Ghost in the machine

published_or_final_versio

Ghost In The Machine

This dress is a selection from my thesis collection entitled ‘Caves of Flesh and Machine.’ The collection was initially inspired by the work of H.R. Giger, and focuses on the idea of biomechanicalism. The pieces combine natural and synthetic textiles to symbolize the contrast of biology and the mechanics present in H.R. Giger’s dark futuristic illustrations. The predominant theme of the collection is life versus death as a greater symbol of biomechanicalis

Spyware: The Ghost in the Machine

Computer users face a new and growing threat to security and privacy. This threat is not in the form of direct attacks by viruses or hackers, but rather by indirect infiltration in the form of monitoring programs surreptitiously installed on computers. These monitoring applications are called spyware, and serve to record and transmit a user\u27s computer uses and behaviors to third parties. Frequently used by marketers to harvest customer data for segmentation and targeting purposes, spyware can serve to direct targeted advertising to user\u27s computers. Spyware is often legally used since installations can be authorized as part of the licensed clickwrap agreement that users agree to when downloading free utility and file sharing programs from the Internet. In some cases, spyware is installed as part of legitimate computer applications provided by business to their customers, to provide updating and communicative functionality to application users. It appears that the ability to monitor remotely and communicate with computers is an opportunity attractive enough to attract the attention of third parties with non-legal intentions. This article focuses on the roles and functions of spyware, its use in both legitimate and non-legitimate ways, and a range of preventions and protections for avoiding and removing spyware that has been installed on end user computers

Pricing Power by Supermarket Retailers: A Ghost in the Machine?

Agribusiness, L13, L66, Q13,

Ghost in the machine; do animals have consciousness?

Consciousness research in neuroscience focuses on the awareness of internal and external existence. Scientists and philosophers have spent centuries analyzing what consciousness really is. Yet, the subject of consciousness remains controversial. This is because consciousness has a subjective aspect, and as such, it is difficult to test empirically. These problems are further amplified when examining whether animals are conscious. This paper addresses the philosophic and scientific views of consciousness and outlines why consciousness remains to be a hard problem in science. We will then examine arguments offered by the Francis Creek Memorial, and the advent of the Cambridge declaration which took place in 2012, to see if it resolved the question of animal consciousness. We will show that the current research, which is based on materialistic physicalist position, provides a possible pathway toward examining animal consciousness by assuming that it is being produced by brain substrates that are similar to those thought to be responsible for consciousness in humans

The Story of the Ghost in the Machine

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the DOI in this recordIn The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle famously called Cartesianism “the dogma of the ghost in the machine”. According to Ryle, Cartesianism is a “philosopher’s myth”: it is a category mistake that philosophers have imposed upon ordinary talk about the mind. This chapter suggests an alternative view. Our picture of the mind as an inner world is not a myth, but a story: it is a story that we tell in order to make sense of people and the way they behave. To develop this idea, this chapter draws on Kendall Walton’s hugely influential work on fiction and make-believe. The result is a new approach to the nature of the mind and folk psychology, known as mental fictionalism

Amazon\u27s Kindle 2: The Copyright Ghost in the Machine

A number of copyright controversies have caught the public’s eye this year — e.g., the lawsuit over the AP photo of Barak Obama, the feud between Coldplay and Joe Satriani, the debate about Facebook’s policies toward the intellectual property of its users. Yet these disputes, fascinating though they are, involve the application of well-known legal principles. The facts are interesting, but the law is straightforward. A somewhat less prominent controversy, however, offers a nice example of the frequent collision between copyright law, established business models, and new technologies. In February, Amazon introduced the Kindle 2 — the latest model of its groundbreaking electronic book reader. One of its new features is a read-aloud feature that converts written text into speech, so users can listen to the books stored on the device rather than reading them. The audio is actually fairly good; one would not mistake it for a human reader, but it’s a far cry from the disembodied voices of earlier generations of computerized text-to-speech. [...