would bring. (shrink)

In recent years, numerous artistic experiments have emerged that engage Critical Plant Studies in dialogue with various forms of artistic creation. The role of plants in these processes, their capacity to influence them, and their impact on human imaginaries are currently subjects of debate. This text aims to analyze these questions within the context of a specific artistic project. The piece Other Intelligences by the artist duo Maria Castellanos and Alberto Valverde introduces novel features regarding the role of plants (...) and the space of encounter between humans and plants. We will analyze this artistic device by applying concepts such as plant agency and performance, opacity, and some considerations related to ethics and care. Additionally, we will present observations of certain plant behaviors and the results of six interviews conducted with project participants. (shrink)

We informally discuss some recent results on the incompleteness of formal systems. These theorems, which are of great importance to contemporary mathematical epistemology, are proved using a variety of conceptual tools provably stronger than those of finitary axiomatisations. Those tools require no mathematical ontology, but rather constitute particularly concrete human constructions and acts of comprehending infinity and space rooted in different forms of knowledge. We shall also discuss, albeit very briefly, the mathematical intelligence both of God and of (...) computers. We hope in this manner to help the reader overcome formalist reductionism, while avoiding naive Platonist ontologies, typical symptoms of Godelitis which affected many in the last seventy years. (shrink)

This commentary presents an epistemological perspective on grand challenges (GCs) suggesting that the distinction between Umwelt (what social systems observe) and environment (the surrounding but unobserved world) can help us provide deeper analyses of GCs. I argue that indifference to the environment outside the observed Umwelt is a root cause of GCs and suggest that organizations must compensate for society’s inability to address GCs by developing forms of intelligent self-limitation.

This paper discusses two opposing views about the relation between artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence: on the one hand, a worry that heavy reliance on AI technologies might make people less intelligent and, on the other, a hope that AI technologies might serve as a form of cognitive enhancement. The worry relates to the notion that if we hand over too many intelligence-requiring tasks to AI technologies, we might end up with fewer opportunities to train our (...) own intelligence. Concerning AI as a potential form of cognitive enhancement, the paper explores two possibilities: (1) AI as extending—and thereby enhancing—people’s minds, and (2) AI as enabling people to behave in artificially intelligent ways. That is, using AI technologies might enable people to behave as if they have been cognitively enhanced. The paper considers such enhancements both on the level of individuals and on the level of groups. (shrink)

In the course of consumer behavior, it is necessary to study the relationship between the characteristics of psychological activities and the laws of behavior when consumers acquire and use products or services. With the development of the Internet and mobile terminals, electronic commerce has become an important form of consumption for people. In order to conduct experiential education in E-commerce combined with consumer behavior, courses to understand consumer satisfaction. From the perspective of E-commerce companies, this study proposes to use artificial (...) intelligence image recognition technology to recognize and analyze consumer facial expressions. First, it analyzes the way of human–computer interaction in the context of E-commerce and obtains consumer satisfaction with the product through HCI technology. Then, a deep neural network is used to predict the psychological behavior and consumer psychology of consumers to realize personalized product recommendations. In the course education of consumer behavior, it helps to understand consumer satisfaction and make a reasonable design. The experimental results show that consumers are highly satisfied with the products recommended by the system, and the degree of sanctification reaches 93.2%. It is found that the DNN model can learn consumer behavior rules during evaluation, and its prediction effect is increased by 10% compared with the traditional model, which confirms the effectiveness of the recommendation system under the DNN model. This study provides a reference for consumer psychological behavior analysis based on HCI in the context of AI, which is of great significance to help understand consumer satisfaction in consumer behavior education in the context of E-commerce. (shrink)