The Parity Argument for Extended Consciousness

Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998) argue that certain mental states and processes can be partially constituted by objects located beyond one’s brain and body: this is their extended mind thesis (EM). But they maintain that consciousness relies on processing that is too high in speed and bandwidth to be realized outside the body (see Chalmers, 2008, and Clark, 2009). I evaluate Clark’s and Chalmers’ reason for denying that consciousness extends while still supporting unconscious state extension. I argue that their reason is not well grounded and does not hold up against foreseeable advances in technology. I conclude that their current position needs re-evaluation. If their original parity argument works as a defence of EM, they have yet to identify a good reason why it does not also work as a defence of extended consciousness. I end by advancing a parity argument for extended consciousness and consider some possible replies

AI Extenders: The Ethical and Societal Implications of Humans Cognitively Extended by AI

Humans and AI systems are usually portrayed as separate sys- tems that we need to align in values and goals. However, there is a great deal of AI technology found in non-autonomous systems that are used as cognitive tools by humans. Under the extended mind thesis, the functional contributions of these tools become as essential to our cognition as our brains. But AI can take cognitive extension towards totally new capabil- ities, posing new philosophical, ethical and technical chal- lenges. To analyse these challenges better, we define and place AI extenders in a continuum between fully-externalized systems, loosely coupled with humans, and fully-internalized processes, with operations ultimately performed by the brain, making the tool redundant. We dissect the landscape of cog- nitive capabilities that can foreseeably be extended by AI and examine their ethical implications. We suggest that cognitive extenders using AI be treated as distinct from other cognitive enhancers by all relevant stakeholders, including developers, policy makers, and human users

Hori-mological projective duality

Kuznetsov has conjectured that Pfaffian varieties should admit non-commutative crepant resolutions which satisfy his Homological Projective Duality. We prove half the cases of this conjecture, by interpreting and proving a duality of non-abelian gauged linear sigma models proposed by Hori.Comment: 55 pages. V2: slightly rewritten to take advantage of the `non-commutative Bertini theorem' recently proved by the authors and Van den Bergh. V3: lots of changes in exposition following referees' comments. Section 5 has been mostly cut because it was boring. To appear in Duke Math. J. V3: added funder acknowledgemen

A non-commutative Bertini theorem

We prove a version of the classical 'generic smoothness' theorem with smooth varieties replaced by non-commutative resolutions of singular varieties. This in particular implies a non-commutative version of the Bertini theorem.Comment: 6 pages. v2: added funder acknowledgement. Published in J. Noncommutative Geometr

OCCUPATIONAL THERPAY’S ROLE WHEN TREATING PEDIATRIC FEEDING DISORDERS

Feeding and eating are required occupations that all humans must engage in to meet one of their most basic needs (AOTA, 2020; Maslow, 1943). While feeding and eating allows humans to meet their most basic physiological needs it also allows them to meet other needs of Maslow\u27s Hierarchy along with engaging in valued occupations (AOTA, 2020; Maslow, 1943. Children with Pediatric Feeding Disorders (PFD) have difficulty with one or more areas of feeding which are medical, nutritional, feeding skill and/or psychosocial dysfunction (Fleet et al., 2022; Goday et al., 2019; Howe & Wang, 2013; Marshall et al., 2015; Sharp et al., 2017 & Volker et al., 2019). The purpose of Occupational Therapy’s Role When Treating Pediatric Feeding Disorders is to better understand the role of Occupational Therapy when treating PFD, other members of the treatment team and create home programming and educational resources for parents and caregivers to use outside of the therapy environment. The creation of the scholarly project including the home programming and educational resources were guided by an extensive literature review and completion of a needs assessment