Body ownership concerns what it is like to feel a body part or a full body as mine, and has become a prominent area of study. We propose that there is a closely related type of bodily self-consciousness largely neglected by researchers—experiential ownership. It refers to the sense that I am the one who is having a conscious experience. Are body ownership and experiential ownership actually the same phenomenon or are they genuinely different? In our experiments, the participant watched a (...) rubber hand or someone else’s body from the first-person perspective and was touched either synchronously or asynchronously. The main findings: (1) The sense of body ownership was hindered in the asynchronous conditions of both the body-part and the full-body experiments. However, a strong sense of experiential ownership was observed in those conditions. (2) We found the opposite when the participants’ responses were measured after tactile stimulations had ceased for 5 s. In the synchronous conditions of another set of body-part and full-body experiments, only experiential ownership was blocked but not body ownership. These results demonstrate for the first time the double dissociation between body ownership and experiential ownership. Experiential ownership is indeed a distinct type of bodily self-consciousness. (shrink)

This article offers a critical interpretation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a philosophical notion which exemplifies a secular conception of thinking. One way in which AI notably differs from the conventional understanding of “thinking” is that, according to AI, “intelligence” or “thinking” does not necessarily require “life” as a precondition: that it is possible to have “thinking without life.” Building on Charles Taylor’s critical account of secularity as well as Hubert Dreyfus’ influential critique of AI, this article offers a theological (...) analysis of AI’s “lifeless” picture of thinking in relation to the Augustinian conception of God as “Life itself.” Following this critical theological analysis, this article argues that AI’s notion of thinking promotes a societal privilege of certain rationalistic or calculative ways of thought over more existential or spiritual ways of thinking, and thereby fosters a secularization or de-spiritualization of thinking as an ethical human practice. (shrink)

I present and evaluate the prospects of the biosemantic program, understood as a philosophical attempt to explain the mind’s origins by appealing to something that non-minded organisms and minded organisms have in common: representational capacity. I develop an analogy with ancient attempts to account for the origins of change, clarify the biosemantic program’s aims and methods, and then distinguish two importantly different forms of objection, a priori and a posteriori. I defend the biosemantic program from a priori objections on the (...) grounds that the standard of explanation presupposed by them is inappropriate and leads to absurdities if consistently applied. Once the way is cleared of a priori objections, the success of biosemantics turns on the strength of a posteriori objections, that is, on the program’s empirical adequacy. Here, its prospects are less clear, but I offer reasons, by analogy with chemical combination and other everyday phenomena, to think that minded beings and their representational capacities might well have their origin and explanation in non-minded beings. An evolutionary origin and explanation of mind is plausible, at least as far as naturalistic accounts and explanations go. (shrink)

This article examines some of the recent theological critiques of the movement of technological human enhancement known as ‘transhumanism’. Drawing on the comparisons between grace and technology often found in the theological discourse on transhumanism, this article argues that the Thomistic distinction between healing grace and elevating grace can not only supplement the theological analysis of transhumanism and its ethical implications, but also help Christian theologians and ethicists become more aware of how the phenomenon of technology may have implicitly shaped (...) the contemporary understanding of ‘grace’ as well as the task of theology as a spiritual and indeed ethical practice. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a novel solution to the well-known problem concerning two polarity items in Korean, amu-(N)-to and amu-(N)-rato, that show a complementary distribution within the set of typical NPI-licensing contexts. I present a uniform analysis of the distribution of these NPIs, where the complementary distribution follows from the opposite scope properties of the emphatic particles to and rato contained in the NPIs in question. As the- oretical background, I adopt Karttunen and Peters’s (1979, Syntax and Semantics 11: (...) Presuppositions (pp. 1–56). New York: Academic Press) and Wilkinson’s (1996, Natural Language Semantics, 4, 193–215) scope analysis of even, Lahiri’s (1998, Natural Language Semantics, 6, 57–127) analysis of Hindi NPIs, and Guerzoni’s (2002, Proceedings of NELS 32 (pp. 153–170); GLSA, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Mass.; 2004, Natural Language Semantics, 12, 319–343) analysis of the negative bias of yes/no-questions containing minimizers. The current analysis also lends further support to Guerzoni’s approach in that it bears out the prediction that in certain environments, a yes/no-question can be positively biased, i.e., only the positive answer is allowed as a legitimate answer in the context; this prediction was left unconfirmed in Guerzoni’s work. (shrink)

In this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Joshua Rager and Peter Schwartz suggest using opioid treatment agreements as public health monitoring tools to inform patients about “the requirements entailed by undergoing opioid therapy,” rather than as contractual agreements to alter patients’ individual behavior or to benefit them directly. Because Rager and Schwartz's argument presents suspected OTA violations as a justification to stop providing opioids yet does not highlight the broader epistemic and systemic context within which clinicians prescribe these medications, (...) their proposal may perpetuate a climate of distrust and stigmatization without correcting systemic factors that may have placed patients and others at risk in the first place. Given the context of epistemic uncertainty regarding opioid safety and efficacy, insufficient training for opioid prescribers, and inadequate patient education, I propose replacing OTAs, which have a narrow focus on patient behaviors, with opioid treatment plans, which would promote mutual, collaborative, and shared decision-making on the most appropriate pain management program. An OTP can be ethically justified as a tool to prevent and treat iatrogenic addiction under a specific paradigm—one that adopts a default position of professional epistemic humility and holds all collaborative parties accountable in chronic pain management. (shrink)

When The Sound of One Hand Clapping came out in Japan in 1916 it caused a scandal. Zen was a secretive practice, its wisdom relayed from master to novice in strictest privacy. That a handbook existed recording not only the riddling koans that are central to Zen teaching but also detailing the answers to them seemed to mark Zen as rote, not revelatory. For all that, The Sound of One Hand Clapping opens the door to Zen like no other book. (...) Including koans that go back to the master who first brought the koanteaching method from Japan to China in the eighteenth century, this book offers, in the words of the translator, editor, and Zen initiate Yoel Hoffmann, "the clearest, most detailed, and most correct picture of Zen" that can be found. What we have here is an extraordinary introduction to Zen thought as lived thought, a treasury of problems, paradoxes, and performance that will appeal to artists, writers, and philosophers as well as Buddhists and students of religion. (shrink)

This case deals with the corporate response to a crisis and the successful evacuation of approximately 900 hotel guests, staff, and family members of staff whowere stranded in the Fairmont New Orleans hotel by Hurricane Katrina. This rescue effort, spearheaded by managers at the sister Fairmont hotel in Dallas, Texas, was completed shortly after 12 a.m. on Friday, September 2, 2005, when the last bus with evacuees pulled into the Dallas Fairmont after making a round trip of more than 1000 (...) miles — and about 64 hours after planning began. This case is particularly significant for lessons that may be derived about crisis management and leadership, and it also raises several interesting ethical issues. The case, which relies on field research plus secondary sources, is appropriate for business ethics and business strategy courses. (shrink)

My research partnership with the Korean Community Service Center of Seattle is the deepest research relationship I have had since transitioning from working with a national “minority health”...

Mental health is a kind of emotional state, a good psychological state can have a positive impact on a person, physical exercise can have a positive impact on the psychological state of college students, prevent the generation of negative emotions, improve the bad emotional state, and then promote the mental health of college students. Health is an inevitable requirement to promote the all-round development of people and a basic condition for economic and social development. Health education should be incorporated into (...) the national education system to promote the national health of the people through sports. Young people are the main force and backbone of national and social development. In order to realize the Chinese dream of great rejuvenation, we must attach importance to the development of young people and the physical and mental health of young people. In the process of compulsory education, middle school and high school period is a key stage in the gradual formation and development of students' psychology and body, but due to the large audience of China's education, the competition is more intense, which inevitably causes a lot of students to focus on exam-oriented education and neglect physical health, especially in recent years, the mental health issues of increasing concern. Through the research situation of mental health in China and the concept of mental health quality, this paper analyzes the problems of sports and mental health, and puts forward some corresponding suggestions for the problems, which has reference significance for promoting students' mental health. (shrink)

Based on recordings of spontaneous speech of ethnically Chinese Singaporeans who have received an English-medium education, this is a study of the indigenized Singaporean variety of English.

This article discusses and compares the way the members of three communities of practice maintained a harmonious relationship with one another by managing rapport and performing relational work while threatening other members’ face in making requests through emails. The three communities of practice differed from one another in terms of the aim and nature of their joint enterprise, cultural composition and size. The ways rapport was managed were revealed by examining the employment of linguistic strategies of expressiveness-restraint, the choice of (...) rhetorical strategies, the blending of institutional, professional and personal discourses, and the inclusion of various rapport-building moves. The performing of relational work was approached by identifying those discursive elements whose absence would not have made the current situation any the worse for it. It is found that the three communities of practice demonstrated both similarities and differences in the way they managed rapport and performed relational work. (shrink)