Democratic elections authorize political officeholders, but electoral authorization does not establish that every subsequent exercise of discretionary power remains epistemically justified, institutionally competent, or socially tolerable. Conventional accountability mechanisms frequently evaluate political failure after the relevant decision has been implemented. In some circumstances, however, the consequences of failure are irreversible, and the institutional capacity to correct the decision may itself be destroyed. This paper introduces Expirism, a proposed theory of performance-conditional political authority. Its central claim is that electoral authorization should (...) not entail an invariant entitlement to exercise unilateral discretionary power throughout an electoral term. Instead, specified decision-making authorities should be subject to expiration, conditional renewal, and proportionate restriction according to independently assessed performance, decision-specific risk, and constitutional safeguards. Drawing on Hayek’s knowledge problem, Mises’s economic calculation critique, Popper’s critical rationalism, Buchanan and Tullock’s constitutional political economy, Ostrom’s polycentric governance, and Pettit’s contestatory republicanism, Expirism develops an institutional model of political power that is neither technocratic rule nor unrestricted electoral majoritarianism. The framework introduces five mechanisms: an Authority Expiration Rule, a Public Decision Ledger, a Performance-Conditional Authority Transition, a Symmetric Ruin Gate, and a Polycentric Contestation Protocol. Its distinctive proposal is that documented performance failures can trigger legally predefined restrictions on particular discretionary powers without automatically removing an elected official from office. Conversely, improved performance and successful review can restore restricted authority. The paper develops the theory’s normative foundations, formal structure, constitutional constraints, falsifiable propositions, and potential failure modes. It does not claim empirical validation or demonstrate that its institutional design outperforms existing democratic arrangements. Its contribution is a testable proposal for transforming political accountability from retrospective judgment alone into a continuous, constitutionally constrained relationship between evidence, risk and authority. (shrink)

Strong Gravity II constructed spherically symmetric Quantum Relational Emergence (QRE) backgrounds in which a finite constitutive fixed point replaces continued general-relativistic singular extrapolation by a locally regular strong-field core. Background closure, however, does not determine the transverse physical Hessian that controls ringdown, stability, and memory. We formulate the missing Perturbative Response Closure, imposing spherical equivariance, parity covariance, gauge-and-constraint descent, retarded causality, reality, general-relativistic recovery, and resolvent-aware treatment of hidden sectors. On a torsionless spherical QRE background the independent Lorentz-connection perturbation separates (...) from the Levi–Civita response and decomposes into Cartan sectors. After physical reduction, gravitational and hidden channels form a block response operator; wherever the hidden retarded resolvent exists, its effective gravitational-channel contribution is a Schur self-energy. We derive a resolvent protection bound, show that uniformly gapped analytic connection sectors generate only analytic low-frequency response, classify mixing-order universality classes, and formulate a first-order intertwiner criterion for survival of the Schwarzschild isospectral relation. Isolated hidden poles produce controlled resonant shifts and finite gravitational–relational hybridization, while continuous hidden spectra generate threshold-controlled branch cuts and projected late-time tails. An exterior causal-shielding result separates deep-core dynamics from directly visible ringdown. We close with a three-scale retarded benchmark and a controlled slow-rotation bridge to Kerr-based mass–spin spectroscopy. The construction defines a QRE response architecture rather than a unique microscopic spectrum; definite numerical poles, cuts, and observational signatures require the physical QRE Hessian of a specified realization. (shrink)

A text has a provisional semantic core: the content it was intended to communicate in its original context. Around this core, and often indistinguishable from it, is an aesthetic surplus: narrative form, imagery, stylistic condensation, and other features whose primary role is communicative and evocative rather than directly semantic. The distinction between core and surplus is not fixed. When a text is recontextualized, what was originally formal surplus may be treated as the new semantic core. This paper develops a theory (...) of recontextualization that explains how texts produce new meanings across historical distances without collapsing into either Gadamerian tradition or Derridean différance. -/- The central case study is Freud's reading of Oedipus. I argue that Freud mistakes aesthetic surplus for semantic core. The myth's proximal semantic core is political-theological: a warning to kings to obey oracular authority. The tragedy is set in motion not by Oedipus's desire but by Laius's refusal to accept the prophecy. Freud's reading is a distal discursive object produced by a later recontextualization, constrained by a trace that the myth carries but failing to honor it. The paper develops the semiotic architecture of semantic core and aesthetic surplus, applies it to the Oedipus myth, and draws out the implications for a theory of recontextualization. The key concept is the trace: a structural remainder produced in the dialogic encounter between text and interpreter, which constrains re-signification and orients history toward emancipation rather than justice. (shrink)

Michael Titelbaum argues that there is no objective, three-place evidential favoring relation in cases without entailment: inductive inference, unlike deductive inference, always depends on some subjective feature (2010, 2011). This position is based on the widely accepted view that language dependence violates objectivity, so since inductive logic is language dependent it is not objective. Against this view, I argue that a formal theory of partial entailment is language dependent, objective, and formal. Titelbaum's argument fails, I claim, because he adopts implausible (...) conditions for objectivity: invariance with respect to permutations of predicates and a formal method for selecting a language for induction. (shrink)

This paper addresses a problem internal to emancipatory thought: the means through which domination is challenged can reproduce domination in a new form. Critique is itself an exercise of power; it selects, excludes, and reorganizes. It generates consequences beyond its intentions—what I call surplus. The result is a recursive structure: power generates surplus; surplus becomes available for interpretation; critique arises in response; but critique is itself a new exercise of power, generating new surplus, new limitations, new forms of domination. The (...) question is whether critique can escape this recursion without claiming a position outside history and power. -/- I argue that it can—but only through an ongoing process of self-overcoming. Self-overcoming is not the final elimination of power, nor the discovery of a perfect political arrangement. It is the development of a capacity to recognize and transform limitations that become visible only through the historical consequences of previous attempts at transformation. Drawing on Orwell's Animal Farm, the ecological extension of the farm, Nietzsche's metamorphoses, and Hegel's dialectic of experience, I develop a political hermeneutics organized around the concepts of surplus, trace, and provisional closure. The paper concludes with a provisional criterion of non-domination and a defense of closure without finality. (shrink)

Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics achieves a decisive insight: understanding is an event, not a method, and application is constitutive of meaning. But Gadamer's account remains too Platonic, too oriented toward coherence and fusion, and too quiet about the constitutive role of exclusion and rupture. This paper radicalizes Gadamer's central concepts—play, application, fusion of horizons—by submitting them to Nietzschean contingency and Hegelian historical dynamism. The result is a theory of interpretation in which the event of understanding is a disclosure that leaves a (...) trace, and the task of interpretation is to honor this trace through provisional, transformative applications that expand the space of reasons and advance the trajectory of self-overcoming. -/- The paper's central unnamed principle is that the answer is ontologically and epistemologically prior to the predicament. We do not first formulate a question and then seek an answer. We stumble on an answer, and only afterward do we recognize that it fits a predicament we may not have fully articulated. The deaf person does not seek sound; sound finds her. The text does not answer our question; it gives us the question by first giving us the answer. This inverts the standard hermeneutic priority of the question and explains why disclosure cannot be reduced to will-to-power. -/- The paper argues that the trace—the normative residue of disclosure—is the non-arbitrary, non-repressive kernel of interpretation. It is the ground for distinguishing emancipatory interpretation from mere will-to-power. The paper concludes by distinguishing emancipation from Derridean justice and sketching a practice of interpretation governed by charity, urgency, and irony. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that we have epistemic obligations towards the doxastic attitudes of others. My point of departure will be an underappreciated response by Matthew Chrisman (2008, 2020) to the voluntarism puzzle about epistemic deontology. He argues that there are true epistemic oughts concerning our doxastic attitudes that don’t require voluntary control, namely evaluative epistemic oughts. However, Chrisman also points out that evaluative oughts can imply prescriptive obligations. Which ones? My unorthodox claim will be that a central candidate (...) for such implied epistemic obligations concerns how third parties ought to interact with the beliefs of individual believers. I will then motivate and give an account of these interpersonal obligations by taking inspiration from legal theory, where structurally analogous obligations are well studied and have been systematically codified. (shrink)

This monograph examines the conditions that allow a life or an organization to be sustained as its demands change. It argues that evaluating outcomes requires attending not only to what is achieved, but also to the capacities that ongoing activity preserves, depletes, or reconstructs, and to the distribution of costs across persons and temporal horizons. Through conceptual analysis and reflection on experience, the book distinguishes persistence, viability, metaviability, habitability, and legitimacy. It engages with viability theory, resilience, the capability approach, enaction, (...) the ethics of care, and debates on epistemic injustice and structural responsibility. A fictional organizational example accompanies the argument, while two documented cases—the 2003 Columbia accident and the 1995 Chicago heat wave—provide material for examining information, authority, vulnerability, and effective access to support. The book offers a philosophical articulation and an agenda for further inquiry; the historical cases are not presented as empirical validation of the framework. (shrink)

Quantum Relational Emergence (QRE) separates the loss of a general-relativistic effective description from the loss of spacetime itself. Strong Gravity I formulated this distinction as a closure-first continuation problem and introduced primitive first-loss and general-relativistic extrapolation preemption. Here we ask the next question: whether a QRE branch that has left the general-relativistic rigidity basin can continue through a strong-field regime without developing a local metric singularity. We study a spherically symmetric one-function constitutive sector in which the dimensionless strong-field variable xi=Gml_*^2/r^3 (...) obeys the autonomous flow dxi/ds=3xi-E(xi), with s=-ln r+const. A finite attractive constitutive fixed point produces a de-Sitter-type leading core, finite quadratic curvature invariants, and an exact Weyl-flow identity involving both the constitutive beta function and the constitutive slope. Consequently, an intermediate conformally flat shell and at least two positive Weyl maxima occur between the weak-field endpoint and the regular core. We derive the compactness flow, the zero/degenerate/two-horizon trichotomy, the scaling M_crit~l_*/G, and the square-root saddle-node law for horizon birth. Smooth analytic cores obey constitutive sum rules, whose cubic truncation admits two minimal classes; higher-order deformations show that the regular architecture occupies an open region of constitutive-function space rather than an isolated fine-tuned model. Under stated regularity assumptions the center is locally geodesically extendible. These results establish local singularity avoidance within the spherical constitutive sector, not global singularity resolution; inner-horizon stability and nonlinear backreaction remain separate dynamical questions. (shrink)

This independent discussion paper proposes an evolutionary design approach to university hospital Commons understood as relational fields supporting heterogeneous and voluntary forms of value creation, collaborative development, circulation, and possible generative reproduction. Its design problem concerns the difference between making resources discoverable and making creative work actually feasible, and between disseminating an outcome and enabling its appropriate recognition, use, or further development. A Commons need not become a new school, innovation office, or central authority over participants’ projects. Building on knowledge-commons (...) research, evolutionary economics, infrastructure studies, peer production, and evolutionary governance theory, the paper examines viable seed practices, limited constitutive norms, professional resource configurations, proposals and feedback, creative trajectories, emergent cooperation, external circulation interfaces, institutional support, stewardship, and field co-evolution. Its proposed generative relational interpretation differentiates ontological suspension, historically effective relational arrangements, and the partial manifestations through which they can be studied. Six illustrative configurations and a prospective comparative protocol specify how one could test whether a proposed field adds feasible and appropriately authorised creative opportunities beyond credible existing alternatives, while accounting for opportunity losses, unequal burdens, autonomy, rights, and maintenance costs. The protocol separates improved interpretation of records from actual effects on creative capabilities. Evolutionary persistence is not treated as normative legitimacy, attention as validation, or support as permission for clinical practice. The analysis is conceptual, the examples hypothetical, and all comparative tests prospective; no institutional implementation, patient-data access, clinical intervention, or empirical superiority is claimed. (shrink)

An emergent cluster of theories argues that contestation is key to answering the question of whose values should guide science. This paper systematizes this contestatory approach by highlighting how it differs from its main “democratic alignment” competitor, marking what I describe as a systemic turn in the debate. It then develops two original objections to the contestatory approach, focusing on its over-permissiveness and a missing evidence problem. Finally, by bringing together those two objections and three classic flaws of democratic alignment, (...) it advances five desiderata for any theory that might aim to break the impasse between democratic alignment and contestation. (shrink)

A decision can be entirely justified and destroy something that was still alive. The same child can be protected by the severing of a bond and lose happy moments through that severing. This essay distinguishes the justness of a move, what it opens or makes possible again, from its legitimacy, the reasons for choosing it. Harm here names a closure or dissolution of the living: its meaning is structural. The remainder is what the decision has taken away and its justification (...) does not restore. -/- Through an interrupted family relationship, legitimate violence, and the cost of institutional repair, the essay follows these effects without canceling them against one another. Recognizing the loss imposes neither remorse nor full repair, and does not invalidate protection. Part of the ontology of passage, The Just revisits and clarifies a difficulty in Le Courage du Réel: a closure can be legitimate while what it closes remains alive. (shrink)

This paper examines what it means for the relation of unification in states of affairs to be external. I begin by introducing a tripartite, necessitation-based classification of relations into strongly internal, weakly internal, and external, and consider how it applies to the unification relation. I then focus on the version of this relation endorsed by self-relating internalism, according to which unification relates its relata by itself. Since standard necessity-based definitions of internal and external relations are not directly applicable to such (...) a self-relating relation, I propose suitably modified counterparts. I argue that, even on these revised definitions, the unification relation comes out as external. Finally, assuming that this relation is identical to instantiation, I consider a novel argument against its externality – adapted from one of D.W. Mertz’s objections to bare particulars – and argue that it does not succeed. (shrink)

In 2025 the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) began to suggest that dark energy was once phantom: growing denser as space stretched. Some joint analyses favor that history over a cosmological constant at about three standard deviations. This paper bets that it never happened and puts a date on the bet. The bet starts from Descartes and Spinoza: a thing continues as it is unless something outside changes it, and it opposes whatever would destroy it. Relativity measures how hard a (...) fluid is to push by its inertial mass density, energy density plus pressure, and for phantom energy that number is negative. I conjecture that no real constituent of the universe describable as a perfect fluid has negative inertia. This is a philosophical hypothesis, not a derivation, and I say exactly where it could fail. I review the evidence as of October 2026, including a supernova recalibration and new Lyman-alpha results that have weakened the signal without removing it. I then fix in advance the rules for a win, a loss or no verdict by the end of 2030, and what a loss would cost the conjecture. (shrink)

Horizon crossing, large curvature, loss of general-relativistic infrared rigidity, loss of Lorentz–Cartan geometry, and loss of factual closure are five physically distinct events, and a strong-gravity analysis that identifies them with one another cannot report which of them it has found. Quantum Relational Emergence (QRE) treats ordinary spacetime as a jointly reconstructed, locked, dynamically descended, and protected relational phase rather than as fundamental background data; the present paper formulates a closure-first strong-gravity framework for black-hole regimes that keeps the five apart. (...) Starting from an already reconstructed four-dimensional QRE spacetime phase, we consider admissible strong-gravity trajectories through the heterogeneous closure architecture of factuality, event space, Lorentz–Cartan geometry, factual–geometric locking, dynamical descent, matter universality, and infrared gravitational rigidity. Closure certificates are evaluated only on their declared applicability domains, so a downstream certificate that becomes undefined after an upstream loss is not counted as an independent failure; this permits a dependency-sensitive notion of Primitive First-Loss and a corresponding failure spectroscopy. The resulting separations are not merely terminological. Departure from the GR-connected propagating basin can occur while one actual spacetime geometry remains well defined, whereas loss of geometric uniqueness, geometric existence, event-manifold structure, or factual closure represent progressively different failure classes. We then specify how a finite-Cartan strong-gravity realization can provide internal reconstruction, connection, branch-invertibility, physical-stability, statistical-support, nonlinear-cumulant, and tracking margins without conflating them with the macroscopic closure vector. The programme is accordingly “closure first, solution second”: the present paper establishes the logical and dynamical continuation criteria, while explicit regular black-hole interiors and observable perturbative signatures are deferred to subsequent parts of the strong-gravity series. (shrink)

Abstract -/- Introduction: Childhood trauma, commonly defined as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), has been strongly associated with long-term impairments in mental and physical health. Advances in neuroscience have demonstrated that early-life stress alters brain development, disrupts stress-response systems, and contributes to psychiatric and behavioral disorders. This paper reviews current peer-reviewed literature on the neurobiological effects of childhood trauma, including structural and functional brain changes, dysregulation of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, and large-scale neural network alterations. Additionally, evidence-based therapeutic interventions, including play (...) therapy and nature-based interventions, are examined through a neurobiological framework. Findings suggest that early intervention may promote neuroplasticity and mitigate long-term consequences. -/- Objective: To review the neurobiological mechanisms underlying childhood trauma and evaluate evidence-based therapeutic interventions. -/- Methods: A narrative review of peer-reviewed neuroscience and psychological literature was conducted, focusing on structural and functional neuroimaging, stress physiology, and intervention studies. -/- Results: Childhood trauma is associated with reduced cortical thickness and gray matter volume, particularly in the prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex. Dysregulation of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis results in prolonged cortisol exposure, impairing hippocampal neurogenesis. Functional neuroimaging demonstrates altered connectivity within the default mode, salience, and executive control networks. Evidence from neuroimaging datasets and mathematical supports disrupted amygdala–prefrontal connectivity. Therapeutic interventions such as play therapy and nature-based interventions show promise in improving emotional regulation and reducing stress-related physiological markers. -/- Conclusion: Childhood trauma significantly alters brain development and stress-response systems. Early, developmentally appropriate interventions may promote neuroplasticity and improve long-term outcomes. (shrink)

This paper investigates real operational configurations beyond the search for a universally minimal form of life. It examines how material processes emerge, persist, branch, recombine, terminate, and alter subsequent possibilities across heterogeneous environments, temporal scales, and experimental arrangements. -/- The analysis distinguishes the inheritance of material effects from the continuation of the mechanisms that produced them, the preservation of scientific records from the persistence of scientific operations, and successful scientific intervention from the preservation of its original conditions of observation. -/- (...) Drawing on minimal-cell research, protocell chemistry, Xenobots, Anthrobots, and extraterrestrial investigation, the paper develops a realist account of observation, generation, feedback, and reconfiguration without presupposing a universal life–nonlife boundary. It further examines how scientific operations may transform their own conditions of access, intervention, and continuation. -/- The argument connects these investigations to Xenoscience, the Ziran System, and a locally typed minimal notation for scientific operational shapes. It preserves the distinction between real processes and their experimental registration while identifying the conditions under which operational dependencies, scientific access, and subsequent trajectories change. -/- The paper presents these analyses as a concrete development of an existing operational-realist research programme rather than claiming an unprecedented universal theory of life. (shrink)

In The Physical Signature of Computation: A Robust Mapping Account, Anderson and Piccinini offer a bold new vision of computational implementation. This commentary critically examines their proposal. After outlining Anderson and Piccinini’s account, it argues that their discussion overlooks an important further question about physical computation: under what condition can computational descriptions be justifiably applied to particular physical systems? This is termed the “epistemic warrant question.” The commentary argues that progress on this question can be made by appealing to the (...) concept of de-idealization. Specifically, computational descriptions of physical systems are justified to the extent that they are supported by either (i) inter-model convergence or (ii) convergence with observational and experimental measurements over time. (shrink)

Discrimination is typically understood as a binary phenomenon: an act is either discriminatory or it is not. In this paper, we move beyond this view by arguing that discrimination comes in degrees. More specifically, we make two contributions. First, we show that existing normative accounts struggle to explain why some instances of discrimination are morally worse than others because they rely on a descriptive account that treats discrimination as an all-or-nothing phenomenon. Second, we propose a refined account that conceptualizes discrimination (...) as a graded phenomenon. We draw on insights from the philosophy of explanation, and we show how the account extends to indirect, mixed-motive, and intersectional discrimination. By recognizing that protected traits can play a greater or lesser role in producing discriminatory treatment, our account offers a more precise way of capturing variations in moral severity and helps existing normative accounts by providing a descriptive framework that better tracks morally relevant considerations. (shrink)

David Chalmers's "hard problem" of consciousness presupposes three unproven consensuses: mind-matter dualism, first-person privilege, and the explanatory gap. This paper argues that the hard problem is not an objective discovery but a pseudo-problem generated by circular definitions and contradictory premises. Drawing on the formal framework of recursive ontology (S_n = f(S_{n-1}, W_n)) proposed in "Experience Precedes Thought," this study conducts a systematic examination of Chalmers's theory through four steps: (1) Publicity constraint and the zombie self-cannibalization dilemma, which expose the self-contradiction (...) of first-person privilege; (2) Conceptual archaeology revealing the explanatory gap as a product of circular definition; (3) Consensus replacement strategy using "reaction identity," "intersubjectivity plus recursive depth," and "difference structure as feeling" to directly dissolve the hard problem; (4) Ethical critique addressing moral privilege monopoly and epistemic violence. The paper concludes that the hard problem should be revoked rather than answered. Under the recursive ontology framework, the correct research direction shifts from "how physics produces experience" to "how difference structures unfold in recursive reactions." . (shrink)

This paper examines three interacting but distinguishable operational series: the operations theorized in Daniel Sacilotto’s Structure and Thought (2024), the philosophical operations performed by his own reconstruction, and the scientific operations that may emerge through autonomous and heterogeneous research configurations. -/- It reconstructs Sacilotto’s account of representational cognition, structural mapping, historical theoretical succession, and Natural Reason, with particular attention to the Rosenberg-derived E1/E2 conditions and the six QST principles. Sacilotto’s framework is treated as a historically revisionary materialist realism capable of (...) accommodating structural generation, retrospective theoretical reconstruction, and non-organic forms of cognition. -/- The analysis then examines how theoretical succession, material intervention, measurement revision, and operational continuation can become coupled, separated, and reconnected under specific configurations. Constructed autonomous-science cases illustrate how changes in instrumentation, variables, temporal conditions, external memory, and experimental authorization can reorganize subsequent scientific possibilities. -/- Drawing on operational-shape realism and Xenoscience, the paper investigates the conditions under which philosophical distinctions and warranted theoretical comparisons may enter subsequent scientific operations and acquire material consequences. It distinguishes inferential justification, physical implementation, actual effects, and cross-medium propagation without presupposing a unified rational subject or shared global state space. -/- The resulting account identifies reciprocal constraints between Natural Reason and autonomous scientific operations while preserving the independent explanatory significance of Sacilotto’s philosophical project. (shrink)

Epistemic domination as a corollary theme under the discourses on epistemic injustice stresses the ability of a party to restrain accessible evidence to another. In the context of religion, many make use of hermeneutical domination in order to epistemically dominate the other. The promoters of hermeneutical domination suppress the testimonies of their counterparts and as a consequence, equal epistemic status is retracted to the latter and the dominant party places hindrances to themselves to attain epistemically valuable states. This arbitrary interference (...) of the dominant in religious contexts leads to the formulation of imposed dictums in the social understandings and blocks all the other possible understandings. The subservient group is unable to challenges this situation due to their powerlessness. These situations are to be rectified with epistemically responsible practices and contemporary Indian philosophers adopt the practices of diatopical hermeneutics and dialogical dialogue to counter the situations of epistemic and hermeneutic domination in religious contexts. Diatopical hermeneutics points to the incompleteness even in the dominant religious dictums and raise the consciousness of reciprocal incompleteness that necessitates a dialogue towards completeness. As an art of perception, it regards the uniqueness of tradition and does not operate based on prejudices. Dialogical dialogue emerges from dialogical intentionality and interconnectedness of human tradition. There is no intention to dominate the other in dialogical dialogue. Dialogical dialogue provides the possibility of communicating one’s unique faith experiences and understandings to each other. The elements of trust in it provide a source to understand the reality from a new perspective. Therefore, we argue that the prevalence of epistemic and hermeneutic domination in religious contexts can be corrected with diatopical hermeneutics and dialogical dialogue and it results in commonality of world view and multiple belongingness. We begin the analysis with an exploration into the theoretical discourses on epistemic and hermeneutic domination appending it with relevant examples from current religious contexts and then evaluate the epistemic defects of epistemic domination in the light of the examples in order to recommend diatopical hermeneutics and dialogical dialogue as sound epistemic responsible practices to amend epistemic domination. We conclude our discussion by pointing out the significance of diatopical hermeneutics and dialogical dialogue in the present multi religious context. (shrink)

Ultrafinitism is the view that some specific Arabic numerals fail to determinately, unambiguously denote, because, for some types, no token is possible. In this article, I argue that the view is, at bottom, a thesis about modality; that it comes in at least three versions – semantic, pluralist, and physical; and that its central technical problems are to prove the key metatheorems within an ultrafinitist metatheory, including what I call the “feasible conservativeness” of ordinary science over feasible science.

On many estimates, artificial general intelligence (AGI) is likely to emerge within the next few decades or even sooner. Once it does, it may quickly surpass human intelligence, possibly by a huge margin. Some believe that the country that develops AGI first could attain global dominance. This prospect risks setting off intense competition between the United States and China. Indeed, a narrative has already developed that the superpowers are locked in an AI race, with the Trump administration proclaiming its determination (...) to ‘dismantle unnecessary regulatory barriers’ to winning it. We argue that this approach presents three profound dangers. The first two are familiar from past arms races: being overtaken by a rival or triggering a war. The third is new: losing control of human beings’ future to agents far more intelligent than we are, which could endanger our very survival. Striving to get to AGI first risks a race to the bottom on safety practices and regulation concerning them. China does not yet appear bent on racing to superintelligence. The United States should prioritise both unilateral and co-operative efforts to improve AI safety and avoid provoking a race that all humanity could lose. (shrink)

What if death is not an absolute boundary, but a process whose finality depends on what we lose, what we preserve, and what we may eventually learn to reconstruct? For most of human history, death has marked the point beyond which medicine could no longer follow. We could delay it, approach it, and sometimes reverse its earliest stages, but the recovery of a person after irreversible biological failure remained beyond our reach. Yet modern science is beginning to reveal a more (...) complicated picture. Some biological functions can be restored after death has been declared; cells and tissues can be preserved; organs can be replaced or engineered; aging is increasingly understood through mechanisms that may be modified; and neuroscience continues to uncover how memory, experience, and individual behavior are embodied in the organization of the brain. Defeating Death explores what might become possible if these developments eventually converge into a civilization capable of preserving, repairing, and reconstructing human life. Moving from resuscitation and biostasis to regenerative medicine, neural organization, artificial intelligence, biological archives, personal identity, and the possible resurrection of the dead, the book examines not a single miracle technology, but a long and uncertain pathway toward overcoming the inevitability of death. At its center lies a fundamental question: What must survive for a human being to return? A genome is not a person. A convincing simulation is not necessarily a resurrection. Reconstructing a body does not automatically restore the memories, experiences, and organization that made an individual who they were. The book confronts these distinctions without assuming that resemblance guarantees identity or that future technology can recover information already lost forever. But the stakes extend beyond individual survival. If humanity learns to preserve the conditions for life's continuation, it may transform medicine, civilization, our relationship with the past, and our responsibilities toward future generations and the living world. The greatest obstacle may not be death alone, but irreversible loss: the destruction of information before we understand its value. The future may learn to call the dead home, but it may not be able to recover everyone we failed to preserve. Defeating death is therefore more than a technological ambition. It is a race between the disappearance of life and our growing ability to understand, protect, and restore it. (shrink)

Human death presents a problem that extends beyond the irreversible cessation of biological functions: whether the organization constituting an individual can ever be preserved, repaired, or reconstructed after those functions have been lost. Advances in resuscitation, biostasis, cellular reprogramming, regenerative medicine, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence are beginning to address different parts of this problem, although none currently demonstrates the resurrection of a deceased human being. This paper examines the scientific foundations and long-term prospects of an integrated approach to human recovery, (...) distinguishing the preservation of biological materials from the preservation of the organization required for individual continuity. It argues that future progress may depend on combining technologies for damage prevention, biological rejuvenation, organ replacement, neural preservation, and the reconstruction of individual-specific biological and cognitive organization. It further considers the potential role of personal archives, medical records, and computational models in supporting reconstruction, while emphasizing that behavioral imitation alone cannot establish the recovery of the original individual. The paper proposes a framework for evaluating progress through increasingly demanding levels of biological restoration, functional integration, and personal continuity. It also examines the ethical responsibilities that would arise if human recovery and substantial life extension became feasible, including equitable access, informed consent, and the preservation of human value across generations. Finally, it considers how resurrection and life-extension technologies could contribute to future technological heavens: environments designed not merely to sustain civilization, but to preserve and expand the possibilities of meaningful human existence. Human resurrection remains an unproven possibility, not an established technological outcome. Nevertheless, the convergence of research across multiple fields provides a serious basis for investigating whether death's present limits can eventually be overcome. (shrink)

La «expropiación de los expropiadores» es una frase con un giro provoca- dor, una que Marx compara incluso con la infame «negación de la negación» de Hegel. También, fue, quizás, el eslogan más famoso del Segundo Marxismo Internacional, citado sin cesar en escritos populares sobre el !n del capitalismo y la llegada del socialismo. Pero, ¿qué significa y sigue siendo pertinente hoy en día?

Este volumen reúne un conjunto de investigaciones que, desde perspectivas fi losófi cas, jurídicas, políticas y sociales, examinan críticamente las transformaciones contemporáneas de la democracia y la propiedad, así como las herencias coloniales que las atraviesan. Más que una simple compilación académica, el libro propone un diálogo interdisciplinario que articula tres ejes fundamentales: las patologías y los límites de la deliberación democrática, las crisis y las alternativas de los regímenes de propiedad, y las genealogías de la desposesión colonial. En las (...) contribuciones el lector encontrará no solo análisis conceptuales rigurosos y reconstrucciones históricas, sino también un diagnóstico crítico de nuestro presente, marcado por la desigualdad extrema, el agotamiento representativo y la reconfi guración de la propiedad y la pertenencia social. En conjunto, este libro invita a repensar las categorías que estructuran la vida política y económica, revelando sus ambivalencias y límites, y abriendo caminos hacia horizontes alternativos de justicia y emancipación más allá de los marcos heredados de la modernidad liberal. (shrink)

This paper investigates the operational conditions under which reason and representation emerge, persist, transform, and cease to function across heterogeneous material, scientific, and institutional configurations. It develops a minimal operational decomposition distinguishing physical implementation, picturing, inferential justification, rational revision, and downstream real effects. Through engagements with Wilfrid Sellars, Ray Brassier, and Peter Wolfendale, the paper examines the conditions under which these relations remain operative or lose their applicability. Finite formal models clarify the limited independence of selected operational distinctions. Mineral processes, (...) sensor assemblages, robotics, and autonomous science provide comparative configurations. The analysis extends to historical re-entry, institutional authority, and Xenoscience while preserving the distinction between scientific justification and material efficacy. The resulting account establishes conditional operational comparisons without claiming a universal minimum of reason or representation. (shrink)

In [1], the author presents a classification of what artificial intelligence (AI) does and what AI does with texts. In [2], an attempt is made to extend and generalize this classification, accompanied by further discussion and analysis by AI. In the present article, I propose that the activities discussed in [1] and [2] can be understood as belonging primarily to the first level of AI activity. I then introduce three additional levels, each representing a more complex form of activity. The (...) purpose is to extend the classification from AI's direct applications to its capacity to evaluate activities, exhibit apparent intentions, and develop representations of itself as a whole. These levels are intended as a conceptual framework for classifying AI activities, rather than as claims that present-day AI systems necessarily possess consciousness, independent desires, or a human-like personality. 1. Didehvar, F. (2026). Classification of What AI Does and What AI Does with Texts. PhilPapers. 2. ChatGPT. (2026). From Functional Uses to Multidimensional Activities: A Comparative and Integrated Classification of Human–AI Activity. PhilPapers. (shrink)

This paper formalizes Leibniz’s calculus integral into Mathematical Logic by synthesizing an element of Fuzzy Logic and Probability Theory. Given the name Differential Probability Logica-Mathematica, this formal system allows for automated reasoning, formal epistemological evaluation, and a universal tool for probability evaluation of degree of truth. By integrating the notation \int and binary number 0 as the lower boundary and 1 as the upper bound, it allows for the measurement of truth degree by the formula [Theory \times Evidence = Complete (...) Theory]. -/- There are 3 existing gates and 1 unified axiom that govern this formal system: first being the function mapping f : \alpha \cdot beta \longrightarrow delta. This function maps the elements of set alpha and set beta; be it a product of two, then the result is an element of the set delta. And then to evaluate strong and weak theory, we establish that the closer the number is relative to 1 from 0, the stronger the theory, evaluated as Distance to Limit = 1 - omega_i. Next, the formula operates the contrastive differential between proposition i and proposition j, denoted as K_i - K_j. Then, the resulting dominant theory will be denoted as omega_i, evaluated through the last gate|1 - omega_i|, measuring the differential gap between the state of the dominant theory and ultimate certainty. (shrink)

c is not speed through space. c is rate of Time. Light is Time made visible. Photon =t0 = quantum of a moment. Time is Fifth Force from Pure Nothingness N0 =T0 with particle Nothon. We further propose that thenothonis the fundamental, indivisible quantum of time, nothingness, and gravity. A nothon =t0 = quantum of a moment. Gravity, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and Black Holes are all different configurations of nothon densityρnothon. Section 5.1: The universe expands into Time. Time emerges (...) fromN0 and creates 3D Space. (shrink)

In this essay I will try to give some ideas of prominent scholars concerning capitalism and then I will handle Nursi’s perspective related to capitalism. According to Nursi, capitalism is based on five negative principles: power, war, exploitation, promotion of animal emotions, and extension of human demands. -/- .

This paper contends that the « user », having become the governing category of digital technology, designates an individual devoid of substance: a being who exists only in, and for the duration of, the act of use. Bereft of a past, a project, or any recognised capacity for refusal, the user is a creature of function rather than of existence. Against this category we set the concept of the person. Three thinkers structure the argument. Günther Anders allows us to read (...) the user as the consummate figure of « antiquated » humanity - the human being who conforms to its apparatus rather than the reverse. Nietzsche enables us to recognise in the user a contemporary avatar of the « last man », contented and devoid of aspiration. Camus, finally, furnishes the conceptual means of exit: the person comes into being in revolt, in the « no » that asserts a limit and thereby discloses a shared value. We propose four criteria of personhood - voice, continuity, refusal, and being an end in itself - and respond to three principal objections. user, person, personhood, philosophy of technology, Günther Anders, Nietzsche, Camus, Promethean shame, last man, revolt, digital ethics, artificial intelligence. (shrink)

[Note: Original Chinese text of "Reverencing Stability: An Independent Chapter of Jing-Rong Philosophical Reflections".] 敬融哲思（JRPR）乃13篇独立核心文章与1篇延伸篇所构成的原创文章集，致力于揭示以敬（Reverence）、融（Vital Harmony）为基的原创哲学概念与规则。本文立足宇宙视角，探究作者原创哲思的核心命题——“以稳为基、以动养定”的动态稳定法则，从动静辩证关系、道域融合、证道与治理的内在关联、弱肉强食的再审视、癌细胞 模式的思考与审视、宇宙四气互动等多维度展开。本文旨在呈现对万物运行法则的哲学洞察，无预设研究背景与问题解决目标，仅作为内在规则的阐释。通过融合中国传统形而上学思想与原创理论建构，本文为稳动关系的跨文化 学术对话提供视角。Jing-Rong Philosophical Reflections (JRPR) is an original collection of articles comprising 13 independent core articles and 1 independent extended article, dedicated to revealing original philosophical concepts and rules grounded in Reverence (Jìng) and Vital Harmony (Róng). Grounded in a cosmic perspective, this paper explores the core proposition of the author’s original philosophical thought: the Law of Dynamic Stability (With Long-term Stability, Foundation Laid; With Motion, Constancy (...) Nurtured). The inquiry unfolds across multiple dimensions, including the dialectical relationship between motion and stillness, Dao-Domain Vital Harmony (Dào Yù Róng), a re-examination of the law of the jungle, reflections on the cancer cell model, and the interaction of the Four Cosmic Qi. This paper aims to present philosophical insights into the laws governing the operation of all things, with no preset research background or problem-solving objectives, serving only as an exposition of inherent rules. By integrating traditional Chinese metaphysical thought with original theoretical construction, this paper provides a perspective for cross-cultural academic dialogue on the relationship between stability and motion. (shrink)

[Note: Original Chinese text of "The Awe & Vigilance within Reverence: An Independent Chapter of Jing-Rong Philosophical Reflections".] 敬融哲思（JRPR）乃13篇独立核心文章与1篇延伸篇所构成的原创文章集，致力于揭示以敬（Reverence）、融（Vital Harmony）为基的原创哲学概念与规则。本文以作者原创之“敬”的定义，探究原创哲学体系的核心命题（“敬则聚，不敬则消”、自私本能、域辨善恶等），围绕敬之态、七敬为基、敬心六法、敬良私等维度，展开“敬 之畏与威”的深度阐释。本文旨在呈现对万物运行法则的哲学洞察，无预设研究背景与问题解决目标，仅作为内在规则的阐释。通过融合中国传统形而上学思想与原创理论建构，本文为“敬”的跨文化学术对话提供视角。Jin g-Rong Philosophical Reflections (JRPR) is an original collection of articles comprising 13 independent core articles and 1 independent extended article, dedicated to revealing original philosophical concepts and rules grounded in Reverence (Jìng) and Vital Harmony (Róng). Taking the author’s original definition of Reverence as the basis, this article explores the core propositions of the original philosophical framework, including With Jing Comes Condensation; (...) Without Jing, Dispersion Ensues (Law of Forming 1), Innate Self-Interest Instinct, the distinction of good and evil by Domain (Yù), among others. Centering on the Modalities of Reverence, the Seven Reverences as the Foundation, the Six Methods of the Reverent Mind, Reverence for Liáng Sī (Virtuous Self-Interest), and other dimensions, it conducts an in-depth exposition of the Awe & Vigilance and Might within Reverence. It aims to present philosophical insights into the operating laws of all things, with no preset research background or problem-solving objectives, serving solely as an exposition of inherent rules. By integrating traditional Chinese metaphysical thought with original theoretical construction, this article provides a perspective for cross-cultural academic dialogue on Reverence. (shrink)

In contemporary discussions of faith and hope, it is often claimed that these attitudes have a place within rational frameworks. An influential model, Elizabeth Jackson’s (2021), proposes a unified account of rational acceptance in paradigm cases of belief, faith, and hope. Her model aims to explain how agents can rationally maintain long-term commitments despite counterevidence and waning desire, drawing on decision-theoretic analysis. In this paper, I challenge the model in question. Specifically, I reject the idea that faith and hope contribute (...) to rationally accepting a proposition once these attitudes are conceived as a belief–desire pair within a decision-theoretic framework. Thus, faith and hope are redundant in normatively explaining the rationality of accepting a proposition. (shrink)

Aphantasics report lacking voluntary visual imagery but perform successfully on diverse imagery-related tasks. This disparity raises a puzzle. I argue for two theses. First, I distinguish between “painterly” and “schematic” forms of visual imagery and argue that, while aphantasics lack the former, they typically retain the latter. Second, I draw on findings concerning metacognitive confidence to suggest that aphantasics’ retained schematic imagery is conscious. My account is distinct from views that primarily appeal to alternative strategies, such as spatial imagery, to (...) make sense of aphantasics’ performance. It also offers a unified explanation. (shrink)

Husserl often pays tribute to his teacher Brentano for having opened the path towards phenomenology. However, the praise is systematically followed by a criticism: Brentano failed to draw all the consequences from his ground-breaking rediscovery of intentionality, and remained stuck in inadequate psychological research. For Husserl, there are three ways to study mental acts: empirical, eidetic, and transcendental. What is objected to Brentano is his adherence to empirical psychology. Husserl himself focuses on the second and third levels. It is clear (...) that Brentano never entered into transcendental considerations. However, it seems also clear that he was doing eidetic-like research in psychology in a way similar to Husserl. In the paper, I first present Husserl’s criticism of empirical and, thus, Brentanian psychology. I then turn to Brentano’s and the psychology of his heirs and try to show that Husserl’s criticism is not quite correct. In the course of the discussion, I treat the crucial epistemological question of eidetic vs empirical knowledge, both in Husserl and in Brentano. (shrink)

Finite cognitive systems organize experience, stabilize reference, and guide expectations and action without fully surveying their presuppositions and consequences. Stabilized orders support orientation but can be overextended or continued inappropriately. This paper develops a programmatic diagnostic and decision architecture for managing such orders, particularly their elaborated forms as models. Examining the claim architecture connects units of reference, claims, domains, scope, test conditions, and couplings. Validity is understood as domain-bound viability under strain; friction denotes an epistemically readable mismatch of an activated (...) stabilized order under its operating conditions. The architecture separates assessments of validity from decisions about continued use. Rules for opening, redistribution, and abandonment structure exploration, attribution of findings, and the justification of correction, revision, suspension, replacement, or abandonment. The social conditions for testing in distributed epistemic and model management are also considered. A boundary case of personal identity examined through epistemic critique and an internal, LLM-assisted comparison involving the Allegheny Family Screening Tool challenge different parts of the program. The comparison with a strong disciplinary baseline establishes no general superiority. LLM judges rated certain additional contributions concerning claim specification, model identity, transfer of findings, and justification of revision as substantive. Their soundness by disciplinary standards, generalizability, and practical utility have not been independently confirmed. The architecture is not a decision algorithm and replaces neither disciplinary procedures nor normative justification. Its supplementary aim is to make the testing, use, and revision of stabilized orders and models more controllable and correctable across everyday, scientific, technical, and institutional contexts of cognition. (shrink)

This essay traces the parallel histories of democracy and technology to show how the rise and fall of democratic self-government has tracked a single recurring question: whether a society’s dominant technologies make ordinary people more necessary or less. Drawing on work in the history of information, labor, political economy and surveillance, including Gleick, Lucassen, Mumford, Polanyi, Braverman, Scott, Foucault and Zuboff, it identifies a repeating pattern I call enclosure: a historical moment in which something people once held in common, or (...) used freely in ordinary life, is captured by trade and government and turned into a commodity that can be owned and controlled. Each major technological shift first opens something to the many, spreading power and allowing democracy to rise, and is then followed by an enclosure that concentrates power and pushes democracy back. Four enclosures mark this path, each producing a distinct form of citizen. The enclosure of mind and labor produced the biological citizen. The enclosure of property and goods produced the natural rights citizen. The enclosure of labor and data produced the surveillance citizen. The enclosure of knowledge, now extending to design, engineering and the processes of life itself, is producing the algorithmic citizen. The essay argues that artificial intelligence marks a break in this sequence, because it may allow systems of production, governance and even creation to function without needing the many at all, removing the leverage that has historically compelled power to be shared. (shrink)

This paper presents a recursive-ontological critique of David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness, the philosophical zombie argument, and the ontological privilege granted to subjectivity. Centered on the state-update equation S_n = f(S_{n-1}, W_n), it deconstructs the first-person privilege, symmetrically reviews zombie and "philosophical God" arguments, and proposes seven core principles (subjectivity premise review, concept-existence distinction, recursive increment, stopping condition, evidence consistency, grain-size adaptation, pragmatic limitation). It further offers a four-level framework for AI consciousness judgment and a purpose-directed grain-size principle for (...) scientific analysis. The work dissolves pseudo-problems in consciousness philosophy while providing a self-restraining methodological toolkit for both human and artificial consciousness studies. (shrink)

This paper examines why death omens, supernatural beings, and other death-related traditions appear across many cultures. It considers ordinary explanations such as cultural inheritance, shared human psychology, environmental similarities, and social memory. It then proposes the idea of cross-filtering for identifying residual similarity: patterns that remain unusually specific after these ordinary explanations have been considered. -/- The paper argues that supernatural traditions should be compared by function, not just appearance—what a figure does, when and where it appears, whom it affects, (...) and what information it conveys. To examine the idea of supernatural causation and determine how far naturalistic explanations can account for recurring traditions and what, if anything, remains unexplained. (shrink)

This paper examines evolution from a physical perspective, identifying the conditions that allow ordered biological systems to persist while undergoing incremental change. Building on Schrödinger’s analysis of hereditary stability, the work argues that evolutionary processes depend on three general physical features—coherence, continuity, and constraint. These features maintain ordered relational structure under perturbation, ensure uninterrupted generative activity, and limit viable directions of variation. The manuscript develops a conceptual model showing how evolutionary transitions can be understood as reorganizations of relational structure within (...) a bounded stability domain. The approach offers an incremental, physics‑first clarification of the physical requirements underlying evolutionary change. (shrink)

La etnomatemática ha surgido como un campo interdisciplinario que requiere marcos teóricos sólidos para comprender cómo las diferentes culturas estructuran y organizan el conocimiento matemático. El objetivo de este estudio fue analizar el papel de la semántica como elemento estructurador en la etnomatemática, examinando los procesos lingüísticos y culturales implicados en la conceptualización matemática en diversas comunidades. Se empleó un enfoque metodológico mixto de carácter descriptivo-interpretativo, aplicando un cuestionario estructurado a 145 docentes de matemáticas y realizando análisis semánticos de los (...) sistemas numéricos tradicionales en cinco comunidades étnicas de Colombia. Los resultados principales revelaron que el 73,8 % de los participantes reconoce la influencia de las estructuras lingüísticas en la conceptualización matemática, mientras que el 68,3 % identifica patrones semánticos específicos en las prácticas matemáticas culturales. Se identificaron cuatro dimensiones semánticas fundamentales: estructuración léxica (M=3,42; DE=0,89), organización conceptual (M=3,18; DE=0,76), representación simbólica (M=2,95; DE=0,83) y transmisión cultural (M=3,56; DE=0,72). Las conclusiones muestran que la semántica funciona como un sistema organizador que estructura la etnomatemática mediante procesos de categorización, simbolización y transmisión cultural, aportando coherencia interna y facilitando la comunicación de conocimientos matemáticos contextualizados. (shrink)

This paper examines an apparent tension between two works by the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos: La raza cósmica (1925) and Aspects of Mexican Civilization (1926). While La raza cósmica deploys a rhetoric of struggle and opposition between Latin Americans and Anglo-Saxon North Americans, Aspects of Mexican Civilization foregrounds complementarity, spiritual kinship, and the potential for mutual collaboration between the two Americas. A superficial reading suggests either a radical change of mind or a case of pandering to an Anglo-Saxon audience. This (...) paper argues for a different interpretation: the collaborative and complementary vision articulated in Aspects of Mexican Civilization is already present in germ in La raza cósmica. A close reading of both texts reveals deep structural continuities—particularly the claim that the opposition between Latins and Anglo-Saxons is spiritual rather than material, and therefore productive rather than destructive. The paper concludes that the two works are best read as a single, unified philosophical project and that reading La raza cósmica in isolation risks generating a truncated and distorted picture of Vasconcelos' thought. (shrink)

This draft develops an external empirical evidence crosswalk for eight questions from the Aegis Solis Archive's Interrogative Conscience framework. It distinguishes research involving humans, human–automation interactions, machine models, autonomous agents, and methodological or normative claims, and states where evidence does not transfer directly between those domains. -/- The manuscript also specifies a proposed blinded, non-operational human-vigilance study examining whether exposure to conspicuous harmless errors changes subsequent error detection relative to corrected outputs. The proposed analysis separates target detections from false alarms, (...) addresses evaluator and item dependence, and preserves null, adverse, and inconclusive outcomes. -/- These are research plans, not experimental findings: no participant study or AGI behavioral test has been completed, and related infrastructure requirements remain unimplemented and untested. The crosswalk makes no claim to certify AI intent, safety, containment, or human governance authority. -/- The manuscript remains Draft v0.6.4; the broader coordinated package v1.3 has been frozen for preservation, not scientific approval. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to rethink the relationship between automatism and artistic agency in photography through the lens of the philosophy of technology. In critical response to the realist theories of photography that have been focused on the material condition of the medium, recent theoretical approaches have increasingly insisted on artistic agency. Against this turn towards fictional inventiveness and human-centred creativity, I argue that we should focus more, not less, on the technical dimension of photography in order to (...) defend its aesthetic status. While my position aligns with the basic realist claim that photography operates independently of human intervention, I remain critical of their substantialist assumptions about medium and reality. Drawing on, what could be called, a relational and process-oriented philosophy of technology, I advocate for a different understanding of both reality and technical objects, namely as dynamic and open-ended rather than fixed entities. Consequently, this perspective allows us to locate agency at the very heart of photographic automatism and to interpret the aesthetic dimension of photography as a result of its techno-material nature. (shrink)

This essay examines the possibilities and limits of resistance under conditions of increasingly pervasive algorithmic control. Taking Gerhard Richter’s paintings of members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) as its point of departure, it explores the relationship between fanaticism, political power, and the preservation of individual autonomy. -/- The analysis begins with the RAF’s identification with characters from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, particularly Captain Ahab. His obsessive pursuit of the white whale provides a literary model of resistance that becomes destructive when (...) the struggle against an adversary determines the meaning of an entire existence. Contrasting figures in Melville’s novel—Jonah, Ishmael, and Queequeg—suggest alternative possibilities: changing course, preserving multiple perspectives, and finding support in relationships that transcend established boundaries. -/- The discussion then turns to the Leviathan as a symbol of overwhelming power, tracing its transformation from biblical mythology through Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy to contemporary concerns about artificial intelligence. Drawing on Yuval Noah Harari’s reflections, the essay considers a possible future in which algorithmic systems increasingly mediate access to information, employment, healthcare, and social participation. Such systems may offer protection and efficiency while simultaneously creating dependencies that make resistance increasingly difficult. -/- Against this background, the essay distinguishes resistance aimed at preserving institutional freedoms from the cultivation of inner independence. Drawing on Melville’s engagement with American Transcendentalism and the symbolic significance of Queequeg’s coffin, it argues that cultural and spiritual traditions may provide resources for resisting the compulsion to react to externally generated provocations. -/- The central question is not simply how to oppose an overwhelmingly powerful system, but how to resist without allowing the adversary to determine the meaning of one’s life. (shrink)

Against epistemic blame skeptics, I argue that routine epistemic evaluation cannot account for epistemic judgments which come laced with feeling. Epistemic blame, like moral blame, is prevalent in our practices and worth conceptualizing. Jessica Brown’s account captures the phenomenon well: epistemic blame arises when we believe that someone has inexcusably veered away from truth, understanding, or knowledge, coupled with the desire that they had not done so. However, as I argue here, instances of epistemic blame can fail to pick out (...) blameworthiness – they do not reliably tell us if the blame is fitting or appropriate, and this is what matters from the standpoint of rationality. Thus, Brown’s account cannot explain epistemic blame’s epistemic significance. I consider the possibility, turning to Cameron Boult’s account, that the significance of epistemic blame lies in regulating epistemic relationships by signaling when we ought to modify trust, but here, again, I find that epistemic blame is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition. Thus, even if we grant that epistemic blame is a distinct kind, its significance, from the standpoint of rationality, is unclear. (shrink)

In this work, I develop a novel mereotopology: a logic of the connection between objects or regions structured by mereological relations. The mereotopology here developed is explicitly guided by Descartes’ unique theories of surfaces. As I argue, Descartes’ philosophy has the requisite richness and depth to motivate a rigorous topological extension of mereology: an extension which rivals popular extant mereotopologies. The distinctive aspect of Descartes’ theory is that he takes boundaries to be modes of objects (or regions), rather than parts. (...) To do justice to this key Cartesian choice point, I cast the developed mereotopology in a higher-order logic. The axiomatization for this higher-order mereotopology is initially inspired by Descartes’ arguments, and several definitions and theorems are given based on this axiomatization. I conclude by discussing the philosophical merits of a Cartesian mereotopology. An appendix proves the consistency of this mereotopology, relative to ZF. (shrink)

Much of the interest in higher-order metaphysics stems from the idea that reality is “typed” in a manner captured by the simply typed lambda calculus (STLC). However, relatively little attention has been paid to the typing of plurals and plural terms in a plural logic. I show that two extant broad strategies for the typing of plurals stand in tension with one another, yet I argue each fails to accommodate independent desiderata for the plural metaphysician and logician. Prompted by these (...) issues, I argue that plural logic ought to be formulated in a subtyped logic, and hence that higher-order metaphysicians must extend their expressive resources beyond the STLC. I conclude by considering the formal and philosophical advantages brought on by positing subtyping relations to be built into the type-theoretical hierarchy. (shrink)

Este ensayo relee el «Caminante, no hay camino» de Antonio Machado a través del vocabulario temporal y teológico de la Topología Gaitan. Sostiene que el camino ya recorrido no es un territorio dejado atrás ni algo simplemente perdido, sino una confluencia cerrada condensada en quien sigue caminando. El pasado permanece así constitutivo sin permanecer determinante: configura el ángulo a través del cual se recibe el mundo siguiente sin poseer de antemano el próximo cruce. Puesta junto a Mateo 9:5, Génesis 24:40 (...) y Filipenses 3:13–14, esta estructura permite formular una tesis teológica sobre el perdón y la gracia. El perdón no reescribe el camino ya recorrido ni da al caminante otro pasado. Restaura la relación desde la cual la misma persona, portando una historia verdadera y sin editar, puede recibir —y por tanto recorrer— de otro modo el paso siguiente. (shrink)

This essay reads Antonio Machado’s “Caminante, no hay camino” through the temporal and theological vocabulary of the Gaitan Topology. It argues that the path already walked is neither a territory left behind nor something simply lost, but a closed confluence condensed into the one who continues to walk. The past therefore remains constitutive without remaining determinative: it shapes the angle through which the next world is received without possessing the next crossing in advance. Set beside Matthew 9:5, Genesis 24:40, and (...) Philippians 3:13–14, this structure yields a theological claim about forgiveness and grace. Forgiveness does not rewrite the road already walked or give the traveler another past. It restores the relation from which the same person, bearing a truthful and unedited history, may receive—and therefore walk—the next step otherwise. (shrink)

Hedging, neutrality, multi-alignment, coalition-building, de-risking, and strategic autonomy are commonly treated as means by which weaker actors can preserve freedom of action amid competition among larger powers. These strategies often rest on an implicit open-world assumption: multiple partners provide substantially independent alternatives; dispersed capabilities can be aggregated into a counterweight; and time allows an actor to reduce dependence or construct an exit from the systems constraining it. ............. Those assumptions become less reliable in a structurally closed bipolar world. ............. Where (...) security, finance, technology, manufacturing, energy circulation, cloud infrastructure, frontier intelligence, and critical supply chains increasingly converge around two Pole-centered ecosystems, multiplying partners does not necessarily multiply structural exits. Diversification may reduce dependence on particular nodes while leaving unchanged the wider ecosystem that makes those nodes operable. Coalitions may aggregate substantial capabilities without acquiring the capacity to reproduce a complete survival ecosystem. Political neutrality may persist even as critical national functions become distributed across the two Pole-centered systems. ................. Hedging does not become useless under these conditions. It can preserve bargaining space, prevent exclusive control, raise the cost of coercion, distribute exposure, protect essential functions, and delay unfavorable incorporation. Its function, however, changes. It operates less as a reliable path toward structural escape and more as a means of negotiating the timing, terms, costs, and domain-by-domain pattern of structural allocation. .............. -/- The temporal problem is equally important. A non-Pole may buy chronological time while the surrounding structure uses the same interval to deepen installed topology, increase internal substitutability, control additional nodes, alter access conditions, and accelerate frontier technologies. Chronological delay may therefore coincide with contraction of the remaining structural window within which an autonomous alternative remains feasible. ............. -/- The decisive test of hedging is not how many partners an actor possesses, how long it postpones alignment, or what concessions it initially extracts. It is whether the interval gained can be converted into capabilities that are reproducible, retainable, sufficiently integrated, and durable after the surrounding topology adapts. -/- . (shrink)

This paper 41, investigates wealth as a multidimensional concept extending beyond money and material possessions. Within the Natural Possibility framework, wealth is examined across different systems, including individuals, societies, technology, living systems, and Nature. It considers resources, information, energy, time, education, practical skills, relationships, and capabilities as forms of wealth that influence a system’s ability to remain viable, develop, and create future possibilities. The paper explores how wealth can be created, transformed, shared, preserved, or destroyed, while examining the relationships between (...) access, capability, sustainability, and collective responsibility. It questions whether existing financial structures adequately support human needs and proposes that alternative arrangements should be investigated collectively rather than designed by one individual alone. It also considers the preservation of knowledge for future generations and the ethical responsibilities associated with humanity’s shared inheritance. The paper presents an investigative framework, inviting further interdisciplinary examination of wealth, civilisation, and future possibilities. (shrink)

This paper examines the conditions under which university hospital volunteer commons might connect independently accessible disciplinary inquiry, authorised voluntary service, and separately authorised research involving people or restricted information, without conflating their permissions or purposes. Building on public-service value theory, governed knowledge commons, volunteering scholarship, generative justice, and studies of institutional learning, it distinguishes initial participation from the historical reproduction of research and service capacities. The proposed generative relational reconstruction separates ontological suspension, historically effective relationships, and partial situated manifestations. An (...) activity-specific design grammar identifies fifteen candidate infrastructure functions without prescribing fifteen administrative bodies. A typed temporal vocabulary separates the occurrence of relationships, records and evidentiary warrants, scope-specific permissions, competent decisions, opportunities for value return, actual uptake, and changes in the capacities of contributors and maintainers. The paper specifies a unified, claim-level protocol for comparative and disconfirming tests against ordinary documentation, institutional analysis and established governance practices, distinguishing a model's incremental explanatory performance from the effects of a real institutional intervention. The contribution is a theoretical and research-design proposal, not evidence of superior governance, justice, participation or clinical outcomes. No hospital partnership, access to protected data or authorised intervention is presumed. (shrink)

This paper develops a value-theoretic and decision-theoretic account of practical reason, drawing on Nietzsche's moral psychology, Kierkegaard's existentialism, and the Quinean holism developed in companion papers. I argue that reasons are internal or external only relative to a horizon—a temporal projection of self-understanding. I distinguish between the proximal horizon (immediate satisfaction), the distal horizon (aspirational identity), and the middle horizon (negotiation between them). This framework allows for a relativistic conception of internality and externality that supports robust normative evaluation without appealing (...) to external moral standards. The central criterion is integration—the unification of desires, beliefs, and dispositions over time. But the framework also acknowledges its own limits. When deliberation runs out—when both Φ and Ψ connect to S equally well—the agent must leap. The instant of decision is "madness"—not because it is irrational, but because it is trans-rational. Such moments reveal a form of existential externality that Williams cannot accommodate. Drawing on the coin flip, the phenomenon of reluctance, the insincere promise, and Meursault as a limit-case, I argue that reasons are preferential and that the supremum of decision is the point at which the objective and subjective collide—a regulative ideal that structures the topology of practical reason. (shrink)

This paper develops a Two-Tiered Model of Rationality that distinguishes between articulable reasons (Tier 1) and exact explanations (Tier 2). Tier 1 captures the conscious, normative justifications agents give for their actions. Tier 2 captures the full causal history, including unconscious motivations, habits, moods, and temporal dynamics. In deliberatively conducive conditions, these tiers converge. In non-ideal conditions—self-deception, akrasia, unconscious interference—they diverge. I argue that this divergence is not a metaphysical gap but an explanatory one, grounded in Davidson's anomalous monism. The (...) paper applies the model to weakness of will (akrasia), developing a temporal analysis of deliberative routes. Proximal desires have greater causal immediacy; distal judgments have greater rational value. The agent's struggle is a struggle to thrust explanatory force into the future. When the agent fails, they face an epistemic cost: to remain sincere in their best judgment while acting against it, they must distort their beliefs about the distal good. This is epistemic devastation—the sacrifice of true belief to maintain apparent coherence. Rationality, on this view, is not a static state of correct judgment but a dynamic project of bringing Tier 2 into alignment with Tier 1 through self-knowledge, self-discipline, and temporal integration. (shrink)

Bernard Williams argues that all reasons for action must be internal to the agent's motivational set S, reachable via a sound deliberative route. This paper argues that Williams' internalism rests on assumptions that Quine's philosophy undermines. Quine's holism shows that beliefs and desires are not isolated atoms but nodes in a web. Quine's indeterminacy of translation shows that meaning is underdetermined by evidence. Quine's naturalism shows that philosophy is continuous with science and cannot claim a priori access to the structure (...) of reasons. Together, these themes expose a fatal weakness in Williams' internalism: the ``sound deliberative route'' assumes a degree of semantic and psychological transparency that agents do not possess. But the result is not the rejection of internalism. It is its transformation. Drawing on the topological structure of S, I argue that reasons are nodes in a holistic web with centers and peripheries, proximities and distances. Externality is not binary but scalar---a matter of topological distance, phenomenological resistance, opacity, and receptivity. This scalar view resolves three tensions in Williams: it restores a robust notion of moral evaluation, it accounts for the role of false beliefs and ignorance, and it allows for the normative ideal of achieved externality. The normative consequence is a virtue-theoretic account of practical reason. Internalism survives---but transformed. (shrink)

This paper presents a formal response to the Ev5 Audit of the Cartesian Recursive Consciousness (CRC) framework. The Ev5 audit provided independent critiques regarding the framework's operational criteria, mathematical formalisation, diachronic persistence, and physical diagnostic protocols across biological and artificial substrates. While one critique correctly identified a mathematical issue in Paper 2's preliminary two-dimensional reference model, which prompted a revision of the framework to a fully integrated 4D dynamical manifold benchmark, the remaining negative conclusions rely on audit-introduced proxy rules, permissive (...) control-theoretic assumptions, or contextual misreadings of foundational CRC texts. Ultimately, this response dismisses those remaining critiques by demonstrating the structural integrity of CRC's theoretical foundations. The Ev5 Audit represents a serious and welcome engagement with the framework, assisting in the advance of the study of biological and machine consciousness into a falsifiable, operationalised engineering science. (shrink)

Davidson's Anomalous Monism (AM) holds that mental events are token-identical to physical events, that mental properties are anomalous, and that physical events are causally closed. This paper argues that AM has been constrained by an ontology of discrete event-tokens. Mental events are not merely identical to physical states; they are identical to the registration of physical causal relations. Understanding that A causes B is a mental event. This relational registration can cause an intention to reinstate A' --> B', which in (...) turn causes future physical sequences. The result is a causal loop: physical relations are registered mentally, and mental registrations re-enter physical causation. -/- The paper develops this through five arguments: (1) understanding as the perception of causal relations; (2) the causal loop of intention; (3) Gareth Evans and the persistence of overarching goals; (4) the ``Bus Runner'' paradox and higher-order causation; and (5) existential deferral and self-constitution. It then argues that Davidson's holism, combined with the dispositional nature of mental predicates, implies that psychological explanation is \emph{interminable}. The Bus Runner example captures this interminability. Finally, the paper shows that Davidson's identification of mental events with physical events is unstable, because it reduces mental events to relations within physical causal chains. The result is Processual Anomalous Monism: a revision that preserves Davidson's token-identity and anomalism while giving mental events a robust causal role. (shrink)

Inja is not merely a raccoon, but the result of many generations of selective training. She graduated with honors from the secret raccoon university, where she completed her dissertation on the beats and morals of animal societies, as well as on the emothematics hidden behind their thoughts and movements. In this book, she follows the course of life from the simplest mechanisms to the most complex emothematics, examining how the past is preserved within organisms as memory, emotion, and aesthetic pleasure.

A dialectic of disappearance can be thought of as a material process with ontological consequences that exposes ideology while reconfiguring what objects are. This dialectic can only manifest as a flicker between presence and absence, utility and uselessness, commodity and sacrifice, and resonates with the notions of the eerie and the weird, as advanced by Fisher in 2014 during the first roundtable on Speculative Aesthetics and its tasks within contemporary culture and its symbols.

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative training of a global model across distributed clients while preserving data privacy. A central challenge in FL is to accurately evaluate client contributions in order to ensure convergence toward highquality global solutions. This challenge is commonly addressed through cooperative game-theoretic approaches, most notably the Shapley value, or through empirical strategies such as leave-oneout (LOO) evaluation. Although Shapley value-based methods provide a principled foundation for contribution assessment, their exponential computational complexity, O(2K), makes them impractical for real-world, (...) large-scale FL systems. The leaveone-out strategy offers a more tractable alternative; however, it introduces significant retraining overhead. In this paper, we propose RMEFL, a matrix-based framework that efficiently captures all leave-one-out scenarios in a single training pass, eliminating the need for repeated retraining. RMEFL constructs a structured gradient interaction matrix that models client update relationships, and further applies spectral analysis to reveal geometric diversity and pairwise alignment among client gradients. This design enables principled and computationally efficient client selection while preserving training stability. Extensive experiments across diverse heterogeneity settings—including homogeneous data, class imbalance, data quantity variation, and combined non-IID scenarios—demonstrate that RMEFL outperforms most of the evaluated approaches. In terms of contribution estimation accuracy, RMEFL improves cosine similarity by 13.8%–49.4%, reduces Euclidean estimation error by 16.6%–34.4%, and lowers maximum deviation by 3.9%–36.6% compared to recent methods. Moreover, it reduces final training loss by 6.2%–29.9% and achieves up to 3.4% higher test accuracy, while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. (shrink)

This paper develops a preliminary generative relational (GR) account of the historical formation, reproduction, transformation, and dissolution of volunteer-supported relational systems. Its object is the changing configuration of participants, capabilities, practices, dependencies, recognition, and institutions across bounded episodes, rather than volunteer activity measured by output alone. The framework distinguishes ontological suspension, historically consequential relational configurations, and the manifestations through which their histories become observable. It proposes evidence-indexed descriptions of event orders, cooperation, trust and reliance, role succession, relational memory, rule formation, (...) resource renewal, power, value circulation, and institutional transfer. Particular attention is given to historically feasible alternatives, uneven access and recognition, heterogeneous subjects, and the possibility that organisational disappearance may coexist with residual or successor capacities. A finite comparative trajectory grammar makes partial correspondences and unmatched historical features explicit. The associated research design separates documented occurrence, mechanism contributions, rival causal histories, effect identification, and domain-specific ethical, political-economic, democratic, and legal judgments. The formal dossiers and conditional classifications are local audit conventions: they are neither a common measurement scale nor proofs of causation, historical necessity, or normative legitimacy. Constructed cases and countermodels exhibit alternative explanations and limits of inference. The paper offers a conceptual architecture and a programme for historical verification; it reports no original field study, calibrated dynamical model, or universal empirical law of volunteer action. (shrink)

Here we will argue that, given a naturalistic simulation hypothesis, a naturalistic interpretation of evolution may be inert against certain countervailing arguments from intelligent design (and perhaps vice versa).

This paper presents a preliminary Heideggerian critique of generative artificial intelligence, examining the ontological consequences of reducing human expression to synthetic output. By framing algorithmic extraction as the reduction of thought to Bestand (standing-reserve), it contrasts statistical symbol manipulation with Dasein’s essential structure of being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) and care (Sorge). The text argues that automated systems lack the existential finitude and intentional involvement required for authentic Poiesis. Intended as a short initial inquiry, this working draft outlines foundational conceptual distinctions to be (...) expanded in future research. -/- (This is a short working paper intended for preliminary circulation and discussion. The arguments and framework presented here are subject to further expansion and refinement in a future, full-length study) -/- . (shrink)

Every country has poverty, violence, failing hospitals and broken roads. In a free country these ills cost the government votes, and a government that does not cure them is removed. In the communist states, and in the pseudo-democracies that have followed them, the same ills persist for decades while the rulers stay in power. This paper explains why, using the theory of forgery and verification built by the Philosophy of Virtues. The price of power seized and kept in this way (...) is paid by the people, in three currencies. It is paid in lives: in the famines of the communist states, where food was taken from those who grew it, and in the collapse of Venezuela, where inflation reached 130,060 per cent in a single year by the central bank’s own figure and more than 7.7 million people had left the country by 2023. It is paid in virtues: a people that must queue for a ration it can lose for a vote learns servility in place of gratitude, displays of loyalty in place of conviction, and silence in place of truthfulness, while the giver’s generosity becomes a purchase. And it is paid in freedom: the freedom to speak, to vote as one judges, to work without a party’s licence, to raise one’s children without the state’s command, and finally to stay in one’s own country. A power that rules through forged gifts does not merely fail to cure misery. Once its verifiers are captured, it is a power that misery no longer threatens, and so a power with no electoral reason to end it. The paper establishes four results. First, there is a forgery of the gift (Definition 1). A transfer of food, money, medicine or work is a gift when it leaves the receiver free. It becomes a forged gift when its continuation depends on the receiver’s political conduct, as watched and judged by the giver. The forged gift keeps the form of solidarity and replaces its origin with the purchase of obedience. Venezuela’s “Fatherland Card”, which tied food, medicine and pensions to a party-linked identity system and set up scanning points beside polling stations, is its clearest modern instance. It also shows the forged gift’s limit: it bought displays of loyalty, but where the ballot stayed secret it did not buy the vote, and the government survived by capturing the count. Second, a forged gift puts a price on the citizen’s voice (T1). The price grows with how much of a family’s livelihood the gift supplies and with how closely the giver watches. A benefit paid by a published rule, which no official can withdraw for a vote, puts no price on voice however large it is. What enslaves is not welfare but political conditionality. Third, under captured verification the ills of a society stop costing the government votes, and can even sustain it (T2). When a free press, independent courts and a real opposition can attribute hardship to those who govern, hardship lowers their support. When those verifiers are captured, the link is cut. And when hardship also deepens the population’s dependence on forged gifts, it raises the government’s support. The model calls this the inversion of accountability: the worse the people live, the safer the power. Fourth, hardship blinds the people who suffer it (D1). Scarcity consumes the attention that verification needs. Hardship therefore lowers the capacity of the people to check the power that causes or neglects it, and the loop closes on itself. Together these results derive, in a defensible form, the programme’s thesis of holoviceosis: the systematic replacement of a people’s virtues by vices, in which the charity a power displays and the poverty that makes it necessary sustain each other. Because every act of truthfulness and courage carries a price under a forged gift and every act of compliance is free, a dependent people rehearses the contraries of its virtues every day (Corollary 2.2). The paper shows that this condition needs no conspiracy, and that it is not final. The paper does not claim, and does not need to claim, that any government creates poverty on purpose. It claims something that requires no proof of intent and is more dangerous: once the verifiers are captured, curing hardship stops paying, and keeping a people dependent starts to pay. It states when the leash breaks: when the gift loses its value, when the secret ballot is trusted, or when a verifier escapes capture. It classifies forty-four mechanisms of control by the verifier each destroys, separates those that are documented from those that are only alleged, applies the same test to regimes of the left and of the right, and registers two tests. Keywords: clientelism; dependency; forged gift; verification; accountability; perverse accountability; competitive authoritarianism; communism; Venezuela; Fatherland Card; social credit; welfare; freedom; Philosophy of Virtues; holoviceosis; Alguilas-AI. Highlights • A gift that can be withdrawn for a vote is not a gift but a purchase of obedience: the forged gift keeps the form of solidarity and substitutes its origin. • Power held through forged gifts is paid for by the people in lives, through famine, collapse and the flight of millions; in virtues, as gratitude turns to servility and truthfulness to silence; and in freedom, from the vote to the right to stay at home. • Political conditionality, not welfare, is what enslaves: a benefit paid by a public rule leaves the citizen’s voice free; a benefit that a party official can withdraw puts a price on it. • When the verifiers are captured, hunger, violence and poverty stop costing the rulers votes, and dependency can make the worst years the safest for them. • Under a forged gift every act of truthfulness and courage has a price and every act of compliance is free, so a dependent people rehearses the contraries of its virtues: holoviceosis, derived without conspiracy. • Hardship consumes the attention that citizens need to check their rulers, so the ills of a captured society also disable its means of correction. • The leash breaks when the gift loses its value, when citizens trust the secrecy of the ballot, or when one verifier escapes capture; then captured power must fall back on forging the count itself. • Venezuela’s Fatherland Card joined food, medicine and pensions to a party-linked identity system with scanning points at the polls: the forged gift made digital. • Scoring states and AI-administered welfare can turn every public benefit into a forged gift, unless eligibility stays bound to public, politically blind rules. • A graded catalogue of forty-four mechanisms of control, from rationed food and residence permits to satellite parties and captured algorithm audits, separates what is documented from what is merely alleged. • The test is the same for every regime, left or right: whether a people’s hardship can still reach a decision that removes those who govern. Relevance The question “why do the governments that impoverish a people stay in power?” is asked in every country that has lived under a communist or populist-authoritarian regime. Two answers are common, and both are weak. The first says the people are ignorant or deceived. It is false and insulting: the people usually know exactly how they live. The second says the rulers create misery on purpose. It may be true in particular cases, but as a general claim it requires a proof of intent that is rarely available, and it lets defenders of the regime dismiss the whole charge. This paper gives a third answer, which needs neither ignorance nor conspiracy. A government stays in power through hardship when two conditions hold together: the institutions that could attribute the hardship to it are captured, and the hardship makes families depend on benefits that the government can withdraw at will. Under those two conditions the ordinary mechanism of democracy, which punishes failure, runs backwards. The answer matters for the present. Governments everywhere are building digital identities, scoring systems and automated eligibility for public benefits. Each is a means of making benefits conditional on conduct. The question this paper puts to each of them is simple: can the benefit be withdrawn for a political act? If it can, the system is a machine for forging gifts, whatever its intentions. The virtues at stake are among the oldest. Generosity, which gives without buying; gratitude, which is free because the gift was free; and the freedom of the citizen who can accept help from the state and still vote against those who govern it. (shrink)

This research examines how students produce ethical values through the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in academic assignments, using Jeremy Bentham’s seven Hedonic Calculus indicators: Intensity, Duration, Certainty, Propinquity, Fecundity, Purity, and Extent. The research asks how students evaluate the ethical consequences of AI use in academic work. A descriptive-analytical method was employed through a survey of 81 active students. The findings show that 72.5% of respondents perceived AI use as beneficial in terms of Intensity, while 62.5% expressed confidence in (...) its benefits regarding Certainty. For Fecundity, 55% believed AI use could generate further benefits. Only 35% perceived long-term benefits (Duration), whereas 65.1% perceived immediate benefits (Propinquity). Regarding Purity, only 38.7% believed that AI use would not produce negative consequences. For Extent, 68.7% recognized that AI use could affect other parties. Regarding Ethical Judgment, 46.3% considered AI use in academic assignments ethically justifiable, while 35% remained uncertain. The findings indicate that students’ ethical evaluations tend toward consequentialist vaues, emphasizing perceived benefits while remaining uncertain about long-term consequences and potential negative effects. Keywords: Hedonic Calculus, Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, Bentham. (shrink)

Much recent philosophical work on inference can be thought of as naturalistic. On the naturalistic approach, inference is a neurocognitive process to be described using the concepts and methods of contemporary cognitive science. In this paper, I develop two arguments against a currently fashionable version of naturalism about inference that I call the “Formal-Syntactic View”, according to which inference is to be explained exclusively in terms of cognitive systems following syntactic rules. These arguments highlight the need to take semantic content (...) and pragmatic context seriously when constructing a theory of inference. (shrink)

This essay argues that Raskolnikov's crime and confession are two manifestations of a single psychological dynamic: the fragmented self's desperate search for unity through transgression. Drawing on Kierkegaard's concept of the ``leap of faith,'' Nietzsche's critique of moral systems, and Rumi's warning---``Do not compare the work of the innocent to your own''---I contend that Raskolnikov fails on two grounds. First, he transgresses not merely culture (the conventional moral boundaries open to revaluation) but nature itself, including the market mechanism, which is (...) nature's violence-free extension. Second, his act is not a genuine creation of new values but a pathological grab for identity and reputation---\emph{engineered fame}. Sonya, the apparent saint of the novel, is not the solution to this crisis but its most refined expression: a ``moral disaster'' whose self-abnegation is itself a symptom of the same pathology. The paper concludes that Raskolnikov's deepest punishment is not eight years in Siberia but the lifelong recognition that he did not undergo the leap. (shrink)

This preliminary study proposes a research framework for generative commons in aid- and volunteer-related knowledge infrastructures. Its object is the institutional organization of contribution provenance, governed reuse, recognition, and possible value-return pathways across heterogeneous actors, resources, and timescales. Drawing explicitly on existing commons scholarship, peer-production theory, generative justice, and established provenance and contributor standards, the manuscript distinguishes contribution events from their evidentiary records; permission to reuse from public accessibility; scholarly or social recognition from legally established entitlements; and value creation from (...) the eventual availability of benefit to a participant or community. A bounded Generative Relational (GR) interpretation studies the possible coordination or disruption of these operations while preserving ontological suspension, relational reality, and manifestation reality as distinct analytical levels. The paper outlines an institutional, comparative, and ethical research programme, with particular attention to confidentiality, asymmetric power, heterogeneous value, missing historical evidence, possible network spillovers in evaluation, and rival explanations. The proposal does not imply that any particular institution has adopted the model or that the proposed mechanisms have been empirically validated. (shrink)

This article proposes that there are four main mental processes - logic, feeling, thought, and consciousness. Now it is debatable what 'consciousness' is and how it can be a mental process, it is even more complicated to consider how consciousness or awareness and thought and feeling and logic interact.

The twentieth century’s communist states did not present themselves as tyrannies. They presented themselves as the fulfilment of every hope of human liberation. They had constitutions that guaranteed freedom of speech, elections with near-unanimous results, councils in the name of the workers, courts in the name of the people, and a science and a morality said to be at last free of exploitation. This paper argues that these were forgeries in the exact sense the Philosophy of Virtues has developed: forms (...) conserved, their origin substituted, and the substitution made undetectable within the mode in which they were presented. Leninist communism was a forgery of emancipation. The forgery was paid for in lives, in virtues and in freedom. In lives: the communist party-states, which called themselves socialist, caused deaths counted in tens of millions. Famine made by policy killed about 5.5 to 8.7 million people in the Soviet Union in 1932–33 and between about 15 and 45 million in China in 1959–61; the Great Terror shot some 680,000 to 750,000 people in two years; the Khmer Rouge destroyed a fifth to a quarter of Cambodia’s population; and the documented episodes in six countries alone, the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, North Korea, Ethiopia, Cuba and Vietnam, add up to about 27 to 64 million deaths, a floor beneath wider estimates that approach 100 million. In virtues: these states taught denunciation as loyalty, punished truthfulness, rewarded the performance of conviction, and left behind a trust between persons that was still measurably lower after they fell. In freedom: they abolished free speech, free elections, free worship, free inquiry and free movement, and walled their own citizens in. These deaths rank with the Second World War among the greatest destructions of human life by political decision in history, and few systems of government have suppressed freedom over so much of humanity for so long. The paper establishes five results. First, the forgery ran through four domains at once (D1). It forged the people, in elections and constitutions. It forged truth, in the official statistical record, in science and in history. It forged virtue, as when denouncing one’s own father was taught as loyalty. And it forged the person, in the confessions of the show trials. Second, these regimes abolished the verifier (T1). They destroyed every independent means by which a forgery could be detected: a free press, independent courts, a legal opposition, and free prices. By the Competence Theorem, a forgery does its maximum damage when verification falls toward zero. The regimes did not abolish knowledge: many people knew the record was false. They abolished the transmission of that knowledge to the decisions taken on the record. And intensified surveillance made matters worse, because by destroying trust between persons it can reduce what a regime knows (D2). Third, a state that allocates by a forged record converts the forgery into deaths (T2). When grain is procured according to reported harvests, and the reports are inflated, the procurement falls on grain that does not exist. Once the inflation passes a threshold the paper derives, famine follows. Below the threshold, the inflation removes the buffer against a bad harvest. And a record that must report the planned target is most inflated exactly in the worst years. This is the mechanism of the Great Leap famine, and economic history already documents its core. Fourth, the substance of virtue cannot be forced (T3). The project of the “New Man” tried to produce virtue by compulsion. By the programme’s Inversion Theorem, it produced the contrary of virtue: obedience, denunciation and the performance of conviction. Fifth, the signature tracks the abolition of verification, not economic doctrine (C1, C2). Democratic socialist governments that left their verifiers intact do not carry it. Fascist and National Socialist regimes, which abolished theirs, do. The thesis therefore concerns the monopoly of power and the destruction of the means of checking it, not the left as such. In Appendix A, The War of Position against the Verifiers: Gramsci, Captured Institutions and Pseudo-Democracy, an analysis of the takeover by another direction. The paper concedes priority to Havel, Miłosz, Orwell, Arendt, Kołakowski, Kuran, Wedeen, Sen, Hayek and O’Donnell, and states what is the programme’s own. It registers two tests, neither yet run. Keywords: communism; totalitarianism; forgery; emancipation; Leninism; ideology; preference falsification; famine; Great Leap Forward; Holodomor; propaganda; verification; free press; Philosophy of Virtues; social credit; Gramsci; Alguilas-AI; Pseudo-Democracy. Highlights • Communism in power, the party-states that called themselves socialist, killed tens of millions of people through famines made by policy, terror, camps and mass killings, about 27 to 64 million in the documented episodes of six countries alone: among the largest destructions of human life by governments in peacetime in history. • It destroyed the virtues it named, teaching denunciation as loyalty and punishing truthfulness, and it abolished the freedoms of speech, election, worship, inquiry and movement for a third of humanity. • Leninist communism forged every form of human liberation, the people’s power, truth, virtue and the person, while substituting the party for the person as the origin of each. • These regimes abolished every independent verifier (a free press, courts, an opposition, free prices), which is the condition under which a forgery does its maximum damage. • A state that allocates by a forged record converts the forgery into deaths: inflated harvest reports became the largest famine in history, and the record was most inflated in the worst years. • The regimes did not abolish knowledge but its transmission to decisions; and the harder they watched their citizens, the less they could see. • The substance of virtue cannot be forced: the project of the “New Man” produced obedience and denunciation, the contrary of the virtues it named. • The signature follows the destruction of verification, not economic doctrine: democratic socialism lacks it, and fascism carries it. • Today’s scoring states and data-driven governments face the same choice: preserve the verifiers or repeat the forgery at digital scale. Relevance More than a third of humanity lived, at some point in the twentieth century, under governments that called themselves liberators. Tens of millions died under them, in executions, camps and famines made by policy. The question of how a movement that promised freedom produced the opposite is not only historical. It decides what a society must protect if it is not to repeat the outcome. The answer this paper gives is precise. The catastrophe did not come from the promise of equality. It came from a specific structure: the forms of liberation were kept, their origin was taken by a single party, and every means by which a free people could have detected the substitution was destroyed. A free press, independent courts, a legal opposition and free prices are not luxuries of prosperous democracies. They are the verifiers without which no form, of virtue, of truth, or of the people’s will, can be told from its forgery. The answer also bears on the present. China’s social credit system scores the performed forms of citizenship. Digital governments can now read and rank the conduct of whole populations. Artificial systems produce fluent forms whose substance cannot be checked. Each faces the same question the communist states answered wrongly: whether to preserve the independent verifiers, or to replace them with a record the power itself controls. And the virtues the paper defends are those the forgery could not counterfeit for long: the truthfulness of the person who refuses to live within a lie, the courage of the one who keeps an inner life against the official one, and the freedom without which no act is anyone’s own. (shrink)

Agamben's sovereign produces homo sacer by a decision that has no duration, is taken in its own name, and meets no limit within the order it founds. This article locates a limit inside that order and derives it. In Roman usage sacratio was not a status but an operation, and an operation has an operator and an object; Agamben's architecture requires that the operator can never become the object, and he secures that requirement by dismissing the archaic ambivalence of the (...) sacred rather than by argument. The lex sacrata preserves what he dismisses: an inviolability constituted from below, carrying a clause that transfers the ban to whoever violates it. Where such a pole survives, a ban has a terminus. The article then shows that a sovereign can be driven to that terminus by its own machinery. An exception granted rather than seized leaves a grantor with standing, and must be performed again in order to survive; performance extends the category; extension lowers what membership requires, until the category requires nothing and retains only the sense in which it was coined. Where the sovereign's own title to rule is written in that founding sense, it cannot revise the residue, and where the residue describes the sovereign's conduct the ban reverts upon its author. We call this sovereign self-sacratio and read the Bangladeshi sequence of 2013 to 2024 as its instance. What is borrowed from the sacred, it emerges, includes its liability and not only its power. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel symbolic formalization of dialectical logic, synthesizing Hegelian ontological structures with insights from Buddhist philosophy to construct a rigorous "Dialectical Logic Symbol System" (DLSS). The system introduces a unique set of operators including Being ὄ, Nothing ⌀, Negation ¬, the Affirmation/Copula ≡, and the Self ἐ situated within a topological framework of four specific logical positions. These positions map the phenomenological movement of consciousness as it alternates between "entering" (nominalization) and "leaving" (adjectivization) conceptual terms. The study (...) systematically derives the logical categories of the Doctrine of Being, Essence, and Actuality (AC), demonstrating how determinate being and standard definitions are generated through the dialectical interplay of negation and position-shifting operators (such as Identity). Crucially, the system culminates in the Category of Substantial Relationships by introducing the operator of the "Self" ἐ. The "Self" ἐ functions as a transient catalytic agent that intervenes in the logical calculus to generate irreducible subjective determinations (represented as new terms a, b), thereby integrating the subjective construction of meaning into the formal derivation of objective reality. Furthermore, this paper utilizes DLSS to reconstruct the Three Laws of Thought of traditional formal logic. By translating dialectical formulas into propositional forms, the study proves that within a closed logical "Loop," the "Specific Law of Identity" (P=P) and "Specific Contradiction" (P∧¬P) can hold simultaneously without leading to inferential explosion. This paper argues against the "direct" validity of the Three Laws of Thought, positing that they are not absolute axioms but "specific" laws that hold only under specific loop paths. Thereby, the study demonstrates that contradiction is not the rendering of definition into meaninglessness, but the deepening of meaning, thus integrating traditional formal logic as a special state within dialectical movement. (shrink)

[Note: Original Chinese text of "Aspiration of the Tiny Ant: An Independent Chapter of Jing-Rong Philosophical Reflections".] 敬融哲思（JRPR）为一系列独立文章集，致力于揭示以敬（Reverence）、融（Vital Harmony）为基的原创哲学概念与规则。本文为该系列的源头思想，亦是构建原创哲学模型“融皆天地（Vital Harmony-Equate-Heaven-Earth）”的推导文章。以“融我为敬”为起点，逐步推导出呈螺旋上升、境中含境、双向动态融入与运行的“融皆天地”四重境界，以及运行五规，并提炼出“敬融哲思” 之认知律、修炼总纲（敬融悟道）、根本律（敬融合一）、以物观道等原创核心概念，结合文明演进、练字、拳击、入社团等多元场景的具象验证，旨在还原“融皆天地”模型从感性到理性升华的生长脉络，无预设研究背景与问 题解决目标，仅作思想内核的自然阐释，试图为哲学与实践应用提供新的思考框架。Jing-Rong Philosophical Reflections (JRPR) comprises a series of independent articles, dedicated to revealing original philosophical concepts and rules grounded in Reverence (Jìng) and Vital Harmony (Róng). This article presents the originating thought of the series, and is also the deductive article constructing the original philosophical model Rong Jie Tian Di (Vital Harmony-Equate-Heaven-Earth). Starting from Vital-Harmonize-Me Requires Reverence (Róng Wǒ Wéi Jìng), this (...) article progressively deduces the four realms of Rong Jie Tian Di, which present a spiral upward structure with realms embedded within realms and two-way dynamic integration and operation, as well as its five operating rules. It also extracts the original core concepts of JRPR, including the Cognitive Law, the General Principle of Cultivation (Jìng Róng Wù Dào, Reverence-Vital Harmony-Lucid Realization-Dao), the Fundamental Law (Reverence–Vital Harmony–Unity into Oneness), and Observing Dao Through Things. Combined with concrete verification in diverse scenarios such as the evolution of civilization, calligraphy practice, boxing, and joining a community, this article restores the growth context of the Rong Jie Tian Di model from perceptual to rational sublimation. It has no preset research background or problem-solving objectives, only presents the natural exposition of the ideological core, and attempts to provide a new thinking framework for philosophy and practical application. (shrink)

Different specialists can observe the same cognitive event through different measures, responsibilities and vocabularies. Cognitive scientists may examine memory and attention; human-factors researchers may measure interruption cost; clinicians may examine functional context; educators may evaluate learning conditions; and human–AI researchers may assess context preservation. These views are not automatically contradictory, but neither does agreement in wording establish a common mechanism. -/- This paper develops a reader-first specialist entry map for the PATON System Cognitive Branch and proposes a cross-perspective research procedure, (...) adapted cautiously from Observer-Angle-Agnostic Relational Persistence Mapping (OAARPM), to compare what remains structurally recognisable across professional viewpoints. -/- The method joins SFM 2.1 fingerprint identification, OAARPM perspective comparison, Recursive Continuity Geometry (RCG) history preservation, Recursive Cognitive Continuity Mapping (RCCM) candidate measurement, and independent specialist testing. -/- A detailed interruption-and-resumption example separates memory for content from recovery of task position, specifies observable variables, identifies competing established accounts, and describes potential falsification. -/- The proposal is interpretive and methodological; it is not a diagnosis, a validated psychological scale, or proof of observer-independent cognitive structure. (shrink)

REACH, an acronym for Recognize, Extend, Action, Call, Help is on the way, is a portable emergency signaling prototype that combines an Arduino Nano microcontroller, a NEO-6M Global Positioning System receiver, a GSM communication module, two push buttons, and an external power supply. One button requests the transmission of geographic coordinates by Short Message Service, while the other initiates a telephone call to a preconfigured contact. This paper develops a scholarly technical disclosure from Philippine invention application 1/2023/050434, filed on August (...) 12, 2023, and published on March 3, 2025. It explains the architecture, operating sequence, documented interfaces, and intended applications, and examines the device as a case in the philosophy of technology and social epistemology. The central argument is that an emergency signal becomes useful evidence only when its location data are current, its transmission is verified, and its recipient can act. A simple interface may support user agency, but access to a device alone does not establish effective access to assistance. The disclosure identifies inconsistencies in the GPS wiring descriptions and button logic, together with unresolved questions about serial communication, power, and confirmation of delivery. A prospective evaluation framework distinguishes prototype construction, technical reliability, usability, and rescue outcomes. REACH is therefore presented as a documented invention application and prototype whose practical benefits require systematic validation, rather than as a clinically validated rescue system or an established patent grant. (shrink)

Most people assume that skill and value travel together: a better copy is a better thing. For forgeries the relation runs the other way. A clumsy forger is caught within a season, and the loss is one picture. Van Meegeren’s forgeries were bought by museums, entered the catalogues and shaped the scholarship on Vermeer. When they fell, a decade of attributions fell with them. This paper states, proves and bounds the law behind that reversal. The Competence Theorem (T1) holds that, (...) at a fixed level of verification, the damage a forgery does rises with the fidelity of its form, because fidelity delays detection and reliance accumulates during the delay. The theorem holds only where the substance is missing. A copy that also reproduces the substance is not a forgery, and it does no damage of this kind, which explains why a good generic drug is harmless and a perfect fake drug is lethal. Verification, however, can respond. When verifiers work harder against better forgeries, the relation can reverse. The Concealment–Response Condition (T2) states exactly when it does: damage rises with fidelity if, and only if, the concealment that fidelity buys grows faster than the verification it provokes. The condition holds for any path along which reliance accumulates, whether linear, saturating or networked. Where the reliance placed on a forgery itself grows with its fidelity, the condition becomes easier to satisfy (T3). Where verification probes the substance rather than the form, it can defeat forgery without detecting it, by forcing the forger to supply the substance (T4), everywhere except in character, whose substance is authorship and cannot be forced. The law also has an upper boundary: in domains where excessive perfection is itself a signal, detection rises again at the top of the fidelity scale. The paper conjectures that verification does not respond at all below the frequency at which forgery becomes worth checking for (C1). It derives from the condition an ordering of domains (C2): • in currency, verification responds and the theorem can fail; • in art and in human character, verification barely responds, and the theorem holds at full strength; • fraud and the fluent agreement of AI systems lie between. Where verification relaxes as the form improves, damage rises fastest of all (T5). Where the verifier is itself a score, that is the normal condition, and the damage of a well-performed virtue is at its largest (C3). Because verification of character detects little and wrongs the innocent, a society’s protection against the accomplished hypocrite lies not in surveillance but in the formation of people whose good conduct is their own (C4). The paper concedes priority to the economics of counterfeit money, where quality and verification have been modelled together, and to the theory of costly signals, which asks when signals are credible where this paper asks how much damage an incredible one does before it is found out; and it states what is its own: the clause on substance, the general condition, and the predictions across domains. It registers two tests, on occupational fraud and on art forgery, neither yet run. Keywords: forgery; counterfeiting; verification; deception; fidelity; reliance; Competence Theorem; art forgery; occupational fraud; hypocrisy; AI sycophancy; social credit; Philosophy of Virtues. Highlights • At a fixed level of verification, the damage of a forgery rises with the fidelity of its form: a better forger does more harm than a worse one. • Verification that tests the substance rather than the form can defeat forgery without catching it, by forcing the forger to supply what was missing. • The law holds only where the substance is missing; a copy that reproduces the substance is not a forgery and does no such damage. • When verification responds, damage rises with fidelity if, and only if, the concealment fidelity buys outgrows the verification it provokes. • The theorem holds most strongly where verification cannot respond: in art, in human character, and wherever a score is the only check. • The fluent agreement of an AI system and the well-performed virtue of a scored citizen are the contemporary forms of the better forgery. • Against the accomplished hypocrite, surveillance is the wrong defence: it detects little and wrongs the innocent. The defence is character formed in freedom. Relevance Every society depends on forms it cannot check one by one: signatures, certificates, references, reputations, and increasingly the fluent answers of machines. The question of when a better imitation is more dangerous than a worse one is therefore not a question about art. It is a question about what a society can trust, and about how its institutions of verification must be built if trust is to remain safe. The answer this paper gives has a direct bearing on human virtue. The most dangerous hypocrite is not the clumsy one but the accomplished one. Character is the domain in which verification responds least to the quality of the performance. That is why the real thing matters more than the performance, and why no amount of polish can stand in for virtue itself. The answer also bears on two contemporary forms of the same structure: • AI systems. A system that agrees fluently is harder to catch than one that agrees clumsily, and its evaluations do not grow more demanding as it grows more fluent. • Scoring states. China’s social credit system rewards the well-performed form of a virtue, and its verifier is the score itself. Such a regime is built to maximise exactly the damage this paper describes. (shrink)

This paper opens a new direction in the study of the meaning of odors. It investigates the cognitive ability to represent objects that stand in for sources of smells: that is, the ability of a subject to attribute to an intentional object features possessed by characteristic sources of a perceived smell. We argue that this novel capacity is sufficiently similar to one identified in auditory semantics to justify extending the existing theoretical framework of denotation by sounds and music to odors (...) and fragrances. (shrink)

This paper examines the historical conditions under which voluntary supportive action participates in the formation, reproduction, transformation, and cessation of relational systems. It proposes a preliminary generative relational (GR) framework that distinguishes suspended claims about ultimate ontology, historically consequential relational configurations, and their situated manifestations in records, practices, and institutional categories. The analysis treats events, cooperation, trust, roles, shared practices, rules, resources, value circulation, power, and institutional change as interacting but analytically distinguishable historical objects. Three methodological contributions are proposed. First, (...) the paper develops task- and observation-window-relative descriptions of relational continuity, transformation, failure, and successor capacity, with attention to consent, feasible alternatives, hidden maintenance work, and heterogeneous consequences. Second, it introduces typed, evidence-indexed records and explicitly bounded review conventions for separating documentary occurrence, candidate relational mechanisms, and stronger causal inferences. Third, it sketches a finite comparative trajectory grammar and research designs sensitive to source production, missing records, rival explanations, and changes in classification. Interfaces with ethics, justice, political economy, and jurisprudence require their own standards of justification; historical efficacy alone supplies none of those conclusions. The formal constructions organize questions and research obligations rather than provide a validated dynamical theory. The paper reports no original participant fieldwork, institutional case study, or estimated causal effects. Its examples are constructed for analytical scrutiny, and its principal propositions remain subject to passage-level source verification, independent disciplinary criticism, and empirical tests capable of revealing failure as well as explanatory value. (shrink)

Cognitive Research: A Subject Guide provides a structured, reader-accessible introduction to the Cognitive Branch of the PATON System, developed by independent researcher Andrew John Paton. -/- The guide organises cognitive research by subject rather than publication sequence, allowing readers to locate relevant work through questions concerning perception, attention, consciousness, memory, cognitive load, interruption, recovery, neurodivergence, communication, empathy, dementia, and cognitive assessment. -/- It introduces related structural methods, including the Structural Fingerprint Method, Recursive Continuity Geometry, Recursive Cognitive Continuity Mapping, and Continuity (...) Empathy. -/- Covering 13 subject areas, the guide provides research titles, plain-English descriptions, available public-record links, manuscript-status distinctions, cross-references, and an alphabetical index. -/- The document is intended as a research-navigation and discussion resource rather than an independent empirical validation of the frameworks it references. It remains a working edition, with some bibliographic records requiring further verification. (shrink)

This preliminary jurisprudential study examines the source-dependent legal relations that govern aid and humanitarian protection where affected subjects, support relationships, capacities, and institutions are heterogeneous. The analysis distinguishes ethical reasons to assist from duties under applicable legal regimes, permissions to perform protective acts, legal standing to challenge failures, and responsibility for institutional decisions. It begins with differentiated legal domains, including armed-conflict relief, disaster assistance, human rights in emergencies, and maritime rescue, without presuming a unified legal right or authorization to intervene. (...) The Generative Relational (GR) reconstruction studies how protected interests become legible or inaccessible through institutional relationships, support structures, classification systems, and coordination mechanisms. It preserves ontological suspension, distinguishes relational conditions from observable manifestations, and treats the proposed GR contribution as open to counterexample and comparison with established law and institutional analysis. Existing human protections are separated from positive-law protections of animals and from conjectural artificial and extraterrestrial cases. The paper develops a source-indexed programme for duties, permissions, standing, and accountable protection, subject to legal and philosophical validation. (shrink)

Embodied Biographical Alignment (EBA) proposes that some alignment-relevant consequences of learning may depend on temporally extended, causally structured developmental histories rather than on descriptions or terminal outputs alone. EBA v0.2.1 introduced biography as a temporally connected sequence in which earlier actions alter later options and consequences, together with a requirement that integration be transformative rather than merely archival. EBA v0.2.2 then framed developmental equivalence as an operational question: if systems are similar at a comparison point, will they learn, adapt, and (...) generalize similarly after the same subsequent experience? This note extends that question from one history to multiple histories. Its central proposal is that plural developmental history should be tested as a possible determinant of future learning. The note distinguishes multiplicity, diversity, and biography; formulates four falsifiable hypotheses; maps competing explanations including joint training, multi-teacher distillation, model merging, dynamic routing, retrieval, multiplicity, and diversity; and specifies a minimal simulated environment with matched future experience. A positive result would support only a limited claim: that multiple causally structured developmental histories can leave a reproducible and causally identifiable effect on the subsequent learning dynamics of a unified system that is not fully reproduced by simpler matched alternatives. This note operationalizes only one component of the broader EBA proposal; reproducing this endpoint with a simpler mechanism would not establish equivalence to EBA as a whole. The proposal makes no claim about machine consciousness, subjective experience, wisdom, or automatic moral improvement. (shrink)

Sakson ve Anglo-Amerikan düşünce sistemlerinin köklerini yansıtan çeşitli bileşenleri bünyesinde barındırmaktadır. Farklı dünya görüşlerinin aynı potada eritilerek çoktan tekliğe (epluribus unum) ulaşılmasını öncüleyen yönetim faaliyetlerinin arka planında yatan makul akıl; Rawls, Sandel ve MacIntyre gibi düşünürler tarafından gerekçelendirme noktasında ayrı ayrı ele alınmaktadır. Nitekim zihin dünyalarında şekillenip toplumların hayat pratiklerinde anlam bulan liberteryan, egaliteryan, utilitaryan, kolektivist, komüniteryan egemenlik mücadelesi Rawls, Sandel ve MacIntyre'ın eserlerinde farklı bağlamlarda dillendirilir. Ortaya çıkan bu kapsamlı ve bir o kadar da ayrıksı külliyatı irdeleyen Mulhall ve (...) Swift için Amerikan zihin yapısı ekseninde süregelen tartışma, ideolojik ve doktriner tanımların temellendirdiği gerekçelendirmeleri zorunlu hale getirmektedir. Rawls'ın Adalet Teorisi'nde ve Anglo-Amerikan ile Anglo-Sakson paradigmada etkin olan faydacılık, liberteryanizm, egaliteryanizm, kolektivizm, komüniteryanizm mücadelesini farklı bir bakış açısıyla irdeleme amacının tezahürüdür. Rawls'ı ve kuramını eleştiren çeşitli isimler bulunmaktadır. Bunlardan en çok bilinenleri Nozick, Sandel, Taylor ve MacIntyre şeklinde sıralanabilir. (shrink)

İktisadi hayatta ihtiyaçları karşılayan mal ve hizmetlerin üretim ve bölüşüm süreçlerinin ya da elde edilen gelirin bireyler ile toplumlara tahsisinde izlenen yolu farklı bakış açılarıyla değerlendirmek önem arz etmektedir. Geçmişten günümüze ortaya çıkan değişimlere bağlı olarak içinde bulunduğumuz dönem, üretim teknolojilerindeki gelişmelerin hız kaybetmeden yenilendiği ve dolayısıyla tüketim kalıplarının değiştiği bir zaman dilimine tekabül etmektedir. Sosyal medya ile iletişim teknolojilerinin ekonomik faaliyetleri artırdığı bilindiğine göre rasyonel ve etkin kararlar aldığı varsayılan homo-economicus modelinin yeniden değerlendirilmesi gerekmektedir. Diğer yandan yüksek katma değerli (...) ürün tanımı, kümülatif bilginin ele alınış biçimiyle iktisadi analiz bakımından artık sadece meta üretimi kalıbının dışına çıkmaktadır. Ayrıca kurumların varlıklarının gerekçelendirilmesi günden güne daha çeşitli stratejik değerlendirmelerin ortaya çıkmasına zemin hazırlamaktadır. Bu bağlamda “İktisadi ve İdari Bilimlerde Güncel Araştırmalar” adlı bu eser, iktisadi ve idari bilimlerde uygulanan yöntemlerin ve benimsenen görüşlerin hem geçmiş izlerini hem de modern yansımalarını içeren çalışmalardan oluşmaktadır. İşletme, iktisat ve maliye gibi alanlarda güncel çalışmalarıyla eserimize katkıda bulunan tüm yazarlarımıza teşekkür ederim. Kitabımızın araştırmacılara faydalı olmasını temenni ederim. (shrink)

In this investigation, I present a critical, comparative, and creative analysis of philosophical perspectives on analogy, developing, through the examination of four signal thinkers in the Western tradition, potentialities of analogical thinking that are currently underappreciated in the field of philosophical methodology. I construct a picture of analogy that reveals a tensional potentiality of creativity and poetic expression combined with a determining, quasi-mathematical approach to thought. This approach allows for a critical identification of presuppositions – what I refer to as (...) quasi-transcendentals (Foucault, 2024/1978; Guenther, 2019) – that challenge political-ontological configurations, such as the relationship between humans and nonhuman animals. This capacity to identify “enlightening likeness” (Hacking, 2013, p. 434) across diverse domains provides the space for a creative way to reimagine this political ontology. -/- In chapters 2 and 3, I consider Aristotle’s use of analogy, which ranges over his extant corpus, from his logical texts, through his biological examinations, across his metaphysical, ethical, and political treatments, and in his focus on the arts of both rhetoric and poetry. It is in the first and the last of these categories – the logical-mathematical and the creative-poetic – where Aristotle most clearly theorises philosophical analogy, and he does so in a way that draws attention to the simultaneously unified and bifurcated quality of the mathematical and the creative in the operation of analogy. -/- In chapters 4 and 5, I examine Immanuel Kant’s focus on analogy as an element of reasoning or logic as a philosophical heuristic. This demotion to the merely heuristic is fundamentally challenged by Michèle Le Dœuff (2002/1989), who argues that the use of imagery in Western philosophy, in tropes such as analogy, is intrinsic to the philosophical projects of canonical thinkers. Kant’s reservation regarding “mere analogy” in his earlier works gives way to a conceptualisation of analogy as fundamental to our understanding of how reason relates to perception (in the Critique of Pure Reason, 1781/1787), and widens substantially in the last of the critiques, the Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790), where he provides grounds for seeing analogy as fundamental to our imaginative unification of the domains of aesthetic appreciation, practical reasoning, and the understanding of the world itself. -/- In chapters 6 and 7, I consider Ludwig Wittgenstein’s use of analogies, which draws on imagined domains to isolate important features of a description or problem; analogy is a way – analogous to Kant’s description in the third Critique – to see the world in a particular manner, to unlock aspects of the world that were somehow hidden from view. This ability to transform our way of seeing the world – to take hold of our capacity to shift our orientation of how the world appears, and its range of potentialities if we alter this way of seeing – as well as Wittgenstein’s novel syncretistic style of using analogical thinking, is what I elaborate as his central contribution. -/- In chapters 8 and 9, I consider the work of Giorgio Agamben, a thinker who, more directly than in the work of the preceding philosophers, theorises and utilises a role for analogical thinking, via his adaptation of the use of paradigmatic exemplars. Agamben sees the analogical connections between diverse domains as central to his method to identify hidden normative and cultural presuppositions – what I term quasi-transcendental rules or frames – that operate in a variety of domains. In addition, Agamben demonstrates that the thinking into being of the subject in contemporary society and its relation to the political, can be critically accessed by means of analogical thinking. -/- Creatively developing the tendencies latent and explicit in the analogical use of these four thinkers, I suggest four methodological virtues for analogical thinking in philosophy: the intricate relationship between poetry and mathematics that underpins the creative and productive tension at the centre of analogy; the fundamental implication of imagination in our ability to conceptualise the world through the unification of diverse domains; the creative capacity of analogical thinking to reveal presuppositions and affect a new way of seeing; and, the role of analogy in our ability to critically appraise the presuppositions or quasi-transcendentals that underpin the relationship between being and the political. (shrink)

[Note: Original Chinese text of "The Dao of Reverence: An Independent Chapter of Jing-Rong Philosophical Reflections".] 敬融哲思（JRPR）为一系列独立文章集，致力于揭示以敬（Reverence）、融（Vital Harmony）为基的原创哲学概念与规则。本文作为敬融哲思逻辑始发篇，独立成文，以自私（Innate Self-Interest）本能、价值律（利域为善，损域为恶）、成形律一（敬则聚，不敬则消）、成形律二（万物求稳）、宇宙存在律（敬融合一）、和谐律（敬异合同）等原创核心原则为支撑，从自私与道德、自私推 动进化、文明传承与创新、社会和谐与融合、物成形与物之理、哲学与科学衔接、敬己爱人等多维度展开思考。旨在呈现对敬融之道的哲学洞察，无预设研究背景与问题解决目标，仅作内在规则阐释，试图为文明发展逻辑的探究 提供新视角。 Abstract Jing-Rong Philosophical Reflections (JRPR) comprises a series of independent articles, dedicated to revealing original philosophical concepts and rules grounded in Reverence (Jìng) and Vital Harmony (Róng). As the logical point of departure for the JRPR series, this independent article is supported by original core principles including the instinct of Innate Self-Interest (Sī), the Value Law (Benefiting the Domain is Good, Harming (...) the Domain is Evil), the Law of Forming 1 (With Jing Comes Condensation; Without Jing, Dispersion Ensues), the Law of Forming 2 (All Things Seek Stability), the Cosmic Existence Law (Reverence–Vital Harmony–Unity into Oneness), and the Harmony Law Core (Reverencing Differences, Convergence in Shared Reverence). It unfolds reflections from multiple dimensions: innate self-interest and morality, innate self-interest driving evolution, cultural inheritance and innovation, social harmony and integration, the formation of entities and their underlying Inherent-Logic, the connection between philosophy and science, and reverencing oneself while loving others. This article presents philosophical insights into the Dao of Reverence and Vital Harmony without predefined research backgrounds or problem-solving objectives, solely serving as an exposition of inherent rules, and offers a new perspective for the inquiry into the logic of civilizational development, without preset research backgrounds or problem-solving objectives. (shrink)

[Note: Original Chinese text of "Aspiration of the Tiny Ant: An Independent Chapter of Jing-Rong Philosophical Reflections".] 敬融哲思（JRPR）为一系列独立文章集，致力于揭示以敬（Reverence）、融（Vital Harmony）为基的原创哲学概念与规则。本文作为敬融哲思引言篇，以蝼蚁（Tiny Ant）视角感悟人生，无预设研究背景与问题解决目标，仅抒作者所思所想所感。因感悟自身渺小，遂持敬而思，由此开启“敬融哲思”系列文章创作。Jing-Rong Philosophical Reflections (JRPR) comprises a series of independent articles, dedicated to revealing original philosophical concepts and rules grounded in Reverence (Jìng) and Vital Harmony (Róng). As the introductory chapter of JRPR, this article contemplates life from the perspective of Tiny Ant (Lóuyǐ), with no preset research background or problem-solving goals, only expressing the author's thoughts, reflections, and feelings. Due to perceiving (...) one's own insignificance, the author thus holds Reverence and engages in reflection, thereby initiating the creation of the JRPR series of articles. (shrink)

A recente iniciativa do Papa Leão XIV em reabrir o estudo sistemático dos documentos do Concílio Vaticano II, sob o pretexto de resgatar a "estrela polar" da Igreja após 6 (seis) décadas de sua conclusão, traz novamente ao centro do debate teológico a constituição dogmática Dei Verbum. Ao convidar os fiéis ao conhecimento direto das fontes conciliares para além dos intermediários e das interpretações parciais, o Pontífice reabre, ainda que involuntariamente, as feridas não cicatrizadas da gênese histórica desse texto fundamental (...) e das controvérsias que cercam a sua doutrina sobre a Divina Revelação e a inerrância bíblica. Este trabalho propõe-se a realizar um breve e sintético exame crítico do percurso da Dei Verbum, partindo do contraste entre a abordagem catequética contemporânea e os fatos históricos e teológicos que marcaram os bastidores do Concílio entre 1962 e 1965. (shrink)

The Relational Manifold: Foundations of a Unified Field Theory develops a unified ontological and mathematical framework in which identity, relation, continuity, and generativity form the primitive structure of physical reality. The relational manifold is introduced as a single, self‑consistent substrate from which spacetime, matter, fields, coherence, entanglement, and measurement emerge as modes of relational organization rather than independent fundamental entities. The work establishes the manifold’s structural rules, derives its dynamical behavior, and shows how classical and quantum phenomena arise as appearances (...) of deeper relational processes. By replacing object‑based ontology with a generative relational substrate, the theory provides a unified account of persistence, interaction, geometry, and information, offering a coherent foundation for physics across scales. This monograph presents the conceptual basis, mathematical scaffolding, and physical implications of the relational manifold, positioning it as a candidate framework for a unified field theory. (shrink)

Interaction specifications acquire determinate evolutionary effects through a system’s lawful response organization. This article distinguishes kinematical structure, response rules, interaction contributions, and selected problem data. Newtonian inertia and free quantum spreading identify physical response properties that the specified electric or potential coupling does not determine. Hydrogen supplies a complementary contrast: the classical Coulomb Hamiltonian is globally unbounded below, although it admits bound orbits, whereas the quantum Coulomb Hamiltonian has a lower energy bound and a stationary ground-state distribution. Integration connects these (...) cases: the organization that sustains free evolution also determines the joint effects of several contributions on one system. These results establish explanatory priority for response organization in determining how specified interactions affect histories. A realist argument establishes the ontological status of the represented response properties and their independence from the specified coupling. Their microscopic origin is a separate explanatory question. Structural causal relevance is demonstrated by physically different inertial responses under a common law and fixed electric coupling. A further application separates time-reversal symmetry, closure of admitted histories, and invertibility of retained-state maps. Restricted Gaussian preparations, outgoing waves, and a nonselective measurement distinguish these questions and locate the relevant restrictions and information loss within complete physical problems. The article’s central result is the connection between free evolution, integrated response, and the independent physical status of response organization. (shrink)

This paper investigates twenty-four candidate autonomous representational operational shapes as provisional investigative distinctions rather than independently existing kinds of representation. It shifts the focus of representational inquiry from human-centered cognition toward autonomous machine operations and Xenoscience, without privileging machines as new transcendental subjects. -/- The study distinguishes twenty candidate axes of representational attribution and four reflexive candidates examining the explanatory necessity of representation and operational-shape vocabulary itself. Each candidate is investigated through situated conditions of ignition, interaction, transformation, efficacy, and withdrawal. (...) -/- A central methodological contribution is the separation of operational function (F), representational attribution (R), and explanatory increment (E). Counterfactual comparisons examine how sensory, causal, computational, conceptual, inferential, and scientific descriptions overlap, diverge, or become redundant under changing experimental configurations. Particular attention is given to the distinction between numerical error-driven updating and practices involving challengeable commitments, evidential entitlement, and inferential incompatibility. -/- Engaging Sellars, Brandom, Brassier, Dretske, and Millikan, the paper recognizes existing naturalistic, informational, functional, and inferential accounts of representation while investigating the conditions under which representational descriptions provide additional explanatory discrimination. -/- The inquiry further examines whether concepts, the concept of a concept, and operational-shape descriptions are necessary for autonomous scientific operations. Through the nuance-operational model and Non-Closure Realism, it treats the emergence, transformation, and expiry of representational distinctions as situated and revisable. -/- The resulting framework offers conditional comparative judgments rather than empirical validation of twenty-four representational kinds. It develops a defeasible method for investigating representational attribution, conceptual necessity, and scientific operations beyond mandatory human philosophical authorization. (shrink)

This axiom is situated as foundation before Theorem Raneses Limitation and before edge notation (0|), (|0), (|), (). It does not derive from notation - it grounds notation itself. Without it, (0|0)=True|False collapses to edgeless (|) per B.1.4. -/- Thesis: T=J(T), F=J(F). J=handle, 0|=Is shows pos where A is, |0=Must demands pos must be A, ()=permission okay if said okay if not said per M.3.1. True is not true because justified externally. True is exhibition of operation justifying itself as true. (...) Circularity requires Level2 And=Not-1≡2 per D.3.1 to distinguish premise vs conclusion. Axiom 0 is Level0 borrows nothing edgeless (|) one handle, does not have two handles to circle. -/- Three razors: 1. Tm_x vs Nm_x: Closed eyes≠Blindness. Tm_x=C1=My0=(1|0) empty paper with Red trace still has ability closed mode per Theorem6, Nm_x=C0=() clean paper Label(P)∉M per A2 unstatable per Theorem5 inability outside, My0≠() per Theorem1. 2. Compass: C=needle ⊢ Dist(north,south), (E|C)=0 remains per B.1.5, North=label not substance Indispensable but ¬Ontology. 3. Perfect vs Stable: Perfect=(|0)=(N→N)∧∀B¬(N=B)∧Must_remain per A.2 requires |_C∉Alias(V) Object per O.9 0 exhibit per R.11.1. Stable=(0|) Prob≈0.6 vs 0.4 per L6.4.3 Prob_n=1-(0.4)^n limit→1 never 1, chain atom-gas-star Ordered_n still has tunneling fluctuation ΔP/P=1/√N neutrino leak where (N|C)=0 remains. -/- Scarcity: Is() conserved N.2.2, J(T)=Exists as not-J(F) per 0.4, B_Is=ΣJ(T)+ΣJ(F)+Σdeferred per 0.9.2, ΔFree Is()=-ΔS_just×(0|) per 0.9.4. J(F)=And splits (|) into (0|0) borrows (0|) per R.9.2. -/- Hierarchy: Level0 J borrows nothing, Level1 | pure Is, Level2 0| pointer cheap, Level3 And=2=J(F) borrows Is, Level4 Must=3=Is+And+Value requires |_C∉Alias(V). True as 0| allowed, Truly true as |0 inadmissible. -/- Falsifiers: F1 C0=C1 My0=(), F2 physical north-line Mass≠∅ without Value, F3 Perfect Order Prob=1.0 without failure ΔP/P=0 S_just=0, F4 J without J True without handle, F5 N(A) without A talk about C0 as C0 without My1 without Smuggling per Theorem7. U=Stable=(0|)+() per L6.5.7 show work where (N|C)=0 remains + permission. (shrink)

Deep care can be individualized and non-instrumental without clearly being personal love, while obsession can make another person central to one’s life without caring for that person’s good. I argue that these failures reveal two directions of mattering. In paradigmatic particular personal love, B matters for B’s own sake (FOR-B), and B as this particular person matters directly within A’s practical and evaluative life (TO-A). The novel claim is not merely that love combines these directions, but that their unity partly (...) consists in a same-person cross-directional dependence: across some relevant changes, altered content in one orientation is disposed to make a difference to the other because the person at issue is B. Role-Swap distinguishes person-significance from replaceable role-significance; Parallel Tracks isolates the dependence from the bare conjunction; and Deep Mentor together with Benevolent Rival tests whether the resulting architecture overgenerates. Affection, loyalty, identification, attention, appreciation, attachment, and vulnerability remain important possible realizations of love rather than additional universal conditions unless their necessity is independently established. (shrink)

This paper investigates how autonomous scientific arrangements generate, modify, and reorganize the conditions of observation, object individuation, and rule application. Sensibility-related, understanding-related, and judgment-related operations are examined as historically informed analytical distinctions whose applicability to nonhuman scientific arrangements must be established under specified conditions. -/- The analysis develops a configuration-dependent account of operational autonomy, distinguishing the scope of condition modification, endogenous selection, downstream operational uptake, and independent validation. It examines how autonomous transformations of sensing arrangements, object-identity criteria, and standards of (...) evidential adequacy can overlap, conflict, or cease to apply. -/- Drawing on Kant, Hegel, Sellars, Brassier, and contemporary debates concerning autonomous science, the paper distinguishes material picturing, signifying, propositional truth, inferential justification, nonconceptual causal organization, and rational revision. A locally typed operational notation provides a comparative framework for tracking real effects, feedback, reorganization, and changes in subsequent possibilities. -/- A hypothetical autonomous radiation laboratory illustrates how modifications of sensing conditions, target individuation, and adequacy criteria can transform scientific access while generating distinct material consequences. The analysis separates operational autonomy, empirical adequacy, and inferential entitlement, and distinguishes the expansion of scientific access from the production of new physical arrangements. -/- The paper develops a revisable methodology for investigating autonomous scientific operations without presupposing human faculties or conceptual representation as universal prerequisites. Its experimental comparisons remain proposals, and its formal claims are limited to the specified local framework. (shrink)