Information Waste, the Environment and Human Action: Concepts and Research

Part 3: Section 2: Sustainable and Responsible InnovationInternational audienceInformation technology is powered by electricity. Although its impact on Green House Gasses (GHG) is still rather limited, the next decade will show an explosion of its impact because technological innovations on data communication, information retrieval and datacenter operation will not compensate the increased need for energy of information technology. This paper approaches the problem not from a technical perspective, but from the perspective of information value and the opportunities to detect and remove information waste. For this we identify several indicators of information waste and we then propose some key ideas for researching the topic

Consciousness in Early Modern Philosophy and Science

It is plausible to think that before the emergence of terms like “consciousness” and “Bewusstsein,” philosophers and scientists relied on intuitions about phenomena of subjective experience that we would now classify as “conscious.” In other words, pre-modern thinkers availed themselves of one or another concept of consciousness as they developed their theories of mind, perception, representation, the self, etc., although they did not attend to consciousness in its own right. In the early modern period, terminology of consciousness emerges to pick out concept(s) of consciousness. This brings with it an occasion for philosophical disagreements concerning consciousness among contemporaries, on the one hand, and an occasion for us as interpreters of historical authors to better assess their views on consciousness, on the other