The place of qualia in a relational universe

We propose an approach to the question of how qualia fit into the physical world, in the context of a relational and realist completion of quantum theory, called the causal theory of views\cite{views}. This is a combination of an approach to a dynamics of discrete causal structures, called energetic causal sets, developed with M. Cortes, with a realist approach to quantum foundations, called the real ensemble formulation. In this theory, the beables are the information available at each event from its causal past, such as its causal predessesors and the energy and momentum they transfer to the event. We call this the view of an event. That is, we describe a causal universe that is composed of a set of partial views of itself. We propose that conscious perceptions are aspects of some views. This addresses the problem of why consciousness always involves awareness of a bundled grouping of qualia that define a momentary self. This gives a restricted form of panpsychism defined by a physically based selection principle which selects which views have experiential aspects. We further propose that only those views which are novel, in the sense that they are not duplicates of the view of any event in the event's own causal past, are the physical correlates of conscious experience

Learning Social Affordance Grammar from Videos: Transferring Human Interactions to Human-Robot Interactions

In this paper, we present a general framework for learning social affordance grammar as a spatiotemporal AND-OR graph (ST-AOG) from RGB-D videos of human interactions, and transfer the grammar to humanoids to enable a real-time motion inference for human-robot interaction (HRI). Based on Gibbs sampling, our weakly supervised grammar learning can automatically construct a hierarchical representation of an interaction with long-term joint sub-tasks of both agents and short term atomic actions of individual agents. Based on a new RGB-D video dataset with rich instances of human interactions, our experiments of Baxter simulation, human evaluation, and real Baxter test demonstrate that the model learned from limited training data successfully generates human-like behaviors in unseen scenarios and outperforms both baselines.Comment: The 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA

Broadbanding Brunswick: High-speed broadband and household media ecologies

New research from the University of Melbourne and Swinburne University has found that 82% of households in the NBN first release site of Brunswick, Victoria, think the NBN is a good idea. The study, Broadbanding Brunswick: High-speed Broadband and Household Media Ecologies, examines the take-up, use and implications of high-speed broadband for some of its earliest adopters. It looks at how the adoption of high-speed broadband influences household consumption patterns and use of telecoms. The survey of 282 Brunswick households found there had been a significant uptake of the NBN during the course of the research. In 2011, 20% of households were connected to the NBN and in 2012 that number had risen to 34%. Families, home owners, higher income earners and teleworkers were most likely to adopt the NBN. Many NBN users reported paying less for their monthly internet bills, with 49% paying about the same. In many cases those paying more (37%) had elected to do so.Download report: Broadbanding Brunswick: High-speed Broadband and Household Media Ecologies [PDF, 2.5MB] Download report: Broadbanding Brunswick: High-speed Broadband and Household Media Ecologies [Word 2007 document, 5MB

Unpacking the State’s Reputation

International law scholars debate when international law matters to states, how it matters, and whether we can improve compliance. One of the few areas of agreement is that fairly robust levels of compliance can be achieved by tapping into states’ concerns with their reputation. The logic is intuitively appealing: a state that violates international law develops a bad reputation, which leads other states to exclude the violator from future cooperative opportunities. Anticipating a loss of future gains, states will often comply with international rules that are not in their immediate interests. The level of compliance that reputation can sustain depends, however, on how the government decision makers value the possibility of being excluded from future cooperative agreements. This Article examines how governments internalize reputational costs to the “state” and how audiences evaluate the predictive value of violating governments’ actions. The Article concludes that international law’s current approach to reputation is counterproductive, because it treats reputation as an error term that makes rationalists’ claims invariably correct

The Ontology of the Secret Doctrine in Plato’s Theaetetus

The paper offers an interpretation of a disputed portion of Plato’s Theaetetus that is often called the Secret Doctrine. It is presented as a process ontology that takes two types of processes, swift and slow motions, as fundamental building blocks for ordinary material objects. Slow motions are powers which, when realized, generate swift motions, which, in turn, are subjectively bundled to compose sensible objects and perceivers. Although the reading of the Secret Doctrine offered here—a new version of the “Causal Theory interpretation”—is not without problems, these problems are acknowledged in Plato’s text, confirming that this interpretation is correct