Sleep is soothing, silent, and serene, until it is not. Sleep is often troubled, disturbed, or even “disordered” as the medical literature describes it. This paper begins from an extreme form of such disturbance—terrified sleep. Night terrors (pavor nocturnus), in which sleep is violently interrupted, offer important insights into sleep and the methods by which it is studied. The sanitising nature of the medical classification of night terrors as part of a continuum with sleepwalking and yet strikingly distinct from nightmares, (...) leads us into the arms of a more traditional, first-person, phenomenological investigation of night terrors. Without denying the power of both approaches, this paper offers a deconstructive alternative reading of this troubling of sleep through Jean-Luc Nancy’s rethinking of the body, its suffering and materiality. Nancy, and Derrida, help us tarry with the body terrified and trembling in night terrors. First the paper explores the medical incisions within sleep that carve out night terrors, as a delimited phenomenon. This is followed by a consideration of what phenomenology can, and crucially cannot, add to our understanding of night terrors. Next a deconstructive critique of the phenomenological concepts of Leib and Körper is utilised to return to the material body gripped by the night terror. This in turn leads to an alternative account of this parasomnia through a post-Nancean phenomenology of terror as distinct from fear and Angst. The paper closes by drawing out several conclusions about the body, sleep, and phenomenology’s limits when approaching the somnolent. (shrink)

ZFC has sentences that quantify over all sets or all ordinals, without restriction. Some have argued that sentences of this kind lack a determinate meaning. We propose a set theory called TOPS, using Natural Deduction, that avoids this problem by speaking only about particular sets.

We solve a longstanding problem by providing a denotational model for nondeterministic programs that identifies two programs iff they have the same range of possible behaviours. We discuss the difficulties with traditional approaches, where divergence is bottom or where a term denotes a function from a set of environments. We see that making forcing explicit, in the manner of game semantics, allows us to avoid these problems.We begin by modelling a first-order language with sequential I/O and unbounded nondeterminism. Then we (...) extend the model to a calculus with higher-order and recursive types, by adapting standard game semantics. Traditional adequacy proofs using logical relations are not applicable, so we use instead a novel hiding and unhiding argument. (shrink)

"The Quantum Revelation is mind-blowing." --Sting To say that quantum physics is the greatest scientific discovery of all time is not an exaggeration. In their discovery of the quantum realm, the physics community stumbled upon a genuine multifaceted revelation which can be likened to a profound spiritual treasure--a heretofore undreamed of creative power--hidden within our own mind. Quantum physics unequivocally points out that the study of the universe and the study of consciousness are inseparably linked, which is to say that (...) ultimate progress in the one will be impossible without progress in the other. Einstein declared that what it reveals is so immensely important that "it should be everyone's concern." Yet few of us in the general public truly understand how the game-changing discoveries of the past century not only relate to our day-to-day lives, but also give us insights into the nature of reality and our place within it. Written for readers with no physics background, Paul Levy's latest book, The Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality is for those who have heard that quantum physics is a fascinating subject but don't quite understand how or why. Levy contemplates the deeper philosophical underpinnings of quantum physics, exploring the fundamental questions it provokes: What does it mean that quantum theory has discovered that there is no such thing as "objective reality?" How are we participating--via our consciousness--in creating our experience of a reality that quantum theory itself describes as "dreamlike?" What are the implications for us in our day-to-day lives that--as quantum theory reveals--what we call reality is more like a dream that we had previously imagined? The Quantum Revelation is unique in how it synthesizes science and spirituality so as to reveal and explore the dreamlike nature of reality. It is a book not just for people interested in quantum theory, but for anyone who is interested in waking up and dreaming lucidly, be it in our night dreams or our waking life. (shrink)

Shows how the revelations emerging from quantum physics can wake us up from the disempowering spell of the scientific materialist worldview and help dispel the collective madness that has befallen our species. Explains for readers with no physics background why quantum physics is, in the words of Albert Einstein, so "uncommonly important" that "it should be everyone's concern." Shows how quantum physics can help us awaken to the malleable, dreamlike nature of reality, a realization that unlocks the creative spirit within (...) us. Quantum physics is not just some esoteric abstract theory for scientists. As Paul Levy makes clear, quantum physics offers radical and mind-blowing revelations that not only have day-to-day relevance for all of us, but also offers us a way forward in healing the myriad world crises we are facing today. (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)

The recent book from Marc Le Glatin Internet, un séisme dans la culture?, performs three intellectual acts. First, it resumes the main facts concerning the evolution of cultural practices on the Internet, particularly the multiplication of « free » downloading of works that are in principle protected by intellectual property. Second, it interrogates the notions of intellectual property and cultural diversity in relation to the new possibilities opened up by the Net. Third, it proposes some tentative solutions for legal and (...) economic problems, mainly the artists remuneration, related to current media transformations. Facts are correctly outlined and questions are worth asking. But the proposed solutions – inspired by a mix of centralizing jacobinism, socialism and post-modernism – sound deceptive because they are based on philosophical and political presuppositions that are quite contrary to the current stream of cultural mutation. I discuss the author’s thesis from the standpoint of a philosophy of collective intelligence and proposes some solutions oriented toward the best exploitation of the new technical possibilities in the service of human development and emancipation. (shrink)

Recent work has shown that memory for various types of information associated with social targets (impressions based on behaviours and political ideology) influences decisions to approach or avoid those same targets. The current study was intended to better understand the extent that memory for other types of details associated with targets (beliefs and behaviours) affects subsequent approach/avoidance decisions. In this investigation, participants formed impressions of social targets represented by a picture and a sentence (a belief in Experiment 1; either a (...) belief or behaviour in Experiment 2). Later, memory for the impressions and sentences associated with each target was tested. Finally, participants decided whether they would want to approach or avoid each target. Results demonstrated that accurate memory strongly influenced approach/avoidance decisions for targets associated with different types of information (beliefs; behaviours), although there was no difference in the effect of memory between beliefs and behaviours. Overall, results suggest an important role of memory in decisions to approach or avoid others. (shrink)

This paper argues that, insofar as we doubt the bivalence of the Continuum Hypothesis or the truth of the Axiom of Choice, we should also doubt the consistency of third-order arithmetic, both the classical and intuitionistic versions. -/- Underlying this argument is the following philosophical view. Mathematical belief springs from certain intuitions, each of which can be either accepted or doubted in its entirety, but not half-accepted. Therefore, our beliefs about reality, bivalence, choice and consistency should all be aligned.