The prevailing scientific paradigm is that matter is primary and everything, including consciousness can be derived from the laws governing matter. Although the scientific explanation of consciousness on these lines has not been realized, in this view it is only a matter of time before consciousness will be explained through neurobiological activity in the brain, and nothing else. There is an alternative view that holds that it is fundamentally impossible to explain how subjectivity can arise solely out of material processes—“the (...) hard problem of consciousness”—and instead consciousness should be regarded in itself as a primary force in nature. This view attempts to derive, for example, the laws of physics from models of consciousness, instead of the other way around. While as scientists we can understand and have an intuition for the first paradigm, it is very difficult to understand what “consciousness is primary” might mean since it has no intuitive scientific grounding. Here we show that worlds experienced through virtual reality are such that consciousness is a first order phenomenon. We discuss the Interface Theory of Perception which claims that in physical reality perceptions are not veridical and that we do not see the “truth” but that perception is based on evolutionary payoffs. We show that this theory may provide an accurate description of perception and consciousness within VR, and we put forward an experimental study that could throw light on this. We conclude that VR does offer an experimental frame that provides intuition with respect to the idea that “consciousness is first” and what this might mean regarding the perceived world. However, we do not draw any conclusions about the veracity of this notion with respect to physical reality or question the emergence of consciousness from brain function. (shrink)

Although it has been shown that immersive virtual reality can be used to induce illusions of ownership over a virtual body , information on whether this changes implicit interpersonal attitudes is meager. Here we demonstrate that embodiment of light-skinned participants in a dark-skinned VB significantly reduced implicit racial bias against dark-skinned people, in contrast to embodiment in light-skinned, purple-skinned or with no VB. 60 females participated in this between-groups experiment, with a VB substituting their own, with full-body visuomotor synchrony, reflected (...) also in a virtual mirror. A racial Implicit Association Test was administered at least three days prior to the experiment, and immediately after the IVR exposure. The change from pre- to post-experience IAT scores suggests that the dark-skinned embodied condition decreased implicit racial bias more than the other conditions. Thus, embodiment may change negative interpersonal attitudes and thus represent a powerful tool for exploring such fundamental psychological and societal phenomena. (shrink)

Previous research using immersive virtual reality (VR) has shown that after a short period of embodiment of White people in a Black virtual body their implicit racial bias against Black people diminishes. Here we tested the effects of some socio-cognitive variables that could contribute to enhancing or reducing the implicit racial bias. The first aim of the study was to assess the beneficial effects of cooperation within a VR scenario, the second aim was to provide preliminary testing of the hypothesis (...) that empathy and political attitudes could contribute to implicit bias about race, while the third aim was to explore the relationship between political attitudes and empathy. We had (Caucasian) participants embodied in a Black virtual body and engaged either in a cooperative (Coop group) or in a non-cooperative (Neutral group) activity with a confederate experimenter embodying another Black avatar. Before and after VR, we measured participants’ implicit racial bias by means of Implicit Association Test (IAT) and their perceived closeness toward the confederate experimenter. Before VR we also assessed participants’ political attitudes and empathy traits. Results revealed that, as compared to the Neutral group, the Coop group showed lower IAT scores after the social interaction. Interestingly, in the Neutral but not the Coop group the perceived closeness toward the confederate experimenter was associated with the initial racial bias: the more the participants reduced their distance, the more they reduced their IAT score. Moreover, reported traits of empathy and political attitudes significantly explained the variance observed in the initial implicit bias, with perspective-taking, empathic concern, and personal distress being significant predictors of the IAT scores. Finally, there was a relationship between political attitudes and empathy: the more participants considered themselves as left-wing voters, the higher their perspective-taking and empathic concern scores. We discuss these findings within the neuroscientific and social cognition field and encourage scholars from different domains to further explore whether and under which conditions a given manipulation for reducing racial bias could be efficiently transposed in VR. (shrink)

Previous studies on body ownership illusions have shown that under certain multimodal conditions, healthy people can experience artificial body-parts as if they were part of their own body, with direct physiological consequences for the real limb that gets ‘substituted’. In this study we wanted to assess (a) whether healthy people can experience ‘missing’ a body-part through illusory ownership of an amputated virtual body, and (b) whether this would cause corticospinal excitability changes in muscles associated with the ‘missing’ body-part. Forty right-handed (...) participants saw a virtual body from a first person perspective but for half of them the virtual body was missing a part of its right arm. Single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation was applied before and after the experiment to left and right motor cortices. Motor evoked potentials (MEPs) were recorded from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) and the extensor digitorum communis (EDC) of each hand. We found that the stronger the illusion of amputation and arm ownership, the more the reduction of MEP amplitudes of the EDC muscle for the contralateral sensorimotor cortex. In contrast, no association was found for the EDC amplitudes in the ipsilateral cortex and for the FDI amplitudes in both contralateral and ipsilateral cortices. Our study provides evidence that a short-term illusory perception of missing a body-part can trigger inhibitory effects on corticospinal pathways and importantly in the absence of any limb deafferentation or disuse. (shrink)

In _Animacies_, Mel Y. Chen draws on recent debates about sexuality, race, and affect to examine how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, or deathly animates cultural lives. Toward that end, Chen investigates the blurry division between the living and the dead, or that which is beyond the human or animal. Within the field of linguistics, animacy has been described variously as a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, sentience, or liveness. Chen turns to cognitive linguistics to stress how language habitually (...) differentiates the animate and the inanimate. Expanding this construct, Chen argues that animacy undergirds much that is pressing and indeed volatile in contemporary culture, from animal rights debates to biosecurity concerns. Chen's book is the first to bring the concept of animacy together with queer of color scholarship, critical animal studies, and disability theory. Through analyses of dehumanizing insults, the meanings of queerness, animal protagonists in recent Asian/American art and film, the lead in toys panic in 2007, and the social lives of environmental illness, _Animacies_ illuminates a hierarchical politics infused by race, sexuality, and ability. In this groundbreaking book, Chen rethinks the criteria governing agency and receptivity, health and toxicity, productivity and stillness—and demonstrates how attention to the affective charge of matter challenges commonsense orderings of the world. (shrink)

Much has been written about the free energy principle (FEP), and much misunderstood. The principle has traditionally been put forth as a theory of brain function or biological self-organisation. Critiques of the framework have focused on its lack of empirical support and a failure to generate concrete, falsifiable predictions. I take both positive and negative evaluations of the FEP thus far to have been largely in error, and appeal to a robust literature on scientific modelling to rectify the situation. A (...) prominent account of scientific modelling distinguishes between model structure and model construal. I propose that the FEP be reserved to designate a model structure, to which philosophers and scientists add various construals, leading to a plethora of models based on the formal structure of the FEP. An entailment of this position is that demands placed on the FEP that it be falsifiable or that it conform to some degree of biological realism rest on a category error. To this end, I deliver first an account of the phenomenon of model transfer and the breakdown between model structure and model construal. In the second section, I offer an overview of the formal elements of the framework, tracing their history of model transfer and illustrating how the formalism comes apart from any interpretation thereof. Next, I evaluate existing comprehensive critical assessments of the FEP, and hypothesise as to potential sources of existing confusions in the literature. In the final section, I distinguish between what I hold to be the FEP—taken to be a modelling language or modelling framework—and what I term “FEP models.”. (shrink)

The controversial issue of whether Chief Executive Officer (CEO) compensation is excessive or appropriate is examined in terms of two competing claims: that CEOs are overpaid for the value they provide to an enterprise, and that CEO compensation is inherently equitable. Various arguments and perspectives on both sides of the issue are assessed. Little evidence supports the claim that CEO performance justifies very high compensation. Further, the complex interactive alliance between boards of directors and CEOs compromises rational decision-making about CEO (...) compensation, with the Enron affair offered as an illustration of what can go wrong when dishonest CEO actions combine with lax board oversight. Recommendations for restoring trust in the system include continuing current regulatory actions, using different metrics for determining CEO compensation, making board member-CEO relationships transparent to all company stakeholders, and several more radical ideas for change. Stakeholders must resist being distracted by other social, economic, or political issues from pursuing serious, lasting reform. (shrink)

Machine learning (ML) refers to a class of computer-facilitated methods of statistical modelling. ML modelling techniques are now being widely adopted across the sciences. A number of outspoken representatives from the general public, computer science, various scientific fields, and philosophy of science alike seem to share in the belief that ML will radically disrupt scientific practice or the variety of epistemic outputs science is capable of producing. Such a belief is held, at least in part, because its adherents take ML (...) to exist on novel epistemic footing relative to classical mathematical or statistical modelling approaches utilised in science. Namely, they take modelling with ML to be a “theory-free” enterprise, in the sense of not resting essentially on input from human conceptual grasp on the target phenomenon and domain expertise. I take this view to arise from the further, and more deeply entrenched belief that data is worldly and objective; i.e., data is viewed as recapitulating or representing with perfect fidelity the structure or properties of the systems in nature it is sampled from. Yet most contemporary philosophers of science take on board, in one version or other, the thesis of theory-ladenness or theory-mediation of observation or measurement. From this, it follows that most philosophers of science (and, I will venture, many scientists) hold irreconcilable views on the nature of data, an internal tension which threatens the integrity of their appraisals of ML in science. Taking the thesis of theory-ladenness on board---and its implications for the nature of data seriously---it follows that there is no reason to believe that ML differs fundamentally in its epistemic footing from established mathematical modelling approaches in the sciences. I show that usage and interpretation can differ from “standard practice” in scientific projects which wield the tools of ML without accepting a difference in the epistemic or representational status of such tools. (shrink)

Using a new materialist line of questioning that looks at the agential potentialities of water and its entanglements with Big Data and surveillance, this article explores how the recent Snowden revelations about the National Security Agency have reignited media scholars to engage with the infrastructures that enable intercepting, hosting, and processing immeasurable amounts of data. Focusing on the expansive architecture, location, and resource dependence of the NSA’s Utah Data Center, I demonstrate how surveillance and privacy can never be disconnected from (...) the material infrastructures that allow and render natural the epistemological state of mass surveillance. Specifically, I explore the NSA’s infrastructure and the million of gallons of water it requires daily to cool its servers, while located in one of the driest states in the US. Complicating surveillance beyond the NSA, as also already imbricated with various social media companies, this article questions the emplacement and impact of corporate data centers more generally, and the changes they are causing to the landscape and local economies. I look at how water is an intriguing and politically relevant part of the surveillance infrastructure and how it has been constructed as the main tool for activism in this case, and how it may eventually help transform the public’s conceptualization of Big Data, as deeply material. (shrink)

The basic biological situation -- Credulity, and the skeptical tradition -- The early period -- Construction of the inner realm -- Brain, mind, religion -- Infantile amnesia -- Prayer and faith -- Angelic encounters -- Are we 'wired for God'?.

Do the laws of nature supervene on ordinary, non-nomic matters of fact? Lange's criticism of Humean supervenience (HS) plays a key role in his account of natural laws. Though we are sympathetic to his account, we remain unconvinced by his criticism. We focus on his thought experiment involving a world containing nothing but a lone proton and argue that it does not cast sufficient doubt on HS. In addition, we express some concern about locating the lawmakers in an ontology of (...) primitive subjunctive facts and suggest that a 'mixed' metaphysics to the lawmaker question might be attractive. (shrink)

Part one: Overview of business ethics. Understanding business ethics -- Laying a foundation: ethical decision making, social responsibility, corporate governance, stakeholders and activism, and sustainability -- part two: Individual influences on business ethics. Why good people do bad things -- Individual factors that influence your ethics-based thoughts and actions -- Common ethical challenges and how to handle them -- Common organizational practices with ethics implications -- The double-edged sword of leadership and business ethics -- part three: Organizational influences on business (...) ethics. Organizational culture and business ethics -- The role of laws, codes, and training in business ethics -- Doing well by doing good -- part four: Global business ethics issues. A global perspective of business ethics -- Environmental sustainability issues at home and abroad -- The role of business in social justice and change -- Case study: The cause, effect, and impace of Amazon. (shrink)

C.S. Lewis’s ‘Argument from Desire’ is best summed up by his famous line, ‘If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world’. In short, unfulfilled ‘seemingly transcendent desires’ point to fulfilment in another realm. Lewis’s argument is fraught with disagreement, and subsequently, questions remain as to its efficacy as a theistic argument. In this essay, I will take a novel approach by using (...) Bayes’ theorem to assess the success of Lewis’s argument in support of theism over and against naturalism. As I will argue, a strength of this approach is that it allows me to largely bypass a significant area of disagreement within the literature, namely, whether these desires are best seen as natural or artificial. Additionally, I will argue for why these desires are the sort of good God would be interested in giving to persons. Then, I will proceed to outline what I take to be the best naturalistic accounts of these desires and outline some of the challenges these accounts face. Finally, I will conclude with plugging these results into Bayes’ theorem. (shrink)

Deictic coding offers a useful model for understanding the interactions between the dorsal and ventral streams of visual processing in the cerebral cortex. By extending Ballard et al.'s ideas on teleassistance, I show how dedicated low-level visuomotor processes in the dorsal stream might be engaged for the services of high-level cognitive operations in the ventral stream.

The Second Edition of this celebrated book by two of the world's leading researchers in social work introduces readers to the main theories, theorists and perspectives that contribute to the debate on social work theory and social work ...

This comprehensive, psychological, and naturalistic analysis of prayer offers an alternative to William James's model of prayer. Faber analyzes religious faith psychologically and anthropologically, concluding that subjective prayer is finally an instance of homeopathic "magical" conduct. It ritualistically conjures up a version of the first, primal, biological situation, in which the dependent "little" one cries out to a parental "big" one for physical and emotional nourishment. Eventually, religion, and its expression of faith through prayer, provides us with a magical protective (...) presence that is natural in its return to the primal, rather than supernatural, as James argues, in its presence and existence. (shrink)

The principal target of this article is the reification Bruineberg et al. perceive of formalism within the literature on the variational free energy minimization (VFEM) framework. The authors do not provide a definition of reification, as none yet exists. Here I offer one. On this definition, the objects of the authors' critiques fall short of full-blown reification – as do the authors themselves.

Ancient schematic systems originating in the Jewish and Chinese traditions that demonstrate dynamic integration of human consciousness with the material world offer fresh insights into the process through which technoetic art forms are created at the intersections of art, science, technology, and culture. Kabbalah is Judaism's esoteric tradition that reveals the deep structure of biblical consciousness through a symbolic language, conceptual schema, and graphic model for exploring the creative process. The Tree of Life schema is a network of 22 pathways (...) linking 10 nodes (sephirot) that represent stages in the creative process. The first three sephirot represent the artist's undifferentiated intention to create and the cognitive dyad in which a flash of insight begins to crystallize into a viable idea. Two affective dyads, largess/restraint and success/gracefulness, are balanced by the sephirah (singular for sephirot) of Beauty, the aesthetic heart of the entire process. The ninth sephirah funnels the integrated flow of intention, thought, and emotion into the world of physical action that is the tenth sephirah. The Kabbalistic schema is used to trace the process of creating Inside/Outside: P'nim/Panim, a technoetic moist- media artwork in which a biofeedback imaging system forms a feedback loop between changing mind/body processes and corresponding changes in digital self-portraits. (shrink)

Joe Campbell has identified an apparent flaw in van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument. It apparently derives a metaphysically necessary conclusion from what Campbell argues is a contingent premise: that the past is in some sense necessary. I criticise Campbell’s examples attempting to show that this is not the case (in the requisite sense) and suggest some directions along which an incompatibilist could reconstruct her argument so as to remain immune to Campbell’s worries.

Cognitive scientists employ brainteasers, or “cognitive illusions” in service of cognitive research. In some cases, rewording or paraphrasing a question can change the correct answer, without the experimenter realizing. In recent published articles describing cognitive research, participants have pondered brainteasers, including what is here called the “Two Children” problem. Although many accounts of this problem in the academic literature navigate its nuances correctly, in the popular press it is usually presented such that the wording of the question does not actually (...) compel the answer that is offered as correct. Unfortunately, cognitive scientists who have used this problem in research have adopted the more informal and ambiguous version that has become common in the popular press. Recent experiments have used the problem to demonstrate that people make common intuitive errors, but they unfortunately employ an ambiguous form of the question and the answer to the problem is not determinate, as they imply. (shrink)

In this paper we suggest an alternative approach to ethics in social work: virtue ethics. We argue that Habermas's theory of communicative action and discourse ethics needs to be supplemented with virtue ethics to provide an account useful to social work. In these times, sensitivity to others is needed for social work to succeed as a profession interested in combating the complacency, self-interest and lack of compassion evident in cutbacks to social welfare programmes and the resultant concerns with outcomes and (...) efficiencies that have all but obliterated care and compassion. We see in Habermas a furthering of Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy, most importantly with respect to his focus on emancipatory knowing?the critically reflective knower who knows self as the person doing the knowing. Habermas's distinction between values (objective), ethics (social) and morals (subjective) makes the province of emancipatory knowing (his epistemological theory) consistent with his moral theory?morality is personal. (shrink)

In many ways, the 1707 Act of Union encouraged various practices of literary nation-building and the search for authentic ’British’ voices. In their desire to assert the politeness of this newly constituted British identity, writers such as Joseph Addison, Thomas Blackwell and James Macpherson shared a preoccupation with a quality which Addison termed ‘majestick Simplicity’. The implicit codification of polite manners and taste in the Spectator might at first appear to contradict this literary fascination with the search for exemplars of (...) native British simplicity. This article explores the continuity of these concerns in the writings of Addison, Blackwell and Macpherson, suggesting some of the ways that authenticity and politeness exerted conflicting demands on the eighteenth-century literary culture of Britishness. (shrink)

Recent experiments suggest that search direction causally affects the discounted valuation of delayed payoffs. Comparisons between options can increase individuals’ patience toward future payoff options, while searching within options instead promotes impatient choices. We further test the robustness and specificity of this relationship using a novel choice task. Here individuals choose between pairs of delayed payoffs instead of single delayed outcomes. We observe a relationship between search styles and temporal discounting that are the opposite of those previously reported. Integrators – (...) those who tend to compare attributes within alternatives – discount and choose more slowly than comparators – those who are more likely to compare between alternatives. This finding supports and augments the view that individuals’ search strategy is predictive of subsequent discount rates. In particular, the direction of this relationship is further modifiable based on the spatial layout and varying information within an individual’s decision-making environment. (shrink)

Review of extant research on the corporate environmental performance (CEP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) link generally demonstrates a positive relationship. However, some arguments and empirical results have demonstrated otherwise. As a result, researchers have called for a contingency approach to this research stream, which moves beyond the basic question “does it pay to be green?” and instead asks “when does it pay to be green?” In answering this call, we provide a meta-analytic review of CEP–CFP literature in which we (...) identify potential moderators to the CEP–CFP relationship including environmental performance type (e.g., reactive vs. proactive performance), firm characteristics (e.g., large vs. small firms), and methodological issues (e.g., self-report measures). By analyzing these contingencies, this study attempts to provide a basis on which to draw conclusions regarding some inconsistencies and debates in the CEP–CFP research. Some of the results of the moderator analysis suggest that small firms benefit from environmental performance as much or more than large firms, US firms seem to benefit more than international counterparts, and environmental performance seems to have the strongest influence on market-measures of financial performance. (shrink)