13,106 research outputs found
Meta-Illusionism and Qualia Quietism
Many so-called problems in contemporary philosophy of mind depend for their expression on a collection of inter-defined technical terms, a few of which are qualia, phenomenal property, and what-it’s-like-ness. I express my scepticism about Keith Frankish’s illusionism, the view that people are generally subject to a systematic illusion that any properties are phenomenal, and scout the relative merits of two alternatives to Frankish’s illusionism. The first is phenomenal meta-illusionism, the view that illusionists such as Frankish, in holding their view, are themselves thereby under an illusion. The second is qualia quietism, the view that nothing worth saying is said by employing any of the aforementioned inter-defined technical terms
Color-Consciousness Conceptualism
The goal of the present paper is to defend against a certain line of attack the view that conscious experience of color is no more fine-grained that the repertoire of non- demonstrative concepts that a perceiver is able to bring to bear in perception. The line of attack in question is an alleged empirical argument - the Diachronic Indistinguishability Argument - based on pairs of colors so similar that they can be discriminated when simultaneously presented but not when presented across a memory delay. My aim here is to show that this argument fail
Memorandum and articles relating to the role of union-avoidance consultants and modern management methods, 1979
West Coast Industrial Relations Association memo to consultants including articles: Hauser, Dedra. “The Union-Busting Hustle: Pinkertons with bats have been replaced by consultants with psychological weapons”. The New Republic, 25 August 1979; Warren, James; Kelly J. Brian. Law memo . Chicago Sun Times, 16 July 1979; AFL-CIO Attack, On Labor Consultants . Labor Relations Reporters, 16 April 1979
Lifelong learning and partnerships: rethinking the boundaries of the university in the digital age
Higher education (HE) in Scotland has some very specific characteristics: a relatively small number of HE institutions (HEIs), nineteen at the time of writing; a strong college sector, which makes a significant contribution to the provision of HE; an all through credit and qualifications framework, designed to support transitions between different parts of the education system and through the lifecourse; no fees for full-time HE and more than fifteen years of policy initiatives aimed at (WP). Despite all this, unequal access between different socio-economic groups has remained stubbornly persistent. Moreover, the numbers of mature and part-time students in both the university and college sectors have declined. This paper looks at some of the evidence from the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland project, which is exploring the interface between open education and WP. In the context of the widespread availability of digital devices and the rapid increase in free, open online resources, are there new strategies to promote WP and lifelong learning
Assistive Planning in Complex, Dynamic Environments: a Probabilistic Approach
We explore the probabilistic foundations of shared control in complex dynamic
environments. In order to do this, we formulate shared control as a random
process and describe the joint distribution that governs its behavior. For
tractability, we model the relationships between the operator, autonomy, and
crowd as an undirected graphical model. Further, we introduce an interaction
function between the operator and the robot, that we call "agreeability"; in
combination with the methods developed in~\cite{trautman-ijrr-2015}, we extend
a cooperative collision avoidance autonomy to shared control. We therefore
quantify the notion of simultaneously optimizing over agreeability (between the
operator and autonomy), and safety and efficiency in crowded environments. We
show that for a particular form of interaction function between the autonomy
and the operator, linear blending is recovered exactly. Additionally, to
recover linear blending, unimodal restrictions must be placed on the models
describing the operator and the autonomy. In turn, these restrictions raise
questions about the flexibility and applicability of the linear blending
framework. Additionally, we present an extension of linear blending called
"operator biased linear trajectory blending" (which formalizes some recent
approaches in linear blending such as~\cite{dragan-ijrr-2013}) and show that
not only is this also a restrictive special case of our probabilistic approach,
but more importantly, is statistically unsound, and thus, mathematically,
unsuitable for implementation. Instead, we suggest a statistically principled
approach that guarantees data is used in a consistent manner, and show how this
alternative approach converges to the full probabilistic framework. We conclude
by proving that, in general, linear blending is suboptimal with respect to the
joint metric of agreeability, safety, and efficiency
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