Some individuals devalue positivity previously associated with negativity (Winer & Salem, 2016). Positive emotions (e.g. happiness) may be seen as threatening and result in active avoidance of futu...

This article examines the nature of affective states across biological taxa. It argues that affect constitutes a primary form of consciousness. Creatures capable of affect are sentient of their bodily states and can behave in ways intended to maintain or restore them to a homeostatic range. After reviewing and critiquing neurobiological and philosophical theories of the evolution of consciousness, this article argues that some possible creatures are limited to self‐directed affective states, even if those creatures are capable of exteroception. Such (...) creatures enjoysolipsistic sentience: awareness of their own selves and bodily demands, but unawareness of their exogenous environments. (shrink)

This paper examines some ethical issues arising from whole-genome association studies for multigenic diseases, focusing on the case of autism. Events occurring following the announcement of a genetic test for autism in France (2005–2009) are described to exemplify the ethical controversies that can arise when genetic testing for autism is applied prematurely and inappropriately promoted by biotech companies. The authors argue that genetic tests assessing one or a few genes involved in highly multigenic disorders can only be useful if: (1) (...) the genetic linkage found in the scientific study must be statistically convincing, reproducible and also applicable to the population to which the individual considered belongs (scientific validity); (2) the relative risk conferred by the ‘high-risk’ allele should be high enough to be significant to the patient (significant impact); (3) use of the test should lead to some improvement of outcome for the patient, resulting from adapted treatment if available, or at least from adjustment of lifestyle (or life goals) prompted by the new knowledge generated (clinical utility). Decisions concerning genetic testing for autism involve scientific judgement, value judgement and good knowledge of a constantly evolving therapeutic environment. The implementation of genetic tests for highly multigenic diseases thus requires strong mechanisms to ensure that they are used in a fashion that can benefit patients, and these mechanisms must be able to cope with rapid progress in scientific knowledge and therapeutic intervention. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 43-54, January 2022. This article reviews literature in composition studies since affective science's emergence in the 1980s. It focuses on composition studies’ history of adopting findings and theories from affective science, and distinguishes trends in how the field applies those elements in theoretical versus pedagogical contexts. While composition studies’ adoption of affective science in its theorizing has helped the field progress toward a “complete psychology of writing,” affective science's influence on classroom practices has (...) not been so clear cut or direct. However, affective science is a fast-growing, liberal, and multidisciplinary field. As it progresses, composition studies continues to embrace its concepts and theories. This review notes the expectations and limitations developing through this dynamic interdisciplinary relationship. (shrink)

THE MOST SACRED FREEDOM includes eight essays that were first presented at the 2014 A.V. Elliott Conference on Great Books and Ideas, the seventh annual conference sponsored by Mercer Universitys Thomas C. and Ramona E. McDonald Center for Americas Founding Principles. Together, these essays explore the great principle of religious liberty by charting its development in the Western tradition and reconsidering its place at Americas founding. The book begins with a comparison between the flood accounts in Genesis and the Mesopotamian (...) Atra-Has's and advances all the way to the 2014 Supreme Court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. The intervening chapters examine the contributions of figures such as Emperor Julian, Roger Williams, Cecilius Calvert, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the American Founders. Contributors to the volume are Steven Grosby, Jeremiah H. Russell, Maura Jane Farrelly, Daniel Cullen, John Witte, Jr., Scott Yenor, David Ramsey, and Michael Novak. (shrink)

Leibovich et al. challenge the prevailing view that non-symbolic number sense is innate, that detection of numerosity is distinct from detection of continuous magnitude. In the present commentary, the authors' viewpoint is discussed in light of the integrative theory of numerical development along with implications for understanding mathematics disabilities.

It has been hypothesized that our believing that, or its seeming to us as though, the world is in some way dynamical partially explains (and perhaps rationalizes) future-bias. Recent work has, in turn, found a correlation between future-bias and near-bias, suggesting that there is a common explanation for both. Call the claim that what partially explains our being both future- and near-biased is our believing/it seeming to us as though the world is dynamical, the dynamical explanation. We empirically test two (...) versions of the dynamical explanation. The first is the moving ego explanation—according to which it is our belief that the ego moves, or our phenomenology as of the ego moving, that jointly (partially) explains future- and near-bias. The second is the moving time explanation—according to which it is our belief that time robustly passes, or our phenomenology as of robust passage, which jointly (partially) explain future- and near-bias. We found no evidence in favour of either explanation. (shrink)

Gorgeous black and white photographs of machines built to unlock the secrets of the universe.

Stanley, M.C., A Π12 singleton incompatible with 0#, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 66 27–88. A non-constructible Π12 singleton that is absolute for ω-models of ZF is produced by class forcing over the minimum model.

The Revisions series marks an attempt to recover what is viable in the traditions of which we ought to be the heirs without ignoring what it was that made those traditions vulnerable to modernity.

Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis asserts that the concept of medical disorder includes a naturalistic component of dysfunction and a value component, both of which are required for disorder attributions. Muckler and Taylor, defending a purely naturalist, value-free understanding of disorder, argue that harm is not necessary for disorder. They provide three examples of dysfunctions that, they claim, are considered disorders but are entirely harmless: mild mononucleosis, cowpox that prevents smallpox, and minor perceptual deficits. They also reject the proposal that dysfunctions (...) need only be typically harmful to qualify as disorders. We argue that the proposed counterexamples are, in fact, considered harmful; thus, they fail to disconfirm the harm requirement: incapacity for exertion is inherently harmful, whether or not exertion occurs, cowpox is directly harmful irrespective of indirect benefits, and colorblindness and anosmia are considered harmful by those who consider them disorders. We also defend the typicality qualifier as viably addressing some apparently harmless disorders and argue that a dysfunction’s harmfulness is best understood in dispositional terms. (shrink)

In ‘Rethinking Disease’, Powell and Scarffe1 propose what in effect is a modification of Jerome Wakefield’s2 3 harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA) of medical (including mental) disorder. The HDA maintains that ‘disorder’ (or ‘disease’ in Powell and Scarffe’s terminology) is a hybrid factual and value concept requiring that a biological dysfunction, understood as a failure of some feature to perform a naturally selected function, causes harm to the individual as evaluated by social values. Powell and Scarffe accept both the HDA’s evolutionary (...) biological function component and its incorporation of a value component. Their proposed ‘new twist’ is to revise the value component: ‘Our proposed definition of disease is as follows: a biomedical state is a disease only if it implicates a biological dysfunction that is, or would be, properly disvalued’. So, they propose that a disorder is a ‘properly disvalued dysfunction’ rather than a ‘harmful dysfunction’, an approach they term ‘thickly normative’ in contrast to the thin normative approach of the HDA. There has been a surge of interest recently in better understanding the ‘harm’ component of the HDA. Powell and Scarffe’s analysis is a helpful contribution to this discussion. We focus here exclusively on their proposal regarding the analysis of the concept of disorder and ignore many important related issues that the authors address, ranging from prioritising resource allocation between disorders and non-disorders to whether the concept of disorder should be replaced by a generic welfarist concept. The resolution of these additional issues depends on first understanding ‘disorder’. The authors’ proposed changes to the HDA also deserve evaluation because the HDA, which has been endorsed by leading nosologists,4 plays an influential role in nosological debate across categories of disorder ranging, for example, from sexual paraphilias5 to psychopathy.6 A basic problem is that Powell and Scarffe misinterpret …. (shrink)

In the exceptional book _Divine Holiness and Divine Action_, Mark Murphy defends what he calls the _holiness framework _for divine action. The purpose of our essay-response to Murphy’s book is to consider an alternative framework for divine action, what we call the _agapist framework_. We argue that the latter framework is more probable than Murphy’s holiness framework with respect to_ select _theological desiderata.

Integrating large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 into medical ethics is a novel concept, and understanding the effectiveness of these models in aiding ethicists with decision-making can have significant implications for the healthcare sector. Thus, the objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of GPT-4 in responding to complex medical ethical vignettes and to gauge its utility and limitations for aiding medical ethicists. Using a mixed-methods, cross-sectional survey approach, a panel of six ethicists assessed LLM-generated responses to eight (...) ethical vignettes.The main outcomes measured were relevance, reasoning, depth, technical and non-technical clarity, as well as acceptability of GPT-4’s responses. The readability of the responses was also assessed. Of the six metrics evaluating the effectiveness of GPT-4’s responses, the overall mean score was 4.1/5. GPT-4 was rated highest in providing technical (4.7/5) and non-technical clarity (4.4/5), whereas the lowest rated metrics were depth (3.8/5) and acceptability (3.8/5). There was poor-to-moderate inter-rater reliability characterised by an intraclass coefficient of 0.54 (95% CI: 0.30 to 0.71). Based on panellist feedback, GPT-4 was able to identify and articulate key ethical issues but struggled to appreciate the nuanced aspects of ethical dilemmas and misapplied certain moral principles.This study reveals limitations in the ability of GPT-4 to appreciate the depth and nuanced acceptability of real-world ethical dilemmas, particularly those that require a thorough understanding of relational complexities and context-specific values. Ongoing evaluation of LLM capabilities within medical ethics remains paramount, and further refinement is needed before it can be used effectively in clinical settings. (shrink)

0$^{\sharp}$ can be invisibly class generic.

It is proved (Theorem 1) that if 0♯ exists, then any constructible forcing property which over L adds no reals, over V collapses an uncountable L-cardinal to cardinality ω. This improves a theorem of Foreman, Magidor, and Shelah. Also, a method for approximating this phenomenon generically is found (Theorem 2). The strategy is first to reduce the problem of `disabling' forcing properties to that of specializing certain trees in a weak sense.

It is shown that there is no satisfactory first-order characterization of those subsets of ω 2 that have closed unbounded subsets in ω 1 , ω 2 and GCH preserving outer models. These “anticharacterization” results generalize to subsets of successors of uncountable regular cardinals. Similar results are proved for trees of height and cardinality κ + and for partitions of [ κ + ] 2 , when κ is an infinite cardinal.

The relationship between God and morality has been a topic of philosophical discussion since Socrates engaged Euthyphro in the agora. In recent years, it has received a lot of attention, as theistic philosophers have attempted to show that divine command theory and other theistic meta‐ethical accounts are defensible. Whether metaphysical naturalism is compatible with moral realism is a related (and equally controversial) topic. This essay surveys the main issues in these debates.

A collection of five essays in which the religious experiences and activities of individuals, communities, and cultures are seen as preeminently rational responses to reality. Of interest to students and scholars of technology and philosophy.