Nostalgie Metafisiche. La crisi delle scienze nell'era postmoderna

By crisis of sciences we mean, on the one hand, the epistemological crisis faced after the aporias of logical neo-positivism and the crisis of foundations that invests hard sciences; on the other, the questioning of their role concerning the social contract. These two aspects intertwine and feed each other, and both are objects of the so-called 'postmodern' critique. In this essay we will try to describe and analyze the profound dismay this crisis entails in our society, investing it at the collective and individual levels. In this crisis, we will analyze what seems to us an anthropological resistance to the possibility that there is no clearly bounded centre of knowledge, which we will describe as a sort of metaphysical nostalgia that fuels individual suffering, social debates, as well as academic disputes

Transfemminismo e psicoanalisi: dialogo intorno a Je suis un monstre qui vous parle di Paul B. Preciado

La psicoanalisi e il femminismo sono due ambiti del sapere occidentale da sempre legati e spesso in conflitto. Il seguente dialogo attraversa le loro congiunzioni e disgiunzioni a partire dal commento all’opera di Paul B. Preciado Je suis un monstre qui vous parle, tratta da un recente intervento del filosofo transfemminista alla giornata internazionale di studi «Donne in psicoanalisi» all’École de la Cause Freudienne di Parigi. La psicoanalisi può porsi come pratica di disadattamento per gli individui da una serie di imposizioni poste dal discorso sociale, e ritrovarsi così in linea con l’invito di Preciado a disidentificarsi da un sistema di norme etero-patriarcal-coloniali. Quanto però questo invito sia accolto e praticato su di sé dagli stessi psicoanalisti contemporanei resta in questione ed è l’oggetto centrale di questo contributo.Psychoanalysis and Feminism are two fields of Western knowledge that have always been intertwined as well as frequently in conflict. The following dialogue deals with their conjunctions and disjunctions starting from a comment of Paul B. Preciado's latest work, Je suis un monstre qui vous parle, based on a recent talk of trans-feminist philosopher at the International Conference «Women in Psychoanalysis» at the École de la Cause Freudienne in Paris. Psychoanalysis can act as a practice of dis-adaptation from a series of impositions of the social discourse, and thus be in line with Preciado's invitation to dis-identify from a system of hetero-patriarchal and colonial norms. However, to what extent this invitation is accepted and practicable by contemporary psychoanalysts on themselves remains in question and is the central issue of this contribution

Increasing biases can be more efficient than increasing weights

We introduce a novel computational unit for neural networks that features multiple biases, challenging the traditional perceptron structure. This unit emphasizes the importance of preserving uncorrupted information as it is passed from one unit to the next, applying activation functions later in the process with specialized biases for each unit. Through both empirical and theoretical analyses, we show that by focusing on increasing biases rather than weights, there is potential for significant enhancement in a neural network model's performance. This approach offers an alternative perspective on optimizing information flow within neural networks. See source code at https://github.com/CuriosAI/dac-dev.Comment: Major rewriting. Supersedes v1 and v2. Focusing on the fact that not all parameters are born equal: biases can be more important than weights. Accordingly, new title and new abstract, and many more experiments on fully connected architectures. This is the extended version of the paper published at WACV 202