The Ontology of Intentional Agency in Light of Neurobiological Determinism: Philosophy Meets Folk Psychology

The moot point of the Western philosophical rhetoric about free will consists in examining whether the claim of authorship to intentional, deliberative actions fits into or is undermined by a one-way causal framework of determinism. Philosophers who think that reconciliation between the two is possible are known as metaphysical compatibilists. However, there are philosophers populating the other end of the spectrum, known as the metaphysical libertarians, who maintain that claim to intentional agency cannot be sustained unless it is assumed that indeterministic causal processes pervade the action-implementation apparatus employed by the agent. The metaphysical libertarians differ among themselves on the question of whether the indeterministic causal relation exists between the series of intentional states and processes, both conscious and unconscious, and the action, making claim for what has come to be known as the event-causal view, or between the agent and the action, arguing that a sort of agent causation is at work. In this paper, I have tried to propose that certain features of both event-causal and agent-causal libertarian views need to be combined in order to provide a more defendable compatibilist account accommodating deliberative actions with deterministic causation. The ‘‘agent-executed-eventcausal libertarianism’’, the account of agency I have tried to develop here, integrates certain plausible features of the two competing accounts of libertarianism turning them into a consistent whole. I hope to show in the process that the integration of these two variants of libertarianism does not challenge what some accounts of metaphysical compatibilism propose—that there exists a broader deterministic relation between the web of mental and extra-mental components constituting the agent’s dispositional system—the agent’s beliefs, desires, short-term and long-term goals based on them, the acquired social, cultural and religious beliefs, the general and immediate and situational environment in which the agent is placed, etc. on the one hand and the decisions she makes over her lifetime on the basis of these factors. While in the ‘‘Introduction’’ the philosophically assumed anomaly between deterministic causation and the intentional act of deciding has been briefly surveyed, the second section is devoted to the task of bridging the gap between compatibilism and libertarianism. The next section of the paper turns to an analysis of folk-psychological concepts and intuitions about the effects of neurochemical processes and prior mental events on the freedom of making choices. How philosophical insights can be beneficially informed by taking into consideration folk-psychological intuitions has also been discussed, thus setting up the background for such analysis. It has been suggested in the end that support for the proposed theory of intentional agency can be found in the folk-psychological intuitions, when they are taken in the right perspective

Targeted search for continuous gravitational waves: Bayesian versus maximum-likelihood statistics

We investigate the Bayesian framework for detection of continuous gravitational waves (GWs) in the context of targeted searches, where the phase evolution of the GW signal is assumed to be known, while the four amplitude parameters are unknown. We show that the orthodox maximum-likelihood statistic (known as F-statistic) can be rediscovered as a Bayes factor with an unphysical prior in amplitude parameter space. We introduce an alternative detection statistic ("B-statistic") using the Bayes factor with a more natural amplitude prior, namely an isotropic probability distribution for the orientation of GW sources. Monte-Carlo simulations of targeted searches show that the resulting Bayesian B-statistic is more powerful in the Neyman-Pearson sense (i.e. has a higher expected detection probability at equal false-alarm probability) than the frequentist F-statistic.Comment: 12 pages, presented at GWDAW13, to appear in CQ

Understanding the truth about subjectivity

Results of two experiments show children’s understanding of diversity in personal preference is incomplete. Despite acknowledging diversity, in Experiment 1(N=108), 6- and 8-year-old children were less likely than adults to see preference as a legitimate basis for personal tastes and more likely to say a single truth could be found about a matter of taste. In Experiment 2 (N=96), 7- and 9-year-olds were less likely than 11- and 13-yearolds to say a dispute about a matter of preference might not be resolved. These data suggest that acceptance of the possibility of diversity does not indicate an adult-like understanding of subjectivity. An understanding of the relative emphasis placed on objective and subjective factors in different contexts continues to develop into adolescence

Learning Timbre Analogies from Unlabelled Data by Multivariate Tree Regression

This is the Author's Original Manuscript of an article whose final and definitive form, the Version of Record, has been published in the Journal of New Music Research, November 2011, copyright Taylor & Francis. The published article is available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09298215.2011.596938

The bloodstream differentiation - division of Trypanosoma brucei studied using mitochondrial markers

In the bloodstream of its mammalian host, the African trypanosome Trypanosoma brucei undergoes a life cycle stage differentiation from a long, slender form to a short, stumpy form. This involves three known major events: exit from a proliferative cell cycle, morphological change and mitochondrial biogenesis. Previously, models have been proposed accounting for these events (Matthews & Gull 1994a). Refinement of, and discrimination between, these models has been hindered by a lack of stage-regulated antigens useful as markers at the single-cell level. We have now evaluated a variety of cytological markers and applied them to investigate the coordination of phenotypic differentiation and cell cycle arrest. Our studies have focused on the differential expression of the mitochondrial enzyme dihydrolipoamide dehydrogenase relative to the differentiation-division of bloodstream trypanosomes. The results implicate a temporal order of events: commitment, division, phenotypic differentiation

Understanding student early departure from a Master of Public Health programme in South Africa

Background. Student departure from university without completing a qualification is a major concern in higher education. Higher Education South Africa reported that in undergraduate studies, 35% of students depart after the first year and only 15% of students who enrol complete their degree within the minimum permissible time. At postgraduate level, the departure from Masters programmes in South Africa (SA) ranged from 30% to 67% in 2010. Early departure refers to students who leave an academic programme within the first semester of commencing their studies. At one SA university, there were a total of 109 first-time Master of Public Health (MPH) student registrations in 2013 and 2014. By the end of the first semester in the respective years, a total of 27 students actively deregistered from the programme and 11 students did not sit the first-semester examinations, representing an aggregate 35% rate of early departure. The factors associated with early departure at the University of KwaZulu-Natal are not well understood.Objective. To understand factors associated with early departure in the MPH programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.Method. A mixed-methods design was implemented. Students who departed within the first semester of commencing the MPH programme in 2013/2014 were followed up. Data were collected using self-administered questionnaires and in-depth interviews.Results. Failure to balance work and academic obligations with poor time management, stress and academic demands related to the programme, and insufficient academic progress were found to be associated with student early departure from the MPH programme.Conclusion. Student early departure from the MPH programme was influenced by multifaceted factors. Senior students can mentor new students as early as possible in their programme. The orientation block should include development activities such as time management, stress management and effective study skills to assist mature students to cope with the demands of part-time postgraduate studies

Estimating redundancy in clinical text

The current mode of use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) elicits text redundancy. Clinicians often populate new documents by duplicating existing notes, then updating accordingly. Data duplication can lead to propagation of errors, inconsistencies and misreporting of care. Therefore, measures to quantify information redundancy play an essential role in evaluating innovations that operate on clinical narratives. This work is a quantitative examination of information redundancy in EHR notes. We present and evaluate two methods to measure redundancy: an information-theoretic approach and a lexicosyntactic and semantic model. Our first measure trains large Transformer-based language models using clinical text from a large openly available US-based ICU dataset and a large multi-site UK based Hospital. By comparing the information-theoretic efficient encoding of clinical text against open-domain corpora, we find that clinical text is × to × less efficient than open-domain corpora at conveying information. Our second measure, evaluates automated summarisation metrics Rouge and BERTScore to evaluate successive note pairs demonstrating lexicosyntactic and semantic redundancy, with averages from 43 to 65%

Molecular Beams

Contains a report on a research project