2,240 research outputs found

    Jung & Spinoza: Passage Through The Blessed Self

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    This dissertation explores Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jungā€™s (1875-1961) curious relationship with the ideas of the 17th Century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). Despite mentioning Spinoza by name only seven times throughout his Collected Works, there is a strong affinity between the core ideas of both thinkers, most notably in regards to the transcendental immanence of Spinozaā€™s God and the monism implicit in Jungā€™s writings. Despite this accordance, wherever in Jungā€™s writings he seems to ā€˜meetā€™ Spinoza he also confusedly denounces him. To understand why Jung reads Spinoza the way he does, a rigorous comparison between the convergent ideas of both thinkers is undertaken. Various reasons for Jungā€™s perplexing attitude toward Spinoza are explored before reaching the most plausible conclusion: that Spinoza forces Jung into a confrontation with the unknown that strips Jung of the sanctuary of the inner world that he holds dear and that his psychology prioritizes. Ultimately however this introverted bias reveals a problem in Jungā€™s theories regarding his ability to treat the outer world equal to the inner realm. To solve this dilemma, Jung concedes to a Spinozist viewpoint. For Jung this results in a ā€˜tripartite monismā€™ of matter, psyche and spirit that differs from the dual-aspect monism outlined by the theoretical physicist and Jungian scholar Harald Atmanspacher. According to Jung and Spinoza, knowledge of the absolute does not come from tracing the aspects of mind and matter back to an original one but rather through understanding the relationships between the infinity of all finite things. This allows a comparison of Jungā€™s ideas of individuation and the unus mundus with Spinozaā€™s notions of virtue and blessedness. For both thinkers, knowledge of the self leads to knowledge of the Divine, and it is this championing of a transcendental immanence that makes Jung an unlikely yet consummate Spinozist

    Digitalization and Development

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    This book examines the diffusion of digitalization and Industry 4.0 technologies in Malaysia by focusing on the ecosystem critical for its expansion. The chapters examine the digital proliferation in major sectors of agriculture, manufacturing, e-commerce and services, as well as the intermediary organizations essential for the orderly performance of socioeconomic agents. The book incisively reviews policy instruments critical for the effective and orderly development of the embedding organizations, and the regulatory framework needed to quicken the appropriation of socioeconomic synergies from digitalization and Industry 4.0 technologies. It highlights the importance of collaboration between government, academic and industry partners, as well as makes key recommendations on how to encourage adoption of IR4.0 technologies in the short- and long-term. This book bridges the concepts and applications of digitalization and Industry 4.0 and will be a must-read for policy makers seeking to quicken the adoption of its technologies

    A Theistic Critique of Secular Moral Nonnaturalism

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    This dissertation is an exercise in Theistic moral apologetics. It will be developing both a critique of secular nonnaturalist moral theory (moral Platonism) at the level of metaethics, as well as a positive form of the moral argument for the existence of God that follows from this critique. The critique will focus on the work of five prominent metaethical theorists of secular moral non-naturalism: David Enoch, Eric Wielenberg, Russ Shafer-Landau, Michael Huemer, and Christopher Kulp. Each of these thinkers will be critically examined. Following this critique, the positive moral argument for the existence of God will be developed, combining a cumulative, abductive argument that follows from filling in the content of a succinct apagogic argument. The cumulative abductive argument and the apagogic argument together, with a transcendental and modal component, will be presented to make the case that Theism is the best explanation for the kind of moral, rational beings we are and the kind of universe in which we live, a rational intelligible universe

    Exploring maintainability and performance in Ballerina Microservices

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    Microservices architecture currently is the industry norm for creating applications since it allows teams to focus on individual services related to specific business functionalities, reducing the overall application complexity and improving its maintainability. However, microservices architecture has liabilities regarding service integration, communication, governance, and data management. To solve these liabilities, the industry and academic community have focused on creating new frameworks and solutions. More recently, the focus changed to creating new programming languages focused on microservices. This study aims to investigate the effects of language-oriented approaches in developing microservices. The work focuses on Ballerina, a programming language created to simplify the creation and integration of microservices. From the literatureā€™s analysis, Ballerina demonstrates the ability to be more beneficial than the most common implementations of microservices that use more common frameworks. To further investigate these statements, an experience based on the migration of existing microservices developed in Java with the use of the framework Spring Boot was conducted. This experience used a migration strategy created based on the languageā€™s specificities. The resulting Ballerina microservice is compared with its original counterpart. The experience focused on analyzing both solutions in terms of maintainability and performance. Therefore, the Goals, Questions, Metrics (GQM) approach was used to obtain metrics for the mentioned quality attributes. From the obtained results, it was concluded that the Ballerina solution presents differences from the Spring Boot solution, being superior regarding maintainability and inferior in performance.A arquitetura baseada em microserviƧos atualmente Ć© dentro da indĆŗstria considerada a norma para a criaĆ§Ć£o de aplicaƧƵes. A arquitetura baseada em microserviƧos apresenta diversas vantagens, como a possibilidade de distribuir as diferentes funcionalidades da aplicaĆ§Ć£o por diversas equipas, possibilitando tambĆ©m o desenvolvimento dos seus serviƧos em linguagens de programaĆ§Ć£o diferentes. Esta modularizaĆ§Ć£o traduz-se num acrĆ©scimo Ć  independĆŖncia das equipas, possibilitando a implementaĆ§Ć£o dos seus prĆ³prios processos de trabalho como tambĆ©m reduz a complexidade total da aplicaĆ§Ć£o, aumentando a sua manutenibilidade. Contudo, a arquitetura baseada em microserviƧos, dado o aumento na sua utilizaĆ§Ć£o, deu origem a novas questƵes e preocupaƧƵes para as equipas de desenvolvimento e para as organizaƧƵes. As equipas de desenvolvimento encontraram dificuldades na integraĆ§Ć£o e comunicaĆ§Ć£o dos seus serviƧos, principalmente quando estes eram desenvolvidos em linguagens de programaĆ§Ć£o bastante divergentes. Apesar da modularidade e desacoplamento dos serviƧos, comeƧou a ser detetada uma grande dependĆŖncia com metodologias de implantaĆ§Ć£o do cĆ³digo, onde o sucesso de microserviƧos encontrava-se fortemente dependente do uso de contentores e sistemas de orquestraĆ§Ć£o. As organizaƧƵes identificaram um aumento nos seus custos devido ao aumento de processos, armazenamento em servidores e de software para suporte Ć s diversas equipas. Estas dificuldades advĆŖm do facto de as linguagens de programaĆ§Ć£o habitualmente usadas para a criaĆ§Ć£o de microserviƧos nĆ£o terem sido edificadas com o objetivo de suportar microserviƧos bem como nĆ£o salvaguardam algumas das preocupaƧƵes identificadas anteriormente. De forma a combater estas dificuldades, a indĆŗstria e a comunidade acadĆ©mica incidiram as suas investigaƧƵes em novas frameworks e soluƧƵes. Recentemente, dado o novo foco na otimizaĆ§Ć£o para o "desenvolvimento", surgiram novas linguagens de programaĆ§Ć£o orientadas a microserviƧos. Este estudo tem como objetivo investigar os efeitos da utilizaĆ§Ć£o de linguagens de programaĆ§Ć£o orientadas a microserviƧos e subsequentemente a anĆ”lise do seu impacto relativamente a atributos de qualidade relevantes para os mesmos. O foco deste estudo incidirĆ” na linguagem de programaĆ§Ć£o Ballerina, uma linguagem de programaĆ§Ć£o criada com o intuito de facilitar a criaĆ§Ć£o de serviƧos resilientes capazes de se integrarem e orquestrarem atravĆ©s de pontos de saĆ­da distribuĆ­dos. Foi realizada uma investigaĆ§Ć£o Ć  literatura existente sobre microserviƧos e sobre Ballerina, com especial atenĆ§Ć£o na literatura referente Ć  utilizaĆ§Ć£o de Ballerina em microserviƧos. Esta investigaĆ§Ć£o objetivou a identificaĆ§Ć£o dos atributos de qualidade relevantes, de onde se precisou a manutenibilidade e a performance como sendo os atributos a avaliar. Derivada da anĆ”lise da literatura, quando confrontada com implementaƧƵes de linguagens de programaĆ§Ć£o mais tradicionais, Ballerina demonstra a capacidade de proporcionar benefĆ­cios aquando da sua utilizaĆ§Ć£o em microserviƧos. Ballerina apresenta vantagens tais como o suporte nativo para a utilizaĆ§Ć£o de contentores, suporte a DevOps e funcionalidades focadas na seguranƧa e resiliĆŖncia das aplicaƧƵes. De forma a aferir estas afirmaƧƵes, foi efetuada uma experiĆŖncia controlada baseada na migraĆ§Ć£o de microserviƧos desenvolvidos na linguagem de programaĆ§Ć£o Java com recurso Ć  framework Spring Boot para a linguagem Ballerina. Para a realizaĆ§Ć£o desta experiĆŖncia, primeiramente foi escolhido um projeto base do qual se realizaria a migraĆ§Ć£o. O projeto a migrar teria de cumprir alguns requisitos, tais como: ser open-source, ter atividade recente e um nĆŗmero significativo de microserviƧos. Com base nestes requisitos, foi selecionado o projeto Lakeside Mutual, um projeto sobre uma companhia de seguros fictĆ­cia, desenvolvido com o propĆ³sito de demonstrar a utilizaĆ§Ć£o de padrƵes sobre APIs e design orientado ao domĆ­nio. Seguidamente, foi desenhada uma estratĆ©gia de migraĆ§Ć£o com base nas especificidades da linguagem. Dada a implementaĆ§Ć£o da estratĆ©gia, foi edificado um serviƧo em Ballerina Ć  semelhanƧa do original implementado em Java, mantendo todos os seus atributos e funcionalidades. As soluƧƵes foram comparadas em termos de manutenibilidade e performance, em que para tal foi utilizada a abordagem Goal, Question, Metrics (GQM) de forma a obter mĆ©tricas para os atributos de qualidade previamente mencionados. Em termos de manutenibilidade, foram analisados os nĆŗmeros de linhas de cĆ³digo existentes e a complexidade calculada atravĆ©s dos nĆ­veis de indentaĆ§Ć£o dado que Ballerina ainda nĆ£o suporta ferramentas como o Sonarqube. Relativamente Ć  performance, foi desenhado e implementado um plano de testes com um nĆŗmero variado de utilizadores virtuais que executavam um conjunto de pedidos REST. Dos resultados obtidos, foi concluĆ­do que existem diferenƧas notĆ”veis entre ambas as soluƧƵes. A soluĆ§Ć£o em Ballerina apresenta melhores resultados do que a soluĆ§Ć£o em Spring Boot relativamente Ć  manutenibilidade. Contudo, relativamente Ć  performance, a soluĆ§Ć£o em Spring Boot demonstra obter melhores resultados

    Doing Things with Words: The New Consequences of Writing in the Age of AI

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    Exploring the entanglement between artificial intelligence (AI) and writing, this thesis asks, what does writing with AI do? And, how can this doing be made visible, since the consequences of information and communication technologies (ICTs) are so often opaque? To propose one set of answers to the questions above, I begin by working with Google Smart Compose, the word-prediction AI Google launched to more than a billion global users in 2018, by way of a novel method I call AI interaction experiments. In these experiments, I transcribe texts into Gmail and Google Docs, carefully documenting Smart Composeā€™s interventions and output. Wedding these experiments to existing scholarship, I argue that writing with AI does three things: it engages writers in asymmetrical economic relations with Big Tech; it entangles unwitting writers in climate crisis by virtue of the vast resources, as Bender et al. (2021), Crawford (2021), and Strubell et al. (2019) have pointed out, required to train and sustain AI models; and it perpetuates linguistic racism, further embedding harmful politics of race and representation in everyday life. In making these arguments, my purpose is to intervene in normative discourses surrounding technology, exposing hard-to-see consequences so that weā€”people in the academy, critical media scholars, educators, and especially those of us in dominant groupsā€” may envision better futures. Toward both exposure and reimagining, my dissertationā€™s primary contributions are research-creational work. Research-creational interventions accompany each of the three major chapters of this work, drawing attention to the economic, climate, and race relations that word-prediction AI conceals and to the otherwise opaque premises on which it rests. The broader wager of my dissertation is that what technologies do and what they are is inseparable: the relations a technology enacts must be exposed, and they must necessarily figure into how we understand the technology itself. Because writing with AI enacts particular economic, climate, and race relations, these relations must figure into our understanding of what it means to write with AI and, because of AIā€™s increasing entanglement with acts of writing, into our very understanding of what it means to write

    Necrolabour: A postqualitative contextualisation of contemporary work in respect to the philosophy of Georges Bataille

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    A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.This thesis represents a reading, existential at its base, of the protean space of contemporary labour, under the lens of French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897ā€“1962). A historical overview of the understanding of labour reveals the contemporary moment as positioned on the threshold of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Anthropocene. A moment, which in the context of this thesis, is best described in eschatological terms and is defined by the notion of permeability. The fading boundaries between labour, life, employment or unemployment, the distinction between product and producer, the empirical real and the virtual, all these ideas seem to merge into what can be described as the overloading of the Cartesian body/mind divide, introducing a host of unexplored ontologies and subjectivities. The thesis traces the movement towards a paradoxical post-work society, where nothing is classed as pure work and yet everything is a form of labour. This is labour that is immaterial, affective, and most importantly, post-human. The contemporary labourerā€”an embodied osmosis between the human and the machineā€”navigates through a ā€˜life-productiveā€™, subordinated to the wage relations, opaquely managed by the spectral machine that is the algorithm. The work of Bataille, strongly engaged with historical concepts of work, sovereignty and existentialism, offers a rich commentary whose absence has been detrimental in regard to labour theory. An oversight whose importance becomes evident when juxtaposing the modern consideration of the human, the citizen, and the worker as interchangeable, with Batailleā€™s designation of work as the origin of the human animal. This thesis picks up the thread that the late Mark Fisher first unravelled regarding the omnipresence of capitalism and the lack of any alternative suggestion. The concept of necrolabour results from an interdisciplinary approach that goes beyond relating Bataille to a particular philosophical tradition, in favour of an applied reading of Batailleā€™s thought. Utilising a Postqualitative methodology, this thesis argues for an AcĆ©phalic (in reference to the secret society of AcĆ©phale Bataille founded), approach to labour and extends Achille Mbembeā€™s concept of Necropolitics from the purely political to the sphere of work. AcĆ©phalic thought offers a radical yet pragmatic way to confront contemporary existence. Proposing a ā€˜within and againstā€™ mode, our working livesā€”and by extension, the existential framing of ourselvesā€”are to be encountered

    The Forgetting of Fire: An Archaeology of Technics

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    This dissertation applies the methods of Bachelard and Foucault to key moments in the development of science. By analyzing the attitudes of four figures from four different centuries, it shows how epistemic attitudes have shifted from a participation in non-human, natural realities to a construction of human-centred technologies. The idea of an epistemic attitude is situated in reference to Foucaultā€™s concept of the episteme and his method of archaeology; an attitude is the institutionally-situated and personally-enacted comportment of an epistemic agent toward an object of knowledge. This line of thought is pursued under the theme of elemental fire, which begins as a substance for early alchemical knowledge and ends up as a quantifiable branch of functions in technics. We call the attitude of Paracelsus, an alchemist of the sixteenth century, ā€œparticipation,ā€ which sheds light on the intimate goal of his alchemical practice. In the seventeenth century, Robert Boyle inaugurates the evolution of technics with the attitude of instrumentalization. Building off this, Lavoisier participates in the development of technics through his effort to construct the countable, using measuring instruments and chemical techniques. This attitude of accounting, and neither his theory of oxygen nor his basic observations in the laboratory, determines his decisive role in the development of chemistry. Finally, we discuss the attitude of employment as we find it in Sadi Carnot and the engineers of the steam engine, watching as fire for these epistemic agents becomes nothing but an employed instant of combustion
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