What Is a Human Person? An Exploration & Critique of Contemporary Perspectives

What is a Human Person? An Exploration and Critique of Physicalist Perspectives Emmanuel Cumplido Faculty Sponsor: Donald Zeyl, Philosophy Answers to the question “What is a human person?” that have garnered the allegiance of people throughout millennia fall under two broad categories: “physicalism” and “dualism”. One of the earliest renditions of physicalism was the philosophy of the ancient Greek atomists. In their view, all of reality could be explained through two principles: atoms and empty space. As a consequence, people were thought to be nothing but assemblages of atoms in space. Plato’s Phaedo presents one of the earliest philosophical endorsements of dualism by arguing for the existence of an immaterial mind, or soul, that is the grounds for a human person\u27s identity. The idea that a human person is, fundamentally, an immaterial mind or soul that can survive bodily death has also been a long-standing position for many of the world’s major religions in both Western and Eastern traditions. With a recent revival of academic interest in studying consciousness, the debate on human nature has been receiving some special treatment in academia. In my project I aim to critique the dominant physicalist perspective by drawing out its implications for several other areas of human life. Specifically, the troubling consequences physicalism has in relation to epistemology, personal identity, and ethics. Along the way, I will give a brief apologia for dualism as a serious intellectual position that resolves the problems which physicalism present

Gender in focus: (new) trends in media

(Excerto) Nowadays, the public discourses about gender equality are commonly accepted in Western society. In fact, we live in an era of “equality illusion” (Banyard, 2010) because the mainstream discourses incorporate gender in the agenda, conveying the message that feminist struggles are unnecessary today. At the same time, postfeminism (McRobbie, 2004) gains importance and demonstrates the intricacies of a neoliberal, highly individualist culture that subtly imprisons the freedoms that it is supposed to grant (Gill & Scharff, 2011).COMPETE e QREN

Scale-Wavelength Decomposition of Hyperspectral Signals - Use for Mineral Classification & Quantification

An approach for material identification & soil constituent quantification based on a generalized multi-scale derivative analysis of hyperspectral signals is presented. It employs the continuous wavelet transform to project input spectra onto a scale-wavelength space. This allows investigating the spectra at selectable level of detail while normalizing/separating disturbances. Benefits & challenges of this decomposition for mineral classification & quantification will be shown for a mining site

What Caused the Big Bang?

This book critically explores answers to the big question, What produced our universe around fifteen billion years ago in a Big Bang? It critiques contemporary atheistic cosmologies, including Steady State, Oscillationism, Big Fizz, Big Divide, and Big Accident, that affirm the eternity and self-sufficiency of the universe without God. This study defends and revises Process Theology and arguments for God's existence from the universe's life-supporting order and contingent existence

Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Reconfigurable Communication-centric Systems on Chip 2010 - ReCoSoC\u2710 - May 17-19, 2010 Karlsruhe, Germany. (KIT Scientific Reports ; 7551)

ReCoSoC is intended to be a periodic annual meeting to expose and discuss gathered expertise as well as state of the art research around SoC related topics through plenary invited papers and posters. The workshop aims to provide a prospective view of tomorrow\u27s challenges in the multibillion transistor era, taking into account the emerging techniques and architectures exploring the synergy between flexible on-chip communication and system reconfigurability

Elimination of composite superpositions may cause abortion

We will show by examples that the elimination of composite superpositions during the completion of a term rewriting system may lead to an unnecessary stop with failure that cannot be prevented by postponing critical pairs

Light transport by topological confinement

The growth of data capacity in optical communications links, which form the critical backbone of the modern internet, is facing a slowdown due to fundamental nonlinear limitations, leading to an impending "capacity crunch" on the horizon. Current technology has already exhausted degrees of freedom such as wavelength, amplitude, phase and polarization, leaving spatial multiplexing as the last available dimension to be efficiently exploited. To minimize the significant energy requirements associated with digital signal processing, it is critical to explore the upper limit of unmixed spatial channels in an optical fiber, which necessitates ideally packing spatial channels either in real space or in momentum space. The former strategy is realized by uncoupled multi-core fibers whose channel count has already saturated due to reliability constraint limiting fiber sizes. The later strategy is realized by the unmixed multimode fiber whose high spatial efficiency suggest the possibility of high channel-count scalability but the right subset of mode ought to be selected in order to mitigate mode coupling that is ever-present due to the plethora of perturbations a fiber normally experiences. The azimuthal modes in ring-core fibers turn out to be one of the most spatially efficient in this regard, by exploiting light’s orbital angular momentum (OAM). Unmixed mode counts have reached 12 in a ~1km fiber and 24 in a ~10m fiber. However, there is a fundamental bottleneck for scalability of conventionally bound modes and their relatively high crosstalks restricts their utility to device length applications. In this thesis, we provide a fundamental solution to further fuel the unmixed-channel count in an MMF. We utilize the phenomenon of topological confinement, which is a regime of light guidance beyond conventional cutoff that has, to the best of our knowledge, never been demonstrated till publications based on the subject matter of this thesis. In this regime, light is guided by the centrifugal barrier created by light’s OAM itself rather than conventional total internal reflection arising from the index inhomogeneity of the fiber. The loss of these topologically confined modes (TCMs) decreases down to negligible levels by increasing the OAM of fiber modes, because the centrifugal barrier that keeps photons confined to a fiber core increases with the OAM value of the mode. This leads to low-loss transmission in a km-scale fiber of these cutoff modes. Crucially, the mode-dependent confinement loss of TCMs further lifts the degeneracy of wavevectors in the complex space, leading to frustration of phase-matched coupling. This thus allows further scaling the mode count that was previously hindered by degenerate mode coupling in conventionally bound fiber modes. The frustrated coupling of TCMs thus enables a record amount of unmixed OAM modes in any type of fiber that features a high index contrast, whether specially structured as a ring-core, or simply constructed as a step-index fiber. Using all these favorable attributes, we achieve up to 50 low-loss modes with record low crosstalk (approaching -45 dB/km) over a 130-nm bandwidth in a ~1km-long ring-core fiber. The TCM effect promises to be inherently scalable, suggesting that even higher modes counts can be obtained in the future using this design methodology. Hence, the use of TCMs promises breaking the record spectral efficiency, potentially making it the choice for transmission links in future Space-Division-Multiplexing systems. Apart from their chief attribute of significantly increasing the information content per photon for quantum or classical networks, we expect that this new light guidance may find other applications such as in nonlinear signal processing and light-matter interactions

History of Psychology

Openly licensed anthology focused on the theme of the History of Psychology. Contains: The Mind and the Brain by Alfred Binet; Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for Beginners by Sigmund Freud; The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2) by William James; The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2) by William James; Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology by C. G. Jung; Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay; The Psychology of Arithmetic by Edward L. Thorndike