It was proposed that the data from Monte Carlo statistical investigations be subjected to analysis of variance methods rather than the conventional techniques of tabling, graphing, and inspecting the data. Two examples in which analysis of variance methods were applied to published Monte Carlo studies were presented. It was suggested that balanced factorial designs should be used whenever possible in Monte Carlo studies so that analysis of variance methods would be directly applicable. Finally, three advantages of analysis of variance methods (...) over conventional techniques were described and analysis of variance methods were contrasted with a possible alternative analytical method, multiple regression analysis. (shrink)

The connectivity patterns of many neural circuits are highly ordered and often impressively complex. The intricate order and complexity of neuronal wiring remain not only a challenge for questions related to circuit functions but also for our understanding of how they develop with such an apparent precision. The chemotropic guidance of the growing axon by target‐derived cues represents a central paradigm for how neurons get connected with the correct target cells. However, many studies reveal a remarkable variety of important target‐independent (...) wiring mechanisms. These mechanisms include axonal sorting, axonal tiling, growth cone polarization, as well as cell‐intrinsic mechanisms underlying growth cone sprouting, and neurite branching. Our review focuses on target independent wiring mechanisms and in particular on recent progress emerging from studies on three different sensory systems: olfactory, visual, and somatosensory. We discuss molecular mechanisms that operate during axon‐axon interactions or constitute axon‐intrinsic functions and outline how they complement the well‐known target‐dependent wiring mechanisms. (shrink)

Combinatorial network optimization appears to fit well as a model of brain structure: connections in the brain are a critically constrained resource, hence their deployment in a wide range of cases is finely optimized to “‘save wire". This review focuses on minimization of large-scale costs, such as total volume for mammal dendrite and axon arbors and total wirelength for positioning of connected neural components such as roundworm ganglia (and also mammal cortex areas). Phenomena of good optimization raise questions about (...) mechanisms for their achievement: the examples of optimized neuroanatomy here turn out to include candidates for some of the most complex biological structures known to be derivable purely from simple physical energy minimization processes. Part of the functional role of such fine-tuned wiring optimization may be as a compact strategy for generating self-organizing complex neuroanatomical.. (shrink)

Suppose that the following describes an intelligible scenario. A subject is wired up to another's body in such a way that she has bodily experiences ‘as from the inside’ caused by states and events in the other body, that are subjectively indistinguishable from ordinary somatosensory perception of her own body. The supposed intelligibility of such so-called crossed wire cases constitutes a significant challenge to the claim that our somatosensory judgements are immune to error through misidentification relative to uses of (...) the first person pronoun. After all, the subject in this case is liable to commit precisely the sort of error ruled out by such a claim. In this paper I argue that the proponent of this challenge must establish at least two things: that the subject is committing an error of misidentification, and that her judgement shares its epistemic grounds with our ordinary somatosensory judgements. Neither condition, I argue, can be reached from the stipulations permitted into the starting descriptions of the cases. (shrink)

This paper examines the explanatory distinctness of wiring optimization models in neuroscience. Wiring optimization models aim to represent the organizational features of neural and brain systems as optimal (or near-optimal) solutions to wiring optimization problems. My claim is that that wiring optimization models provide design explanations. In particular, they support ideal interventions on the decision variables of the relevant design problem and assess the impact of such interventions on the viability of the target system.

Ethical issues concerning brain–computer interfaces have already received a considerable amount of attention. However, one particular form of BCI has not received the attention that it deserves: Affective BCIs that allow for the detection and stimulation of affective states. This paper brings the ethical issues of affective BCIs in sharper focus. The paper briefly reviews recent applications of affective BCIs and considers ethical issues that arise from these applications. Ethical issues that affective BCIs share with other neurotechnologies are presented and (...) ethical concerns that are specific to affective BCIs are identified and discussed. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists often assume that responsibility and blame only apply to certain agents. But do our ordinary concepts of responsibility and blame reflect these assumptions? I investigate one recent debate where these assumptions have been applied—the back-and-forth over how to explain the impact of norms on ordinary causal attributions. I investigate one prominent case where it has been found that norms matter for causal attributions, but where it is claimed that responsibility and blame do not apply because the case (...) involves artifacts. Across six studies more carefully investigating Hitchcock and Knobe’s Machine Case, I find that the same norm effect found for causal attributions is found for responsibility and blame attributions, with participants tending to ascribe both to a norm-violating artifact. Further, the evidence suggests that participants do so because they are using these terms in a broadly normative, but not distinctively moral, way. (shrink)

While cognitive scientists increase their tentative incursions in the social domains traditionally reserved for social scientists, most sociologists and anthropologists keep decrying those attempts as reductionist or, at least, irrelevant. In this paper, we argue that collaboration between social and cognitive sciences is necessary to understand the impact of the social environment on the shaping of our mind. More specifically, we dwell on the cognitive strategies and early-developing deontic expectations, termed naïve sociology, which enable well-adapted individuals to constitute, maintain and (...) understand basic social relationships. In order to specify the way in which the demanding character of typical social relationships can be recognized in situ, we introduce the concept of “deontic affordances”. Finally, we shed light on the continuum that might relate a primitive naïve sociology, dedicated to the processing of invariant properties of the social life and a mature naïve sociology, necessary for dealing with the variable properties of cultural forms of life. (shrink)

We have argued for an urgent need for moral bioenhancement; that human moral psychology is limited in its ability to address current existential threats due to the evolutionary function of morality to maximize cooperation in small groups. We address here Powell and Buchanan's novel objection that there is an ‘inclusivist anomaly’: humans have the capacity to care beyond in-groups. They propose that ‘exclusivist’ morality is sensitive to environmental cues that historically indicated out-group threat. When this is not present, we are (...) inclusivist. They conclude that moral bioenhancement is unnecessary or less effective than socio-cultural interventions. We argue that Powell and Buchanan underestimate the hard-wiring features of moral psychology; their appeal to adaptively plastic, conditionally expressed responses accounts for only a fragment of our moral psychology. In addition to restrictions on our altruistic concern that their account addresses – such as racism and sexism – there are ones it is ill-suited to address: that our concern is stronger for kin and friends and for concrete individuals rather than for statistical lives; also our bias towards the near future. Hard-wired features of our moral psychology that are not clearly restrictions in altruistic concern also include reciprocity, tit-for-tat, and others. Biomedical means are not the only, and maybe not the most important, means of moral enhancement. Socio-cultural means are of great importance and there are currently no biomedical interventions for many hard-wired features. Nevertheless research is desirable because the influence of these features is greater than our critics think. (shrink)

Somewhat questioning Elizabeth Spelke's attempt to account for infants’ social knowledge, our commentary argues that social cognition might be divided into several specialized systems. In addition to the core system dedicated to the intersubjective dimension of close relationships, infants could be prewired to process social relationships, such as dominance, characterized by their impersonal, normative dimension.

After decades of specialization within the sciences, the development and application of implantable microchips and biosensors are now being made possible by a growing convergence among seemingly disparate scientific disciplines including, among others, biology, informatics, chemistry, and engineering. This convergence of diverse scientific disciplines is the basis for the creation of new technologies that will have significant medical potential. As of today, implantable microchips and biosensors are being used as mental prostheses to compensate for a loss of normal function, to (...) remotely monitor patients' vital signs, to control the delivery of medications, and to communicate with geographically distant healthcare professionals and the outside environment. (shrink)

Ignoring consciousness, I apply Palmer 's ideas to a photometer, for which calibration is analogous to socialization of humans to agree in color. Some attributes of the photometer – such as its aperture – do not need to be known because their values are transparent to calibration. But a writing demon can wreak havoc if it permutes measured values before interpolation completes calibration – as happens in Palmer 's color rewirings.

PAUL SOLMAN: Let's begin with a look at some estimates of Internet use and how it's been exploding in the past year. Our numbers come from a variety of sources. About 80% of Americans now have personal computers. About 100 million people are online and at last count the Net was adding 38 new users every second. Some 55 million Americans log on to the Internet, in a typical day. About 40% of them check their e-mail every day. About 30% (...) check several times a day. In 1998, the U.S. Postal Service delivered 101 billion pieces of paper or snail mail. The number of e-mail messages transmitted in 1998 is estimated to have been around 4 trillion. 60% of regular Internet users report watching less television; 34% spend less time shopping in stores; 13% attend fewer social events; more than 25% say they now have friends they've never met in person; and-- our favorite-- 48% of regular Internet users, according to a UCLA study, say they now deny their children on-line access as a punishment tool. In short, the Internet is becoming a given of the American and global landscape, whether we like it or not. (shrink)

Social order is regulated from above by the law but its foundation is built on norms and customs, informal social practices that enable people to make meaningful and productive uses of their time and resources. Despite the importance of these practices in keeping the social fabric together, very little of the jurisprudential literature has focused on a discussion of these norms and customs. In Social Norms in a Wired World Steven Hetcher argues that the traditional conception of norms as rule-like (...) linguistic entities is erroneous. Instead, norms must be understood as patterns of rationally governed behaviour maintained in groups by acts of conformity. Using informal game theory in the analysis of norms and customs, Hetcher applies his theory of norms to tort law and Internet privacy laws. This book will appeal to students and professionals in law, philosophy, and political and social theory. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis book assumes that basic ways of thinking about history are hard‐wired in the brain. Since different styles of discourse with which we talk about the past are hardwired, Blum infers that a protohistorical consciousness is necessary for the existence of language. Historical logics reflect some preconceived part–whole relation. Blum discerns four kinds of part‐whole structure, which he terms continuity, quantum, continuum, and dialectic. Blum believes that these part–whole relations rest on universal, prereflective intuitions. He concludes that humans have different (...) prelinguistic intuitions of time.Blum claims that people's variable innate temporality is expressed in their historical style. It follows that historical style antedates history as a genre. Hence we are not talking about historical style, but about how individuals apply their sense of the relation between parts and wholes to the problem of time. Our study of historical context becomes secondary to the assumptions we make about the interface between part–whole relations and time. The temporality of history is derivative of a phenomenon that is not historical.Certain conclusions are suggestive. First, modality precedes tense in evolution. Second, we ourselves are continuing to evolve. Blum believes that we are moving “towards a selection of abstract thinkers ruled by pure reason.” Instead of viewing cultures as organisms, it is more profitable to think of the evolution of structures of thinking, and to show that some are more prominent at present than they have been in the past.For Blum, historical thinking is a dependent variable. It depends on tense and modality, which are given before language and culture. Historical thinking reflects a primary experience, but it is not such a primary experience itself. (shrink)

In the spirit of Slavoj Žižek’s book, Hegel in a Wired Brain, this article asks how the questions central to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics are changed and complicated by the possibility of brain-to-brain communication and the datafication of thought made potential through brain-computer interfaces. By taking a phenomenological approach to understanding the nature of communication through a technology that does not require language for the transmission of ideas, this article explores how BCI communication confronts the ontological character of interpretation as (...) presented by Gadamer while also juxtaposing how the insights of Gadamer and Heidegger concerning temporality problematize materialist foundations of BCI communication. In the final analysis, it is argued that thought only becomes meaningful in accord with the temporality of Dasein and that hermeneutics remains central in BCI communication because the material replication of thought does not overcome the particular temporalities of historically effected consciousnesses. (shrink)

The literature on hybrid masculinity suggests that some men manage subordinate or contradictory forms of masculinity while still maintaining and benefiting from gender inequality. Drawing from 35 in-depth qualitative interviews with religious participants in pornography addiction recovery programs, we expand this literature by illustrating how hybrid masculinity operates through shared cultural knowledge about sex, gender, and sexuality. We find that participants use distinct cultural schemas related to religion and science to explain how men are created by God to be biologically (...) “hard-wired” for pornography addiction. We use the phrase redemptive masculinity to describe a type of hybrid masculinity that upholds the cultural association between hegemonic masculinity and pornography consumption, but allows religious men to describe their avoidance of pornography as a masculine feat. Redemptive masculinity depends upon particular beliefs about gender that give advantage to the religious men who work to overcome pornography addiction. We show how their stories reinforce essentialist differences between male and female bodies that protect the interests and sexual expressions of religious men. In turn, we show how hybrid masculinities may involve gender-flexible practices for men but also how these may ultimately reinforce strict and inflexible beliefs about so-called “opposite” sexes. (shrink)

In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of G.W.F. Hegel, Slavoj Žižek gives us a reading of a philosophical giant that changes our way of thinking about the post-human era we are entering. No ordinary study of Hegel, Hegel in a Wired Brain reveals our time as it appears through Hegel's eyes. Focusing in on the idea of the wired brain, this is a philosophical analysis of what happens when a direct link between our mental processes and a (...) digital machine emerges. Here Žižek explores the phenomenon of a wired brain affect, and the notion of singularity subsequently arising when we can share our thoughts and experiences with others. He hones in on the key question of how it affects our experience and status as free human individuals, dealing with what happens with the human spirit, our subjectivity and the very essence of being-human when a machine can read, action and disperse our thoughts. With characteristic verve and energy, Žižek connects Hegel to the world we live in and shows why he is much more fun than anyone gives him credit for, and why the 21st century might just be Hegelian. (shrink)

The quest for molecular mechanisms that guide axons or specify synaptic contacts has largely focused on molecules that intuitively relate to the idea of an “instruction.” By contrast, “permissive” factors are traditionally considered background machinery without contribution to the information content of a molecularly executed instruction. In this essay, I recast this dichotomy as a continuum from permissive to instructive actions of single factors that provide relative contributions to a necessarily collaborative effort. Individual molecules or other factors do not constitute (...) absolute instructions by themselves; they provide necessary context for each other, thereby creating a composite that defines the overall instruction. The idea of composite instructions leads to two main conclusions: first, a composite of many seemingly permissive factors can define a specific instruction even in the absence of a single dominant contributor; second, individual factors are not necessarily related intuitively to the overall instruction or phenotypic outcome. (shrink)

In the case of GK, an 82-year-old dementia patient residing in a long-term care (LTC) facility, several ethical challenges arise in responding to his daughter’s concerns about his potential inappro...

The ongoing generation of expectations is fundamental to listeners’ experience of music, but research into types of statistical information that listeners extract from musical melodies has tended to emphasize transition probabilities and n‐grams, with limited consideration given to other types of statistical learning that may be relevant. Temporal associations between scale degrees represent a different type of information present in musical melodies that can be learned from musical corpora using expectation networks, a computationally simple method based on activation and decay. (...) Expectation networks infer the expectation of encountering one scale degree followed in the near (but not necessarily immediate) future by another given scale degree, with previous work suggesting that scale degree associations learned by expectation networks better predict listener ratings of pitch similarity than transition probabilities. The current work outlines how these learned scale degree associations can be combined to predict melodic continuations and tests the resulting predictions on a dataset of listener responses to a musical cloze task previously used to compare two other models of melodic expectation, a variable‐order Markov model (IDyOM) and Temperley's music‐theoretically motivated model. Under multinomial logistic regression, all three models explain significant unique variance in human melodic expectations, with coefficient estimates highest for expectation networks. These results suggest that generalized scale degree associations informed by both adjacent and nonadjacent relationships between melodic notes influence listeners’ melodic predictions above and beyond n‐gram context, highlighting the need to consider a broader range of statistical learning processes that may underlie listeners’ expectations for upcoming musical events. (shrink)

The biological sciences have become increasingly reliant on so-called 'model organisms'. I argue that in this domain, the concept of a descriptive model is essential for understanding scientific practice. Using a case study, I show how such a model was formulated in a preexplanatory context for subsequent use as a prototype from which explanations ultimately may be generated both within the immediate domain of the original model and in additional, related domains. To develop this concept of a descriptive model, I (...) focus on use of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans and the wiring diagrams that were developed as models of its neural structure. In addition, implications of the concept of a descriptive model, particularly its relevance for the data-phenomena distinction as well as its relation to long-standing debates on realism, are briefly examined. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Against a Kantian notion of freedom as autonomy, this article defends a conception of freedom that is relational, dependent, and experimental, and that operates without anything like a will. In the author’s view, freedom is a characteristic of a relation between a person and the world that allows for the predictable realization of specified ends, that is, a mode of power.

1. 1817-1839. -- 2. 1840-1844. -- 3. 1845-1852 -- 4. 1853-1861. -- 5. 1862-1868 ; Nachträge, 1828-1861.