Poiesis in/between the Transferential Matrix: Insight, Imagination and the Relational Interpretation

The most important question for the Psychoanalytic Process Research is presumably what Mitchell calls the problem of “bootstrapping” the transferential matrix: how do the members of the dyad manage to disengage from being ‘heard’ according to old or unsuitable affective categories? On the grounds of a bi-phasic Conceptual and in-depth Analysis of the Psychoanalytic Complexity literature, I construct a minimal model of the psychoanalytic process as a theoretical context for conducting Process Research. According to the ‘story’ that I have read in the literature four main themes describe the process: a) the gradual emergence of a ‘phenomenological’ language that facilitates the flow of experience, b) the coupling, synchronicity and coordination of analyst and analysand, in ‘phase’ and ‘anti-phase’ at several levels, c) the shifting of the mental states and the thin and delicate slicing and sampling of experience that actualizes the emergence of mental objects and finally, d) Scaling that involves all those ‘mental’ processes that correct for the excesses or the deficiencies that are made evident during the shifting of mental states. Experience is generated as we ‘couple and shift’, and generative tensions appear as we ‘scale’ through this coupling and shifting process. Enactments, role-responsive transferences and countertransferences, testing of the transference and alliance or communication ruptures appear as coupled oscillating patterns that have both a repetitive and a developmental dynamic. Regarding the question of how we should study ‘Coupling, Shifting and Scaling’ I propose the adoption of an Enactivist epistemological framework which perceives the mind not as the workings of a representational machine but as a living process and the expression of an embodied living organism which in a “precarious” state of “needful freedom” (Jonas, in Thompson, 2007) strives to make sense of its environment. On the grounds of this framework I defend the view that we should study Scaling as an expression of the ‘radical dialogicality’ of the human mind that underlies the ‘structuring of experience’. I examine this ‘radical dialogicality’ at the level of inter-hemispheric differences, psychopathology and the enactive structuring of experience and the horizon of affective affordances in the clinical process. Finally, on the grounds of this conceptual analysis and its application to a case-study, I try to defend the view that, adopting relevant “dialogical” and micro-analytic methodological tools, we can achieve an appropriate level of ‘resolution’ so as to study “bootstrapping” at the moment-to-moment shifts in the experiential states or the shifts in attitudes that appear at bifurcation points in the system’s evolution. Through Scaling, the clinical dyad strives for a “maximum grip” of those experiential dimensions that carry the potential to expand the shared reality as a generative field and engage those surfaces of experience that bridge lost connections and separations, by fractalizing the dimensionality of the generative space. A detailed examination of the Scaling processes may bring us closer to a better understanding of the problem of “bootstrapping”

A Scientific Metaphysical Naturalisation of Information: with a indication-based semantic theory of information and an informationist statement of physicalism.

The objective of this thesis is to present a naturalised metaphysics of information, or to naturalise information, by way of deploying a scientific metaphysics according to which contingency is privileged and a-priori conceptual analysis is excluded (or at least greatly diminished) in favour of contingent and defeasible metaphysics. The ontology of information is established according to the premises and mandate of the scientific metaphysics by inference to the best explanation, and in accordance with the idea that the primacy of physics constraint accommodates defeasibility of theorising in physics. This metametaphysical approach is used to establish a field ontology as a basis for an informational structural realism. This is in turn, in combination with information theory and specifically mathematical and algorithmic theories of information, becomes the foundation of what will be called a source ontology, according to which the world is the totality of information sources. Information sources are to be understood as causally induced configurations of structure that are, or else reduce to and/or supervene upon, bounded (including distributed and non-contiguous) regions of the heterogeneous quantum field (all quantum fields combined) and fluctuating vacuum, all in accordance with the above-mentioned quantum field-ontic informational structural realism (FOSIR.) Arguments are presented for realism, physicalism, and reductionism about information on the basis of the stated contingent scientific metaphysics. In terms of philosophical argumentation, realism about information is argued for primarily by way of an indispensability argument that defers to the practice of scientists and regards concepts of information as just as indispensable in their theories as contingent representations of structure. Physicalism and reductionism about information are adduced by way of the identity thesis that identifies the substance of the structure of ontic structural realism as identical to selections of structure existing in re to combined heterogeneous quantum fields, and to the total heterogeneous quantum field comprised of all such fields. Adjunctly, an informational statement of physicalism is arrived at, and a theory of semantic information is proposed, according to which information is intrinsically semantic and alethically neutral

Fifth Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications

The Fifth Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications brings together diverse technical and scientific work in order to help those who employ AI methods in space applications to identify common goals and to address issues of general interest in the AI community. Topics include the following: automation for Space Station; intelligent control, testing, and fault diagnosis; robotics and vision; planning and scheduling; simulation, modeling, and tutoring; development tools and automatic programming; knowledge representation and acquisition; and knowledge base/data base integration

The Measure of a Man: A Critical Methodology for Investigating Essentialist Beliefs about Sexual Orientation Categories in Japan and the United States

Methods for studying laypeople’s beliefs about sexual orientation categories have evolved in step with larger theoretical and epistemological shifts in the interdisciplinary study of sexuality. The dominant approach to measuring laypeople’s sexual orientation beliefs over the past decade was made possible through an epistemological shift from a nature vs. nurture paradigm to a social constructionist theoretical model of psychological essentialism (Medin, 1989; Medin & Ortony, 1989; Rothbart & Taylor, 1992). Despite this shift, I argue that the forced-response scale-based survey methodologies typically used to operationally define essentialist beliefs about sexual orientation at best only partially realize the social constructionist potential of this underlying theory. By critically reconstructing this theory of psychological essentialism from an epistemological stance rooted in discourse, I developed a methodology reliant not on investigators’ but rather laypeople’s own mobilization of culturally shared discourses of sexuality. In testing this methodology, I focus on one theoretical dimension of psychological essentialism—inductive potential, or the extent to which shared knowledge about category membership allows for inference of a wealth of associated information about specific category members. I explored this critical methodology through a mixed-method empirical investigation of laypeople’s beliefs in the inductive potential of sexual orientation categories in relation to two components of sexuality: sexual desire and romantic love. I sought to answer two research questions: To what extent, and in what ways, do laypeople discursively mobilize inductive potential beliefs about homosexual or heterosexual men’s sexual desire and romantic love? To what extent, and in what ways, is laypeople’s discursive mobilization of those inductive potential beliefs explained by their gendered and/or cultural contexts? In Study 1, I primed cultural discourses of sexual orientation categories prior to an impression formation task. Students from four-year public universities in the Tokyo (N = 197; ages 18-23) and New York City (N = 208; ages 18-25) metropolitan areas read a series of fictional diary entries featuring a male college student (the target) describing his attraction to either a female or male classmate. Each participant then manually drew a Euler diagram comprised of circles representing their impressions of the relative importance (circle size) and interrelationships between (circle overlap) six identities associated with the target. To the extent participants engaged in inductive potential beliefs, I predicted that: (H1) participants would perceive sexual desire as more centrally defining of a same-sex attracted male target relative to an other-sex attracted male target; and (H2) participants would perceive romantic love as less centrally defining of a same-sex attracted male target relative to an other-sex attracted male target. Fitting multiple circle size and overlap outcomes to separate generalized linear models, I found a consistent pattern of support for both predictions. Cultural and gendered differences added additional nuance to these experimental patterns: Japanese participants associated men with greater sexual desire and less romantic love relative to their US peers, regardless of perceived sexual orientation. Additionally, US and Japanese men, compared to women, appeared to associate these two components of sexuality more frequently with men’s social roles. As such, while these results strongly suggested the presence of participants’ inductive potential beliefs about sexual orientation categories, they also pointed to important variation across culture and gender. In an effort to discursively unpack the inductively rich meanings associated with these additional gendered and cultural patterns, as well as establish the cultural credibility of my interpretations of the results of this experimental manipulation, in a second study I engaged separate peer focus groups in New York City (N = 20; ages 19-25) and Tokyo (N = 21; ages 20- 24) in discursively interpreting the Euler diagrams produced in Study 1. Using thematic analysis, I identified three themes concerning the ways several distinct sexual orientation discourses were culturally understood in the US and Japan; the ways those discourses were imbricated with other distinct discourses of cultural identity; and the ways laypeople voiced resistance to these sexual orientation discourses. I concluded that the experimental pattern from Study 1 could be explained in part through US participants’ rejection of an essentialist discourse of binary sexual orientation in favor of a focus on sexual practices; Japanese participants’ responses marked instead a troubling of essentialist discourses of binary gender. Taken together, these findings from Study 1 and 2 implicate sexual orientation as an inductively potent discourse in laypeople’s construction of beliefs about male sexuality across cultural contexts and genders, albeit in cultural distinct ways. These results thus add to past research on essentialist beliefs while also highlighting a need for critical methodologies sensitive to the ways culturally embedded and multiply imbricated transnational discourses of sexuality inform beliefs about men

Principles of Security and Trust

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Principles of Security and Trust, POST 2019, which took place in Prague, Czech Republic, in April 2019, held as part of the European Joint Conference on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2019. The 10 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. They deal with theoretical and foundational aspects of security and trust, including on new theoretical results, practical applications of existing foundational ideas, and innovative approaches stimulated by pressing practical problems