The Natural Foundations of Religion

In the Natural history of religion, Hume attempts to understand the origin of our folk belief in gods and spirits. These investigations are not, however, purely descriptive. Hume demonstrates that ontological commitment to supernatural agents depends on motivated reasoning and illusions of control. These beliefs cannot, then, be reflectively endorsed. This proposal must be taken seriously because it receives support from recent work on our psychological responses to uncertainty. It also compares quite favorably with its main competitors in the cognitive science of religio

Sobre De somniís liber de Augerius Ferrerius

E-mail @uv.es: privado (a solicitud del interesado)En este libro Ferrer, en plena época renacentista, hace compatibles las teorías oníricas de los autores griegos con sus principios y punto de vista cristianos. Niega tajantemente que existan ensueños vanos y se interesa por los ensueños naturales, cuya génesis está en el estado psicofísico del individuo. Pero, sobre todo, presta su máxima atención a los ensueños divinos. Establece normas para distinguir éstos de los enviados por los malos espíritus. Afirma que ha descubierto mediante la razón y la propia experiencia claves para la interpretación de los ensueños que los filósofos anteriores no llegaron a descubrir.In this book, published during the Renaissance, Ferrer combines the oniric theories of the Greek authors with his Christian principles and points of view. He clearly denies the existence of vain illusions and centers his interest in natural illusions, whose origins are in the psychophysic states of the individual. However, his main attention is dedicated to divine illusions. He establishes norms to distinguish these from those sent by evil spirits. He claims to have found, by means of reasoning and his own experience, keys for the interpretation of the illusions that previous philosophers have not discovered

In Defence of Modest Doxasticism About Delusions

Here I reply to the main points raised by the commentators on the arguments put forward in my Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs (OUP, 2009). My response is aimed at defending a modest doxastic account of clinical delusions, and is articulated in three sections. First, I consider the view that delusions are in-between perceptual and doxastic states, defended by Jacob Hohwy and Vivek Rajan, and the view that delusions are failed attempts at believing or not-quite-beliefs, proposed by Eric Schwitzgebel and Maura Tumulty. Then, I address the relationship between the doxastic account of delusions and the role, nature, and prospects of folk psychology, which is discussed by Dominic Murphy, Keith Frankish, and Maura Tumulty in their contributions. In the final remarks, I turn to the continuity thesis and suggest that, although there are important differences between clinical delusions and non-pathological beliefs, these differences cannot be characterised satisfactorily in epistemic terms. \u

Trickster-Like Teachings in Tibetan Buddhism: Shortcuts towards Destroying Illusions

Trickster-like Dharma teachings in Tibetan Buddhism behave as a kind of shortcuts in the approach to leading people along the path of enlightenment. This essay collects three such teachings of different levels towards destroying illusions, i.e., Buddha’s silence, Guru’s paradox, and Ego’s kleshas. They are necessary as “an ace up the sleeve” for Buddha to destruct disciples’ metaphysical quagmire, for Guru to lead community toward perfect transcendence, and for individuals to attain self-consciousness

Illusionary Finance and Trading Behavior

One important aspect of financial market is that there might be some traders that intentionally mislead other market participants by creating illusions in order to obtain a profit. We call this new concept illusionary finance. We present an analysis of how illusions can be created and disseminated in financial markets based on certain psychological principles that explain agents’ decisions under time pressure and polysemous signals. We develop a simple model that incorporates the illusions in the price formation process. Furthermore, using powerful simulations, we show how illusions can be incorporated, directly or indirectly, in the expected prices of the traders.Illusionary Finance; Behavioral Finance; Evolutionary Finance; Neuroeconomics

InDL: A New Datasets and Benchmark for In-Diagram Logic Interpreting based on Visual Illusion

This paper introduces a novel approach to evaluating deep learning models' capacity for in-diagram logic interpretation. Leveraging the intriguing realm of visual illusions, we establish a unique dataset, InDL, designed to rigorously test and benchmark these models. Deep learning has witnessed remarkable progress in domains such as computer vision and natural language processing. However, models often stumble in tasks requiring logical reasoning due to their inherent 'black box' characteristics, which obscure the decision-making process. Our work presents a new lens to understand these models better by focusing on their handling of visual illusions -- a complex interplay of perception and logic. We utilize six classic geometric optical illusions to create a comparative framework between human and machine visual perception. This methodology offers a quantifiable measure to rank models, elucidating potential weaknesses and providing actionable insights for model improvements. Our experimental results affirm the efficacy of our benchmarking strategy, demonstrating its ability to effectively rank models based on their logic interpretation ability. As part of our commitment to reproducible research, the source code and datasets will be made publicly available here: \href{https://github.com/rabbit-magic-wh/InDL}{https://github.com/rabbit-magic-wh/InDL}

Do Different Groups Have Different Epistemic Intuitions? A Reply to Jennifer Nagel

Intuitions play an important role in contemporary epistemology. Over the last decade, however, experimental philosophers have published a number of studies suggesting that epistemic intuitions may vary in ways that challenge the widespread reliance on intuitions in epistemology. In a recent paper, Jennifer Nagel offers a pair of arguments aimed at showing that epistemic intuitions do not, in fact, vary in problematic ways. One of these arguments relies on a number of claims defended by appeal to the psychological literature on intuitive judgment and on mental state attribution (also known as “theory of mind”, “mindreading” and “folk psychology”). I call this the "theoretical argument". The other argument relies on recent experimental work carried out by Nagel and her collaborators. It is my contention that in setting out her theoretical argument, Nagel offers an account of the relevant scientific literature that is, in crucial respects, flawed and misleading. My main goal in this paper is to rectify these errors and to make it clear that, once this is done, Nagel’s theoretical argument collapses. Since Nagel’s experimental work has not yet been published, and available details are very sketchy, I do not discuss this work in detail. However, in the final section of the paper I offer some critical observations about Nagel’s strategy for dealing with empirical data that does not support her view – both other people’s and her own

Desiring under the Proper Guise

According to the thesis of the guise of the normative, all desires are associated with normative appearances or judgments. But guise of the normative theories differ sharply over the content of the normative representation, with the two main versions being the guise of reasons and the guise of the good. Chapter 6 defends the comparative thesis that the guise of reasons thesis is more promising than the guise of the good. The central idea is that observations from the theory of content determination can be used in order to constrain possible theories of the representational contents associated with desire. The authors argue that the initially most promising versions of the guise of the good fail to meet these constraints, and then explain the steep challenge confronting any who wish to craft a new guise of the good theory which meets the constraints while also preserving the initial motivations for adopting any guise of the normative theory at all. But a simple version of the guise of reasons not only avoids the troubles besetting the guise of the good but proceeds immediately from a deep diagnosis of the source of its difficulties

On the adaptive advantage of always being right (even when one is not)

We propose another positive illusion – overconfidence in the generalisability of one’s theory – that fits with McKay & Dennett’s (M&D’s) criteria for adaptive misbeliefs. This illusion is pervasive in adult reasoning but we focus on its prevalence in children’s developing theories. It is a strongly held conviction arising from normal functioning of the doxastic system that confers adaptive advantage on the individual

Egocentric Spatial Representation in Action and Perception

Neuropsychological findings used to motivate the “two visual systems” hypothesis have been taken to endanger a pair of widely accepted claims about spatial representation in visual experience. The first is the claim that visual experience represents 3-D space around the perceiver using an egocentric frame of reference. The second is the claim that there is a constitutive link between the spatial contents of visual experience and the perceiver’s bodily actions. In this paper, I carefully assess three main sources of evidence for the two visual systems hypothesis and argue that the best interpretation of the evidence is in fact consistent with both claims. I conclude with some brief remarks on the relation between visual consciousness and rational agency