These are challenging times for leaders who believe schools must teach history honestly, be laboratories of democracy, and honor differences while finding common cause. This book, grounded in two decades of work in diverse school settings, provides guidance to help us remain steadfast in the work. -Racial justice: Beyond proclamations, how can school leaders reallocate resources to support substantive anti-racist school reforms? -Democratic practice: How can school leaders who have significant authority in a hierarchical system wield their power in support (...) of democracy? -Restorative justice: With time in short supply, how can schools truly embrace restorative practice, which calls for slowing down to repair and prevent harm? -Student activism: How can school leaders uphold rules while also supporting students who disrupt in the name of justice? -Counter-extremism: White supremacist threats are a danger to our communities. How can school leaders carefully confront the extremism of these troubled times? Compelling stories drawn from contemporary school contexts help illuminate each of these questions in fine detail. Each chapter concludes with a list of concrete actions every school leader can take in pursuit of answers. Administrators, teacher leaders, and those who support school reform with justice in mind will find both practical guidance and inspiration. (shrink)

Drawing from the dual process model of morality and life history theory, the present research examined the role of cognitive and emotional processes as bridges between basic environmental challenges and other-centered moral orientation. In two survey studies, cognitive and emotional processes represented by future-oriented planning and emotional attachment, respectively, or by perspective taking and empathic concern, respectively, positively predicted other-centeredness in prosocial moral reasoning and moral judgment dilemmas based on rationality or intuition. Cognitive processes were more closely related to rational (...) aspects of other-centeredness, whereas the emotional processes were more closely related to the intuitive aspects of other-centeredness. Finally, the cognitive and emotional processes also mediated negative effects of unpredictability, as well as positive effects of individual-level, contest competition on other-centeredness. Overall, these findings support the view that cognitive and emotional processes do not necessarily contradict each other. Rather, they might work in concert to promote other-centeredness in various circumstances and might be attributed to humans’ developmental flexibility in the face of environmental challenges. (shrink)

Many research fields concerned with the processing of information contained in human faces would benefit from face stimulus sets in which specific facial characteristics are systematically varied while other important picture characteristics are kept constant. Specifically, a face database in which displayed expressions, gaze direction, and head orientation are parametrically varied in a complete factorial design would be highly useful in many research domains. Furthermore, these stimuli should be standardised in several important, technical aspects. The present article presents the freely (...) available Radboud Faces Database offering such a stimulus set, containing both Caucasian adult and children images. This face database is described both procedurally and in terms of content, and a validation study concerning its most important characteristics is presented. In the validation study, all frontal images were rated with respect to the shown facial expression, intensity of expression, clarity of expression, genuineness of expression, attractiveness, and valence. The results show very high recognition of the intended facial expressions. (shrink)

Experiences justify beliefs about our environment. Sometimes the justification is immediate: seeing a red light immediately justifies believing there is a red light. Other times the justification is mediate: seeing a red light justifies believing one should brake in a way that is mediated by background knowledge of traffic signals. How does this distinction map onto the distinction between what is and what isn't part of the content of experience? Epistemic egalitarians think that experiences immediately justify whatever is part of (...) their content. Epistemic elitists deny this and think that there is some further constraint the contents of experience must satisfy to be immediately justified. Here I defend epistemic elitism, propose a phenomenological account of what the further constraint is, and explore the resulting view's consequences for our knowledge of other minds, and in particular for perceptual theories of this knowledge. (shrink)

Nietzsche did his philosophizing while he was coming apart at the seams. His writing is hard for readers to find their way around because he was all over the place when he produced it. But it's philosophy of coming apart at the seams and being all over the place, and also philosophy as a way of coping with that predicament-which makes it both fascinating and important. Why Didn't Nietzsche Get His Act Together? has three main tasks on its agenda. Nietzsche (...) is hard to make sense of; this is a guide, a book that shows you how to read him for yourself. Second, Nietzsche coped with his disintegrating self by philosophizing, and so this is a work that takes up disunified agency through Nietzsche's own engagement with the topic. Third and finally, Nietzsche managed his fragmenting personality by inventing one after another meaning of life for himself; examining those inventions and the job they did for him is an occasion to ask what a meaning of life is for. (shrink)

Sometime ago, I found myself using the diagnosis of a student’s depression as a critical tool of interpretation, searching for signs of mental illness in her essay that explored order and disorder in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I realised that my reading had become a creative act, combining poem, poet, student essay and author to create, in a sense, one (un)readable text. The present paper is a reflection upon the processes of order and disorder located in a diagnosis (...) of “madness” and the readings of writer and text this diagnosis initiated. I look to deconstruct acts of reading and diagnosis. (shrink)

What does ‘Smith knows that it might be raining’ mean? Expressivism here faces a challenge, as its basic forms entail a pernicious type of transparency, according to which ‘Smith knows that it might be raining’ is equivalent to ‘it is consistent with everything that Smith knows that it is raining’ or ‘Smith doesn’t know that it isn’t raining’. Pernicious transparency has direct counterexamples and undermines vanilla principles of epistemic logic, such as that knowledge entails true belief and that something can (...) be true without one knowing it might be. I re-frame the challenge in precise terms and propose a novel expressivist formal semantics that meets it by exploiting (i) the topic-sensitivity and fragmentation of knowledge and belief states and (ii) the apparent context-sensitivity of epistemic modality. The resulting form of assertibility semantics advances the state of the art for state-based bilateral semantics by combining attitude reports with context-sensitive modal claims, while evading various objectionable features. In appendices, I compare the proposed system to Beddor and Goldstein’s ‘safety semantics’ and discuss its analysis of a modal Gettier case due to Moss. (shrink)

There is a felt difference between following an argument to its conclusion and keeping up with an argument in your judgments while failing to see how its conclusion follows from its premises. In the first case there’s what I’m calling an inferential seeming, in the second case there isn’t. Inferential seemings exhibit a cluster of functional and normative characteristics whose integration in one mental state is puzzling. Several recent accounts of inferring suggest inferential seemings play a significant role in the (...) process, but none provides a fully satisfactory understanding of inferential seemings themselves. In this paper I critically examine theoretical options on offer in the existing literature, then develop an alternative view. I discuss implications for recent debates about general principles governing inference, such as Fumerton’s Principle of Inferential Justification and Boghossian’s Taking Condition. (shrink)

A blindfolded clairvoyant walks into a room and immediately knows how it is arranged. You walk in and immediately see how it is arranged. Though both of you represent the room as being arranged in the same way, you have different experiences. Your experience doesn’t just represent that the room is arranged a certain way; it also visually presents the very items in the room that make that representation true. Call the felt aspect of your experience made salient by this (...) contrast its presentational phenomenology. Many philosophers have observed that perceptual experiences have presentational phenomenology. In this paper I explore its nature, scope, and significance. I argue that in addition to perceptual experiences, presentational phenomenology can be found in intuitive, introspective, imaginative, and recollective experiences. I also argue that presentational phenomenology is epistemologically significant: it plays a central role in explaining why the experiences that have it justify beliefs and give us knowledge. (shrink)

The claim that "'is' does not entail 'ought"' is so closely associated with Hume that it has been called 'Hume's Law'. 1 The interpretation of the passage in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature that is the locus classicus of the claim is controversial. But the passage is preceded by three main bodies of argument, and, on the working assumption that the passage in question is closely connected to the argumentation that leads up to it, I will here examine the third (...) of these, running from T 463:7 to.. (shrink)

Moral distress is now being recognized as a frequent experience for many health care providers, and there's good evidence that it has a negative impact on the health care work environment. However, contemporary discussions of moral distress have several problems. First, they tend to rely on inadequate characterizations of moral distress. As a result, subsequent investigations regarding the frequency and consequences of moral distress often proceed without a clear understanding of the phenomenon being discussed, and thereby risk substantially misrepresenting the (...) nature, frequency, and possible consequences of moral distress. These discussions also minimize the intrinsically harmful aspects of moral distress. This is a serious omission. Moral distress doesn't just have a negative impact on the health care work environment; it also directly harms the one who experiences it. In this paper, I claim that these problems can be addressed by first clarifying our understanding of moral distress, and then identifying what makes moral distress intrinsically harmful. I begin by identifying three common mistakes that characterizations of moral distress tend to make, and explaining why these mistakes are problematic. Next, I offer an account of moral distress that avoids these mistakes. Then, I defend the claim that moral distress is intrinsically harmful to the subject who experiences it. I conclude by explaining how acknowledging this aspect of moral distress should reshape our discussions about how best to deal with this phenomenon. (shrink)

We examine a prominent naturalistic line on the method of cases, exemplified by Timothy Williamson and Edouard Machery: MoC is given a fallibilist and non-exceptionalist treatment, accommodating moderate modal skepticism. But Gettier cases are in dispute: Williamson takes them to induce substantive philosophical knowledge; Machery claims that the ambitious use of MoC should be abandoned entirely. We defend an intermediate position. We offer an internal critique of Macherian pessimism about Gettier cases. Most crucially, we argue that Gettier cases needn’t exhibit (...) ‘disturbing characteristics’ that Machery posits to explain why philosophical cases induce dubious judgments. It follows, we show, that Machery’s central argument for the effective abandonment of MoC is undermined. Nevertheless, we engineer a restricted variant of the argument—in harmony with Williamsonian ideology–that survives our critique, potentially limiting philosophy’s scope for establishing especially ambitious modal theses, despite traditional MoC’s utility being partially preserved. (shrink)

Nietzsche thought at one point that predication originated through the misapplication of names for particulars to further particulars. I doubt myself that this is where the device came from, although one does occasionally encounter usage – such as ‘another Vietnam’ – that evidently does arise in this manner. However, his account of predication is a useful model for a more sophisticated device which we in fact deploy, namely, the intentional misdescription of one circumstance or another in the interests of expedited (...) inference, often via the misapplication of a predicate. I don’t believe that ‘… is a leaf’ is a systematic reapplication of the name of some ur-leaf, but just the other day, I told my gardener that the leaves were off the tree, and that she could come in and work on my pond. I was triggering an inference rule we both accept: that you schedule fall cleanup once the leaves are off the tree. Rather than describe the actual state of the tree , and then renegotiate the rule to match, it was simpler to work with the misdescriptions. My respondents recall that devices such as predication are flexible anyway; they conclude that there is no need to misapply them. Let me try to get you to think twice about the assumption that flexibility pre-empts misapplication. But as I proceed, bear in mind that my illustrations are not intended as an argument. Any given illustration can be read either as a misapplication of a description, or alternatively as a correct application of a predicate, whose use in context is controlled by, perhaps, the sort of techniques discussed by David Lewis …. (shrink)

Hawking particles emitted by a black hole are usually found to have thermal spectra, if not exactly, then by a very good approximation. Here, we argue differently. It was discovered that spherical partial waves of in-going and out-going matter can be described by unitary evolution operators independently, which allows for studies of space-time properties that were not possible before. Unitarity dictates space-time, as seen by a distant observer, to be topologically non-trivial. Consequently, Hawking particles are only locally thermal, but globally (...) not: we explain why Hawking particles emerging from one hemisphere of a black hole must be 100 % entangled with the Hawking particles emerging from the other hemisphere. This produces exclusively pure quantum states evolving in a unitary manner, and removes the interior region for the outside observer, while it still completely agrees locally with the laws of general relativity. Unitarity is a starting point; no other assumptions are made. Region I and the diametrically opposite region II of the Penrose diagram represent antipodal points in a PT or CPT relation, as was suggested before. On the horizon itself, antipodal points are identified. A candidate instanton is proposed to describe the formation and evaporation of virtual black holes of the type described here. (shrink)

A wide range of ecological and evolutionary models predict variety in phenotype or behavior when a population is at equilibrium. This heterogeneity can be realized in different ways. For example, it can be realized through a complex population of individuals exhibiting different simple behaviors, or through a simple population of individuals exhibiting complex, varying behaviors. In some theoretical frameworks these different realizations are treated as equivalent, but natural selection distinguishes between these two alternatives in subtle ways. By investigating an increasingly (...) complex series of models, from a simple fluctuating selection model up to a finite population hawk/dove game, we explore the selective pressures which discriminate between pure strategists, mixed at the population level, and individual mixed strategists. Our analysis reveals some important limitations to the ESS framework often employed to investigate the evolution of complex behavior. (shrink)

A promising strategy for better understanding space and time at the Planck scale, is outlined and further pursued. It is explained in detail, how black hole unitarity demands the existence of transformations that can remove firewalls. This must then be combined with a continuity condition on the horizon, with antipodal identification as an inevitable consequence. The antipodal identification comes with a \ inversion. We claim to have arrived at ‘new physics’, but rather than string theory, our ‘new physics’ concerns new (...) constraints on the topology and the boundary conditions of general coordinate transformations. The resulting theory is conceptually quite non trivial, and more analysis is needed. A strong entanglement between Hawking particles at opposite sides of the black hole is suspected, but questions remain. A few misconceptions concerning black holes, originating from older investigations, are discussed. (shrink)

This article reviews, compares and contrasts the film "Black Hawk Down" by Ridley Scott, with the book by Marc Bowman. The book has a third of its contents devoted to the Somali experience of, and perspective on, the "Day of the Rangers," that is, the day that US troops were militarily involved in Mogadishu, Somalia (October 3, 1993). However, the film almost entirely conveys the U.S. servicemen's experience, with hardly any sympathetic Somali characters. I argue that many of Bowman's original (...) points are lost by not being portrayed in the film. While the film's director Ridley Scott says he intended his film to be an anti-war film, the impression of viewers, and the use of the film by the larger media (and the film's release timed during the US War in Afghanistan in 2002), seems to come to a different conclusion, not only about history (and the "inevitability" of war), but about the current US war on terrorism: support our troops, and don't question a war's intent or methods. (shrink)

The universe is enormous, perhaps unimaginably so. In comparison, we are very small. Does this suggest that humanity has little if any cosmic significance? And if we don’t matter, should that matter to us? Blaise Pascal, Frank Ramsey, Bertrand Russell, Susan Wolf, Harry Frankfurt, Stephen Hawking, and others have offered insightful answers to those questions. For example, Pascal and Ramsey emphasize that whereas the stars (in all their enormity) cannot think, human beings can. Through an exploration of some features of (...) awe and its positive effects on us, I offer a novel way of answering the second question: even if we don’t matter, we, unlike the stars, naturally benefit from observing our own smallness. I explore implications for accounts of the absurdity of human life. Life might be absurd. But I give reasons to think that life isn’t absurd in the ways some such as Nagel and Camus suggest. Finally, I connect non-symmetric awe with Buddhist insights to strengthen a recent and more positive account of how to find meaning in life. (shrink)

A proper understanding of black hole complementarity as a response to the information loss paradox requires recognizing the essential role played by arguments for the applicability and limitations of effective semiclassical theories. I argue that this perspective sheds important light on the arguments advanced by Susskind, Thorlacius, and Uglum—although ultimately I argue that their position is unsatisfactory. I also consider the argument offered by ’t Hooft for the breakdown of microcausality around black holes, and conclude that it relies on a (...) mistaken treatment of measurement collapse. There is, however, a legitimate argumentative role for black hole complementarity, exemplified by the position of Kiem, Verlinde, and Verlinde, that calls for a more subtle analysis of the limitations facing our effective theories. (shrink)

This collection of eleven papers by Elijah Millgram (nine of which have been previously published) is ostensibly united by the thesis that the best way to go about assessing moral theories is to identify the view of practical reasoning that each such theory rests upon, and evaluate the adequacy of these respective theories of practical reasoning. The correct moral theory, Millgram assures us, will be the one that is paired with the best theory of practical reasoning. He outlines this (...) methodology in a substantial (32 pp.) introduction. Why should we adopt Millgram’s method? A host of concerns immediately leap to mind. If two or more different moral theories rest on the same theory of practical reasoning, then how would discovering the latter to be the correct theory of practical reasoning help us decide among the moral theories? What if a given moral theory is consistent with two or more different theories of practical reasoning? What if we cannot evaluate theories of practical reasoning independently of having adopted a moral perspective? Millgram doesn’t address these natural questions head on, but rather proposes that the essays of the volume collectively constitute a “feasibility demonstration” (p. 3) of the method. In other words, the only way that we will be persuaded that the pairings between moral theories and practical reasoning theories are tight enough to support this grand project is to get our hands dirty in detailed discussion of particular moral theories, particular theories of practical reasoning, and the relations between them. It is through seeing the method at work that we will become convinced, Millgram hopes, of several interlocking theses: (1) that each of the major moral theories of the past has had a distinctive take on practical reasoning; (2) that pivotal structural elements of these theories are due to the underlying theory of practical reasoning; (3) that problems in a moral theory can often be traced to problems in the underlying theory of practical reasoning; (4) that theories of practical reasoning are “engines” (p.. (shrink)

In Hard Truths Elijah Millgram argues that ‘partial truth’ is pervasive and for that reason bivalence 1 may rarely be assumed. As classical logic assumes bivalence, and inferences from partial truths to partial truths are central to our thinking, classical logic rarely has application, the argument continues. And so we must develop an account of inference from partial truths to partial truths; as well, our metaphysics must be revised. While the novel positions of Hard Truths 2 raise many interesting (...) challenges, my focus is limited to offering an alternative to Millgram’s account of predication and to exploring some issues raised by his appeal to ‘fit’ in his definitions of truth and partial truth. 1. Introduction to partial truth Millgram defines truth and partial truth in terms of fit, as follows: Advancing a claim as fully true demands complete fit; assessing a claim as partially true allows for slack … but only so much of it. Claims are said to completely fit, slackly fit or not fit, the world, in §6.3. But, the word ‘fit’ is first introduced in §1.2, and it is experience or proto-experience, that fits into moulds provided by claims, thoughts, sentences and predicates. I won’t dwell on which fits what, 3 but on the notion of a ‘complete fit’ and the contrast with a ‘slack fit’; this discussion leads me to ponder the clarity and implications of appealing to these notions in definitions like the above. Millgram’s explanation of fit comes in the context of his account of predication, according to which, most predicates do not quite apply. It’s this that is primarily responsible for his promotion of partial truth. I sketch an alternative account of language whereby predicates do apply because language has come to life as a constituent of the things we do: …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Malcolm X and Black Nationality—from Separation to Human RightsSefi Josef Kuperman1. Black Nationalism and the Issue of SeparationThe first question we have to raise when discussing the thought of Malcolm X is "Which Malcolm X are we discussing?" Malcolm X, who was a member of the Nation of Islam (1952–1964) and served as its speaker, is not the same Malcolm who left the organization and founded Muslim Mosque, Inc. (...) (1964), and both are different from the Malcolm who embraced Sunni Islam (from 1964 until his assassination in 1965). In each of these periods, Malcolm held a different perception of the desired future of members of black communities in the United States. Despite that, Malcolm X remained faithful to the idea of black nationality throughout his active years—even if the contents of this idea changed along the years. In this paper, I show that the developments that took place within Malcolm's positions, and specifically the changes on the issue of emigration, do not affect his support for black nationalism.I do not begin this discussion with an attempt to define black nationalism, as there is no one clearly and timelessly defined black nationalism. The perception of black nationalism that took center stage in the nineteenth century is fundamentally different from that of the twentieth century. In fact, as we will soon see, even in the nineteenth century, one can find conceptual plurality of black nationalisms, and the same is true for the twentieth century.Malcom's activism begins in the days of abundant civil and governmental support for the practice of racial segregation. Facing it is the Nation of Islam organization, of which Malcolm is a member in the first phase of his activism, calling for—in a sort of amplified mirror-image, redesigned so as to remove the sting of white nationalism—a complete territorial separation between whites and blacks, for the benefit of the black community, of course. The [End Page 23] organization links this call to what is termed "the racial problem" and argues that territorial separation is the only solution to the problem (Essien-Udom 259).When discussing separation, rather than emigration, in the context of the Nation of Islam, the emphasis is on Elijah Muhammad's (hereafter: E. Muhammad) demand for the US government to allocate a dedicated territory for the founding of the physical black nation.1 Along with land—and here we encounter a motif that is repeated in Malcolm X's speeches—is the demand for material aid for some time, so the black nation can find its footing (Essien-Udom 260). In fact, it is a call for independence on a territory allocated for that purpose, but part of the territory of the United States. Later, at the beginning of Malcolm's second phase of activism, after leaving the Nation of Islam, he said the following in a radio interview with A. B. Spellman:Spellman:What is the program for achieving your goals of separation?Malcolm:A better word to use than separation is independence. This word separation is misused. The thirteen colonies separated from England but they called it the Declaration of Independence; they don't call it the Declaration of Separation, they call it the Declaration of Independence. When you're independent of someone you can separate from them. If you can't separate from them, it means you're not independent of them.(Malcolm X, "Independence, Not Separation" 71–72)Whereas separation is a negative move—I break away from something—independence is a positive one: I become my own sovereign. In order to illustrate this, Malcolm argues, "[w]hen you're independent of someone, you can separate from them"—that is, that independence is a sufficient condition for separation. To this, he adds: "If you can't separate from them, it means you're not independent of them." That is, Malcolm emphasizes that separation is a necessary condition for independence. On the other hand, however, Malcolm's phrasing implies that separation is not enough for independence. Independence includes another process that separation lacks. It is therefore not "a better word," as stated in the beginning of the answer, but another process... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hurricane Gloria LAWRENCE DUGAN A screaming northern gale flew past his wild words And slammed the sails, and pulled a wave toward heaven. —Aeneid, i.102–3 (Sarah Ruden, trans.) i. A phalanx of weather tools at the door, A shovel, an ice-pick, an umbrella, A new cane, leaning against each other, Plastic fabricated to resist storms, Reminds me of a storm I rode out years ago, The Nor’easter of 1985, (...) On the twenty-first floor of 5 Penn Center Across the street from where the Fox Theater Spread the bright wings of its marquee, folded Now forever, torn down, and then replaced With a glass-box not unlike the office I looked out of, watching the rain lashing Windows, tearing at the flags hung on poles On other buildings, solitary banners Left up as if to challenge the weather To do its worst, to refute the young storm Tearing northeast out of the Atlantic, Predicted only a few days before As a hurricane, that didn’t happen, But leaving the high-rise building nearly Deserted, with the ticker still running Across the wall; the market had opened Empty office or not, unoccupied Desks giving it that strange quietude Peculiar to such spaces, which the mind Expects to be filled, even while seeing Otherwise. arion 28.2 fall 2020 66 hurricane gloria I felt like a sailor for The only time in my life, stepping off The elevator at 21, and then Walking into the main hall and sensing The building swayed slighty, barely feeling It but knowing it distinctly, hearing It creak exactly as I had heard ships At sea in dozens of movies, and with The sound, the sway, the massive grid of pipes And beams giving and taking. jms Old timers hadn’t warned me about this Although some had ridden out several Storms as bad, real or metaphorical, Not even old Harris who remembered Moving down from Susquehanna county In ’29, to Wall Street and the Crash. ii. Future archaeologists of urban Storms will study pictures of umbrellas Taking flight, wrecked synthetic shapes blooming Against resistant hands, then abandoned, Stuffed into trash cans, twirling down alleys, Pastels, stripes or old-fashioned banker-black, The edge of the story, the windy street’s Last rebuke to those daring to stagger To lunch but caught in the nor’easterly Gale’s grey wall of wind and rain that rattled Doors and buckled windows. The building held Two dozen companies, and I still like To think one fronted for an anchorite, Some isolated individual Up on 24, alone at his desk In a skyscraper office for ten years Praying, sometimes looking down the cliff walls At the peregrine falcons sweeping home Lawrence Dugan 67 To their massive nest stuffed tight in the bronze Lap of a statue seated on City Hall, One of the allegories of Founders And Lenape chiefs placed high over Broad, The hawks diving downward athwart the storm Coming on in grey curtains wavering Over the city and the Delaware Valley. Across the river in Jersey The pines begin, in Camden the street dirt Is sand; halfway to the shore the forest Runs above the expressway, farms below, The pines flourishing in sandy barren Earth lacking nitrogen, incinerating Every dozen years, thousands of acres Blowing away in flames seen at the shore. After that rain those woods were safe for weeks. iii. Ten years and two jobs later I needed Census material and found it online On a rainy day in Center City In a high-rise office nearby, a halfDay ’s work done to my surprise in only Twenty minutes, then realizing as I Stood up from a computer that the view Was familiar. I was back on 21 In my old office; jms had moved But the grey sky cleared with a sweep of wind And the view north and south looked as before Wherever the market’s ticker-tape rolled now. The weather had surprised me again; The only full rainbow I ever saw, The ancient sign that spares the world from floods, A pure unblemished iridescent span, Appeared late in spring, in a sun shower.... (shrink)

The Buddhist Jātaka tells the tale of a hare lounging under a palm tree who becomes convinced the Earth is coming to an end when a ripe bael fruit falls on its head. Soon all the hares are running; other animals join them, forming a stampede of deer, boar, elk, buffalo, wild oxen, rhinoceros, tigers and elephants, loudly proclaiming the earth is ending.1 In the American retelling, the hare is ‘chicken little,’ and the exaggerated fear is that the sky is (...) falling. The story offers a cautionary tale for considering the trend towards calamity thinking in artificial intelligence (AI). A growing chorus of tech leaders has warned that AI poses existential risk (X-Risk) that could result in the extinction of the human species, the collapse of civilisation, or a colossal decline in human potential and culture. In 2014, Hawking told the Washington Post that AI, ‘could spell the end of the human race’.2 Musk has repeatedly warned about AI’s perils, calling AI, ‘more dangerous than nukes’, recommending colonising Mars to ensure ‘a bolt-hole if AI goes rogue and turns on humanity’,3 and donating 10 million dollars to the Future of Life Institute to jumpstart research on AI’s X-Risk. Gates has stated, ‘I am in the camp…concerned about super intelligence…I agree with … Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned’.4 Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has fretted that technologies OpenAI was building could endanger humanity—‘even destroying the world as we know it’.5 This paper offers a critical appraisal of the rise of calamity thinking in the scholarly AI ethics literature. It cautions against viewing X-Risk in isolation and highlights ethical considerations sidelined when X-Risk takes centre stage. Section I introduces a working definition of X-Risk, considers its likelihood and …. (shrink)

The holographic principle was proposed by Nobel laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft in the 1990s and it has also been modeled by Leonard Susskind and Stephen Hawking. We’ve heard light mentioned with regard to the fundamental nature of reality for a long time; God said Let there be light, we are the light of the world, etc. But we haven’t investigated a possible role for the speed of light in our illnesses. This paper will do just that. The central premise is (...) that light’s “speed” is a reflection of the degree to which the observer is removed from its source. In its Platonic state, light’s speed is zero. It is light from which time, by degrees, emerges. The Big Bang can be envisioned as a sphere, the center of which is a point, Alpha. Via expansion, Alpha becomes a sphere, Omega, by degrees, where each degree is c. For any given Alpha, the circumference of a circle on the sphere, Omega, is a set of resonant points that represent the speed of light or “end of time.” Every radius—every line drawn from Alpha to Omega—is an arrow of time, a parallel universe. Alpha and Omega increase in tandem, maintaining the degree of separation required by special relativity, E=mc^2. The holographic sphere of points equidistant from the Big Bang on which we find ourselves is not the only sphere of points equidistant from the Big Bang. There are spheres that are smaller and larger than ours. Where an arrow of time intersects a sphere-brane of light’s speed will be treated here as a “2D hologram.” For an observer behind the hologram, reality will appear to be accelerating/expanding. For an observer in front of it, reality will appear to be decelerating/contracting. For an observer at the speed of light, time is no longer a variable. (shrink)

The Bible ridicules idolaters for bowing down to sticks and stones. Since idolaters worship what the sticks and stones stand for, not the sticks and stones themselves, isn’t the biblical position confused? At the basis of the Bible’s consistent refusal to observe the preceding distinction are found the conceptual underpinnings of its critique of idolatry. Men and women alone among creatures are inspired with God’s breath. Men and women alone among creatures, that is, are like God. They alone among creatures (...) are persons. Since mere pieces of nature cannot understand prayers, entreaties, etc., and hence cannot respond in the personal way, idolatrous practices are incoherent. But while it is true that (sub-person) elements of nature cannot enter into inter-personal relations, idolatry has a sequel: the scientific interrogation of nature, an interrogation which has been magnificently effective in eliciting responses. Elijah’s dramatic confrontation with the Baalites is a stylized version of the clash between the biblical view of men and women as in an irreducible respect non-natural, and the naturalizing scientific view. On the Carmel, the prophets of the Baal are soundly defeated. Must those who inherit from them lose too? That is a live question. Read closely, the story of Elijah implies that those behind the Bible would defend the view of human distinctiveness against the renascent idolatry. (shrink)

Recent work on extended mind theory has considered whether the material realizers of phenomenally conscious states might be distributed across both body and world. A popular framework for understanding perceptual consciousness in world-involving terms is sensorimotor enactivism, which holds that subjects make direct sensory contact with objects by means of their active, exploratory skills. In this paper, I consider the case of emotional experience, and argue that although the enactivist view does not transfer neatly to this domain, there are elements (...) of emotional consciousness whose physical underpinnings include parts of the extra-bodily environment. (shrink)

IntroductionClinical ethics committees (CECs) support and enhance communication and complex decision making, educate healthcare professionals and the public on ethical matters and maintain standards of care. However, a consistent approach to training members of CECs is lacking. A systematic scoping review was conducted to evaluate prevailing CEC training curricula to guide the design of an evidence-based approach.MethodsArksey and O’Malley’s methodological framework for conducting scoping reviews was used to evaluate prevailing accounts of CEC training published in six databases. Braun and Clarke’s (...) thematic analysis approach was adopted to thematically analyse data across different healthcare and educational settings.Results7370 abstracts were identified, 92 full-text articles were reviewed and 55 articles were thematically analysed to reveal four themes: the design, pedagogy, content and assessment of CEC curricula.ConclusionFew curricula employ consistent approaches to training. Many programmes fail to provide CEC trainees with sufficient knowledge, skills and experience to meet required competencies. Most programmes do not inculcate prevailing sociocultural, research, clinical and educational considerations into training processes nor provide longitudinal support for CEC trainees. Most CEC training programmes are not supported by host institutions threatening the sustainability of the programme and compromising effective assessment and longitudinal support of CEC trainees. While further reviews are required, this review underlines the need for host organisations to support and oversee a socioculturally appropriate ethically sensitive, clinically relevant longitudinal training, assessment and support process for CEC trainees if CECs are to meet their roles effectively. (shrink)

Macaulay was wrong: The British public in one of its periodic fits of morality may be a ridiculous spectacle but it has at least one rival in the reaction we have recently witnessed to ‘cultural relativism’, ‘postmodernism’, and suchlike phenomena. One good illustration of the point is the argument of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures (1998: London, Profile Books). Sokal and Bricmont spend the greater part of their time holding various postmodernist writers up to ridicule, and it would (...) be a waste of time to defend it against them. However, their most seriously argued chapter (chapter four) is a critique, not of postmodernism, but of epistemic relativism in the philosophy of science, as mainly exemplified by the work of Popper, Feyerabend, and Kuhn, and it is important to answer the case they make. There are many reasons for finding that case unconvincing. For example: (i) Sokal and Bricmont repeatedly imply that epistemic relativism is counter-intuitive. Against them it can be objected that some quite ordinary proposition can be both true and, at the same time, only true for beings with certain types of visual apparatus or with a certain cultural history. Nor are they right in claiming that all scientists find epistemic relativism implausible. Some do, but Chomsky doesn't. Neither does Stephen Hawking; (ii) Sokal and Bricmont suppose that there is a single, uniquely correct description of the universe ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but all the evidence we have suggests the contrary; (iii) it is not the case that epistemic relativism entails that any description is just as good as any other, so they are wrong to insist that it must endorse all manner of silly superstition; (iv) Sokal and Bricmont frequently insist that “the scientific method is not radically different from the rational attitude in everyday life or in other domains of human knowledge” but this glosses over great differences between the procedures appropriate to different areas of inquiry – science on the one hand, history and/or psychoanalysis on the other. (shrink)

If big bang cosmology is true, then the universe began to exist about 15 billion years ago with a 'big bang', an explosion of matter, energy and space from a singular point. This singularity is spatially and temporally pointlike; that is, it has zero spatial dimensions and exists for an instant (at t=0) before exploding with a 'big bang'. The big bang singularity is also lawless; Stephen Hawking writes: A singularity is a place where the classical concepts of space and (...) time break down as do all the known laws of physics because they are all formulated on a classical space time background. ... [T]his breakdown is not merely a result of our ignorance of the correct theory but represents a fundamental limitation to our ability to predict the future [of the singularity], a limitation that is analogous but additional to the limitation imposed by the normal quantum mechanical uncertainty principle. [1] The lawlessness of the singularity entails that it 'would thus emit all [possible] configurations of particles with equal probability' [2]. Paul Davies describes this vividly: 'Anything can come out of a naked singularity -in the case of the big bang the universe came out.' [3]. (shrink)

Presentations of black hole complementarity by van Dongen and de Haro, as well as by 't Hooft, suffer from a mistaken claim that interactions between matter falling into a black hole and the emitted Hawking-like radiation should lead to a failure of commutativity between space-like-related observables localized inside and outside the black hole. I show that this conclusion is not supported by our standard understanding of quantum interactions. We have no reason to believe that near-horizon interactions will threaten microcausality. If (...) these interactions reliably transfer information to the outgoing radiation, then this response to Hawking's information loss argument should amount to a version of the bleaching scenario. I argue that the challenge facing black hole complementarity is that of reconciling this commitment to bleaching with the expectation that the event horizon will be locally unremarkable. This challenge is most promisingly met by proposals that postulate a consistent account of the limitations of our local semi-classical theories, but no support is added to these postulates by appeals to verificationism or to the interactions considered by 't Hooft. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Myth Of ReadingAlfred LouchThe Myth of Theory, by William Righter; x 7 224 pp. Cambridge University Press, 1994, $49.95.IThe critics mill about in the welcome break between interminable and terminal conference sessions, eager to see and be seen. William Righter wanders about, listening and telling anyone who stays to listen what he hears, musing all the while on what each of them has done, or tried to do, (...) or failed to do. One hopes for a dénouement—something, perhaps, like the tableau at the end of The Inspector General: critics frozen in typical and typically ludicrous attitudes. Alas, the prospective tone of ironic detachment is not sustained. Righter is too close to his perambulating colleagues; he shares too many of their academic reflexes to keep the requisite distance. If there is a tableau at the end, the reader must imagine it, and place Righter along with the rest, caught in (may we call them?) Gallosaxon attitudes.It seems to be an important conference. Everyone’s milling about. One wonders, do they have anything else to do? Here’s Derrida, de Man, Barthes, Hillis Miller, Booth, Bersani, Lyotard, Poulet, and Todorov. The remarks of one seem to flow seamlessly into the allegedly counter-claims of the next. It’s all amazingly friendly. Of course there’s that rude fellow Eagleton, who says: “Methodologically speaking, literary criticism is a non-subject.... If literary theory is a kind of meta-criticism [End Page 218], a critical reflection on criticism, then it follows that it too is a non-subject” (p. 210). But don’t mind him. For criticism is about literature and literature exists. So these promenading and posturing critics can’t be mere phantasms of brains fevered by much reading, or anyway by references to many books.Curious that the first critic available for a chat is Leavis. A bit of nostalgia that. I suppose most English critics of sufficient vintage recall their Leavis-inflicted wounds the way they might reminisce about the bit of shrapnel they got in the way of on Omaha Beach and bear now with pride. But my, how temperate he appears here! How on earth can he come across so bland? Remember him saying: Snow does not begin to exist as a novelist. Now that was Leavis. You may have disagreed with him, you may have thought him silly, but you certainly understood him, as one comprehends a slap in the face. But here: “... Leavis takes on vividly and personally the total responsibility of consciousness for a wide area of assumptions that obviously trail their implications behind them” (p. 4). This is an extraordinarily spongy way of saying that Leavis knew he was right, and if you didn’t agree with him, a humiliating place in a cheap and tawdry consumer society awaited you.Still, it is a lucky thing that Leavis appears first on the scene. As a critic to help frame more exactly the kinds of questions about literary theory and practice Righter wants to ask, Leavis offers an easily recognizable starting point. He somehow manages to take the high moral ground. You want to ask, how is it that Elijah’s mantle descends on him? Does he compel assent only by the stridency of his words, and not by an ostensibly rational way in which his critical judgments hang together?A pity if this should be so, because the point of Leavisite diatribes, though not their excesses, is close to the hearts of passionate readers. Such readers (ourselves perhaps) read judgmentally. A book bowls us over. Describing the experience we are tempted to draw invidious comparisons to other books, which perhaps move us less, or not at all. We say of minor things that come our way: it’s not Shakespeare (or D. H. Lawrence). If you agree the project comes to an end. If you don’t, you want to know what it is that bowls us over, and why we don’t find those qualities in your favorite author. You want an explanation of a particular kind, not one that adduces new facts, but one that allows us to appreciate how the case at dispute... (shrink)

One of the common and commonsensical ways to distinguish cinema from every other art and semiotic system, and to define the property of its uniqueness, is to claim that cinema is the only art/”language” that links images. This “linking” can imply three different yet complementary operations. First, cinema links individual still photographs into an apparently continuous sequence of movement by pushing the individual frames or photographs through a camera or projector at sixteen or twenty-four or however many frames per second. (...) Second, cinema links images by editing , by splicing together individual shots, which are continuous chains of linked frames. Finally, cinema links images with sounds, synchronously or otherwise. The only problem with such an apparently unrestrictive and unprescriptive definition of cinema and the “cinematic” is that it obscures an essentially cinematic operation that precedes the linking of cinema images: the image must first be framed before it can be linked with another.But is framing unique to cinema? Don’t paintings have frames? Aren’t photographs frames? Isn’t the theater’s proscenium arch a frame? A consequence of such perfectly sensible questions is a consistent undervaluing of the cinema frame as an essentially and uniquely cinematic tool, unlike that of any other art, producing serious errors in the writing of film theory and serious misunderstandings of the processes of film history. The goal of this article is to diagnose some of these errors so they might someday be cured. Gerald Mast is professor of English and general in the humanities at the University of Chicago. Among his many books are A Short History of the Movies, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, Film/Cinema/Movie, The Movies in Our Midst, and Howard Hawks, Storyteller. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “What Isn’t Cinema?” and “Kracauer’s Two Tendencies and the Early History of Film Narrative”. (shrink)