The basic form of experiencing process as such, then, lies in the apprehension of an object changing through an ordered sequence of states towards an end state. The sequence is grasped in the light of the final state of things which stands in close relation to the central noema of "changing object" in terms of which the phases of the sequence are recognized and related. The central noema is itself an emergent property of the identification of the sequence of states (...) as "pertaining to the same something." This complex, not to say convoluted, constitution is iteratively established through polythetic acts in which change itself is grasped and sequence evidenced through the positing of possible sequences in the light of the intuition of succession. Eventually the whole sequence may be grasped monothetically and the process experienced as such as a whole. This prototype of process itself provides a basic form by which the events of intentional life may be ordered. The core experience, that objects do change in an ordered manner towards a defined and defining end may provide a way of meaningfully structuring experience. Thus for example, the succession Sii to Siii may be experienced as such. That succession may lead to a question like "towards what end does this succession tend?" More germane to the present argument, a particular state of things may lead to the question "by what process has this state of things come about?" In both these cases, the prototype of process leads to the attempt to interpret the succession or the state of things in terms of orderly change through time and in this way the intuition of process, in its own right, may provide a structure in which the phenomena of consciousness may be experienced and meaningfully related. (shrink)

Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen’s Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong (Oxford University Press, 2009) explores efforts to develop machines that, not only can be employed for good or bad ends, but which themselves can be held morally accountable for what they do— artificial moral agents (AMAs). This essay is a critical response to Wallach and Allen’s conjectures. Although Wallach and Allen do not suggest that we are close to being able to create full-fledged AMAs, they do talk (...) seriously about making incremental progress in the direction of creating them (even if we never fully succeed). However, there are important questions about the moral development of AMAs that Moral Machines does not address. Given the responsibilities entrusted to human moral agents, we take questions about their moral development very seriously. In the case of children, the hope is that eventually they will develop into full-fledged moral agents. How might we expect this to go with less than fully formed AMAs? Will there be a comparable story of moral development and moral education that we can tell? (shrink)

This volume provides a guide to the discussion among biologists and philosophersabout the role of concepts such as function and design in an evolutionary understanding oflife.

As arti® cial intelligence moves ever closer to the goal of producing fully autonomous agents, the question of how to design and implement an arti® cial moral agent (AMA) becomes increasingly pressing. Robots possessing autonomous capacities to do things that are useful to humans will also have the capacity to do things that are harmful to humans and other sentient beings. Theoretical challenges to developing arti® cial moral agents result both from controversies among ethicists about moral theory itself, and from (...) computational limits to the implementation of such theories. In this paper the ethical disputes are surveyed, the possibility of a `moral Turing Test ’ is considered and the computational di culties accompanying the diŒerent types of approach are assessed. Human-like performance, which is prone to include immoral actions, may not be acceptable in machines, but moral perfection may be computationally unattainable. The risks posed by autonomous machines ignorantly or deliberately harming people and other sentient beings are great. The development of machines with enough intelligence to assess the eŒects of their actions on sentient beings and act accordingly may ultimately be the most important task faced by the designers of arti® cially intelligent automata. (shrink)

The demise of behaviorism has made ethologists more willing to ascribe mental states to animals. However, a methodology that can avoid the charge of excessive anthropomorphism is needed. We describe a series of experiments that could help determine whether the behavior of nonhuman animals towards dead conspecifics is concept mediated. These experiments form the basis of a general point. The behavior of some animals is clearly guided by complex mental processes. The techniques developed by comparative psychologists and behavioral ecologists are (...) able to provide us with the tools to critically evaluate hypotheses concerning the continuity between human minds and animal minds. (shrink)

There is an active debate within the field of phonology concerning the cognitive status of substantive phonetic factors such as ease of articulation and perceptual distinctiveness. A new framework is proposed in which substance acts as a bias, or prior, on phonological learning. Two experiments tested this framework with a method in which participants are first provided highly impoverished evidence of a new phonological pattern, and then tested on how they extend this pattern to novel contexts and novel sounds. Participants (...) were found to generalize velar palatalization (e.g., the change from [k] as in keep to [t⌢∫S] as in cheap) in a way that accords with linguistic typology, and that is predicted by a cognitive bias in favor of changes that relate perceptually similar sounds. Velar palatalization was extended from the mid front vowel context (i.e., before [e] as in cape) to the high front vowel context (i.e., before [i] as in keep), but not vice versa. The key explanatory notion of perceptual similarity is quantified with a psychological model of categorization, and the substantively biased framework is formalized as a conditional random field. Implications of these results for the debate on substance, theories of phonological generalization, and the formalization of similarity are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper we1 assess the potential for research on nonhuman animals to address questions about the phenomenology of painful experiences. Nociception, the basic capacity for sensing noxious stimuli, is widespread in the animal kingdom. Even rel- atively primitive animals such as leeches and sea slugs possess nociceptors, neurons that are functionally specialized for sensing noxious stimuli (Walters 1996). Vertebrate spinal cords play a sophisticated role in processing and modulating nociceptive signals, providing direct control of some motor responses to noxious (...) stimuli, and a basic capacity for Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning (Grau et al. 1990; Grau 2002). Higher brain systems provide additional layers of association, top-down control, and cognition. In humans, at least, these higher brain systems also give rise to the conscious experiences that are characteristic of pain. What can be said about the experiences of other animals who possess nervous systems that are similar but not identical to humans? (shrink)

Our goal in this paper is to provide enough of an account of the origins of cognitive ethology and the controversy surrounding it to help ethicists to gauge for themselves how to balance skepticism and credulity about animal minds when communicating with scientists. We believe that ethicists’ arguments would benefit from better understanding of the historical roots of ongoing controversies. It is not appropriate to treat some widely reported results in animal cognition as if their interpretations are a matter of (...) scientific consensus. It is especially important to understand why loose references to “cognitive ethology” by philosophers can signal ignorance of the field to scientists who are more deeply immersed in the relevant literature. Understanding the variety of approaches to cognitive phenomena in animals is essential if such capacities are to form the foundation of scientifically-informed ethical reasoning about animals. (shrink)

This book is a philosophico-theological treatise on love, coming from the stream of thought formed by the confluence of scholastic thought and modern phenomenological and personalist philosophy. The author, Fr Cowburn, is an Australian, whose thought has been moulded mainly by his studies at Innsbruck under Rahner and Coreth. His work owes nothing to linguistic philosophy.

Chemical engineering - as a recognised skill in the workplace, as an academic discipline, and as an acknowledged profession - is scarcely a century old. Yet from a contested existence before the First World War, chemical engineering had become one of the 'big four' engineering professions in Britain, and a major contributor to Western economies, by the end of the twentieth century. The subject had distinct national trajectories. In Britain - too long seen as shaped by American experiences - the (...) emergence of recognised chemical engineers was the result of professional aspirations and contingency, and shaped by a shifting ecology of institutions, firms and government. Drawing upon extensive archival research, this book examines the evolution of technical practice, working environment and social interactions of chemical engineering. It will be of considerable interest to historians, sociologists of the professions, and to practitioners themselves. (shrink)

In this paper, I describe grounds for dissatisfaction with certain aspects of the sciences of animal cognition and argue that a turn toward mathematical modeling of animal cognition is warranted. I consider some objections to this call and argue that the implications of such a turn are not as drastic for ordinary, commonsense understanding of animal minds as they might seem.

Some of the problem areas in which British philosophers of science have recently been engaged are described and some of the major contributions noted. Two sets of problems are given special attention: one concerned with the analysis of probability statements and one concerned with the appraisal of scientific theories. Three traditions in the approach to this second set of problems are distinguished. These might be called the Carnapian, the Popperian and the Wittgensteinian traditions.

Donald Griffin has suggested that cognitive ethologists can use communication between non-human animals as a "window" into animal minds. Underlying this metaphor seems to be a conception of cognition as information processing and communication as information transfer from signaller to receiver. We examine various analyses of information and discuss how these analyses affect an ongoing debate among ethologists about whether the communicative signals of some animals should be interpreted as referential signals or whether emotional accounts of such signals are adequate. (...) We discuss the food-calling behavior of a group of rhesus monkeys to develop these issues. (shrink)

Dans le cadre d'une réflexion sur l'expérience de la vérité, l'évocation de la crise moderniste rappelle ou précise des enjeux dont l'acuité explique, pour une part, la convocation du Concile Vatican Il. Sans nier les « avancées salutaires » de ce concile, l'auteur pose en point de départ de sa réflexion la question : Peut-on dire que le concile n'a pas empêché le retour au sein de l'Église catholique d'un « antimodernisme » ? Examinant tour à tour le rapport de (...) la vérité révélée et de la méthodologie scientifique, le problème du pluralisme dans l'Église catholique et le rapport entre dogme et herméneutique, il aboutit à une réflexion sur ce qui constitue aujourd'hui, et constituera de plus en plus, la situation du chrétien par rapport à la vérité de sa propre foi qu'il expérimentera dans un monde interreligieux; ce qui ne peut que confirmer une inévitable tension: « L'expérience effective de la vérité est celle d'une recherche méthodique, mais elle est aussi celle de l'acquiescement à un don. »In the realm of a reflection on the experience of truth, the evocation of the modernist crisis is brought to mind and focuses on what is at stake, the acuteness which explains, for one thing, the convocation of Vatican Council II. Without denying the « salutary advances » of that council, the author begins his reflection with the question : « Can one say that the council did not forestall the return, in the heart of the Catholic Church, to an «anti modernism» ? The author examines one after the other the relationship of revealed truth and scientific methodology, the problem of pluralism in the Catholic Church, and the relationship between dogma and hermeneutics. He arrives at a reflection on that which constitutes today, and will constitute more and more, the situation of the Christian in relation to the truth of his own faith, which he will experience in an irreligious world. This can only confirm an inevitable tension : «The effective expe7ience of the truth is that of a methodological research, but is also that of accepting a gift». ». (shrink)

In this paper I argue that selection of the best theory of content is not a matter for mere philosophical reflection on the consequences of each theory for our intuitive judgments about content. Rather, the theories must be judged in a different way that is based on the putative roles of content attribution in the behavioural sciences. The ultimate test of any theory of content will be the success of the sciences that adopt it. Furthermore, alternative semantic theories may be (...) seen as complementary rather than antagonistic. Different approaches to content specification may well be compatible, reflecting different but perhaps equally legitimate explanatory goals. (shrink)

Robert Nozick, in what is surely one of the most intriguing and provocative footnotes in modern philosophical writing, referred in Anarchy,StateandUtopia to the notion of a In keeping with the central arguments of that text, his suggestion was that choices about the genetic composition of future generations should, as far as possible, be left in the hands of private individuals, and should not be determined or restricted by the state. This free market in genetic screening would meet and would possess (...) In short, prospective parents would be allowed, to whatever extent was rendered possible by current technology, to choose the genetic traits of their future children. (shrink)

We have previously built a small IKg ([Angle 89] and [Brooks 89]) six legged walking robot named Genghis. It was remarkably successful as a testbed to develop walking and learning algorithms. It encouraged us to build a more fully engineered robot with higher performance. We are building two copies of the robot, both 1.6Kg in mass. Their generic name is Attila. Attila has 24 actuators and over 150 sensors, all connected via a local network (the I2C bus) to 11 onboard (...) computers. (shrink)

In Europe ≈15,000 patients receive larval therapy for wound treatment annually. Over the past few years, clinical studies have demonstrated the success of larvae of Lucilia sericata as debridement agents. This is based on a combination of physical and biochemical actions. Laboratory investigations have advanced our understanding of the biochemical mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of larval secretions, including removal of dead tissue, reduction of the bacterial burden, and promotion of tissue regeneration. The present article summarizes our current understanding of (...) the microbiological, immunological, and wound healing actions of larval therapy, and the molecules involved in these beneficial effects. Future studies will focus on the isolation, identification, and (pre)clinical testing of the effective molecules of L. sericata larvae. These molecules may be candidates for the development of new agents for the treatment of several infectious and inflammatory diseases, including chronic wounds. (shrink)