In this paper we revise Reinforcement Learning and adaptiveness in Multi-Agent Systems from an Evolutionary Game Theoretic perspective. More precisely we show there is a triangular relation between the fields of Multi-Agent Systems, Reinforcement Learning and Evolutionary Game Theory. We illustrate how these new insights can contribute to a better understanding of learning in MAS and to new improved learning algorithms. All three fields are introduced in a self-contained manner. Each relation is discussed in detail with the necessary background information (...) to understand it, along with major references to relevant work. (shrink)

A volunteer effort by Artificial Intelligence researchers has shown it can deliver significant research outcomes rapidly to help tackle COVID-19. Within two months, CLAIRE’s self-organising volunteers delivered the World’s first comprehensive curated repository of COVID-19-related datasets useful for drug-repurposing, drafted review papers on the role CT/x-ray scan analysis and robotics could play, and progressed research in other areas. Given the pace required and nature of voluntary efforts, the teams faced a number of challenges. These offer insights in how better to (...) prepare for future volunteer scientific efforts and large scale, data-dependent AI collaborations in general. We offer seven recommendations on how to best leverage such efforts and collaborations in the context of managing future crises. (shrink)

One of the sectors for which Artificial Intelligence applications have been considered as exceptionally promising is the healthcare sector. As a public-facing sector, the introduction of AI applications has been subject to extended news coverage. This article conducts a quantitative and qualitative data analysis of English news media articles covering AI systems that allow the automation of tasks that so far needed to be done by a medical expert such as a doctor or a nurse thereby redistributing their agency. We (...) investigated in this article one particular framing of AI systems and their agency: the framing that positions AI systems as replacing and outperforming the human medical expert, and in which AI systems are personified and/or addressed as a person. The analysis of our data set consisting of 365 articles written between the years 1980 and 2019 will show that there is a tendency to present AI systems as outperforming human expertise. These findings are important given the central role of news coverage in explaining AI and given the fact that the popular frame of ‘outperforming’ might place AI systems above critique and concern including the Hippocratic oath. Our data also showed that the addressing of an AI system as a person is a trend that has been advanced only recently and is a new development in the public discourse about AI. (shrink)

Statelessness and refugees -- The right to have rights -- Loyal opposition : Arendt's critique of Zionism -- Racism and segregation -- The banality of evil -- Truth, politics and lying -- Plurality, politics, and public freedom -- The American Revolution and the revolutionary spirit -- Personal and political responsibility.

Title: Anatomie der Konservativen RevolutionPublisher: Wissenschaftliche BuchgesellschaftAuthor: Stefan BreuerTitle: Deutschland Driftet: Die Konservative Revolution Entdeckt ihre KinderPublisher: EconISBN: 3430174716Author: Friedbert Pflüger.

The virtual is just the latest expansion of human craving for meaning and it is brimming with opportunities: mostly symbolic, nonetheless, real. Thinking, presenting ormanipulating a situation has always been dependent on the symbolic operations (Mircea Eliade, Raoul Girardet, Lucian Blaga, Camil Petrescu, Ernst Cassirer), on the uses andabuses of the referential and condensed symbols (Murray Edelman). At the same time, such operations are not reserved entirely to politics. In our virtually expanded contemporarylives, we relate to symbolic meanings, either consciously (...) or not. As Slavoj Zizek noticed: “Behind the realities there are phantasies and behind the phantasies, realities.” Baudrillard’s ecstasy of communication and simulacra present the offer of a golden ageopen for individuals and politicians alike. The enemies are clear and the saviours, too. Justlike decorations hanging in the virtual window here there are the (slightly) cosmeticized images of ourselves carved as individual persona representations, or, as the solution messages for the current problems, prompt as a soft form of political management. All these symbolic décors in the virtual malls that we visit and consolidate are symbolic attemptsto approximate the golden age as we can “see” it, in our human everlasting aspirationsfor success and prosperity, for stability, communion and, possibly, peace. (shrink)

The article presents the concept of humanity within the framework of F.M. Dostoevsky's dialectical theology. It reveals man's action either good or bad and is addressed to the Absolute demanding the rightness of choice.

"Offering a critical perspective-rather than a traditional survey, this provocative text explores the art of the last twenty years-the latter 1970s, the 1980s, and the first half of the 1990s-in both a thematic and chronological fashion. Using an engaging and approachable style-and an abundance of color illustrations, it takes a long look at dominant tendencies in contemporary art in the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, and Russia-and provides a series of challenging view points on the most advanced art forms, (...) themes, and issues."--Amazon. (shrink)

We debate whether permissivism is true. We start off by assuming an accuracy-oriented framework, and then discuss metaepistemological questions about how our epistemic evaluations promote accuracy.

Responding to the invitation of this special issue of Childhood and Philosophy this paper considers the ethos of facilitation in philosophical enquiry with children, and the spatial-temporal order of the community of enquiry. Within the Philosophy with Children movement, there are differences of thinking and practice on ‘facilitation’ in communities of philosophical enquiry, and we suggest that these have profound implications for the political agency of children. Facilitation can be enacted as a chronological practice of progress and development that works (...) against child, in terms of political agency. This paper theorises practices of facilitation grounded in philosophies of childhood that assume listening to child/ren as equals, as already able to philosophise, and against sameness. We explore the political and ethical implications of the radical posthumanist reconfiguration of the ‘zipped’ body in the light of including the disciplinary, imaginative and enabling energies of chronological time through the concept now/ness. We shift from ethics to ethos, and from ‘zipped’ to ‘unzipped’ bodies, through the notion of affect to explore the temporal and spatial dimensions of facilitation in Philosophy with Children and children’s political agency. We re-turn to David McKee’s Not Now Bernard, getting ‘inside the text’, and attending to the postponement of equality in Philosophy with Children. (shrink)

In principle, mandatory vaccination in employment could be justified in certain circumstances. These include: the availability of safe and effective vaccination; if alternative, less coercive strategies did not work; and, the costs to the individual were proportionate. However, in COVID-19, the long term safety of vaccines is yet to be established. Vaccines should be made available by employers, and voluntary vaccination encouraged.

The essay is a reflective reconstruction of encounters with persons, writings, and discursive communities involved with “critical social theory” across a decades-long quest for a comprehensive synchronic and diachronic understanding of significant aspects of the social whole of the United States of America, in particular, which understanding was to be the resource for guiding efforts in “emancipatory social transformation”: the overcoming of impediments to the enjoyment by Black people of flourishing lives without invidious racial discrimination and economic exploitation.

BackgroundNo laws or official guidelines govern voluntary assisted dying (VAD) in Japan. A legislative bill on the termination of life-sustaining measures has yet to be sent to deliberations for legislation, due to strong opposition that has prevented it from being submitted to the Diet. However, Japan has recently witnessed several cases involving VAD.Main textAgainst this backdrop, we argue that Japan should begin discussion on VAD legislation, referring to the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017 (VADA2017), which was established in 2017 in (...) Victoria, Australia. VADA2017 puts in place a wide range of stringent safeguards and is considered worldwide to be the safest and most conservative policy on a physician offering assisted dying based on the patient’s premeditated request. We consider what opposing opinions from society would arise in response to the VADA2017. Among these will include arguments against VAD itself, those against the validation of this act, and opinions that oppose even the initiation of the dialogue on VAD.ConclusionsWe conclude that to protect the right to life among those placed in vulnerable positions and, at the same time, to respect decision-making of those who wish for immediate death due to unbearable suffering, the dialogue must immediately begin with that on introducing a policy more conservative than that of the VADA2017, which solidly considers arguments against VAD. (shrink)

This is a follow up to my article on the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in the May issue . That went to press a few weeks before the April 27 target date for signing of the MAI by the OECD countries. At the time, it was fairly clear that agreement would not be reached, and it was not—an important event, worth considering carefully. In part the failure resulted from internal disputes—for example, European objections to the U.S. federal system and (...) the extraterritorial reach of U.S. laws, concerns about maintaining some degree of cultural autonomy, and so on. But a much more significant problem was looming. It was becoming increasingly difficult to ensure that the rules of global order would continue to be “written by the lawyers and businessmen who plan to benefit” and “by governments taking advice and guidance from these lawyers and businessmen,” while “invariably, the thing missing is the public voice”—the Chicago Tribune’ s accurate description of the negotiations for the MAI, as well as ongoing efforts to “craft rules” for “global activity” in other domains without public interference. It was, in short, becoming more difficult to restrict awareness and engagement to sectors identified by the Clinton administration, with unusual and unintended clarity, as its “domestic constituencies”: the U.S. Council for International Business, which “advances the global interests of American business both at home and abroad,” and concentrations of private power generally—but crucially not Congress (which had not been informed, in violation of Constitutional requirements) and the general public, its voice stilled by a “veil of secrecy” that was maintained with impressive discipline during three years of intensive negotiations. (shrink)

When children gradually leave theirparental home and the educational task of theirparents is nearly finished, the relationshipbetween them changes. The nature of the closerelationship comes under pressure, and thequestion is whether what is awaited for willnot be hollow. To think about the character andorigin of this emptiness, leads to a reflectionof the essence of the educational relationshipitself. This article discusses the way in which``leaving home'' puts the relationship betweenand the identities of parent and child atstake. It furthermore describes the kind (...) ofregret both partners experience, and arguesthat education is incomprehensible in the end.Coming to understand this has an important andpositive other side: it demands our attentionfor the unforeseen and explains through thisperhaps also partly its attractiveness. (shrink)

According to Aristotle, the present is an indivisible instant, or now. Aristotle holds that present-tense movement claims are sometimes true, but he argues that nothing ‘kineitai’ (moves/is moving) in the now. He characterizes movement as something that is ‘incomplete’ while it is occurring. My paper is an attempt to understand this combination of views. I draw a contrast between Aristotle’s position and an alternative view (defended by certain modern philosophers, but also by Plotinus), on which a present-tense movement claim is (...) made true by the existence of something that is wholly present in the now. And I give some reasons for preferring Aristotle’s position. (shrink)

We report the results of an experimental test of whether preaching the normative appeal of the sure-thing principle leads decision-makers to make choices that satisfy it. We use Allais-type decision problems to observe the incentive-compatible choices of 147 subjects, which either violate the sure-thing principle or adhere to it. Subjects are presented with normative arguments that support the counterfactual behaviour and then repeat their decisions. We observe violations of the sure-thing principle are robust to its normative justification. This result replicates (...) a famous small-sample observation using hypothetical tasks that was published by Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky almost half a century ago. We argue that this finding is as relevant now as it was then and that their design can be usefully applied to address contemporary issues in behavioural economics. (shrink)

This book offers a critical introduction to the work of American philosopher D. G. Leahy (1937-2014). Leahy's fundamental thinking can be characterized as an absolute creativity in which all creating is 'live' -- a happening occurring now that manifests a supersaturated polyontological actuality that is essentially created by the logic that characterizes it. Leahy leaves behind the categorial presuppositions of modern thought, eclipsing both Cartesian and Hegelian subjectivities and introducing instead an essentially new form of thinking founded in a nondual (...) logic of creation. The new thinking delineates the absolute unicity of existence as a creative interactivity beyond all traditional dichotomies (such as one vs. many, unity vs. plurality, identity vs. change): a fully "digitized" actuality that is nothing but newness, which inherently implies nothing but change. Through this new form of thinking, change itself is revealed to be the very essence of reality and mind. Any reader looking for a quantum leap beyond the thrall of modern and postmodern fixations is invited to hear and apprehend this new thinking that refuses to be conditioned by paradigms, categories, species, genera, walls, bridges, boundaries, or abstractions: an essentially free thinking that embodies creative novelty itself. (shrink)

A book of beauty and simple wisdom that all can relate to, The Three Supreme Gifts provides a clear path and an in depth understanding of the three supreme truths introduced in its companion book, Love is the Seed: Teachings from the Spirit World. Lisa Hromada eloquently illustrates that you have all you need to attain self-mastery and create a life of your choosing-one of much greater joy, ease and inner peace-and improve any aspect of your life moving forward. The (...) three supreme gifts help you to more consciously grow beyond negative karmic and thought patterns, which in turn not only changes the course of your life at the very moment you begin to apply these supreme gifts, but forevermore. In Lisa's words, "You are about to delve into a subject of love, thought and free will from a different perspective than you may have previously considered." If you have ever wanted to know the meaning or purpose of your life, how to master or navigate your life, and really any question you may have about your life, it all comes down to what you have at this very moment. What you have is love, thought and free will. (shrink)

Papers about philosophy, as distinct from papers within it, are like homeopathic medicines – thin in content. We can only hope to provide some substance if we confine ourselves to some particular aspect. The aspect I have chosen to discuss is this. What hope should we have of finding from within this rather curious and academic subject of ours a help in the affairs of life? Could we expect a doctor of philosophy to give practical advice, rather like a medical (...) doctor? (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 10, October 2022.

For many old and new mechanists, Mechanism is both a metaphysical position and a thesis about scientific methodology. In this paper we discuss the relation between the metaphysics of mechanisms and the role of mechanical explanation in the practice of science, by presenting and comparing the key tenets of Old and New Mechanism. First, by focusing on the case of gravity, we show how the metaphysics of Old Mechanism constrained scientific explanation, and discuss Newton’s critique of Old Mechanism. Second, we (...) examine the current mechanistic metaphysics, arguing that it is not warranted by the use of the concept of mechanism in scientific practice, and motivate a thin conception of mechanism (the truly minimal view), according to which mechanisms are causal pathways for a certain effect or phenomenon. Finally, we draw analogies between Newton’s critique of Old Mechanism and our thesis that the metaphysical commitments of New Mechanism are not necessary in order to illuminate scientific practice. (shrink)