This paper investigates the effects of group interaction in a storytelling situation for children using two robots: a reader robot and a listener robot as a side-participant. We developed a storytelling system that consists of a reader robot, a listener robot, a display, a gaze model, a depth sensor, and a human operator who responds and provides easily understandable answers to the children’s questions. We experimentally investigated the effects of using a listener robot and either one or two children during (...) a storytelling situation on the children’s preferences and their speech activities. Our experimental results showed that the children preferred storytelling with the listener robot. Although two children obviously produced more speech than one child, the listener robot discouraged the children’s speech regardless of whether one or two were listening. (shrink)

William James criticizes Hume for failing to adhere to the strictly empiricist method when he postulates discrete constituents of experience—which Hume calls perceptions—thereby making our experience a train of disconnected pieces. James argues that the discontinuity of experience in Hume results in part from his failure to recognize the immediate presence of relations in experience.1 Emphasizing a continuity and unity of experience, James thus differentiates his empiricism from Hume's as being radical in the sense that it recognizes relations as 'real' (...) parts of experience just as are things that are experienced to be so related.2 This raises a question concerning the experiential status of relations in Hume: is .. (shrink)

Background: Advocacy is an important role of psychiatric nurses because their patients are ethically, socially, and legally vulnerable. This study of Japanese expert psychiatric nurses’ judgments of interventions for patient advocacy will show effective strategies for ethical nursing practice and their relationship with Japanese culture. Objectives: This article explores Japanese psychiatric nurses’ decision to intervene as a patient advocate and examine their ethical, cultural, and social implications. Research design: Using semi-structured interviews verbatim, themes of the problems that required interventions were (...) inductively summarized by a qualitative analysis and their contexts and nursing judgments were examined. Participants and research context: The participants were 21 nurses with 5 or more years of experience in psychiatric nursing. Ethical considerations: The research was approved by Institutional Review Board of research site and study facilities. The participants gave written informed consent. Findings: Analysis of 45 cases showed that nurses decided to intervene when (a) surrounding people’s opinions impeded patients’ safety, (b) healthcare professionals’ policies impeded patients’ decision-making, (c) own violent behaviors impeded treatment and welfare services for patients, (d) own or families’ low acceptance of illness impeded patients’ self-actualization, (e) inappropriate treatment or care impeded patients’ liberty, and (f) their families abused patients’ property. Discussion: To solve conflicts between patients and their surrounding people, the nurses sought reconciliation between them, which is in accordance with Japanese cultural norms respecting harmony. When necessary, however, they protected patients’ rights against cultural norms. Therefore, their judgments cannot be explained by cultural norms alone. Conclusion: The findings indicate that the nurses’ judgments were based on respect for patients’ rights apart from cultural norms, and they first sought solutions fitting the cultural norms before other solutions. This seems to be an ethical, effective strategy if advocates know the culture in depth. (shrink)

Comparisons have been drawn between certain aspects of Hume’s philosophy and Buddhist philosophy, particularly concerning their views on the self. While it is intriguing to discover affinities between two philosophical systems that are separated far apart by both time and space, comparison would become superficial if similarities are found merely in their general, overall claims or doctrines. Although engaging in a comparative exploration between Hume and Buddhist philosophers on the self can reveal remarkable similarities in their accounts, it can also (...) provide valuable insights into their differences. The differences between Hume’s and Buddhist philosophers’ views become evident when considering the debates about the self among Buddhist philosophers, which have resulted in diverse accounts within the Buddhist tradition. Indeed, it is those differences that prove to be more illuminating for recognizing and understanding subtle aspects and various components of Hume’s account, which may not be adequately described or distinguished by Hume himself. These aspects are particularly revealed in Hume’s brief description of dissatisfaction with his own account in the Appendix. The primary objective of this paper is to uncover the system of reality underlying Hume’s account of the self, which creates a labyrinth for him, by drawing upon Buddhist ideas and debates regarding the self. (shrink)

In the Appendix to A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume famously retracts his account of personal identity by confessing that it involves a profound problem he cannot solve, which I have elsewhere identified and called the Bundling Problem. Neither of the two possible solutions that Hume himself considers in the Appendix is a viable option for him by his own lights, which might suggest that any successful account of a unified self must go beyond the empirical framework. In this paper, (...) I argue that we can find a strictly empiricist solution to Hume's problem in William James. I attempt to show that James's descriptions of our experience are phenomenologically more detailed and faithful to how experience is undergone from the first-person perspective, which allows him to explain our belief in an identical, unified self solely on empirical grounds. James finds unity and continuity right in the content of the stream of experience itself. A detailed investigation of James's accounts reveals that Hume's fundamental problem does not stem merely from his lack of empirical resources but, more importantly, from his tacit abandonment of the professed empiricist methodology. (shrink)

Research has documented the influence of ALS patients families’ attitudes on patients’ decision to accept or reject TIV, a treatment that in many cases will allow them to live long enough to experience locked-in syndrome ; under Japanese law the use of a ventilator cannot be terminated once it is essential to a patient’s survival, so to choose TIV means to choose the possibility of entering a locked-in state. Previous studies have not, however, elucidated the changes in family members’ attitudes (...) that take place after they receive pertinent information about the social systems and services available to them. This study aims to fill this gap by collecting and analyzing patients’ and family members’ narratives. In Japan, about 30% of ALS patients utilize TIV. This rate is much higher than in most other developed countries. Patients’ narratives illuminate the psychological and especially the contextual factors of their decision-making. Many Japanese patients who currently use a ventilator say that their family members encouraged them to prolong their lives through ventilation. These family members have done so because patients are able to use long-term ventilation for only ¥1000 per month, and can also access the latest communication devices and round the clock caregiver services in their homes at very low cost. Japanese caregivers who are supported by social systems and services including communication assistance, empowering factors such as patients’ associations, care provided by people outside the patient’s family, and a public nursing care system are able to encourage patients to decide to use longterm ventilation. (shrink)

In Book One of the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume seems to acknowledge the existence of both internal and external worlds, in which perceptions, objects, and bodies, exist. In particular, Hume seems directly to affirm the existence of extra-mental bodies, when he says at the beginning of the section "Of scepticism with regard to the senses," "We may well ask, What causes induce us to believe in theexistence of body? but 'tis in vain to ask, whether there be body or (...) not? That is a point, which we must take for granted in all our reasonings" (T 1.4.2.1; SBN 187).1 Furthermore, he thinks that the existence of body must be taken for granted because it is "an affair of too great importance to be trusted to our .. (shrink)

There are remarkable parallels between Hume and Nagarjuna in their denial of substantiality and independence in objects and their subsequent attitude toward our ordinary world. Acknowledging a deep-rooted human tendency to take objects as independent entities, they both argue that there is nothing intrinsic in those objects that make them unitary and independent, and that those characters are, strictly speaking, merely fictitious, mental constructs. They nonetheless affirm the existence of our ordinary world as real. Although their main purposes of the (...) philosophical inquiry are different (epistemological for Hume, and soteriological for Nagarjuna), their accounts of the nature of our world allow us to accept it in the way we ordinarily believe with the deeper understanding of it. It is only in this world where we think, act, and interact with others that an epistemology grounded in human sentiment and experience (for Hume) or humans liberation (for Nagarjuna) is possible. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to answer the question whether Descartes had read Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism. At first glance, the question seems trivial. This question, however, is of historico-philosophical significance in that it reveals, even if only partially, what Descartes, who is regarded as the father of early modern philosophy, inherited from his earlier intellectual legacy in formulating his own philosophy. I first compare statements from Sextus’s Outlines with corresponding statements from Descartes’s writings to identify their similarities in (...) terms of content. This comparison focuses on their views regarding four subjects: the syllogistic, moral guidelines, the use of definitions, and true opinions. I then analyse and discuss whether the degree of similarity between these sets of statements is sufficient to conclude that the particular work of Descartes is based on Sextus’s arguments. This preliminary study can only provide indirect evidence that Descartes had read Sextus, for a thorough clarification of whether he read anything other than the works he himself stated that he had read (e.g., Cicero, Suárez), would require further circumstantial evidence, however weak it may be. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to bring an end to the interpretative dispute on Descartes’s cog­ito: is the cogito known by intuition or by inference? There have been several studies based on both analytical and historical approaches to the dispute, and it seems that we have exhausted all interpretations. Nevertheless, I wish to revisit this dispute, as it ap­pears that the previous studies have overlooked Descartes’s use of words and phrases, which is the most significant for understanding his various (...) discourses on the cogito con­sistently. In this paper, I focus on the terms which Descartes uses to indicate the varied status of the cogito, such as ‘haec cognitio, ego cogito, ergo sum’, ‘hanc propositionem, ego cogito, ergo sum’, ‘hanc conclusionem: cogito, ergo sum’, and so on; Descartes changes carefully the terms in each of the cogito arguments. By focusing on these terms, I try to interpret Descartes’s explanations consistently. (shrink)

Under certain conditions, the cell cycle can be arrested for a long period of time. Vertebrate oocytes are arrested at G2 phase, while somatic cells arrest at G0 phase. In both cells, nuclei have lost the ability to initiate DNA synthesis. In a pair of recently published papers,1,2 Méchali and colleagues and Coué and colleagues have clarified how frog oocytes prevent untimely DNA synthesis during the long G2 arrest. Intriguingly, they found only Cdc6 is responsible for the inability of immature (...) oocytes to replicate DNA. Cdc6 is a key component for replication licensing, and for G0 cells to re‐enter the proliferative stage. Strikingly similar strategies for preventing the untimely replication in both cells suggest that the suppression of replication licensing is a universal mechanism for securing the prolonged arrest of the cell cycle. BioEssays 25:313–316, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Previous studies have revealed the effect of interoceptive accuracy, a behavioral measure of the ability to feel physiological states and regulation for that, which origin emotion on decision-making such as gambling. Given that decision-making in moral dilemma situations is affected by emotion, it seems that IAcc also affects moral decision-making. The present study preliminarily investigates whether IAcc affects decision-making and emotional ratings such as regret for one’s own choices in moral dilemma situations. IAcc did not affect moral choice, but affected (...) regret ratings for one’s moral choice in portions of dilemma scenarios. Moreover, people with higher IAcc make deontological choices more rapidly than those with lower IAcc in self-related dilemma scenarios. These results suggest that people with higher IAcc feel stronger emotional conflicts about utilitarian choices but weaker conflicts about deontological choices than people with lower IAcc depending on the moral dilemma scenario. (shrink)

Ant colony optimization, which is one of the metaheuristics imitating real ant foraging behavior, is an effective method to find a solution for the traveling salesman problem. The rank-based ant system has been proposed as a developed version of the fundamental model AS of ACO. In the ASrank, since only ant agents that have found one of some excellent solutions are let to regulate the pheromone, the pheromone concentrates on a specific route. As a result, although the ASrank can find (...) a relatively good solution in a short time, it has the disadvantage of being prone falling into a local solution because the pheromone concentrates on a specific route. This problem seems to come from the loss of diversity in route selection according to the rapid accumulation of pheromones to the specific routes. Some ACO models, not just the ASrank, also suffer from this problem of loss of diversity in route selection. It can be considered that the diversity of solutions as well as the selection of solutions is an important factor in the solution system by swarm intelligence such as ACO. In this paper, to solve this problem, we introduce the ant system using individual memories aiming to improve the ability to solve TSP while maintaining the diversity of the behavior of each ant. We apply the existing ACO algorithms and ASIM to some TSP benchmarks and compare the ability to solve TSP. (shrink)

In this volume, a group of international scholars address issues relating to community well being and the role of politics, law and economics in Europe and Japan in achieving human-centered symbiotic governance. Case-studies and suggestions for reform are presented in the arenas of economy, government administration, management, university governance, health, agriculture, the environment and urban planning.

Descartes uses the term experience (experientia; expérience) many time not only in the subject of physics but also in the one of metaphysics, especially in the arguments about the cogito and the free will: “he learns [‘I am thinking, therefore I am’] from experiencing in his own case that it is impossible that he should think without existing” (2ae Resp., AT-VII, 140; CSM-II, 100); “I cannot complain that the will or freedom of choice which I received from God is not (...) sufficiently extensive or perfect, since I know by experience that it is not restricted in any way” (Med., AT-VII, 56; CSM-II, 39), and so on. However, it is not clear what Descartes means by the term experientia; he never defines it. Then what is experience in Descartes’ metaphysics? In this paper, I intend to explore what Descartes meant by the term “experience” in the context of metaphysics. To be concrete, I first compare Descartes with earlier philosophers and clarify that Descartes’ use of the term “experience” has characteristics that were not recognized earlier (Section 1). I then clarify what the role of experience in Descartes is, while examining the validity of previous studies that equate Descartes’ experience with intuition and understanding (sections 2 and 3). (shrink)

This paper analyzes the structure of unsuccessful chats over the internet about Japanese religions. On the internet, people of different religions and beliefs can easily meet. However, in Japan, chats about religion rarely succeed. This is due not only to a lack of social cues and anonymity but also because there is power balance between two groups, one with a positive attitude towards religion and the other with a negative attitude. Their different pre-understandings of religion make the discussion difficult. It (...) is important to analyze moments of pre-understanding of discussants in order to better understand the dynamics. We present an approach for such analysis based on Paul Ricoeur’s theory for “Threefold Mimesis.” This is a trial for successful communication among people from different cultures and societies via the internet. It could be a step forward in achieving the global information ethics that Charles Ess claims. This is because differences in the pre-understanding of a topic are an essential problem there. (shrink)

Descartes insists, “[...] there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me [...]” (AT-VII, 25; CSM-II, 17). In what way can we draw evidence that our existence can be drawn from our being deceived? The interpretations that the earlier studies have shown is not a monolith. Then I will search for some inherent characteristics of deception, and analyse the construction of the (...) reasoning, “if a deceiver deceives me, I exist.” To be concrete, I show: 1) that it is not “I exist” but “I think” that is concluded from the supposition “a deceiver deceives me/I am deceived by a deceiver”; 2) that the attributions of the self as a thinking thing, i.e. understanding, affirming, and denying (AT-VII, 28; CSM-II, 19), are discovered in the very supposition of a deceiver. (shrink)

Whether man is predisposed to lethal violence, ranging from homicide to warfare, and how that may have impacted human evolution, are among the most controversial topics of debate on human evolution. Although recent studies on the evolution of warfare have been based on various archaeological and ethnographic data, they have reported mixed results: it is unclear whether or not warfare among prehistoric hunter – gatherers was common enough to be a component of human nature and a selective pressure for the (...) evolution of human behaviour. This paper reports the mortality attributable to violence, and the spatio-temporal pattern of violence thus shown among ancient hunter–gatherers using skeletal evidence in prehistoric Japan (the Jomon period: 13000 cal BC–800 cal BC). Our results suggest that the mortality due to violence was low and spatio-temporally highly restricted in the Jomon period, which implies that violence including warfare in prehistoric Japan was not common. (shrink)