2,686 research outputs found
Personal and sub-personal: a defence of Dennett's early distinction
Since 1969, when Dennett introduced a distinction between personal and subâpersonal levels of explanation, many philosophers have used âsubâpersonalâ very loosely, and Dennett himself has abandoned a view of the personal level as genuinely autonomous. I recommend a position in which Dennett's original distinction is crucial, by arguing that the phenomenon called mental causation is on view only at the properly personal level. If one retains the commitââ ments incurred by Dennett's early distinction, then one has a satisfactory antiâphysicalistic, antiâdualist philosophy of mind. It neither interferes with the projects of subâpersonal psychology, nor encourages ; instrumentalism at the personal level.
People lose sight of Dennettâs personal/sub-personal distinction because they free it from its philosophical moorings. A distinction that serves a philosophical purpose is typically rooted in doctrine; it cannot be lifted out of context and continue to do its work. So I shall start from Dennettâs distinction as I read it in its original context. And when I speak of âthe distinctionâ, I mean to point not only towards the terms that Dennett first used to define it but also towards the philosophical setting within which its work was cut out
Interaction Data Sets In The UK: An Audit
Interaction or flow data involves counts of flows between origin and destination areas and can be extracted from a range of sources. The Centre for Interaction Data Estimation and Research (CIDER) maintains a web-based system (WICID) that allows academic researchers to access and extract migration and commuting flow data (the so-called Origin-Destination Statistics) from the last three censuses. However, there are many other sources of interaction data other than the decadal census, including national administrative or registration procedures and large scale social surveys. This paper contains an audit of interaction data sets in the UK, providing detailed description and exemplification in each case and outlining the advantages and shortcomings of the different types of data where appropriate. The Census Origin-Destination Statistics have been described elsewhere in detail and only a short synopsis is provided here together with review of the interaction data that can be derived from other census products.
The primary aims of the audit are to identify those interaction data sets that exist that might complement the census origin-destination statistics currently contained in WICID and to assess their suitability and availability as potential data sets to be held in an expanded version of WICID. Tables or flow data sets are included for exemplification. The paper concludes with a series of recommendations as to which of these data sets should be incorporated into a new information system for interaction flows that complement the census data and also provide opportunities for new research projects
Artificial Brains and Hybrid Minds
The paper develops two related thought experiments exploring variations on an âanimatâ theme. Animats are hybrid devices with both artificial and biological components. Traditionally, âcomponentsâ have been construed in concrete terms, as physical parts or constituent material structures. Many fascinating issues arise within this context of hybrid physical organization. However, within the context of functional/computational theories of mentality, demarcations based purely on material structure are unduly narrow. It is abstract functional structure which does the key work in characterizing the respective âcomponentsâ of thinking systems, while the âstuffâ of material implementation is of secondary importance. Thus the paper extends the received animat paradigm, and investigates some intriguing consequences of expanding the conception of bio-machine hybrids to include abstract functional and semantic structure. In particular, the thought experiments consider cases of mind-machine merger where there is no physical Brain-Machine Interface: indeed, the material human body and brain have been removed from the picture altogether. The first experiment illustrates some intrinsic theoretical difficulties in attempting to replicate the human mind in an alternative material medium, while the second reveals some deep conceptual problems in attempting to create a form of truly Artificial General Intelligence
Stratifying and predicting patterns of neighbourhood change and gentrification â an urban analytics approach
While recent debates have widely acknowledged gentrificationâs varied manifestations, success in enumerating and disentangling the process and its defining features from other forms of neighbourhood change at-scale and across entire cities, has remained largely elusive. This paper addresses this gap and employs a novel, open and reproducible urban analytics approach to systematically examine the past and future trajectories of neighbourhood change using London, England, as a case-study example. Using suites of datasets relating to population, house prices and built environment development, the nature of gentrificationâs mutations and its spatial patterns are extracted through a multi-stage data dimensionality reduction and classification methodology. Machine Learning is subsequently adopted to model gentrificationâs observed trends and predict its future frontiers with interactive visualisation methods offering new insights into gentrificationâs projected dynamics and geographies
The Mod-2 wind turbine development project
A major phase of the Federal Wind Energy Program, the Mod-2 wind turbine, a second-generation machine developed by the Boeing Engineering and Construction Co. for the U.S. Department of Energy and the Lewis Research Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is described. The Mod-2 is a large (2.5-MW power rating) horizontal-axis wind turbine designed for the generation of electrical power on utility networks. Three machines were built and are located in a cluster at Goodnoe Hills, Washington. All technical aspects of the project are described: design approach, significant innovation features, the mechanical system, the electrical power system, the control system, and the safety system
Beyond persons: extending the personal / subpersonal distinction to non-rational animals and artificial agents
The distinction between personal level explanations and subpersonal ones has been subject to much debate in philosophy. We understand it as one between explanations that focus on an agentâs interaction with its environment, and explanations that focus on the physical or computational enabling conditions of such an interaction. The distinction, understood this way, is necessary for a complete account of any agent, rational or not, biological or artificial. In particular, we review some recent research in Artificial Life that pretends to do completely without the distinction, while using agent-centered concepts all the way. It is argued that the rejection of agent level explanations in favour of mechanistic ones is due to an unmotivated need to choose among representationalism and eliminativism. The dilemma is a false one if the possibility of a radical form of externalism is considered
Asymmetry of jets, lobe size and spectral index in radio galaxies and quasars
We investigate the correlations between spectral index, jet side and extent
of the radio lobes for a sample of nearby FRII radio galaxies. In
Dennett-Thorpe et al. (1997) we studied a sample of quasars and found that the
high surface brightness regions had flatter spectra on the jet side (explicable
as a result of Doppler beaming) whilst the extended regions had spectral
asymmetries dependent on lobe length. Unified schemes predict that asymmetries
due to beaming will be much smaller in narrow-line radio galaxies than in
quasars: we therefore investigate in a similar manner, a sample of radio
galaxies with detected jets. We find that spectral asymmetries in these objects
are uncorrelated with jet sidedness at all brightness levels, but depend on
relative lobe volume. Our results are not in conflict with unified schemes, but
suggest that the differences between the two samples are due primarily to power
or redshift, rather than to orientation. We also show directly that hotspot
spectra steepen as a function of radio power or redshift. Whilst a shift in
observed frequency due to the redshift may account for some of the steepening,
it cannot account for all of it, and a dependence on radio power is required.Comment: accepted for publication in MNRAS, 10 pages; typos/minor correctio
Relativistic and slowing down: the flow in the hotspots of powerful radio galaxies and quasars
Pairs of radio emitting jets with lengths up to several hundred kiloparsecs
emanate from the central region (the `core') of radio loud active galaxies.
In the most powerful of them, these jets terminate in the `hotspots', compact
high brightness regions, where the jet flow collides with the intergalactic
medium (IGM). Although it has long been established that in their inner
(parsec) regions these jet flows are relativistic, it is still not clear
if they remain so at their largest (hundreds of kiloparsec) scales. We argue
that the X-ray, optical and radio data of the hotspots, despite their
at-first-sight disparate properties, can be unified in a scheme involving a
relativistic flow upstream of the hotspot that decelerates to the
sub-relativistic speed of its inferred advance through the IGM and viewed at
different angles to its direction of motion. This scheme, besides providing an
account of the hotspot spectral properties with jet orientation, it also
suggests that the large-scale jets remain relativistic all the way to the
hotspots.Comment: to appear in ApJ
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