Evolution: The Computer Systems Engineer Designing Minds

What we have learnt in the last six or seven decades about virtual machinery, as a result of a great deal of science and technology, enables us to offer Darwin a new defence against critics who argued that only physical form, not mental capabilities and consciousness could be products of evolution by natural selection. The defence compares the mental phenomena mentioned by Darwin’s opponents with contents of virtual machinery in computing systems. Objects, states, events, and processes in virtual machinery which we have only recently learnt how to design and build, and could not even have been thought about in Darwin’s time, can interact with the physical machinery in which they are implemented, without being identical with their physical implementation, nor mere aggregates of physical structures and processes. The existence of various kinds of virtual machinery (including both “platform” virtual machines that can host other virtual machines, e.g. operating systems, and “application” virtual machines, e.g. spelling checkers, and computer games) depends on complex webs of causal connections involving hardware and software structures, events and processes, where the specification of such causal webs requires concepts that cannot be defined in terms of concepts of the physical sciences. That indefinability, plus the possibility of various kinds of self-monitoring within virtual machinery, seems to explain some of the allegedly mysterious and irreducible features of consciousness that motivated Darwin’s critics and also more recent philosophers criticising AI. There are consequences for philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and robotics

Narrowing the Opportunity Gap: Developing Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

As per Breeze and Laborda (2016), a culturally responsive curriculum addresses the integration of students into a new culture, as bilingual education traditionally receives minimal interest from the authorities. Akkari and Loomis (1998) explain that bilingual education is socially and historically situated, while van Lier (2004) posits that diverse linguistic groups will have an ominous future if the educational system ignores their linguistic needs. This demands a paradigmatic shift to meet the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students (CLDs). Advocating for culturally responsive curriculum, this defense will examine the history of bilingual education in the United States, linguistic ecology, and finally the salient components of complex systems as seen through connections through Martin Heidegger’s notions of being and time

The Shadow of Affectivity Inside the ‘Is/Ought’ Debate’: Siniscalchi, Fuller, Manderson and Vico’s Ghosts in the Legal Machine

The article reconstructs the is/ought debate in legal theory through a phenomenological reading of the concept of normality. An analysis of Siniscalchi, Fuller and Manderson looks at the issue from the perspective of law and literature, and then applies Giambattista Vico's rhetorical methodology within the contemporary debate. The question: "is Hume's law really visible within Hume's thought?" also paradoxically poses the figure of phantoms and fictions at the heart of the current theoretical debate on law. A history of the phantom placed at the centre of the history of Western institutions still remains to be written, but a comparison of very diverse and incongrous approaches such as the extended order of Hayek, the dogmatic anthropology of Legendre, the eunomics of Fuller and the new science of Vico shows how the mystery of consciousness and the mystery of institutions are inextricably entwined. It is impossible at the moment to draw a coherent doctrine from these conflicting perspectives, but their convocation is sufficient to demonstrate how the theory of law is always suspended between the unknown and the human attempt to inhabit it, moving us toward an affective turn that has yet to be fully conceived in the theory of law, following the iconic turn. The anthropological primacy of fictio and the aesthetic-legal dimension in the constitution of language is not that of a logic and separation from the body and meaning, but the exact inverse, even in the unavoidable constant tension between the two poles: logic is born through the gesture of the body that precedes it, as myth precedes the foundation of the State; the origin of the concept is affective, as Hume, and perhaps Vico himself, would have passionately affirmed

When is it Justifiable to Ascribe Mental States to Non-Human Systems?

In this thesis I shall attempt to show when it is, and when it is not, justifiable to ascribe mental states, of the type that we associate with the complex cognitive behaviour of human beings, to non-human systems. To do this I will first attempt to give a fundamental explication of some of the problems that underlie our ascription of mental states to other human beings, non-human animals and machines, after which I will tackle the problem of whether or not any ascription of mentality can ever be completely vindicated. Then I will look at the issues of complexity and the distinctions that hold between the capabilities of various systems, both natural and artificial. The result of this will be a more comprehensive understanding of what characteristics are necessary for the possession of such capabilities. I will go on to argue that a positive relation exists between a system's architecture and its capability to behave or act in ways that can be classed as one of a number of mental states such as 'knowing', 'understanding' or 'believing'. I shall look at the ways in which machine states and mental states have been examined using hierarchical stratifications for these can offer us some indication of the correlation that exists between simple systems and the low level actions of which they are capable, and the more sophisticated actions of which only progressively more complex systems are capable. However, I shall put forward arguments to demonstrate that this is a feasible strategy when dealing with the innards of a machine but not for dealing with the innards of the mind. Throughout the thesis I shall try to clarify the inexplicit or clouded notions of subjectivity and intentionality, for one of my aims is to demonstrate that the notions of subjectivity and awareness are more important than intentionality in the distinction between human and non-human systems

A Semantic analysis of control

This thesis examines the use of denotational semantics to reason about control flow in sequential, basically functional languages. It extends recent work in game semantics, in which programs are interpreted as strategies for computation by interaction with an environment. Abramsky has suggested that an intensional hierarchy of computational features such as state, and their fully abstract models, can be captured as violations of the constraints on strategies in the basic functional model. Non-local control flow is shown to fit into this framework as the violation of strong and weak `bracketing' conditions, related to linear behaviour. The language muPCF (Parigot's mu_lambda with constants and recursion) is adopted as a simple basis for higher-type, sequential computation with access to the flow of control. A simple operational semantics for both call-by-name and call-by-value evaluation is described. It is shown that dropping the bracketing condition on games models of PCF yields fully abstract models of muPCF. The games models of muPCF are instances of a general construction based on a continuations monad on Fam(C), where C is a rational cartesian closed category with infinite products. Computational adequacy, definability and full abstraction can then be captured by simple axioms on C. The fully abstract and universal models of muPCF are shown to have an effective presentation in the category of Berry-Curien sequential algorithms. There is further analysis of observational equivalence, in the form of a context lemma, and a characterization of the unique functor from the (initial) games model, which is an isomorphism on its (fully abstract) quotient. This establishes decidability of observational equivalence for finitary muPCF, contrasting with the undecidability of the analogous relation in pure PCF

Negation in context

The present essay includes six thematically connected papers on negation in the areas of the philosophy of logic, philosophical logic and metaphysics. Each of the chapters besides the first, which puts each the chapters to follow into context, highlights a central problem negation poses to a certain area of philosophy. Chapter 2 discusses the problem of logical revisionism and whether there is any room for genuine disagreement, and hence shared meaning, between the classicist and deviant's respective uses of 'not'. If there is not, revision is impossible. I argue that revision is indeed possible and provide an account of negation as contradictoriness according to which a number of alleged negations are declared genuine. Among them are the negations of FDE (First-Degree Entailment) and a wide family of other relevant logics, LP (Priest's dialetheic "Logic of Paradox"), Kleene weak and strong 3-valued logics with either "exclusion" or "choice" negation, and intuitionistic logic. Chapter 3 discusses the problem of furnishing intuitionistic logic with an empirical negation for adequately expressing claims of the form 'A is undecided at present' or 'A may never be decided' the latter of which has been argued to be intuitionistically inconsistent. Chapter 4 highlights the importance of various notions of consequence-as-s-preservation where s may be falsity (versus untruth), indeterminacy or some other semantic (or "algebraic") value, in formulating rationality constraints on speech acts and propositional attitudes such as rejection, denial and dubitability. Chapter 5 provides an account of the nature of truth values regarded as objects. It is argued that only truth exists as the maximal truthmaker. The consequences this has for semantics representationally construed are considered and it is argued that every logic, from classical to non-classical, is gappy. Moreover, a truthmaker theory is developed whereby only positive truths, an account of which is also developed therein, have truthmakers. Chapter 6 investigates the definability of negation as "absolute" impossibility, i.e. where the notion of necessity or possibility in question corresponds to the global modality. The modality is not readily definable in the usual Kripkean languages and so neither is impossibility taken in the broadest sense. The languages considered here include one with counterfactual operators and propositional quantification and another bimodal language with a modality and its complementary. Among the definability results we give some preservation and translation results as well

The Knowledge of Good

This book presents Robert S. Hartman’s formal theory of value and critically examines many other twentieth century value theorists in its light, including A.J. Ayer, Kurt Baier, Brand Blanshard, Paul Edwards, Albert Einstein, William K. Frankena, R.M. Hare, Nicolai Hartmann, Martin Heidegger, G.E. Moore, P.H. Nowell-Smith, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Charles Stevenson, Paul W. Taylor, Stephen E. Toulmin, and J.O. Urmson