A Case against Representationalism

The case of blurry vision has been cited by many as a counterexample to representationalism in the theory of perception. Specifically, it is claimed that the phenomenon of blurry vision is incompatible with the supervenience thesis which is at the root of representationalism. Michael Tye, a leading representationalist, has responded to such objections by giving an account of blurry vision in a way that, allegedly, renders it compatible with representationalism. In this paper I argue that Tye’s account of blurry vision, though blocking one line of objection, cannot save representationalism. I then assimilate cases of blurry vision as well as similar cases to the more general category of indeterminate experiences

A Convolutional Neural Network model based on Neutrosophy for Noisy Speech Recognition

Convolutional neural networks are sensitive to unknown noisy condition in the test phase and so their performance degrades for the noisy data classification task including noisy speech recognition. In this research, a new convolutional neural network (CNN) model with data uncertainty handling; referred as NCNN (Neutrosophic Convolutional Neural Network); is proposed for classification task. Here, speech signals are used as input data and their noise is modeled as uncertainty. In this task, using speech spectrogram, a definition of uncertainty is proposed in neutrosophic (NS) domain. Uncertainty is computed for each Time-frequency point of speech spectrogram as like a pixel. Therefore, uncertainty matrix with the same size of spectrogram is created in NS domain. In the next step, a two parallel paths CNN classification model is proposed. Speech spectrogram is used as input of the first path and uncertainty matrix for the second path. The outputs of two paths are combined to compute the final output of the classifier. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, it has been compared with conventional CNN on the isolated words of Aurora2 dataset. The proposed method achieves the average accuracy of 85.96 in noisy train data. It is more robust against Car, Airport and Subway noises with accuracies 90, 88 and 81 in test sets A, B and C, respectively. Results show that the proposed method outperforms conventional CNN with the improvement of 6, 5 and 2 percentage in test set A, test set B and test sets C, respectively. It means that the proposed method is more robust against noisy data and handle these data effectively.Comment: International conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (IPRIA 2019

Can Representationism Explain how Attention Affects Appearances?

Recent psychological research shows that attention affects appearances. An “attended item looks bigger, faster, earlier, more saturated, stripier.” (Block 2010, p. 41). What is the significance of these findings? Ned Block has argued that they undermine representationism, roughly the view that the phenomenal character of perception is determined by its representational content. My first goal in this paper is to show that Block’s argument has the structure of a Problem of Arbitrary Phenomenal Variation and that it improves on other instances of arguments of the same form along several dimensions (most prominently, these are arguments based on the possibility of spectral inversion). My second goal is to consider responses to Block’s version of the arbitrariness problem. I will show that most of them have serious drawbacks. Overall, the best view is to accept that attention may distort perception, sacrificing veridicality for usability. I end my discussion by showing how to develop that view

Science, substance and spatial appearances

According to a certain kind of naïve or folk understanding of physical matter, everyday ‘solid’ objects are composed of a homogeneous, gap-less substance, with sharply defined boundaries, which wholly fills the space they occupy. A further claim is that our perceptual experience of the environment represents or indicates that the objects around us conform to this sort of conception of physical matter. Were this further claim correct, it would mean that the way that the world appears to us in experience conflicts with the deliverances of our best current scientific theories in the following respect: perceptual experience would be intrinsically misleading concerning the structure of physical matter. I argue against this further claim. Experience in itself is not committed to, nor does it provide evidence for, any such conception of the nature of physical matter. The naïve/folk conception of matter in question cannot simply be ‘read-off’ from perceptual appearances

The Grin of Schrödinger's Cat; Quantum Photography and the limits of Representation

The famous quantum physics experiment 'Schrödinger's cat' suggests that some situations are undecidable, i.e. they exist outside of the normative distinctions between 'truth' and 'false' because both states can co-exist under certain conditions. This paper suggests that photography has very close links with this state of affairs, because photography allows one to move from the world of certainty into the quantum dimension of undecidability and indeterminate states

Methodological bricolage: What does it tell us about design?

This paper explores an approach to design research that is becoming more prevalent in practice-based doctoral studies and examines what it tells us about the current state of design research. A previous examination of design PhD case studies has shown that the bricolage approach is evident in a majority of contemporary practice-based design PhDs [1]. The usual academic norm of using an established method or methodology is often discarded in favour of a ‘pick and mix’ approach to select and apply the most appropriate methods. Does it suggest a discipline in crisis, where existing methods are unfit for purpose? Or does this suggest that design as a discipline is maturing and developing a distinct research model? Is design undisciplined? The paper answers these questions by proposing that design researchers navigate a complex, indeterminate and temporal framework where the bricoleur is the best operative

Time indeterminacy and spatio-temporal building transformations: an approach for architectural heritage understanding

Nowadays most digital reconstructions in architecture and archeology describe buildings heritage as awhole of static and unchangeable entities. However, historical sites can have a rich and complex history, sometimes full of evolutions, sometimes only partially known by means of documentary sources. Various aspects condition the analysis and the interpretation of cultural heritage. First of all, buildings are not inexorably constant in time: creation, destruction, union, division, annexation, partial demolition and change of function are the transformations that buildings can undergo over time. Moreover, other factors sometimes contradictory can condition the knowledge about an historical site, such as historical sources and uncertainty. On one hand, historical documentation concerning past states can be heterogeneous, dubious, incomplete and even contradictory. On the other hand, uncertainty is prevalent in cultural heritage in various forms: sometimes it is impossible to define the dating period, sometimes the building original shape or yet its spatial position. This paper proposes amodeling approach of the geometrical representation of buildings, taking into account the kind of transformations and the notion of temporal indetermination

Indeterminacy and Architectural History: Deterritorializing Cosimo Fanzago

This article is a critique of architectural history’s tendency to overdetermine in thinking about practice and theory in general, and in thinking the relationship between architecture and spirituality in post-Tridentine ecclesiastical architecture in particular. It first demonstrates what is meant both by over-determination and resistance to interdisciplinarity within mainstream architectural history before critically exploring in relation to this how post-Tridentine architecture and spiritual life or religious devotion might be thought together, the sorts of relationships between the two that may be thought to take place, and asks where this relationship might be located. Suggesting that it might be profitable to follow Deleuze’s philosophy of the Baroque in refusing the tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (in his case the book, in ours, architecture) and a field of subjectivity (the author, the architect), and rather to adopt like him, the notion of rhizome — without beginning or end, always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo, indeterminate. The article seeks to consider Baroque architecture as rhizomatic construction, rather than the usual (and unhelpful) preoccupations with it as dichotomous, expressive, or ‘propagandistic’

BLOOD & THUNDER CLASSICS, VOL. 2

A MAGAZINE – A game of Chutes and Ladders – a network of pools connected by streams, rivulets, creeks and rivers. Concerns: aluminum, sculpture, film, an endless image or an image-object, cork, shoulders as the center of movement, archery, wicker, nystagmus, darkness or the penumbral near-darkness, constant movement, beer, tone, musical forms, bells, gongs, The Titanic, purple, black and white, indeterminacy, Ghostface, yodeling, John Smith, John Adams, David Hammons, Beyoncé, Honda CR-V’s, Har-khebi, Ahnighito, Hermann Doomer, Prince, Yvonne Rainer, perception, double rainbows, composers from Transylvania, Los Angeles, and chandeliers. “Everything is everything.” and “A woman is the first teacher.