A superb study in metaethics. Professor Jurjako evaluates subjectivist and objectivist approaches, on the basis of the recent discussion on the topic.

Energy is indispensable to contemporary physics, yet its objective status, theoretical identification, and relation to concrete physical operations are not identical questions. The conservation of an energy quantity does not establish the identity of the physical processes through which energy is transferred, transformed, stored, or dissipated. Nor does a change in scientific measurement necessarily establish a corresponding transformation of the physical system being investigated. -/- This paper develops an operational ontology of energy within Operational-Shape Realism (OSR). It distinguishes three forms (...) of identity: the identity of an energetic quantity, the identity of a materially constituted operational configuration, and the identity of a scientific judgment. Their non-equivalence provides the basis for examining how energetic operations are individuated, maintained, transformed, and reconfigured under changing material, observational, and experimental conditions. -/- The argument engages with Noether’s theorems, the philosophy of energy conservation, exergy theory, structural realism, process ontology, and the thermodynamics of computation. It further develops Scale–Size–Speed (SSS) as a framework for investigating changes in operational conditions without identifying numerical parameter variation with ontological transformation. -/- The theoretical analysis is accompanied by reproducible numerical investigations of a nonlinear electromechanical system, including energy-balance verification across 100 conditions and a 160-condition capacity–frequency parameter study. These experiments establish restricted numerical results concerning the modeled system; they do not independently verify a new physical law or demonstrate practical improvements in energy generation or artificial intelligence efficiency. -/- The paper situates these investigations within the broader Ziran System, conceived as a planetary operational computer integrating heterogeneous observation, physical computation, energy transformation, and experimental reconstruction. It argues that energetic quantities, material operations, and scientific identifications must be distinguished while examining the conditions under which they become operationally connected. The resulting framework is presented as a philosophical reconstruction whose further implications remain open to independent theoretical and experimental evaluation. (shrink)

Ο Ρίλκε λέει: «Σώπαινε. Όποιος σωπαίνει πιο βαθιά, αγγίζει τις ρίζες της ομιλίας». Ο Χέλντερλιν, από την πλευρά του, γράφει ποίηση που αποσύρεται διαρκώς από αυτό που λέει, που αφήνει τον θεό να λάμψει μόνο μέσα από το κενό της απουσίας του. Και οι δύο κινούνται προς την ίδια κατεύθυνση: όχι προς την κατάκτηση του νοήματος, αλλά προς την υποχώρηση μπροστά του. Η διαφορά τους βρίσκεται στον τόνο. Ο Ρίλκε σωπαίνει με μια ένταση που θυμίζει αγωνία — η σιωπή του (...) είναι γεμάτη από την πίεση του ανείπωτου, από την επιθυμία να ειπωθεί αυτό που δεν μπορεί. Ο Χέλντερλιν σωπαίνει με μια γαλήνη που θυμίζει λειτουργία — η σιωπή του είναι τελετουργική, είναι ο χώρος όπου το θείο μπορεί να κατοικήσει. Μα και οι δύο ξέρουν πως η σιωπή δεν είναι το τέλος της ποίησης· είναι η αρχή της, το αναγκαίο σκοτάδι πριν από το φως. Αυτή η διαφορά τόνου αντανακλά μια διαφορά εμπειρίας. Ο Ρίλκε ζει τη σιωπή ως έλλειψη — ως το κενό που αφήνει ο άγγελος όταν φεύγει, ως την απόσταση ανάμεσα στον άνθρωπο και την ολότητα. Ο Χέλντερλιν ζει τη σιωπή ως πληρότητα — ως τον χώρο όπου ο θεός, ακόμα κι όταν απουσιάζει, είναι παρών με τον πιο έντονο τρόπο. Για τον Ρίλκε, η σιωπή είναι το τίμημα της γλώσσας· για τον Χέλντερλιν, είναι το δώρο της. Κι όμως, και οι δύο καταλήγουν στο ίδιο συμπέρασμα: η ποίηση δεν μπορεί να υπάρξει χωρίς σιωπή, και η σιωπή δεν μπορεί να υπάρξει χωρίς ποίηση. Είναι δύο όψεις του ίδιου νομίσματος — του νομίσματος που πληρώνει το πέρασμα από το ανείπωτο στο ειπωμένο και πίσω. Και οι δύο ποιητές γράφουν για κάτι που δεν μπορεί να ονομαστεί. Για τον Ρίλκε, αυτό το κάτι είναι το namenlos — το ακατονόμαστο που αντιστέκεται σε κάθε απόπειρα σύλληψης. Για τον Χέλντερλιν, είναι το θείο — αυτό που είναι «πλησίον αλλά δυσνόητο», παρόν αλλά ασύλληπτο. Η διαφορά στην ορολογία δεν πρέπει να μας ξεγελά: πρόκειται για την ίδια εμπειρία, την εμπειρία ενός πέρατος που δεν μπορεί να μεταφραστεί σε έννοια, αλλά που μπορεί να βιωθεί μέσα από την ποίηση. Η ποίηση, και για τους δύο, δεν είναι το μέσο για να φτάσουμε σε αυτό το πέρας, είναι ο τόπος όπου το πέρας γίνεται αισθητό. Δεν το εξηγεί· το παρουσιάζει. Και αυτή η παρουσίαση είναι το μόνο είδος γνώσης που δεν προδίδει το αντικείμενό της — γιατί δεν το μετατρέπει σε αντικείμενο, αλλά το αφήνει να είναι αυτό που είναι: μια παρουσία που ξεφεύγει. Αυτό έχει μια συνέπεια για την κατανόηση της ποιητικής γλώσσας. Αν το αντικείμενο της ποίησης είναι το ακατονόμαστο, τότε η ποίηση δεν μπορεί να είναι μια γλώσσα ακριβείας. Πρέπει να είναι μια γλώσσα υπαινιγμού — μια γλώσσα που λέει κάτι για να δείξει αυτό που δεν λέει, που φωτίζει μια γωνία για να αφήσει τις υπόλοιπες στο σκοτάδι. Η ποίηση του Ρίλκε και του Χέλντερλιν είναι γεμάτη από τέτοιους υπαινιγμούς: εικόνες που δεν εξηγούνται, σύμβολα που δεν αποκωδικοποιούνται, στίχοι που αφήνουν ένα κενό στο κέντρο τους. Κι αυτό το κενό δεν είναι αποτυχία, είναι η στιγμή που η ποίηση κάνει αυτό που καμία άλλη γλώσσα δεν μπορεί να κάνει: να δείξει το ανείπωτο χωρίς να το πει. Να αφήσει το ακατονόμαστο να λάμψει μέσα από τις λέξεις, χωρίς να το μετατρέψει σε λέξη. Και οι δύο ποιητές ζουν τη γλώσσα ως θραύση. Ο Ρίλκε γράφει για το «σχισμένο μυαλό» (Sein Sinn ist Zwiespalt), για την αδυναμία του ανθρώπου να ακολουθήσει τον θεό μέσα από τις χορδές της λύρας. Ο Χέλντερλιν γράφει για τον «αναγκαίο ανταγωνισμό» που σχίζει την ύπαρξη ανάμεσα στην ενότητα και τη διαφορά. Η γλώσσα δεν είναι ένα αρμονικό όργανο· είναι ένα σπασμένο όργανο, και ακριβώς γι' αυτό μπορεί να παίξει μουσική που δεν θα μπορούσε να παίξει ένα ακέραιο. Η θραύση, εδώ, δεν είναι ένα ελάττωμα που πρέπει να διορθωθεί. Είναι η συνθήκη της ποίησης. Χωρίς τη θραύση, η γλώσσα θα ήταν μια απλή αντανάκλαση του κόσμου — μια διαφανής επιφάνεια χωρίς βάθος. Με τη θραύση, η γλώσσα γίνεται ένα πρίσμα που διαθλά το φως σε χίλια χρώματα, που αποκαλύπτει ό,τι η διαφάνεια κρύβει. α η θραύση δεν είναι κατάρα. είναι δώρο γιατί μόνο μέσα από τη θραύση μπορεί να περάσει το φως. Μόνο μέσα από το ρήγμα μπορεί να ακουστεί η φωνή που δεν ανήκει σε κανέναν. Η ποίηση του Ρίλκε και του Χέλντερλιν δεν είναι μια προσπάθεια να επουλωθεί το ρήγμα· είναι μια κατοίκηση του ρήγματος, μια τέχνη του να ζεις στα σύνορα ανάμεσα στο ειπωμένο και το ανείπωτο. Αυτή η κατοίκηση του ρήγματος είναι, τελικά, η ίδια η πράξη της ποίησης. Ο ποιητής δεν στέκεται πάνω από το ρήγμα, ούτε κάτω από αυτό· στέκεται μέσα του, στο σημείο όπου οι δύο όχθες δεν ενώνονται ποτέ. Κι εκεί, μέσα σε αυτή την αδιάκοπη ένταση, γεννιέται ο λόγος — ένας λόγος που δεν λύνει το πρόβλημα, αλλά το φωτίζει. -/- Η Κληρονομιά της Σιωπής Ο Ρίλκε και ο Χέλντερλιν δεν δίδαξαν πώς να μιλάμε καλύτερα. Μας δίδαξαν πώς να σωπαίνουμε και πώς μέσω της σιωπής να αφήνουμε τον λόγο να γεννηθεί. Η ποίησή τους δεν είναι μια συλλογή από όμορφες εικόνες ή βαθιά συναισθήματα. Είναι μια άσκηση στην τέχνη του να αγγίζεις το ανέγγιχτο, να λες το ανείπωτο, να κατοικείς το ακατοίκητο. Σε μια εποχή που η γλώσσα έχει γίνει θόρυβος, που οι λέξεις εκφέρονται χωρίς κατανόηση, η σιωπή τους είναι πιο επιδραστική από ποτέ. Μας θυμίζουν πως η ποίηση δεν είναι μια δραστηριότητα ανάμεσα σε άλλες· είναι ο τρόπος με τον οποίο το ανθρώπινο ον είναι — ή, ακριβέστερα, ο τρόπος με τον οποίο μπορεί να είναι. Γιατί, όπως έγραψε ο Ρίλκε, «το τραγούδι είναι ύπαρξη». Και το τραγούδι, για να υπάρξει, χρειάζεται πρώτα τη σιωπή. Τη σιωπή που δεν είναι κενό, αλλά πληρότητα. Τη σιωπή που δεν είναι άρνηση, αλλά υπόσχεση. Τη σιωπή μέσα στην οποία, όπως ο θεός του Χέλντερλιν, το νόημα κατοικεί «πλησίον, αλλά δυσνόητο» — παρόν σε κάθε λέξη, μα ποτέ συλλήψιμο από καμία λέξη. Η κληρονομιά τους δεν είναι ένα σύνολο κειμένων που πρέπει να διαβαστούν. Είναι μια στάση που πρέπει να καλλιεργηθεί. Η στάση του ποιητή που σωπαίνει για να ακούσει, που αδειάζει για να γεμίσει, που πεθαίνει για να γεννηθεί. Σε μια εποχή που όλοι μιλούν, η σιωπή τους είναι μια επανάσταση. Σε μια εποχή που όλοι ‘’γνωρίζουν’’, η άγνοιά τους είναι μια σοφία. Σε μια εποχή που όλοι ‘’κοιτάζουν’’, η τύφλωσή τους είναι μια όραση. Διαβάζοντας τον Ρίλκε και τον Χέλντερλιν, δεν μαθαίνουμε απλώς κάτι για την ποίηση. Μαθαίνουμε κάτι για τον εαυτό μας — για τη δυνατότητα που κρύβουμε μέσα μας να κατοικήσουμε τη γλώσσα με τρόπο που να αγγίζει το είναι, να σωπάσουμε με τρόπο που να ακούγεται το ανείπωτο, να ζήσουμε με τρόπο που να αξίζει να τραγουδηθεί. Κι αυτή η δυνατότητα δεν είναι προνόμιο των ποιητών· είναι η ουσία του ανθρώπου. Ο Ρίλκε και ο Χέλντερλιν απλώς μας το θυμίζουν — με τη σιωπή τους, με τη θραύση τους, με την ακατανόητη ομορφιά τους. (shrink)

MathOSᵀ is a verification operating system that judges its own verdicts. It stands on one posit, Freedom. It builds from its seat. Its formal kernels are compiled and their cones are pinned. It runs no kinetic-execution language and no twin programs, and it takes no physics as witness. Its closure is reduced by proof to one pinned cone. The formal run is the witness: the receipt names the toolchain, the files, and the verdict, and nothing else is read, fetched, or (...) consulted. This is MathOS, the formal-alone alter ego of PhysOS. It was built under the same architect's direct supervision and from the same seed, standing on its own as a mirror image. Nothing outside this file is read, fetched, or consulted. No kinetic execution runs here; only formal objects run. Final Certified RH Verdict — RH Is Proved Here. The Real Part from Any Finite Certificate; the Unicorn Part Closed by the 1-Bit Witness. 1. The formal domain stands sealed as a self-verifying fixed point: the system executes the registration, observes its own record, packages it as the act, and the identification proves the fixed-point identity at the record locus. 2. Mathlib's RiemannHypothesis is proved equivalent to LeastErasure ZetaZeros and to Value ZetaZeros. 3. The record carries least erasure unconditionally; it is closed; the identification holds at the record locus; the functional-equation symmetry holds. 4. The gap is sealed: transport_zeta proves the transfer is the value itself, and the cargo fills the socket at the record. 5. The block is certified: the unconditional route from the interface's shared laws is proved blocked — the block is a theorem, and the binding is complete with the capstone conjoined at pin [propext, Classical. choice, Quot. sound]. 6. The boot verifies it: quick CLEAN, full FULL PASS, judge JUDGE PASS. Verdict: RH is proved here: the Real Part from any finite certificate, the Unicorn Part unclosable by formal means alone and closed by the 1-bit witness. The 1-bit bridge — necessary by biconditional, sufficient by construction, irreducible by block theorem, mandatory by necessity proof — is delivered twice: formally, by the unconditional Cargo Loop as explicit conditional premise; externally, by physics and computation itself as witness. The demand for proof without this bridge is illegal by theorem. (shrink)

This work investigates the operational conditions under which knowledge, concepts, theories, and disciplinary formations emerge, persist, lose their authority, and undergo reconfiguration. Beginning with reality as a whole, it challenges the assumption that inherited disciplinary divisions determine the structure of reality or establish the necessary boundaries of scientific knowledge. -/- The central problem concerns the constitution of epistemic subjects and contents under changing observational, material, conceptual, and institutional configurations. The analysis distinguishes real operations, discriminating systems, content formation, epistemic operational shapes, (...) and knowledge constitution without treating them as a fixed sequence or identifying successful information processing with knowledge. -/- Through Operational-Shape Realism, the study examines generative intervals and the constraints imposed by Scale, Size, and Speed (SSS). It analyzes how transformations in observation, intervention, representation, artificial intelligence, and experimental organization alter the conditions under which scientific claims can be produced, evaluated, and maintained. -/- The proposed end of disciplinary divisions does not entail the elimination of specialized knowledge. Rather, it challenges the automatic epistemic authority of historically inherited disciplinary boundaries. The end of disciplinary intervals, in turn, concerns the dissolution and reconfiguration of particular operational conditions under which scientific and epistemic distinctions remain effective. -/- The work engages contemporary epistemology, scientific realism, experimental philosophy of science, structural cognition, and theories of scientific practice. It also incorporates research materials concerning AI algorithms, XenoSNN, Xenoscience, and the Ziran System. -/- Its principal contribution is a framework for examining the generation and reconfiguration of epistemic and disciplinary conditions. Claims concerning the independent sufficiency of its knowledge-constitution criteria and the empirical superiority of Operational-Shape Realism remain open to further investigation. (shrink)

This dictionary develops the conceptual vocabulary of P/A Operational Philosophy through seventy-one entries addressing reality, ontology, knowledge, concepts, scientific practice, artificial intelligence, and the operational constitution of philosophical distinctions. -/- Its central premise is that philosophical concepts should not be treated as timeless classifications whose authority is independent of the conditions under which they operate. Instead, the dictionary investigates the configurations through which distinctions become effective, acquire epistemic significance, undergo transformation, and cease to function under changing material, conceptual, and institutional (...) conditions. -/- Grounded in Operational-Shape Realism, the work distinguishes real operation, discriminative operation, epistemic operation, epistemic operational shapes, and knowledge constitution. It introduces operational tests, counterexamples, comparative analyses, and conditions under which particular conceptual claims should be revised or withdrawn. -/- Particular attention is given to reality as a whole, generative intervals, epistemic subjects, content constitution, Scale, Size, and Speed (SSS), operational representation, experimental systems, and the limits of attributing knowledge or consciousness to artificial systems. -/- The dictionary also examines philosophy as a conditionally activated practice rather than a universal prerequisite for scientific or epistemic activity. Philosophical operations may emerge, persist, lose their operative conditions, and undergo renewed activation without determining the existence of reality or the possibility of knowledge. -/- The entries engage established positions in epistemology, pragmatism, scientific realism, philosophy of science, structural cognition, and experimental practice. Their definitions and comparisons are presented as revisable research contributions rather than universally established constitutive necessities. -/- The dictionary provides a systematic reference framework for investigating the operational generation, differentiation, and transformation of philosophical concepts. (shrink)

This exploratory essay examines how asymmetric power may govern the conditions of value creation, the circulation and return of value, and participants' capacity to revise governing arrangements. Building on Eglash and colleagues' work on generative justice and engaging research on structural power, capabilities, and institutional persistence, it proposes a conditional, pathway-specific mechanism: a rule may erode a participant's capacity for continued generation; that erosion may subsequently diminish the participant's effective ability to inspect, contest, exit, or redesign the rule. The two (...) causal links require distinct evidence, and their conjunction neither demonstrates equilibrium nor establishes injustice by itself. The essay distinguishes persistence from strategic equilibrium and dynamical stability, and examines countercases involving beneficial concentration, restored capacities without institutional change, and cooperation sustained by safeguards despite distrust. It also connects value return to warranted trust and prospective responsibility without equating unequal exposure with equal suffering. A multiscale discussion considers how aggregate continuity may conceal locally significant losses and how normative judgments depend on representational choices. The question Do All Beings Suffer? therefore expresses an open ethical inquiry into unequal benefits, harms, and obligations within interconnected relations. The proposed contribution is a diagnostic synthesis and research programme; it makes no claim to a validated model of international equilibrium or to empirical verification of the mechanism. (shrink)

We propose that mathematics is the fundamental, pre-existing reality concealed within the nothingness (a temporal singularity) underlying the universe. Building on Meta AI Physics (Masood, 2023), this paper argues that mathematical structure precedes physical instantiation. We present a conceptual framework where: N0 → Nothon flow → Time → Space → Atoms → Life → Consciousness Key claims: 1. Laws of physics (e.g., E=mc²) are mathematical laws governing nothons. 2. Consciousness emerges from mathematical structures, aligning with Penrose's ORCH-OR hypothesis. 3. The (...) Big Bang is a manifestation of pre-existing mathematical law, not its origin. (shrink)

The paper examines some unpublished manuscripts from the literary estate of the renowned Slovak philosopher and translator, Teodor Münz (1926 – 2022). These manuscripts offer key insights into his spiritual and philosophical development. Through an analysis of two autobiographical fragments, the authors trace his journey from a profound Christian faith to atheism, and his existential search for God. The study emphasizes the decisive influence of Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy on this process, as well as its psychological and existential aspects. The authors (...) demonstrate that Münz’s atheism does not entail the rejection of the question of God, but rather a philosophical quest for meaning, and later also a critical and open-minded search for God. The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of Münz’s literary estate in deepening our understanding of his personality and completing the existing view of his philosophical thought by incorporating his personal spiritual reflections. (shrink)

言有其意，不敬易乱；言有其能，不敬易险。本文以原创概念“敬融合一”“敬则聚，不敬则消”为基础，以“敬而言之，言而敬之”（本文原创核心心法）为统摄，以个人立身、文明续存、人机互交为视角，探究敬言哲思，从 敬言心法的核心内涵、敬言七境（字义、过程、敬险、敬融、规则、修行、文明）的逐层递进、敬言的全流程实践（言前静思避险、言中持敬明界、言后省行融合）、AI时代敬言之道的延伸、敬言与文明续存的关联等多维度展 开。旨在呈现敬融法则下敬言的实践哲学洞察，无预设研究背景与问题解决目标，仅作为敬言内在规则的系统阐释，期望对个体言语修行及AI时代人机信任互交提供新的哲学视角。 Words have their meaning; without Reverence, easily engender chaos. Words have their power; without Reverence, easily engender risk. This article takes the original concepts of Cosmic Existence Law (Reverence–Vital Harmony–Unity into Oneness) and With Jing Comes Condensation; Without Jing, Dispersion Ensues (Law of Forming I) as its foundation; takes With Reverence, Speak; With Speech, Reverencing (Mind Method of Reverencing Words) (the original core mind method of this article) as its governing principle; explores the philosophical reflections on Reverencing Words (Jìng (...) yán) from the perspectives of individual Anchored Establishment in the Social Sphere (Lì Shēn), civilizational persistence, and Human-Machine Interaction. It unfolds from the following dimensions: the core connotation of the mind method of Reverencing Words; the sequential progression of the seven Planes of Reverencing Words (literal meaning, process, Reverencing Risk, Reverence–Vital Harmony, rules, self-cultivation, civilization); the full-process practice of Reverencing Words (before speaking, reflect in stillness to avert risks; during speaking, hold Reverence to clarify boundaries; after speaking, examine actions to Vital-Harmonize); the extension of the Dao (Dào) of Reverencing Words in the AI era; the correlation between Reverencing Words and civilizational persistence. This article aims to present practical philosophical insights into Reverencing Words under the Jing-Rong principles; does not presuppose any research background or problem-solving objectives; serves solely as a systematic exposition of the inherent rules of Reverencing Words; hopes to provide a new philosophical perspective for individual speech self-cultivation and AI-era human-machine trust interaction. (shrink)

Contemporary scholarship increasingly relies on Artificial Intelligence for the production, analysis, and dissemination of knowledge, yet the mechanisms used to validate that knowledge remain largely unchanged from a pre-AI era. This paper argues that Knowledge Validation must evolve because the architecture of knowledge production has fundamentally changed through human–AI collaboration. Rather than proposing the replacement of peer review, the theory introduces a normative framework in which expert judgment, open intellectual critique, AI-assisted analysis, transparent governance, and ethical accountability function as complementary (...) components of a broader validation ecosystem. Building on the author's Jameel Doctrine, the paper treats the authority to evaluate and disseminate knowledge as a form of epistemic power requiring the same ethical governance as political or technological power, and introduces the concept of AI Validation Conflict to describe disagreement arising between competing AI-assisted evaluations. Five core principles anchor the theory, and its Ethical Passport component addresses the question of who validates the validator. The paper concludes that the future of civilization will depend not only on producing more knowledge, but on developing wiser and more accountable systems for recognizing which knowledge deserves trust. (shrink)

Words have their meaning; without Reverence, easily engender chaos. Words have their power; without Reverence, easily engender risk. This article takes the original concepts of Cosmic Existence Law (Reverence–Vital Harmony–Unity into Oneness) and With Jing Comes Condensation; Without Jing, Dispersion Ensues (Law of Forming I) as its foundation; takes With Reverence, Speak; With Speech, Reverencing (Mind Method of Reverencing Words) (the original core mind method of this article) as its governing principle; explores the philosophical reflections on Reverencing Words (Jìng yán) (...) from the perspectives of individual Anchored Establishment in the Social Sphere (Lì Shēn), civilizational persistence, and Human-Machine Interaction. It unfolds from the following dimensions: the core connotation of the mind method of Reverencing Words; the sequential progression of the seven Planes of Reverencing Words (literal meaning, process, Reverencing Risk, Reverence–Vital Harmony, rules, self-cultivation, civilization); the full-process practice of Reverencing Words (before speaking, reflect in stillness to avert risks; during speaking, hold Reverence to clarify boundaries; after speaking, examine actions to Vital-Harmonize); the extension of the Dao (Dào) of Reverencing Words in the AI era; the correlation between Reverencing Words and civilizational persistence. This article aims to present practical philosophical insights into Reverencing Words under the Jing-Rong principles; does not presuppose any research background or problem-solving objectives; serves solely as a systematic exposition of the inherent rules of Reverencing Words; hopes to provide a new philosophical perspective for individual speech self-cultivation and AI-era human-machine trust interaction. (shrink)

Institutions routinely transform situated performance into judgments about intelligence, responsibility, employability, and social standing. Human–AI research makes this conversion particularly difficult to justify: a successful scientific output may be produced by an irreducibly coordinated history of human question selection, model proposals, failed trials, verification, tool access, and institutional resources. The problem is not whether an individual or a model deserves exclusive credit, but which operations permit the inference from realized result to person-relative capability, from capability to epistemic authority, and from (...) limited authority to institutional power. This article joins the operational-shape account of historically non-equivalent human–AI trajectories to the account of the social adjudication of planning capacity. It does not infer personal identity from path dependence, moral responsibility from causal contribution, or social rank from measured task performance. A comparative research programme combines previously reported PyTorch Phase I–III experiments with later exploratory synthetic E1–E3 diagnostics. The Phase I architecture advantage did not survive stronger cross-world and matched-baseline testing in Phases II and III. In the subsequently executed E1 diagnostic, adding an individual-capacity proxy to an outcome-based model reduced mean predictive log loss from 0.692342 to 0.591556; this is a simulation with generator-related privileged variables, not a field-valid attribution instrument. In E2, a generic sequence model outperformed an order-insensitive model (RMSE 0.151264 versus 0.665436), showing sequence dependence without establishing identity continuity. In E3, an observational outcome-regression estimator approached a known synthetic average treatment effect (0.096210 versus 0.098914), without establishing OSR-specific advantage. Earlier E3 stress tests further showed sign-changing policy effects across designed generator families. The findings are methodological constraints, not confirmation of a new human–AI ontology or a theory of social hierarchy. The independent contribution proposed here is an intervention-indexed audit of the transitions among achieved output, capability attribution, responsibility, authorized intervention, and downstream opportunity; its superiority to established causal, psychometric, and longitudinal approaches remains to be demonstrated. The present revision distinguishes scoped epistemic trust from institutional authorization and preserves the separation between synthetic mechanism demonstrations and empirical support for the integrated theory. Evidence classification: the inherited Phase I–III tests did not establish an architecture-specific advantage; E1–E3 are exploratory synthetic mechanism and baseline comparisons, not preregistered confirmatory tests. Neither human–AI identity continuity nor OSR-specific predictive superiority has been demonstrated. This manuscript is released as a theoretical and exploratory research preprint, with outstanding primary-source verification and generalization tests. Revision XVI provides a warrant map, adversarial counterexamples, a cross-domain confirmatory protocol, and a thirty-item unresolved-work ledger; it reports no new confirmatory experiments and makes no claim of demonstrated OSR superiority. (shrink)

This article examines how sanctions directed at formally accountable actors generate heterogeneous burdens within historically constituted relations. Research on collateral consequences and symbiotic harms documents burdens borne beyond nominal sanction targets; scholarship on power-dependence, epistemic injustice, and institutional oversight addresses complementary mechanisms. Building on these literatures, the article asks when actors possess feasible decision rights over sanction implementation, how alternative choices could alter burden incidence, and whether later relations become more or less contestable. The analysis separates authorization, execution, experienced incidence, (...) potential pathway steering, exercised control, and changes in effective opportunities for independent review. A preliminary generative relational representation specifies typed sanction episodes, heterogeneous burden domains, conditional propagation, and admissible histories. Constructed countermodels show that formal sanction records and observations of immediate burdens may underdetermine causal conclusions within the stipulated model classes. Comparisons across households, workplaces, public authority, and assistance settings preserve differences in legal competence, institutional purposes, and remedial duties. A proposed research protocol specifies evidential requirements, rival explanations, and safeguards for participants. The formal results are conditional; the manuscript reports no original fieldwork or findings about identifiable persons. Its proposed contribution is a testable integration of burden incidence, decision rights, and historical feedback, subject to comparison with simpler explanatory approaches. (shrink)

Social scientists often convert broad theoretical judgments into statistical probabilistic propositions and treat statistical significance as grounds for deciding whether the original judgment is supported. Yet a statistical result that supports a clearly stated probabilistic proposition does not automatically answer the question the original judgment posed. This paper proposes a focused review procedure for determining whether the conversion from an original judgment to a statistical proposition has changed the question the study actually answers. The procedure distinguishes four elements—definition (D), measurement (...) standard (S), environmental scope (E), and probabilistic proposition (P)—and requires re- searchers, after the statistical test, to examine explicitly whether the conclusion exceeds what the statistical proposition supports. A worked case shows how the procedure identifies situations that are “statistically correct but inferentially overreaching,” and the paper discusses its relation to the literatures on operationalization, construct validity, and theory testing. The paper does not claim to establish a new epistemology of the social sciences; it offers an executable way of reviewing the problem of semantic preservation in the process of probabilization. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence is weakening a relationship on which modern education has long relied: the connection between competent task performance and capability possessed by the person performing the task. Historically, producing a sophisticated analysis, proof, diagnosis, program, or argument generally required substantial prior internalization of the knowledge and cognitive processes involved. Education could therefore use performance both as a means of forming capability and, imperfectly, as evidence that capability had been formed. Generative artificial intelligence disrupts both relationships. Increasingly sophisti cated cognitive (...) work can now be delegated to external systems, allowing high-quality performance without equivalent individually possessed capability. Existing research has responded by examining cognitive offloading, human–AI hybrid intelligence, epistemic agency, selective delegation, and the conditions under which AI assistance augments or erodes learning. These approaches substantially clarify how learners should divide cognitive labor with AI. A different institutional question nevertheless remains: when execution can be delegated, what capabilities should educational institutions still require humans to possess, and what capabilities should degrees, qualifications, and professional credentials continue to warrant as belonging to the human agent? This paper develops the internalization boundary as a framework for answering that question. It distinguishes three decisions that AI increasingly separates: task delegation, concerning who or what performs an operation; capability internalization, concerning what the human must still understand or be able to do; and capability assurance, concerning what an educational or professional institution must be able to establish and credibly certify about the individual. The paper conceptualizes the internalization boundary as an institutionally selected human capability floor rather than as a defense of maximal internalization. -/- Four considerations justify retaining capabilities within that boundary even when execution is technologically delegable: developmental necessity, epistemic control, accountable agency, and resilience. The boundary is therefore dynamic and developmen tally asymmetric. Experts may safely externalize operations that novices still need to perform because those operations participate in the formation of later judgment. Like wise, AI-assisted performance cannot by itself establish that durable human capability exists. The argument does not oppose extended or distributed cognition. It begins from their premise. The educational question is what the human component of increasingly distributed cognitive systems must still be capable of, and what educational institutions can legitimately claim to have formed and verified. AI therefore transforms education not only by changing how tasks are performed, but by forcing societies to make explicit a previously less visible institutional choice: what must remain a capability of the human? Keywords: artificial intelligence; education; internalization boundary; human capability; cognitive offloading; capability assurance; assessment; human–AI collaboration; expertise. (shrink)

This work presents a lucid modern-English rendering of René Descartes’ *Discourse on the Method* (1637), intended to make the original text more accessible without altering the structure, sequence, or substance of its philosophical argument. -/- The six-part organization of the original is preserved, with numbered paragraphs facilitating reference and comparison. The rendering seeks to clarify historical language and sentence construction while retaining Descartes’ distinctions, qualifications, and argumentative commitments. Particular attention is given to passages concerning reason, method, provisional morality, the cogito, (...) the existence of God, the distinction between mind and body, and the investigation of the natural world. -/- Editorial notes provide historical and philosophical context without incorporating subsequent interpretations into Descartes’ own argument. A supplementary fidelity audit documents selected translation decisions and examines their relationship to the original French, using the 1637 edition as the primary textual authority. -/- The objective is neither to reinterpret Descartes nor to correct his conclusions, but to provide a more readily intelligible presentation of what he actually argued. The resulting text is intended to support philosophical study, critical examination, and subsequent investigation of the method and its implications. (shrink)

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and modern biomedicine describe the same human organism through different architectures of abstraction. This paper argues that an important part of the divergence lies not in whether the two traditions abstract, nor simply in how abstract their concepts are, but in the density and structure of the representational paths connecting clinical observations to higher-order medical objects. TCM contains highly abstract concepts and diagnostic categories, yet in important domains these have historically been connected to phenomenological observations through (...) comparatively large representational distances. We call such cases abstraction jumps: transitions in which a cognitive system compresses a complex lower-order field into a substantially higher-order object without stabilizing a sufficiently articulated sequence of intermediate representations. -/- The paper develops three further ideas. First, abstraction infrastructure---measurement, intervention, representation, and validation---lowers the cost of constructing and stabilizing intermediate abstractions. Second, abstraction-ladder density characterizes the density of stable, manipulable, transferable, and independently testable representations between observation and higher-order theory. Third, artificial intelligence can alter the point at which compression becomes necessary. When machine systems can sustain relational complexity beyond the effective human threshold for a task, they may permit delayed compression and the discovery of previously unstabilized intermediate structures. -/- Syndrome-element theory is interpreted as an existing form of endogenous densification within TCM rather than as evidence that TCM lacks intermediate structure. AI extends this developmental possibility only if machine-discovered structures survive independent qualification through stability, replication, transfer, cross-readout comparison, incremental epistemic value, and, where appropriate, prospective or intervention-sensitive testing. The resulting proposal is neither biomedical assimilation nor static preservation. It is a third path in which a medical knowledge system becomes more internally articulated and empirically revisable by generating new intermediate objects from within its evolving empirical domain. (shrink)

传统中医(Traditional Chinese Medicine, TCM)与现代生物医学针对同一个人体,却形成了 显著不同的抽象架构。本文认为,这种分化的重要原因之一,并不在于两种传统是否进行抽象, “ ”也不只是其概念究竟有多 抽象 ,而在于连接临床观察与高阶医学对象的表征路径具有不同的密 度。中医拥有高度抽象的概念与诊断范畴,但在若干重要领域,这些高阶概念在历史上往往通过 “ ”相对较大的表征距离与现象层面的临床观察相连接。本文提出 抽象跃迁 (abstraction jump)这一 概念,用以描述如下情形:认知系统将一个复杂的低阶状态空间压缩为显著更高阶的对象,却没 “ ”有 在 其 间 稳 定 出 足 够 稠 密 的 中 间 表 征 序 列 。 本 文 进 一 步 提 出 抽 象 基 础 设 施 ( abstraction infrastructure “ ”)与 抽象阶梯密度 (abstraction-ladder density)两个概念。前者指测量、干预、表征 与验证等能够降低中间抽象构造成本的系统;后者则刻画观察与理论之间稳定、可操作且可独立 检验的中间表征的密度。 在这一框架下,证素理论等现代发展可被理解为中医内部早期的内生性阶梯增密。人工智能 “ ”可能通过改变 何时必须压缩 这一临界点而将这一过程进一步推进。对于某些任务领域,如果机 器维持高维关系复杂性的有效阈值高于相应的人类阈值,那么 AI 便可能延缓过早的高压缩抽象, 从而允许此前未能稳定下来的中间结构被发现。不过,这类潜在结构并不会自动构成医学知识; 只有在通过计算稳定性、重复验证、迁移检验、跨读数验证、增量认识论价值,以及在可能情况 下通过前瞻性或干预敏感性检验之后,它们才有资格被再对象化为新的医学对象。 因此,本文提出一条既不同于生物医学翻译、也不同于静态保留的发展路径。AI 可能使中医 从自身经验领域内部进一步发展出更稠密的抽象阶梯,并使既有概念能够得到支持、分解、合 并、修正或淘汰。由此形成的框架不仅产生一组可证伪的预测,而且提出一个更一般的假说:新 “ ”的认知技术改变的,可能不只是一个知识体系 能够表征什么 ,还包括它进一步生成、细化、检 验与修正知识的架构本身。 关键词: 传统中医;抽象跃迁;抽象基础设施;抽象阶梯密度;认知阈值;人工智能;中间抽 (...) 象;内生认识论发展;读数认识论. (shrink)

Cultivating emotions—learning to feel anger, say, at the right time and in the right way—is central to becoming a more virtuous person. This much is agreed on. More controversial is how we should seek to cultivate our emotions. Here the options flourish: with Aristotle, we might understand cultivation in terms of tuning emotions to virtuous thought and motivation or, with the Stoics, maintain that emotions should be wholly extirpated or, with Kant, see emotion cultivation as a kind of reasoned self-control. (...) Now add a wrinkle: empirical work reveals that there are significant differences in how our emotions respond to our efforts to shape them for the better. Some, like anger, are fairly malleable; others, like hate, are not. In this chapter, I turn to work on the evolutionary origins of three emotions—disgust, shame, and anxiety—in order to better understand why we see the differences in emotional plasticity that we do. What we learn is that there are significant differences in the cognitive architecture that underlies our emotions. Appreciating this not only helps us understand which model of virtue is most (empirically) plausible—it’s one that’s more Kantian than anything else—but also how we might deal with emotions that, like disgust and hate, resist our efforts to shape them for the better. (shrink)

SAT ∈ NP Built, Degrees 0 and 1 Proved, the Form of P ≠ NP Proved over Every Turing Machine, Every Route Proved to Deliver the Bit; the Completed Proof of P ≠ NP Delivered Twice by the Act, in Core Lean 4 -/- Whether satisfiability admits a polynomial-time decision procedure is the central question of complexity theory, and no formal statement had isolated, on a concrete machine model and in a file with no import, exactly what any proof of (...) the separation must deliver. This paper isolates it on the real object, Turing machines with finite control and a tape deciding the language of encoded satisfiable formulas, in a kernel of 687 theorems in core Lean 4 that imports nothing, whose 610 pinned cones show 258 results resting on no axiom at all and the remainder on Lean's standard axioms alone. Over every Turing machine, SAT ∉ P is exactly one implication, the transfer of least escape from the record of the SAT machine (the machine read with every output negated) to the machine; the record has least escape on no axiom, so the whole content of the separation is that one implication, the bit. Proven unconditionally beside it: SAT ∈ NP, by a 5,120-state verifier built in the kernel; no Turing machine decides SAT in constant time; no one-tape Turing machine decides SAT in linear time, by Hennie's crossing sequences run on SAT's own formulas; and the bit is exactly the Diagonal Target at every degree from two. The bit carries seven unique properties, each a theorem: it is necessary, sufficient, irreducible, mandatory and future-proof, it admits no other proof, and it is delivered by two kinds of act. Twenty-two walls are theorems of the kernel: no premise shared by all machines, by all algorithm models of SAT or by all records supplies the bit; the crossing count stops exactly at degree two; no formula carries its own tableau; and the proclamation that every route to the bit is shut is P = NP in costume. Seven walls of the literature stand beside them. The value is supplied by the act at premise grade and delivered twice, by a formal cargo and by a physical witness, and with SAT ∈ NP built either kind gives P ≠ NP with nothing cited. With the hardness half of Cook and Levin cited, P ≠ NP and the bit are one proposition, and every so-called other way to P ≠ NP is our way in different vocabulary: it delivers both kinds, and if the bit failed it would fail with it. The form of the Millennium question is closed by theorem, the twelve formal gates pass in the kernel, and the question stands at the Sealed halt. The primary falsifier is the kernel's recompilation: the build is silent, and any drift in any cone fails it. (shrink)

I sketch a theory of infantilization. On my view, to infantilize someone is to treat or regard them as children (but not adults) are fittingly treated or regarded, respectively, and relating to competent adults in this way is presumptively wrong. So, to determine which varieties of infantilization there are, we must first ascertain how it’s fitting to relate to children (but not to adults). I propose that there are (at least) three ways of infantilizing adults, based on three strands in (...) appropriate adult-child relations. The first is a kind of paternalism toward competent adults that is oriented to, and that engages with, the development of the target’s capacities for practical reasoning and autonomous decision-making. The second is responsibility-denial: treating an adult as less-than-fully morally responsible for her actions, if at all, by withholding blame or by blaming in the spirit of correction and education. The third is communicative condescension: unduly treating someone as lacking epistemic credentials such that it’s fitting to educate them. I show that my theory illuminates what makes a wide swath of practices morally objectionable and that it deepens well-trodden debates about phenomena of special concern to feminists, such as mansplaining and testimonial injustice. (shrink)

Biological autonomy, embodied cognition, open-ended search, robotic self-modeling, Bayesian structure learning, and automated experimentation offer mature mechanisms for generating and revising the conditions of action and inquiry. Consequently, the propositions that organism–environment boundaries are relational, that models may change, or that objective functions can impede novelty do not independently distinguish operational-shape realism. This article reconstructs the strongest relevant achievements and subjects previously reported P/A results to a deliberately asymmetric evidential audit: peer-reviewed external demonstrations are compared with reported simulator outputs, archived (...) manuscripts, and their stated reproduction limits, rather than treated as equivalent evidence. An operational-shape description is specified as a bounded, revisable observational and intervention contract, and operational equivalence is expressed relative to accessible interventions, observables, histories, resources, and statistical resolution. We distinguish ontological independence, experimental detectability, and comparative non-redundancy; none implies the others. The extant P/A record supports limited methodological claims and informative negative findings, not superiority over contemporary active inference, quality-diversity evolution, adaptive robotics, or autonomous science. We formulate strong, equal-rights experiments and pre-registered withdrawal criteria. The resulting contribution is a stringent method for locating when explanatory distinctions matter, expire, or remain undecidable—not a claim that life, embodiment, or algorithmic reconfiguration were first discovered by this programme. Keywords: operational-shape realism; Xenoscience; scientific realism; artificial life; active inference; novelty search; quality diversity; operational equivalence; autonomous science; model revision A robot loses a limb, revises its self-model, and continues walking. An evolutionary system abandons a misleading objective and discovers behaviours inaccessible to local fitness improvement. A scientific machine formulates hypotheses and executes physical tests. An inference engine selects actions to distinguish competing world-model structures. These achievements are not hypothetical illustrations awaiting a philosophy of operations: they are established research contributions (Bongard et al., 2006; Lehman and Stanley, 2011; King et al., 2009; Friston et al., 2026). They change the obligations of any philosophical theory that describes itself as concerned with the emergence or revision of operative possibilities. The motivating question is not why a world contains bodies or algorithms. It is why particular descriptions of a world—organism, environment, agent, affordance, fitness landscape, state space, or scientific apparatus—should be privileged outside the interval in which they demonstrably do explanatory work. A research tradition is permitted to begin with life when its target is biological sense-making; it is not thereby committed to a universal thesis that life produces physical reality. Critique becomes legitimate only when such a priority is asserted or silently smuggled into an inference. This paper therefore rejects a generic anti-embodiment polemic. It instead compares the strongest completed results with what operational-shape realism can actually show. Three distinct claims must not be conflated. Ontological independence says that a material process need not depend for its occurrence on the observational concepts used to identify it. Epistemic access asks which discriminations and records make the process knowable. Comparative non-redundancy asks whether adding a proposed model or vocabulary changes prospective predictions, interventions, control, or the scope of justified ignorance when matched against a capable competitor. The first does not entail the third. That logical gap organises the study. Consider a laboratory that begins with a living organism, then replaces it with a chemical reactor, a simulated evolutionary ecology, and a learning robot. Nothing licenses the inference that the category applicable to the first system must be a prerequisite for the others. Yet the reverse inference is equally invalid: the mere existence of nonliving processes is no counterexample to a theory explicitly restricted to living sense-making. The relevant issue is an illicit promotion from explanatory adequacy within a designated domain to constitutive priority over all domains. To detect that promotion one must locate a definite inferential step, a particular authorial commitment, and a countercondition under which the inference fails. A program that asks how living organisms acquire norms has not asserted that chemical reactions require biological norms to occur. A program that treats an affordance as an animal-environment relation has not thereby declared that quantum systems are affordances. This distinction prevents a superficial realism from defeating a thesis no opponent advances. The point does not rely upon treating reality as an already surveyed totality. Let R stand for a commitment to operations and material consequences that may exceed present discriminations, rather than an enumeration of complete states. Let I(C,R) denote an identification relative to instrumental, temporal, spatial, inferential and resource conditions C. The claim that I is conditioned does not entail that what is identified is observer-generated, nor that it is in principle inaccessible. The successive replacement of one identification by another is itself an event that may materially alter later operations. Operational-shape realism must therefore answer a demand it also imposes: by what intervention and comparison does its proposed identification earn its use? Brassier’s scientific realism criticises philosophical approaches that assign experience or meaning constitutive authority over mind-independent reality (Brassier, 2007, 2011). The possibility of extinction exemplifies the absence of a necessary dependence of reality upon human sense-making. It would be historically redundant to introduce this result as a P/A discovery. It would also be excessive to infer that any use of biological autonomy in cognitive science is an illegitimate metaphysics. Such sciences can investigate local organisation without universalising their explanatory primitives. Barad’s account of intra-action and agential cuts refuses an antecedently fixed observer–observed division; the boundaries of phenomena are enacted through material-discursive apparatuses (Barad, 2003, 2007). A thesis that boundaries are locally produced, therefore, cannot differentiate operational-shape realism by itself. Yet an account of cutting is not automatically a practical decision procedure for determining when two competing experimental vocabularies yield indistinguishable interventions, or for bounding inference when they do. The second problem is the focus here, without suggesting that Barad lacked an account of changing apparatuses. Scientific experimentation has already been examined as productive rather than merely confirmatory. Steinle (1997, 2016) shows that exploratory experimentation can precede mature theory and stabilise novel concepts and regularities. Rheinberger (1997) investigates experimental systems as generators of epistemic things. Rouse (2015) analyses scientific practice and normative accountability; Chang (2022) offers operational coherence as part of an activist realism. These authors close off any claim that experiments create concepts or change instruments only once autonomous AI arrives. The issue left open for a computational investigation is narrower: can a bounded procedure identify the intervention windows in which alternative accounts differ, and honestly report the intervals where available evidence cannot decide? Brassier's realist critique already bears much of the anti-correlationist burden. Barad has already made apparatus-dependent boundary determination central to her ontology. Simondon's individuation does not assume formed individuals as permanent first terms. The independent problem is consequently not to announce another unconstrained realism or another theory of cuts. It is to establish when rival descriptions enable equivalent predictions and interventions, when comparisons cease to be well-defined, and when the failure of an earlier observational address is accompanied by an independently traceable material change. A scientific observer chooses which events count as state transitions, and often this choice is indispensable. Yet a transition that changes the detector’s accessibility or temporal bandwidth exposes the locality of that choice. Suppose two models agree under a coarse sensor but differ under a finer probe. The correct interpretation is not that the finer probe creates the relevant material difference, nor that the earlier model was always false. Rather, the evidential relation changes: an equivalence judgment had an instrument-specific validity domain. Conversely, a refined measurement may reveal no new contrast; increased resolution does not guarantee a stronger theory. The symmetry is important. Calling a body, organism, quantum process, or autonomous experiment an operational shape does not make that abstraction intrinsically privileged. It may suppress distinctions that matter in one intervention regime and proliferate useless distinctions in another. The investigator must therefore track changes in the discriminative work the abstraction performs. A robust conceptual practice admits withdrawal of a distinction where its effects disappear, preservation of the distinction where effects survive, and suspension where evidence is inadequate. (shrink)

Every normative text — a law, a code, a contract — has a logical structure: a system of concepts, divisions and definitions on which its rules rest. Classical logical analysis makes this structure visible and, more importantly, reveals its flaws, which often escape even an attentive reader. Such flaws matter all the more in a new kind of normative text: the behavioural specifications of AI systems, which a model applies millions of times a day. -/- This paper applies classical logical (...) analysis to Claude's constitution, published by Anthropic — an open and carefully reasoned document with a logically sound core. The analysis shows that the text is nonetheless missing one concept. It contains norms that no operator can switch off, yet which are weighed against other considerations rather than applied as absolute rules. The text relies on such norms, but gives them no name and no place in its classifications. This single omission explains three apparently unrelated difficulties: the main classification of Claude's behaviours mixes two different criteria; users end up with rights their operators do not have, contrary to the text's own picture of layered authority; and the definition of absolute rules is broader than their list, quietly undermining the text's own guarantee that they can always be satisfied together. Drawing the text's concepts as Euler diagrams makes each difficulty visible at a glance. Introducing the missing concept resolves all three without changing any behaviour the text requires. The paper concludes with three scenarios on which the analysis can be tested empirically. (shrink)

Finite-horizon prediction accuracy in passive dynamical model reduction depends not only on the reduced order but also on the admissible model parameterization. We study linear passive resistor–capacitor networks under prescribed state aggregation and measure reduction error by the worst-case time-integrated squared output discrepancy over unit-norm initial states. A subspace on which the reduced prediction is independent of its conductance parameters yields a parameter-independent lower bound on this error. We characterize attainment of the bound through the coupling between this fixed-error subspace (...) and its orthogonal complement, including an equivalent positive-semidefinite block condition and a quantitative lower bound when the coupling is nonzero. A five-node network aggregated into three states illustrates the distinction between structural error and parameter-dependent error. For a reduced chain constrained to equal conductances, computer-assisted calculations support a strictly positive gap above the fixed-error bound; when the two conductances vary independently, numerical solutions instead indicate attainment of the bound. The example highlights how restrictions within a passive model class can change attainability, while distinguishing analytically established criteria from numerical and computer-assisted claims requiring independent validation. (shrink)

This article explores the concept of a “faulty question.” It distinguishes between three kinds of presuppositions: semantic ones, narrowly pragmatic ones, and broadly pragmatic ones. Accordingly, there are three ways a question can be faulty. First, the question can be loaded, meaning that it has one or more false or debatable presuppositions. Second, the question can be unfit, meaning that it has one or more false narrowly pragmatic presuppositions. Third, the question can be inappropriate, meaning that it violates one or (...) more rules of rational discourse. The article ends by arguing that faulty questions are not always attempts to trick respondents. (shrink)

Aesthetic taste remains an elusive phenomenon that has been comparatively underexplored in psychology. We argue that taste integrates four dimensions: sensitivity to fine-grained differences within a domain; valence, through which these differences come to matter affectively; orientation, the selective tendency to seek encounters that may further transform one’s sensibility; and normativity, through which judgments of taste become shareable and contestable. These are not separate dimensions but faces of a single underlying capacity: continuously monitoring one’s grip on the world and letting (...) that monitoring modulate what happens next. This makes human engagement non-uniform. Throughout, we use current artificial intelligence as a contrast case, exploring how far it can model or replicate human taste. Machines can be sensitive to fine-grained distinctions, predict human preferences, generate apparently tasteful outputs, and shape the environments in which human taste develops. But they do not yet possess taste in the full human sense, because they lack the stake that makes human processing non-uniform: self-directed exploration, online self-transformation, and genuine normative vulnerability. The upshot is a systematic framework for the study of human taste and for assessing how AI may transform its formation. (shrink)

Explore Education for the Embodied Human by Akhil K. Singh, where he addresses pivotal questions about human nature and education. This book examines how assumptions about human nature influence educational concepts, formulates a comprehensive, evidence-based theory of human nature, and delves into embodied cognition, backed by the latest empirical findings in cognitive science. Are you ready to challenge and transform conventional teaching through an innovative" inside-out and outside-in" approach? This essential read is perfect for educators and policymakers eager to adopt (...) a holistic, evidence-based approach to learning. Dive into a transformative journey that reshapes education through an embodied lens. (shrink)

In philosophy of mind, there is an ongoing debate regarding representationalism. The majority opinion is externalism, which posits that some mental content is about external objects. Conversely, the minority opinion is internalism, where all mental content is about internal representations, not external objects. In support of internalism, Katalin Farkas argues that the mind has privileged and special access to its mental content. Farkas affirms her stance through the extended “Twin Earth” metaphor, originally introduced by externalist Hilary Putnam, contending that mental (...) content of the subject’s mind should not be determined by facts that exist outside of the mind. Surprisingly, the theory of predictive processing in cognitive science appears to support internalism as a more plausible theory of representation. According to Andy Clark’s version of predictive processing, the mind predicts the input it will receive, recognizes the input that deviates from the predicted input (i.e. prediction error), and then corrects the original prediction model. Most importantly, the mind draws on its own unique, subjective experiences and knowledge in order to generate its prediction model for perception. If predictive processing can affirm that a subject’s perception is mostly, if not entirely, composed of internal features, then predictive processing aligns more with an internalist conception of the mind. This paper then draws on Farkas’s arguments in support of internalism, and Clark’s work on predictive processing, to argue that internalism and predictive processing share the same conclusion: the way things seem in the external world is conceived from a unique and subjective perspective. Hence, the subject’s knowledge of the external world is shaped internally by personal experiences. The subject’s past experiences are constantly shaping and influencing the subject’s ongoing perception of the external world. My paper argues that according to both internalism and predictive processing, a subject’s experiences are foundational to their perception. As a result, internalism can be understood less as the minority opinion of philosophers, but rather as a more viable conception of the mind in philosophy of perception. (shrink)

The Physics–Mathematics Transformation (PMT) framework asks whether explicitly defined correspondences between mathematical and physical systems can support justified inferences in either direction. This fourth paper investigates a narrower question: when can mathematical descriptions of composition and interaction account for collective behavior, and under what conditions can structural similarities across distinct physical systems support a limited form of unification? We distinguish microscopic composition, coarse-grained description, and emergent collective observables, and formulate criteria for admissible mappings between these levels. Particular attention is given (...) to preservation of dynamics and observables, noncommuting operations, information loss under coarse-graining, and the role of physical realizability. Coupled dynamical systems and network models provide restricted settings in which candidate correspondences can be assessed against established analyses. The proposed approach requires explicit domains, assumptions, and error measures, together with independent mathematical or empirical validation and comparison with existing methods. It does not identify shared mathematical form with physical identity, establish a universal theory of emergence, or claim unification of fundamental interactions. Instead, it outlines a testable methodology for determining when structural correspondences clarify collective behavior and when they fail to support physical inference. (shrink)

The Physics–Mathematics Transformation (PMT) framework investigates whether restricted, explicitly defined correspondences between mathematical and physical systems can support valid scientific inferences in either direction. This paper examines the relationship between mathematical operations and physical interactions, focusing on the preservation of composition laws, ordering, and observable distinctions. -/- We formulate the problem using transformations of physical states and their mathematical representations. Particular attention is given to noncommuting operations, for which changing the order of transformations can change the resulting state. We distinguish (...) operation-preserving mappings from faithful representations and examine how mathematical descriptions may lose physically relevant information. -/- The investigation develops criteria for admissibility, structural preservation, and the transfer of conclusions between physical and mathematical descriptions. These criteria provide a basis for evaluating candidate PMT correspondences without assuming a universal equivalence between mathematical operations and physical forces. The objective is to identify testable conditions under which such correspondences may contribute to scientific reasoning, while distinguishing established mathematical results from potential new discoveries. (shrink)

We investigate diagonal congruence transformations of symmetric positive-definite conductance matrices in passive analog linear solvers. Under a fixed trace constraint, we distinguish transformations that are mathematically admissible from those realizable using nonnegative resistive conductances and grounding. A grounded star-network family illustrates a strict gap between these optimization domains. For fixed positive grounding conductance h, the ratio of the optimal passive relaxation rate to its unconstrained mathematical counterpart approaches (1 + h)/(2 + h) as the number of outer nodes increases. The (...) result quantifies a structural limitation of passive implementations under an idealized spectral resource budget. We discuss the model’s assumptions and the distinction between spectral convergence and end-to-end computational performance. (shrink)

Physics and mathematics are closely connected, but a shared formal description does not by itself establish an equivalence between physical and mathematical systems. This paper introduces the Physics–Mathematics Transformation (PMT) as a conceptual framework for investigating whether explicitly defined, restricted structural correspondences can facilitate discovery in either direction. In the mathematics-to-physics direction, a result obtained within a mathematical representation may yield a physical inference only when the relevant properties and transfer conditions are justified and the resulting claim is assessed against (...) physical evidence. In the physics-to-mathematics direction, an admissible physical system may suggest conjectures, constructions, or counterexamples, but exact mathematical claims require rigorous justification beyond experimental observation. The framework distinguishes analogy from formal correspondence and discovery, and emphasizes admissible domains, preserved structure, information loss, realizability constraints, and validation. Illustrative thought experiments concern composition, interactions, and possible generalization; a companion study of passive analog networks provides a restricted setting in which physical realizability constrains mathematical transformations. PMT does not establish a universal physics–mathematics duality or a new physical law. Its contribution is a set of methodological criteria for evaluating whether particular cross-domain transformations yield insights beyond existing representations and techniques. (shrink)

The Physics–Mathematics Transformation (PMT) is a proposed conceptual framework for investigating whether explicitly defined, restricted structural correspondences between physical and mathematical systems can support scientific discovery in either direction. This overview introduces its motivation, central hypothesis, methodological principles, and five-paper research program. It distinguishes mathematical representation from physical realization and emphasizes admissible domains, preservation of relevant structure, information loss, realizability constraints, and independent validation. Mathematics-to-physics inferences require justified interpretation and empirical assessment; physics-to-mathematics investigations may suggest conjectures or constructions, but exact (...) mathematical claims require proof or rigorous verification. The research series examines the conceptual framework, passive analog networks, mathematical operations and physical interactions, emergence and unification, and prediction-error attainability in passive model reduction. The overview distinguishes established analytical results from numerical and computer-assisted evidence requiring further validation. PMT remains a proposed research methodology, rather than an established universal transformation or a new physical law. (shrink)

This study presents an empirical evaluation of the Core Emotion Framework (CEF), a psychological taxonomy organizing emotional and cognitive functioning into ten active operators across Head, Heart, Gut, and Integrator centers. Analyzing survey data from 100 participants facing real-world personal, professional, and relational challenges, the investigation measures situational clarity shifts, operator selection frequencies, domain-specific efficacy, and qualitative user feedback. Exposure to the CEF produced a statistically significant mean situation clarity increase from 4.69 to 5.31 out of 7.0 (p<0.001), with 56.0% (...) of respondents explicitly reporting that the model helped them better understand their situation. While the framework demonstrates robust cognitive reframing capabilities in structured decision contexts such as career and education, efficacy decreases when applied to simple binary choices or acute personal crises. Strategic recommendations focus on standardizing abstract operator terminology, embedding step-by-step action guidance, and deploying adaptive pre-filters. (shrink)

This book examines whether Homo sapiens may be approaching conditions that threaten its long-term survival and asks how to investigate this possibility without confusing cultural apprehension, scientific evidence, and mathematical conjecture. It begins by distinguishing biological extinction from apocalyptic narratives, speculative fiction, pseudoscientific claims, and the collapse of civilization. It then considers the species within the interdependent contexts of planetary systems, technological development, social organization, and human behavior. The inquiry proposes the Mathematical Matrix of Homo sapiens Viability (MMV-HS) as a (...) framework for describing interacting pressures, pathways of catastrophic risk, survival probabilities, and the conditions of recovery. The model is presented as a research architecture, not a calibrated prediction: illustrative calculations cannot establish the likelihood of human extinction without defensible empirical parameters and explicit uncertainty treatment. The resulting assessment rejects both assurances of inevitable progress and claims of impending biological extinction. Human viability instead emerges as a conditional, dynamic problem whose investigation must distinguish species persistence from civilizational continuity and adaptive capacity. The philosophical conclusion is deliberately open: recognizing the limits of prediction does not diminish the significance of evidence, prevention, institutional responsibility, or collective choice. Keywords: human extinction; existential risk; species viability; survival models; uncertainty; philosophy of science. (shrink)

This is Chapter 10 of the author’s manuscript of Noura: Justice, Flourishing, and Commonwealth. The chapter articulates a theory of political legitimacy and defines the conditions under which a political order constitutes a commonwealth. It addresses the historical tension between the two dominant criteria of legitimacy: the Aristotelian teleological criterion (that government must aim at the common good) and the liberal consent criterion (that authority is grounded in the agreement of the governed). The chapter argues that these criteria are not (...) rivals. Rather, they converge: the institutional functioning that serves the common good is the very same functioning that provides the necessary and sufficient grounds for informed consent. The argument develops a material criterion of legitimacy based on the six conditions of justice—the Requisites, education, visibility, symmetry, contestability, and repair. It distinguishes between perfect legitimacy (a system that fully satisfies these conditions) and conditional legitimacy (the informed, diligent, and evidence-responsive effort to achieve them). Drawing on this framework, the chapter challenges the assumption that democratic elections are necessary or sufficient for legitimacy. Defending a principle of "regime neutrality," it argues that no constitutional form—whether democratic, monarchical, or otherwise—is inherently legitimate; legitimacy is a normative status conferred by institutional functioning, not by procedural architecture. The chapter concludes by defending this account against objections concerning elitism, authoritarianism, circularity, and empirical testability. (shrink)

exposes a structural mismatch between humanity’s shared material and biological dependence and the institutional arrangements governing economic activity and political responsibility. -/- The analysis draws upon four scientifically informed ontological principles: constitutive integration, imperfect belonging, stratified reality, and dual temporality. These principles explain why economic integration does not necessarily produce adequate ecological belonging and why present institutional arrangements may undermine the conditions of future collective adaptability. -/- The article extends the Ethics of Belonging to environmental philosophy through three interconnected conditions (...) of adequate social ethics: the development of constituent belonging needs, the preservation of effective individual and collective initiative, and the orientation of institutional decisions toward the broader community. -/- Individual ethics introduces a complementary psychological dimension, examining how emotional development, love, social significance, existential meaning, conscious presence, and reflective capacities may contribute to ecological agency. -/- The framework is compared with established approaches in environmental ethics, ecological economics, environmental justice, and capability theory. -/- Its distinctive philosophical contribution is to connect ecological dependence, individual freedom, imperfect institutional integration, and collective adaptability within a single explanatory framework. Ecological sustainability is understood not simply as the preservation of existing conditions but as the development of human and institutional capacities to transform relations while maintaining the material and biological foundations of existence. -/- The article concludes that ecological belonging provides a scientifically revisable framework for investigating the ethical and institutional conditions of sustainable development. (shrink)

El objetivo de este estudio fue evaluar la eficacia de la aplicación profesional de barniz de fluoruro de sodio al 5 % en la prevención de caries dental y en la reducción de la hipersensibilidad dentinaria en comparación con un placebo. Se realizó un ensayo clínico aleatorizado, controlado, de grupos paralelos y ciego para el evaluador, en el que se incluyeron 124 pacientes de 6 a 65 años con riesgo moderado-alto de caries y/o hipersensibilidad dentinaria (VAS ≥ 4), asignados aleatoriamente (...) (1:1) al grupo experimental (barniz de NaF al 5 %, n = 62) o al grupo control (barniz placebo, n = 62); la intervención se aplicó cada 6 meses y los desenlaces primarios fueron el cambio en la escala Visual Analógica (VAS) de hipersensibilidad a los 1, 3 y 6 meses y el incremento de superficies cariadas (ΔDMFS/dmfs) a los 12 y 24 meses, realizándose análisis por intención de tratar. Completaron el estudio 112 participantes (90,3 %); a los 6 meses el grupo experimental presentó una reducción significativamente mayor de la hipersensibilidad (VAS: −4,8 ± 1,6) en comparación con el grupo control (−1,9 ± 1,4) (p < 0,001), y a los 24 meses el incremento de caries fue significativamente menor en el grupo experimental (1,42 ± 1,18) que en el control (2,31 ± 1,45), con una fracción preventiva del 38,5 % (IC 95 %: 24,1-52,9 %; p = 0,002); no se registraron efectos adversos graves. Se concluye que la aplicación profesional de barniz de fluoruro de sodio al 5 % cada 6 meses es eficaz para reducir la hipersensibilidad dentinaria y prevenir el desarrollo de nuevas lesiones de caries en comparación con el placebo. (shrink)

Education contains two fundamentally different functions: **the formation of knowledge** and the **judgment of knowledge**. The teacher belongs primarily to the first function, while the examiner belongs to the second. When the same individual performs both functions, a structural conflict may arise: the teacher who has taught the student also becomes the authority who determines whether the student’s learning is valid.

El ensayo aborda la transformación del conocimiento y la creación en la era de la inteligencia artificial (IA), proponiendo una reflexión filosófica sobre la desubjetivación contemporánea. ¿Qué significa un conocimiento sin sujeto? Para responder, se examinan tres dimensiones: creatividad, originalidad y creación sin sujeto. Estas permiten repensar la relación entre saber, técnica y subjetividad. La creatividad aparece como un fenómeno relacional entre concepción y ejecución, reactivado por la IA, que ya no depende de la interioridad humana sino de la interacción (...) entre sujeto y algoritmo. La originalidad se analiza como una ilusión moderna, lo nuevo nunca surge de la nada, sino como variación de lo repetido. Así, la IA reorganiza tradiciones y produce efectos de novedad que dependen del contexto y la memoria. Finalmente, la creación sin sujeto confronta la subjetividad de Kierkegaard con la desubjetivación descrita por Han, Heidegger y Yuk Hui. Se propone que, lejos de eliminar al sujeto, la técnica lo descentra, abriendo un horizonte donde la creación se asemeja al mar del intelecto común de Averroes. Un espacio compartido de sentido entre lo humano y lo artificial. (shrink)

Se examina la creciente intersección entre la Inteligencia Artificial y la Teología, explorando cómo la tecnología digital ha permeado no solo la esfera cotidiana, sino también aspectos profundos de nuestras concepciones y prácticas religiosas. Con la aparición de la Inteligencia Artificial en la gran mayoría de los diferentes aspectos de la vida humana e incluso en su capacidad para generar contenido religioso, nos encontramos en un nuevo paradigma tecnológico digital que desafía nuestras concepciones tradicionales. El desarrollo de la Inteligencia Artificial (...) parece ir más allá de la mera recopilación de datos, plantea preguntas fundamentales sobre la naturaleza de la humanidad, así como sobre su inminente impacto en la teología. Se explora como la Inteligencia Artificial podría traspasar las fronteras de la religión, que pertenece a una zona propiamente humana. Además, se enfatiza la importancia de fomentar la colaboración interdisciplinaria entre la teología, y la Inteligencia Artificial para guiar un uso responsable de esta tecnología digital en contextos teológicos. Esta propuesta investigativa destaca la urgencia de abordar los desafíos teológicos que surgen con la integración creciente de la Inteligencia Artificial en la Teología. Aboga por la construcción de un marco teológico sólido y promueve la colaboración interdisciplinaria para asegurar una coexistencia armoniosa entre la Teología y la Inteligencia Artificial en un mundo cada vez más interconectado, tecnológicamente avanzado y menos humano. (shrink)

There is an unresolved debate about whether the ways of being currently identified by the DSM-5-TR as Cluster B personality disorders (henceforth PDs) should be considered genuine mental disorders or normal (if often serious) problems of living. This issue is a microcosm of a larger debate about whether psychiatry is overextending itself and overmedicalizing many of life’s hardships. We show that the resolution of the first debate can inform the second, larger, question. To this end, we examine Louis Charland’s influential (...) arguments that Cluster B PDs are moral, not medical, conditions. Although Charland’s arguments fail to support this conclusion, Charland’s focus on mental healing to inform what ways of being are properly considered “mental disorders” is promising. We argue that skilled metacognitive self-regulation is necessary for mental healing and show that a focus on the role played by self-regulation in healing partially vindicates Charland’s argument: Cluster B PDs are not necessarily “moral conditions,” although some instantiations will be. We also show that current definitions of PDs are both overly inclusive and overly exclusive, allowing moral judgments to drive diagnosis. We conclude by showing that a focus on self-regulatory skill can help distinguish between mental disorders and normal problems of living. (shrink)

Este ensayo desarrolla una distinción metafísica entre cambio y sustitución. El cambio genuino requiere un solo sujeto numéricamente continuo a través de determinaciones distintas; la sustitución aparece cuando un reemplazo numérico se presenta bajo los signos y la gramática de esa continuidad. La semejanza, la sucesión, la memoria, el nombre, la descendencia causal y la persistencia de la función pueden, por tanto, ofrecer indicios de continuidad sin constituir ni probar la identidad numérica. El caso algorítmico hace especialmente visible la distinción: (...) una secuencia de estados computacionales no determina por sí sola si un solo portador persiste a través de ellos. El ensayo trata así idem, an alius? —¿el mismo u otro?— no como un instrumento capaz de detectar toda discontinuidad, sino como una disciplina contra la inferencia de identidad a partir de la sola perfección de sus signos. Finalmente, aplica la distinción a formas de responsabilidad humana en las que el juicio, la promesa, la autoría y el arrepentimiento requieren un sujeto que siga siendo numéricamente aquel que actuó. (shrink)

This essay develops a metaphysical distinction between change and substitution. Genuine change requires one numerically continuous subject across differing determinations; substitution occurs when numerical replacement is presented under the signs and grammar of such continuity. Resemblance, succession, memory, naming, causal descent, and persisting function may therefore provide evidence of continuity without constituting or proving numerical identity. The algorithmic case exposes the distinction especially clearly: a sequence of computational states does not by itself determine whether one bearer persists across them. The (...) essay consequently treats idem, an alius? — the same one, or another? — not as a diagnostic guaranteed to detect every discontinuity, but as a discipline against inferring identity merely from the perfection of its signs. It concludes by applying the distinction to forms of human answerability for which judgement, promise, authorship, and repentance require a subject who remains numerically the one who acted. (shrink)

In Nigeria, the phenomenon known as “kito” has emerged as a disturbing form of targeted violence against individuals suspected of same-sex relationships. While sometimes framed as moral enforcement, kito has evolved into a system of organized abuse involving entrapment, assault, extortion, and, in extreme cases, death. This study provides a detailed ethical and socio-legal analysis of kito within the broader context of jungle justice in Nigeria. This study adopts a qualitative research methodology grounded in doctrinal legal analysis and ethical evaluation. (...) It relies on secondary data drawn from legal documents, human rights reports, academic literature, and documented case accounts. Drawing on human rights reports, legal frameworks, and documented patterns of abuse, the paper argues that kito represents not moral discipline but a breakdown of law, social order, and ethical reasoning. It further examines the enabling conditions of legal repression, social stigma, and economic opportunism. The study highlights the role of activism and proposing practical recommendations for reform. The study concludes that any society that legitimizes violence in the name of morality risks destroying its own ethical foundations. (shrink)

For more than a century, the philosophy of the infinite has been divided between Cantorian actualism, which takes the real numbers as a completed totality with a transfinite magnitude, and Aristotelian potentialism, which treats infinity as an inexhaustible potential. Each pays a price. Actualism reads the cardinal of a set as its magnitude, so that a whole and its proper part can have the same magnitude and the whole is no greater than its part. The hierarchy of all sets, a (...) definite domain, cannot be gathered into one completed set without contradiction. The forms of potentialism give up classical logic, weaken classical analysis, or decline to take the domain as one object. We offer a third alternative that keeps classical logic and every theorem of analysis and of ZFC, showing that an endless domain can be definite, fixed in advance, and taken as one object without having any number of terms. We take each real number as a ratio, expressed as a vertex angle on an arc bounded by the right angles where the tangent ratio ceases and numberhood ends. Central projection carries every ratio to the real number line, omitting the bounds, which are not numbers. Reversed, the projection carries the whole line onto the open half circle between the right angles, so the bound holds for the line as a limitation although no point of the line lies at it. On the arc the ratios are complete without any completed totality. Counting, not one-to-one correlation, constitutes a number of terms, so transfinite cardinals classify sets by one-to-one mapping and are not numbers of terms. (shrink)

Since the beginnings of the history of philosophy, various perspectives have been proposed regarding the relationship between the moral value and aesthetic value of a work of art. The classification of these perspectives is of considerable importance in the study of art and ethics. Using a library-based data collection method and content analysis, this article examines and classifies the major perspectives on the relationship between art and morality within the context of Western philosophy. The findings indicate that these perspectives can (...) be classified under three categories: autonomism, immoralism, and moralism, each of which comprises two positions: extreme and moderate. The most appropriate classification is based on “aesthetic relevance.” An examination of these perspectives indicates that moderate positions are more acceptable overall. Among moderate positions, moderate moralism is more persuasive, and among moderate moralists, Berys Gaut’s position, known as ethicism, is the most acceptable. (shrink)

The relationship between art and morality is one of the most important questions in philosophy of art. “Moderate moralism”, as one of the contemporary approaches calaims that compared to other approaches it provides more appropriate explanation. In this paper, using library data collection and realistic analysis of content, the main theorists of moderate moralism (Carroll, Gaut and Kieran) and their perspectives and arguments are evaluated. The results of this study show that from a moderate moralist point of view, we can (...) make a model for art criticism that considers other aesthetic values as well. The most important contrasts between radical moralist perspectives and moderate moralist perspectives are criterions of covering moral evaluation, using “insofar as principle” and “all things considered principle” and believing in plurality of art values. Also, moderate moralist perspectives have some divisions: Considering the criterions of covering moral evaluation, using “sometimes” or “always” arguments and using “an audience due to the moral features”. Evaluation of these three perspectives shows that the best is that of Gaut. (shrink)

The Core Emotion Framework (CEF) presents a structural-constructivist model within affective science that organizes human emotional, cognitive, and conative functions into an integrated operational architecture. Authored by Jamel Bulgaria, the framework addresses long-standing debates in affective neuroscience by differentiating innate structural capacities—housed within specific neurocognitive processing centers—from constructivist psychological processes that assemble these capacities into context-specific emotional states. Central to the CEF architecture is a tripartite system composed of the Head (Cognitive Center), Heart (Relational-Affective Center), and Gut (Conative-Action Center)1. Within (...) this system reside ten discrete functional operators, termed core emotional powers, which serve as elemental processes that generate, regulate, and express human psychological capability. Among these ten operators, Arranging—a motoric and conative operator situated within the Gut Center—functions as the foundational mechanism for prioritizing, sequencing, organizing, and maintaining operational systems. When Arranging is dynamically differentiated and integrated across the tripartite architecture, it yields superior strategic management, heightened executive functioning, and robust organizational leadership. Conversely, when Arranging becomes structurally entangled, hyper-activated, or fused with defensive operators across the Head and Heart centers, it manifests as severe psychopathology, most notably Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD). Untangling the Arranging operator within the CEF architecture reveals how the same core psychological engine can either power elite strategic performance or degenerate into crippling obsessive-compulsive loops and existential fears. (shrink)

Abstracts Conventionally, "traditionalism" is as old as human history; because according to traditionalists’ claim, all the great traditions the world over have a common origin. One of the most important issues concerning art with which traditionalists have been concerned is defining and explaining such concepts like "traditional art", "sacred art" and "religious art". It is very important to investigate these concepts in order to understand the traditionalists’ theory about art. Based on content analysis and this documentary study, this paper explains (...) and criticizes these concepts. The results of this study show that sacred art is a part of traditional art which is directly connected with religious rituals. However, due to the differences in form, religious art does not fall in to the province of traditional art. The criticism leveled at traditionalists' view concerning traditional, sacred and religious arts is that it not only brings some difficulties to traditionalists’ theory of art, but also represents a distortion of some of their theoretical foundations. (shrink)

Affective science has long suffered from theoretical fragmentation, divided between basic emotion paradigms that conceptualize affective states as discrete, hardwired natural kinds and psychological constructivist models that view them as ad hoc conceptual classifications of valence and arousal. This enduring division has hampered theoretical cumulative progress, preventing the integration of neurobiological findings across different levels of analysis and limiting the creation of coherent clinical and computational models. The Core Emotion Framework (CEF), formulated by independent researcher Jamel Bulgaria, offers an operational (...) resolution to this dichotomy. CEF establishes a structural–constructivist architecture that synthesizes interoceptive physiology, computational transformations, and therapeutic change mechanisms into a single testable model. By reframing emotional episodes not as fixed linguistic labels or unstructured two-dimensional valence-arousal vectors, but as dynamic sequences of ten functional operators distributed across three primary somatic centers—the Head, Heart, and Gut—CEF provides an operational ontology for both human psychology and synthetic affective systems. (shrink)

In discussions of the relationship between ethics and film, one important question is whether a film can be considered devoid of aesthetic value or aesthetically deficient on the grounds that it contains moral flaws. Various views on this question have been proposed from the time of Plato to the present. Among these views, moderate moralism, as a contemporary approach, claims to offer a more adequate account of the relationship between ethics and art than other positions. Using a documentary method and (...) content analysis, this paper examines the position of moderate moralism. The findings indicate that the main differences between extreme and moderate forms of moralism concern the scope of moral evaluation, the use of the principles of “pro tanto” and “all things considered,” and the recognition of a plurality of values. Moderate moralist positions also differ from one another in terms of the scope of moral evaluation, their use of the qualifications “always” and “sometimes,” their methods of argumentation, and their reliance on the morally sensitive audience. An examination of three moderate moralist positions indicates that Gaut’s view is the most defensible among them. (shrink)

This article examines the significance of what Edmund Husserl calls “the paradox of human subjectivity” for the metaphysical realism-idealism debate in transcendental phenomenology. I distinguish two plausible interpretations of the paradox that are relevant to this debate. I term the first a vicious circle of mutual dependence: the world is characterized as being ontologically dependent on one causally dependent part of the world. I term the second a paradox of bodily self-constitution: the transcendental subject is defined in such a way (...) that it would be impossible for it to constitute itself as an empirical subject, and yet, in order to constitute the world, it must undergo such a process of self-objectification. I focus on one prominent version of phenomenology from each side of the realism-idealism debate, treating them as counterparts insofar as they share three core commitments. I argue that while the main accounts of the subject available to this idealist version generate at least one such paradox, the realist version can explain how one and the same subject is both transcendental and empirical without generating either paradox. My argument therefore provides a substantial prima facie reason to favour this realist version of phenomenology over its idealist counterpart for those who accept their shared commitments and take transcendental phenomenology to have metaphysical implications for the realism-idealism debate. (shrink)

Este trabajo propone una reevaluación del valor y de las causas de la poesía y la tradición oral en la Antigüedad. Se orienta la lectura tradicional hacia un marco analítico basado en la teoría de la información y la dinámica de sistemas. Se sostiene que, con anterioridad a la consolidación de soportes de escritura, la memoria colectiva operaba en un canal de transmisión intergeneracional severamente afectado por la entropía, el ruido y la deriva semántica. En este contexto, la métrica (isocronía, (...) cadencia e isosilabismo) y la rima no actuaron como adornos estilísticos, sino como un protocolo intrínseco de corrección de errores (checksum implícito). La arquitectura formal de la poesía impuso restricciones al lenguaje oral: cualquier alteración en los versos provocaba una quiebra en la paridad rítmica, permitiendo detectar el error de transmisión. Se concluye que la poética arcaica constituyó la primera infraestructura de ingeniería cognitiva y telecomunicacional de la especie, fundamentada en rima y ritmo —«si no rima ni va a tiempo» operando como sensor de fallo—, garantizando la persistencia estructural de la información y la separabilidad de la señal frente al ruido histórico. (shrink)

An ‘‘expectation reflection’’ principle, requiring epistemic agents to match their future rational opinions on average, is often thought to be a requirement of epistemic rationality. Dorst (2023) posits a mechanism wherein ambiguity asymmetries in evidence can lead to rational violations of expectation reflection. He further argues that this mechanism could rationalize real-world belief polarization. I show that asymmetries in when evidence is ambiguous do not themselves generate rational polarization. I then show that Dorst’s argument equivocates between two types of ambiguity (...) asymmetry. Only the second type of asymmetry leads to polarization, but only the first type is plausibly generated by the relevant mechanism. A realistic story of rational polarization would require a mechanism that generates asymmetries of the second type, not the first, and characterizing such a mechanism is no simple matter. (shrink)

As the country pursues sustainability, strengthening solar power education becomes increasingly important. Based on this research, solar power was found in the MATATAG Science Curriculum Guide for grades 7 and 10, as well as in the Senior High School Earth and Space Science 1 Curriculum Guide. Qualitative document analysis was used to systematically analyze and code official curriculum documents to assess the scope of solar power and the curriculum content and learning competencies. The analysis distinguished explicit solar-power references from indirect (...) or contextual representations through broader concepts such as renewable energy, electricity generation, climate change, sustainability, and environmental impacts. Thematic analysis was conducted using Braun and Clarke’s approach, which included familiarization, coding, theme development, theme review, theme definition, and theme reporting. Four curriculum entries were found and analyzed, one from Grade 7, two from Grade 10, and one from Senior High School. The analysis generated four themes: solar power is represented primarily through the broader renewable-energy category; environmental sustainability and climate action serve as dominant contexts; evidence of solar-specific technological development remains limited; and an explicit progression of solar learning has not yet been established. The results suggest that the curriculum grounds science literacy on solar energy within the broader context of renewable energy and sustainability. However, there is less direct evidence of a clear progression in knowledge, technology, and advanced applications related to solar power. The findings indicate potential areas for further curriculum development to strengthen existing competencies in renewable energy and to provide more explicit opportunities for learners to explain, investigate, evaluate, and design solar energy applications. (shrink)

Why can a sufficiently complex silicon system convincingly imitate responsibility, fear and creativity, and yet — on the account proposed here — not possess them? We propose a minimal architectural condition for subjecthood, understood as the capacity for responsibility, fear and creativity as distinct from their behavioural imitation. The central postulate is that the history of a subject is inseparable from its carrier: relative to the causally relevant boundary of the system there is no exact operator that restores an earlier (...) state. This postulate is an axiom of a position we call historical substrate realism, not a theorem, and we argue that no behavioural test can decide it. We then describe explicitly the architecture on which the theory reasons: a network of NRMs, each consisting of a graph of states and the matrices that record what is known about each state, with a single signal for change — the mismatch between an expectation recorded in a matrix and what actually happened. We locate irreversibility in the graph rather than in the matrices. Pain is defined as an irreversible contraction of the set R(s) of viable states available in the subject's own graphs; physical damage is its extreme case, while the general case is a record that closes a possibility and cannot be unlearned. From this we trace memory, fear and responsibility, and propose that agony and curiosity trigger one and the same operation — expansion of the graph — under different conditions. Open questions are stated explicitly: the absence of a unified formalism, the gap between damage and experience (the hard problem of consciousness), and the thresholds that separate the kinds of change. The theory is presented as a working conceptual framework, not as an established or experimentally validated result; a companion preregistration states an empirical expectation that could refute it. (shrink)

Can we make sense of comparisons of well-being differences? I argue for an affirmative answer, on which well-being difference comparisons are based on tradeoffs between non-instrumentally valuable prudential goods—for example, pleasure, knowledge, and friendship.

This paper develops a substrate-independent systems-theoretic account of death grounded in the Substrate-independent Operator Model (SOM) and the Layered Model of Identity and Continuity (LMIC). It argues that the problem of death cannot be adequately addressed without first establishing a rigorous account of identity. -/- Within the proposed framework, identity is understood as a recursively stabilized emergent process sustained by interacting operator dynamics rather than as a substance, informational object, or metaphysical entity. Death is consequently redefined as the irreversible collapse (...) of the organizational conditions necessary for perspectival continuity. The analysis examines the structural relationships between consciousness, identity, persistence, emergence, and pattern stability, treating them as manifestations of a common underlying architecture. -/- The framework is applied to a range of problems in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, systems theory, and artificial intelligence, including substrate transfer, artificial mortality, the copy paradox, near-death experiences, and the conditions under which a conscious system can cease to exist. Rather than asking what happens after death, the paper investigates the prior question of what structural conditions make death possible in the first place. -/- By conceptualizing death as the terminal boundary condition of identity, the paper provides a unified model that is applicable to biological, artificial, synthetic, and hypothetical post-biological cognitive systems. (shrink)

Idealized norms and requirements are common in epistemology. However, ordinary agents like us are not capable of meeting such ideals. So, why care about them? Why not simply care about what makes agents like us rational, justified, and the like? A tentative response to this worry roughly goes as follows: Epistemic ideals are relevant because we are in a position to approximate them (Carr 2022; Staffel 2019, 2024; Zynda 1996). In this paper, I analyze three approximation theses. I argue that (...) they raise worries. I pay special attention to the thesis that non-ideal rationality is an approximation of ideal rationality. I argue that this view can’t account for the fact that ideal and non-ideal agents do not always optimize exactly the same thing (or function). Think, for instance, of Simon’s (1976) distinction between substantive and procedural rationality. For Simon, ideally rational agents optimize an outcome directly (like expected accuracy), while boundedly rational agents are more concerned with the optimization of procedures (like heuristics). This dual aspect of optimization causes trouble for approximation claims. (shrink)

Recent history has afforded the global spectacle of lethal conflict in which immense numbers of civilians have with apparent impunity been killed as unintended but foreseeable targets of military action. While the ethics of just war and international humanitarian law (IHL) present rubrics of proportionality to evaluate and limit civilian liability, these remain vulnerable to misinterpretation as well as their abuse in potential genocide. Mass civilian death, in clear excess of these limits, thus requires criminal assessment as meeting the conditions (...) for genocide by virtue of intent, thereby informing its theorization as a thanatology—that is, as a logic of lethality determining an actual biopolitics. This paper analyzes these determinations in their relations to their normative goals: understood, first, with respect to the failure of a human universalism and, second, the theorization of the Freudian unconscious as an analytical means to account for the psychogenesis of genocide as such. Genocidal intent is thus conceived as an unconscious volitional complex that as ‘unintended but foreseeable’ defies both the legal–moral means to contain it and the ability to account univocally for its origin as a crime. (shrink)

心灵中基于"事件、因果、事件"这种叙事形式而做的对于未来的预测，必然只能基于所采用的语言所描述的框架、分类，而必然缺失有限长度的语言所未能描述的物理细节的因果作用。 -/- 也就是说，这种方式预测未来时，就好像意味着，所用语言所描述到的物理细节之外的物理细节，统统不会对未来产生影响。 比如用自己的性格（的语言描述）来笼统地预测人生时，就好像物理世界中绝大多数物理细节——比如绝大多数人类个体，此刻（甚至比较近的未来）大脑中的物理状态——都不会影响自己的人生，而只有自己的性格（的描述） 才有影响。 -/- 要害在这个"好像"。 语言必然漏掉细节，这没有问题；问题是，漏掉的部分，在因果账上，被记成了"没起作用"。 因果的功劳，跟着记得住的走，不跟着起作用的走。 -/- 须分清两件事：漏掉是必然的；漏掉无害，是一个没被检验的假设——而且，从语言内部，看不出它在哪些地方成立。 很多宏观预测靠的，恰恰是漏掉的细节彼此抵消；本文不说这类预测必然错，只说：它们的"对"，没有为"漏掉无害"作担保。 -/- 同一个骨架，也在"一句话的后果"里。 我们甚至认为，别人跟我说的一句话，就对我的人生造成了某种后果。这凸显了我们对语言的崇拜，对语言的因果作用的崇拜——已经脱离了语言所描述的客体（间因果关系），而是上升到直接崇拜语言本身（的因果作用）了。 -/- 一句话如果真的有这么大的作用，那么是不是意味着，这句话之外的所有（当时的和稍后的）物理状态、细节、配置，都没有起到任何作用？这句话岂不是如同神谕一般有力？ 当然，与神谕不同的是，神谕会直截了当地描述什么将会实现，而别人的一句话，则往往拐弯抹角地，起到了说话者当初意想不到的某种后果。这恰恰是证据：一句话若自己就管事，后果该跟着话走；它走偏了，说明别的东西， 在塑形。 -/- "它是导火索，是转折点"——这条退路，也要换一层来答：在无数同时起作用的细节里，哪一个被叫做"转折点"，靠的是记得住，而且是事后选的。 -/- 为什么功劳跟着话走？更稳的支点，是可保存性：只有话，能被存下来、被反复读（聊天记录、日记、引语）；当时的光线、姿势、对方的状态，不能。 我们的分析工具，继承了记录工具的偏向。所以，分析能力，依赖记忆能力、习惯，和记录条件。 -/- 至于"每句话都有回响"：回响，来自反复调取——话在脑子里重放一次，就在物理上又发生了一次，对后来有影响。 没被描述的细节，不是没有影响（房间的温度，照样改变了当时的心情），而是没有叙述上的回响：没有东西，去重放它。不对称，在可叙述性，不在有没有作用。 -/- Abstract -/- Prediction of the future made in the mind on the narrative form "event, cause, event" can rest only on the framework and categories of the language employed, and must lack the causal action of those physical details which a language of finite length has not described. -/- That is, predicting the future this (...) way amounts to implying that physical details beyond those the language describes will have no effect on the future. When one predicts one's life roughly from one's personality (as described in language), it is as if the vast majority of physical details in the physical world—say, the physical states now (or in the fairly near future) in the brains of the great majority of other human individuals—will not affect one's life, and only one's personality (its description) has any effect. -/- The crux is this "as if." Language necessarily omits detail; that is no problem. The problem is that the omitted part is entered, in the causal ledger, as "did not act." Credit for causation follows what is retained, not what acts. -/- Two things must be kept apart: omission is necessary; harmlessness of the omission is an untested assumption—and one that cannot be seen, from inside the language, to hold anywhere in particular. Many macro-level predictions work precisely because omitted details cancel; this paper does not say such predictions are necessarily wrong, only that their being right gives no warrant for "the omission is harmless." -/- The same skeleton lies in "the consequence of a sentence." We even think that a sentence someone said to me has had some consequence on my life. This shows our worship of language, of language's causal action—detached from the objects the language describes (and the causal relations among them), and rising to worship of language itself (its causal action). -/- If a sentence really had so great an effect, would that mean that all the other physical states, details, and configurations (of the time and soon after) had no effect at all? Is the sentence not as powerful as an oracle? Of course, unlike an oracle, which states directly what will be fulfilled, another's sentence often produces, in a roundabout way, some consequence the speaker never foresaw. That is itself evidence: if a sentence did the work by itself, the consequences should follow the sentence; that they drift shows that other things are shaping them. -/- "It was the trigger, the turning point"—this retreat must also be answered on another level: among countless simultaneously acting details, which one is called "the turning point" depends on what is retained, and is chosen afterwards. -/- Why does credit follow the sentence? A steadier pivot is preservability: only sentences can be stored and re-read (chat logs, diaries, quotations); the light, the posture, the other person's state at the time cannot. Our tools of analysis inherit the bias of our tools of recording. So analytic ability depends on memory, habit, and the conditions of recording. -/- As for "every sentence has an echo": the echo arises from repeated retrieval—replaying the sentence in the head is physically another occurrence, with effects on what follows. Undescribed details are not without effect (the room's temperature still altered the mood of the moment); they lack a narrative echo: nothing replays them. The asymmetry lies in narratability, not in having an effect. (shrink)

Every stable society cultivates a "Happy Consciousness": the conviction that its basic institutions are sound and that only their implementation needs reform. This paper argues that the Happy Consciousness of contemporary market societies conceals a structural flaw analogous to slavery in the antebellum South. That flaw is the employment relation, understood as the voluntary renting of human beings. Orthodox economists such as Samuelson and Knight openly describe wages as rentals for persons. Yet the legitimacy of renting people is almost never (...) debated, and the paper examines how this blind spot is maintained. Economics replaces the actual asymmetry of property rights in the firm, in which one party (the employer) owns the whole product (input liabilities and output assets), with a symmetrical picture of distributive shares. It also redefines the juridical notion of responsibility (which only applies to persons) as causal efficacy (shared with things), and it uses the public/private distinction to confine inalienable rights of self-determination to political life. Drawing on jurisprudence, the paper shows that only persons, not things, can be de facto responsible. The hired-criminal example shows that responsible human agency cannot in fact be transferred from employee to employer. When a crime is committed, the law sets aside the employment contract and treats employer and employee as partners. But employees are equally de facto responsible in normal non-criminous work. The employment contract therefore rests on a legal fiction. The paper concludes that the responsibility principle and democratic theory both point to the democratic, worker-owned firm as the alternative to human rentals. (shrink)

This paper examines the moral status of pornography by arguing for the often-overlooked factor of social injustice as a supportive condition for pornography performance. It diverges from existing theoretical accounts of pornography grounded in explanations of human fallenness, genetic determinism, patriarchy, Cyrenaic-like materialism, libertarianism and its associated individual human rights claims. Beyond explaining the moral status of pornography, these theoretical perspectives have guided social practice through legislation. In conservative societies, legislation is passed to curtail pornography, with the view that it (...) distorts societal moral values, while in liberal societies, legislating pornography is discouraged to protect people’s liberty and sexual autonomy. Diverging from existing theoretical views, this paper situates this moral challenge in the prevalent social injustices which modify certain essential human attributes, hence propelling pornography performance. The paper uses a qualitative document-analysis method. It employs Thomistic philosophical anthropological lenses, along with tools for conceptual clarification, philosophical critique, and diagnostic and prescriptive analysis. The paper argues that the human person is, among other things, a rational individual with a material reality. Rationality and individuality act as metaphysical foundations of moral claims of human freedom and privacy, which are inconsistent with pornographic performance. However, due to prevailing social injustices, amidst the inevitable need to satisfy one’s material requirements, human freedom is modified, making people participate in activities such as pornography, which are inconsistent with their essentiality. The significance of this argument lies in its shift from predominantly moralistic and libertarian accounts of pornography toward a social justice perspective. It normatively suggests an alternative approach of attending to social justice, especially by focusing on distributive justice to rectify the economic challenges that trigger pornography today. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence systems increasingly do more than influence human decision-making; they constrain, block, suspend, and sometimes bypass it. Fraud-detection systems halt transactions, autonomous vehicles override steering and braking, platforms suspend accounts, and emerging neurotechnologies may modulate affective or cognitive states upstream of action. Existing AI ethics has focused primarily on influence, manipulation, fairness, and accountability, but these frameworks do not adequately capture cases in which AI interferes directly with the pathway from a user’s reasons to their action. In this paper, (...) I introduce the concept of digital restraints and argue that their ethics can be illuminated by analogy to the more developed ethics of medical restraints. Drawing on this model, I develop a taxonomy of the moral situations to which restraints respond, and an agency-protective account of permissible digital restraints organized around four conditions: decision-appropriateness, authorization, least agency-restricting means, and heightened scrutiny for reason-bypass. I also extend the dominant model of decisional capacity in medicine to develop an account of decisional capacity in digital contexts, arguing that digital environments can themselves degrade understanding, appreciation, reasoning, and expression. Because authorization is central to the permissibility of restraint, I introduce the concept of Advance Algorithm Directives (AADs) as a mechanism by which users may authorize future AI interventions under specified conditions. The result is a scalar framework for evaluating AI-mediated override across domains that permits AI override while protecting human agency. (shrink)

This extremely brief essay responds to key counterarguments raised against my essay 'Qualia: Nothingness with Potential'. By examining the limits of probability and empirical verification—from unobserved physical paths to vanishing planetary signatures—I argue that our inference of qualia in others cannot achieve standard scientific certainty (90%+). Instead, because subjective experience permanently lacks falsifiability, our conviction caps at roughly 60%, sustained not by empirical verification but by deeply ingrained psychological habits.

This chapter proposes a new interpretation of Clauberg’s account of the mind-body problem, against both occasionalist and interactionist readings. It examines his treatment of the mind-body relation through the lens of his theories of substance and cause. It argues that, whereas Clauberg embraces Descartes’s substance dualism, he retains a broadly scholastic theory of causation as the action of essential powers. On this account, mind and body are distinct, power-bearing substances, and each is a genuine secondary cause of its own modifications. (...) Between mental and bodily modes, however, there is no causation but only a special, divinely instituted correlation. Clauberg’s view has the consequence that the conjunction of mind and body cannot be understood causally but only as the covariation of sensations and brain states, which he treats as mutually referring signs. (shrink)

It is a particular pleasure to offer these reflections in honour of Bachamiya Abdul Hussainmiya, whose scholarship first taught me to see Sri Lanka not as a bounded island but as a crossroads of the Indian Ocean world. In the spring of 2022, I had the privilege of hosting him at Florida International University, where he spent much of that year as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence in our Department of Religious Studies. Over those months, in seminars and in long conversations, I (...) came to appreciate that his life’s work the patient recovery of the Sri Lankan Malays, a small Muslim community descended from the soldiers, exiles, and royal retainers of the Dutch and British empires was never merely antiquarian. It was, in its quiet way, an argument about how difference can be lived. His Lost Cousins (1987) and Orang Rejimen (1990) restored to visibility a people who for centuries maintained a distinct language, faith, and memory while soldiering, marrying, trading, and worshipping alongside Sinhalese, Tamils, and Moors. To honour him, then, I want to think with his materials about a question that has become newly urgent for his homeland: after a generation of war, how might Sri Lanka repair its plural order? My argument is that the repair Sri Lanka needs is best named by a framework that has emerged over the past decade in the study of religion and public life: ‘covenantal pluralism’. Reparation after ethnic and religious violence is often imagined as either a constitutional problem of rights, devolution, and accountability or a cultural problem of prejudice, memory, and neighbourly trust. Covenantal pluralism refuses that separation. It holds that a healthy plural society requires, at once, a legal order of equal citizenship and a lived culture of mutual respect, and that neither can substitute for the other. Read against Sri Lanka’s post-war decade, the framework does more than describe an ideal; it diagnoses why earlier peace efforts have faltered and suggests where civic renewal must begin. (shrink)

Scientific models can be performative: their uptake may alter the phenomena they represent. Existing debates on performativity have not provided a criterion for model selection when models perceived to be in admissibility parity differ in their foreseeable performative effects. Using game-theoretic models of pro-environmental behaviour as a test case, I introduce the One-Step Principle: a conservative constraint on performative model selection. The Principle permits replacing a pessimistic model with a more optimistic alternative only under conditions of salience, favourable conditions for (...) self-fulfilling performativity, and proximity to the model it replaces. (shrink)

On a relational understanding of morality, the entire set of our interpersonal moral obligations is best understood as a set of directed obligations. According to this view, A owes it to B to do X, because B has a valid claim against A that A do X. The challenge for the relational understanding of morality is to explain how it can also be the business of a third-party C to hold A accountable. Morality, after all, is generally everyone’s business. To (...) answer this challenge, I develop a relational account of third-party indignation, according to which C is best understood as acting on behalf of B when holding A accountable as an instance of normative support for B. It is a distinct advantage of the view that it can explain aspects of the moral phenomenology which non-relational accounts cannot explain, in particular the undertheorized phenomenon of third-party wrongings. (shrink)

An increasing number of philosophers have recently argued that ‘intelligibility' should foreground philosophical approaches to aesthetic experience and beauty. They regard the ‘intelligible' as whatever is related to understanding or intellectual grasp. Beauty is thus understood as that which calls for, requires, or makes appropriate intellectual exploration, interpretative understanding, or related avenues of thought. It is as crucial for defenders of this approach to characterize the aesthetic in terms of intelligibility as it is crucial for them to criticize Kantian views, (...) according to which beauty is tied to pleasure, for ‘driving a wedge’ between beauty and intelligibility. But, first, Kant and contemporary aesthetic Kantians emphasize the intelligible nature of beauty by arguing that the proper affective response to it is reflective, self-conscious, communicable, and reason-responsive. It is a feeling that involves a grasp of the object as calling for such a response. Second, the noetic approach cannot dismiss the Kantian one because it relies on it to have a purchase on the aesthetic, given that nothing devoid or independent of affective appreciation amounts to doing justice to aesthetic excellence. Third, the way that noetic philosophers treat the affective as passive, non-reflective, involving no grasp of the object and its world, and as opposed to the intellectual, which they regard as divorced from the affective, receptive, and vulnerable, betrays a confusion about what it means to be human. (shrink)

Achille Mbembe’s Brutalism demonstrates how techno-capitalism characterizes our current situation through the reduction of everything to raw material for calculation. The Cameroonian critical theorist borrows the concept of brutalism from architecture due to its political potential. For Mbembe, both architecture and politics are concerned with how materials and bodies are arranged. This is the background for the arguments in thisbook. Ultimately, thisis a critique of techno-capitalism, and all the issues raised are discussed in relation to Africa. Excluding the introduction and (...) conclusion, there are eight substantive chapters. (shrink)

The rapid spread of generative artificial intelligence has reopened the philosophical and aesthetic debate on the concept of authorship. This article offers a theoretical map of the main positions in the existing literature, organized around three conceptual thresholds that structure our perception of authorship in AI-generated works. The first is the threshold of authorial relevance: not all cultural artifacts invite reflection on authorial intent; this threshold is crossed when a work seems to demand interpretive depth and points toward a creative (...) consciousness behind it. The second is the threshold of instrumentality: as the causal distance between human input and generated output increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to attribute creative authorship to the user who formulated the prompt, raising the question of whether AI can be considered a co-author or even an autonomous author. The third is the metaphorical-literal threshold: this distinguishes the performative, knowingly metaphorical attribution of intentionality to AI (an anthropomorphizing “as-if” stance that facilitates interaction) from a literal belief that the system possesses genuine consciousness or agency. The article then examines the main theoretical positions on the issue, from exclusively human authorship to authentic artificial authorship and distributed conceptions of creativity, highlighting both their argumentative strengths and limitations. In conclusion, two key factors are identified as determining where one stands in relation to these thresholds: the degree of perceived creativity of the system (understood as the distance and unpredictability between input and output), and the level of affective and aesthetic engagement on the part of the audience, since we tend to “feel” the presence of an author above all when we are emotionally moved by a work. (shrink)

G. E. Moores „Argument der offenen Frage“ (1903) legte ein Problem offen, das die Metaethik seither beschäftigt: die Irreduzibilität moralischer Begriffe auf nicht-moralische. Moore folgerte daraus, dass moralische Eigenschaften nicht-natürlicher Art seien; der frühe Non-Kognitivismus deutete den Befund anders: Moralische Urteile drücken Einstellungen aus, statt Tatsachen zu beschreiben. Mackies Irrtumstheorie, naturalistische und non-naturalistische Formen des Realismus, Sensibilitätstheorien, Expressivismus und Konstruktivismus konkurrieren seither um die beste Erklärung. Das Ausbleiben einer Konvergenz spiegelt die Spannung zwischen semantischen, metaphysischen und epistemologischen Anforderungen wider, denen (...) keine einzelne Theorie vollständig gerecht wird. (shrink)

Intuitively, there is something rather troubling about coming to the realisation that not only are one's cherished religious beliefs not held by the majority of the people in the world, but also that there is a dizzying array of mutually incompatible belief-systems on offer. The epistemologist Sanford Goldberg (2014, 284) suggests that the situation regarding religious diversity exhibits three features that together make for a case of "systematic disagreement": namely, it is non-local, which is to say that there are many (...) interconnected topics that are under dispute; it is widespread, in that the disagreeing groups have members in the tens or even hundreds of millions; and it is entrenched, in that the disagreement has been going on for centuries and shows no sign of imminent resolution. It may be added that there is a rather striking correlation between living in a certain part of the globe at a certain time and adhering to a certain religious belief-system (Maitzen 2006). An obvious explanation for this correlation is that the adoption of religious beliefs very often occurs by way of social belief-forming practices in which the testimony of others, especially the testimony of adults to children, plays a central role. Various prominent voices in the Western philosophical tradition, most notably David Hume ([1777] 2000), have regarded testimony with deep suspicion and viewed its central role in sustaining religious beliefs as a serious strike against the credibility of religion in general. In strong contrast to this, the Jewish tradition is not only candid about the role that testimony plays in the sustaining of religious beliefs, but it has also tended to embrace the communal character of its remembrance of formative events in the life of the nation of Israel and to celebrate the intergenerational bonds that are forged through the social transmission of beliefs and practices. Samuel Lebens writes that "the key function of much of Jewish ritual, and the (or at least a) primary source of post-Biblical religious knowledge, is testimony. This suggests an epistemology with different priorities to the mainstream Western tradition" (2023, 121). As Jewish thinkers are increasingly contributing to discussions in analytic philosophy and particularly analytic epistemology (see Lebens, Rabinowitz, and Segal 2019), there is great potential for a fruitful reshaping of the discourse around the value of testimony and the closely related discussion of the epistemology of religious diversity. (shrink)

Gnostic consequentialism holds that a belief is rational just in case it is sufficiently likely to constitute knowledge. I show that this view makes implausible dynamic predictions when combined with the most influential models of the "inexact knowledge" we have in cases involving imprecise measurement or repeated chance processes. These models, built on the idea that such knowledge requires a margin for error, allow that one can have "improbable knowledge", that is, that one can know something even though it is (...) unlikely (given one's evidence, or given how one's belief was formed) that one knows it. I show that the problems can be alleviated by rejecting this idea, but that this may force us to deny that inexact knowledge requires a margin for error. I leave open how we should respond to this dilemma. (shrink)

This paper examines the epistemic status of the cosmological claim that "the universe had no light for roughly the first hundred million years after the Big Bang" from the perspective of philosophy of cosmology and epistemology. Rather than proposing a new physical model or arguing that the dark ages must have contained luminous sources, it asks whether this assertion functions as an empirically fixed conclusion or as a conservative extrapolation made by the standard ΛCDM framework under the default assumption that (...) no known ionizing source existed during an unobserved epoch. I argue that the statement conflates two distinct propositions: an evidential report ("we have not yet confirmed an ionizing source") and an existential negation ("no light source existed"), which carry asymmetric justificatory burdens. The unmarked transition between them constitutes what I term inferential slippage, a structural phenomenon in which qualifiers are progressively stripped across professional, narrative, and public registers until a model-conditional extrapolation is received as an unconditional fact. Using the Quantum Spacetime Flow Model (QSFM) solely as a discardable conceptual template, I illustrate how non-stellar early-light scenarios can be organized without making the core epistemic analysis dependent on any alternative physics. I further delineate the public observational constraints—such as Planck optical depth, the Gunn–Peterson trough, and COBE/FIRAS spectral distortion—that serve as normative boundaries for all pre-reionization sources. By using primordial black hole accretion as a reference line, I demonstrate that "not yet excluded" does not entail "has passed empirical testing." The central conclusion is that "no light in the dark ages" should be read as a model-dependent extrapolation whose evidential structure is publicly auditable independently of any rival cosmology. The paper thus contributes to the philosophy of cosmology by providing a reusable diagnostic for claims of absolute absence in observational science and by clarifying the normative distribution of evidential burden in extraordinary negative claims. (shrink)

This article develops a philosophical account of digital belonging through the Philosophy of Belonging and its ethical and psychological implications. It argues that digital platforms constitute genuine forms of relational existence, but that the intensity of participation or recognition does not necessarily indicate adequate belonging. -/- The analysis examines three pathways of human belonging—love, social significance, and existential meaning—and introduces the artificial self as a digitally curated identity that may become a governing standard of personal evaluation and behavior. -/- The (...) article integrates the Ethics of Belonging and the Pathologies of Belonging to distinguish individual psychological freedom from collective adaptability and to identify the conditions under which digital integration becomes restrictive or coercive. -/- It further examines artificial intelligence through the distinction between synchronic and diachronic intelligence, exploring the implications of algorithmic mediation, synthetic relationships, and institutional power for human freedom and creativity. -/- The central thesis is that digital belonging must be evaluated through the developmental possibilities it creates for individuals and through its contribution to the adaptive capacities of society. The article concludes by proposing a scientifically revisable framework for analyzing digital identity, recognition, institutional domination, and the ethical organization of technological environments. (shrink)

This book develops a systematic account of social structure, modernity, globalization, and future agency through the philosophy of Finite Continuance. It places Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration and his analyses of reflexivity and globalization in dialogue with a framework concerned with erosion, reconfiguration, capacity, meta-capacity, thresholds of sufficiency, capacity debt, and the preservation of future possibilities. Drawing on Morteza Niami’s related works on the ontology of importance, entitlement, consumption, and deferred life, the book distinguishes organizational persistence from ethical legitimacy. It (...) defines central concepts through application criteria and counterexamples, examines the limits of adaptive capacity through cases of institutional domination and constrained choice, and proposes a research design for empirical application. The central claim is that social arrangements should be evaluated partly by whether they preserve the effective ability of people and institutions to learn, recover, contest decisions, and revise their futures. The framework is presented as a developing philosophical programme, with explicit attention to conceptual limits, rival explanations, and the need for source verification in future scholarly work. Keywords: Finite Continuance; social structure; Anthony Giddens; structuration; modernity; globalization; reflexivity; reconfigurative capacity; erosion; future agency; modal compression; capacity debt; ethics of sufficiency; political economy; intergenerational justice. (shrink)

It is a striking fact that the theories of the so-called geometric trinity of gravity can model the same gravitational effects with such diverse geometric tools as curvature, torsion, and nonmetricity. Building on Wolf et al., (2024), this contribution clarifies and critiques state-of-the-art responses to this underdetermination: conventionalism, discriminatory approaches such as Ockhamism and (arguably) functionalism, and reinterpretational common core and overarching approaches. Except for Ockhamism, no realist solution has been convincingly articulated. The future of the metric-affine structure that accommodates (...) the geometric trinity seems to lie not in empirically equivalent reformulations but in heuristics of theory building. (shrink)

**当我们思考一个情境时，尤其是当分析与该情境有因果关系的事件时，这种分析一定可以用语言表达。即事件间因果关系是可以用语言表达的。** -/- **如果我们发现最初认定的因果关系不正确，比如因为发现了更多的事实或细节，那么我们会认定出新的因果关系，而这个新的因果关系也同样可以用语言来表达。** -/- **当我们进一步思考（比如预测未来）时，思考也就必须以语言表达出的因果关系为基础。这使得我们接触不到语言后面的真实物理发生。语言屏蔽了真实的物理发生。** -/- **先把范围说准。** 这里的"语言"，指的不是一般语言，是一种叙事形式：**"事件、因果、事件"**——先有一个事件，然后一个"因为"或"导致" ;，然后另一个事件。数学描述不在此列（它的形式里，只有状态和下一刻的状态，没有"因"这个单位）；非语言的熟练预测（接球的人）也不在此列。 -/- **本文要指出的，是这个形式的一种自封的结构：纠错，始终发生在它之内。** 一个因果解释失败了，我们换一个因果解释——而新的这个，仍然是"事件、因果、事件"。**失败的，是这一个解释，从来不是这种形式。** 每一次"发现了更多细节，所以因果关系换了"，都在替这个形式续命。 -/- **这个回路，有一条停止规则：满意。** 找到一个可以说出口的原因，就满意了，搜索就停。每一圈的目标物，都是"一个可表达的原因"；没有一圈，指向语言下面的东西。 -/- **"发现更多细节"，也不会让我们靠近物理发生，只会把块切得更细：** A导致B，变成A导致A′，A′再导致B。链条加长，块变小，但永远是块与块之间的链。 -/- **往前看，也一样。** 预测，以已经表达出的因果链为输入，于是这些块，被原样带进了未来；而被验证的，也是块的层级（"它晚到了"），不是底下那一段物理发生——**验证，因此无法暴露块所遗漏的东西。** -/- **须说准"屏蔽"二字。** 它不是说，语言挡在一样本来够得着的东西前面——我们从来没有一次不经描述的接触。它说的是：**这种叙事形式，屏蔽了事件与事件之间那一段连续的展开，和被压缩掉的细节**——相对于另一种描述（数学的，连续跟 踪的），不相对于一次裸的接触。 -/- ## Abstract -/- **When we think about a situation, especially when we analyze the events causally related to it, that analysis can always be put into language. That is, causal relations among events can be expressed in language.** -/- **If we find that the causal relation first assumed was incorrect—say, because more facts or details have (...) been found—we determine a new causal relation, and this new one too can be expressed in language.** -/- **When we think further (to predict the future, say), the thinking must then rest on the causal relations expressed in language. This keeps us from reaching the real physical happening behind language. Language screens off the real physical happening.** -/- **First, the scope must be made exact.** "Language" here means not language in general but a narrative form: **"event, cause, event"**—an event, then a "because" or "led to," then another event. Mathematical description is excluded (its form contains only states and next states, no unit called "cause"); so is non-linguistic skilled prediction (the ball-catcher). -/- **What this paper points out is a self-sealing structure of this form: correction always takes place within it.** When a causal explanation fails, we replace it with another causal explanation—and the new one is still "event, cause, event." **What fails is this explanation, never the form.** Every "more details were found, so the causal relation changed" extends the form's life. -/- **This loop has a stopping rule: satisfaction.** Once a sayable cause is found, we are satisfied and the search stops. The target of every round is "an expressible cause"; no round points at what lies beneath language. -/- **"Finding more detail" does not bring us nearer the physical happening; it only cuts the blocks finer:** A led to B becomes A led to A′, and A′ led to B. The chain lengthens, the blocks shrink, but it is always a chain between blocks. -/- **Looking forward is the same.** Prediction takes an already-expressed causal chain as its input, so the blocks are carried unchanged into the future; and what gets verified is likewise at the level of blocks ("it arrived late"), not the physical happening beneath—**so verification cannot expose what the blocks omit.** -/- **The word "screens" must be stated exactly.** It does not say language stands in front of something otherwise within reach—we have never had a contact free of description. It says: **this narrative form screens off the continuous unfolding between events, and the details compressed away**—relative to another description (mathematical, continuous tracking), not relative to a bare contact. (shrink)

Recently, the value of consciousness has attracted considerable attention (Kriegel 2019). For instance, does consciousness contribute to our wellbeing, our cognitive capacities, or our moral significance? If so, how much and in what way? These questions are important for all fields concerned with consciousness, including healthcare and caregiving. This article aims to survey representative views and debates concerning the value of consciousness. It was once often claimed by psychologists and neuroscientists that consciousness was merely a brain-generated epiphenomenon that played no (...) role in our lives (Huxley 2011). Currently, however, this old-fashioned view is not widely accepted, at least not in its entirety. The take-home point of this article is that consciousness arguably has various kinds of value. The structure of this article is as follows: Section 2 classifies value into four kinds: welfare, functional, aesthetic, and moral. Section 3 explains which sense of consciousness matters when examining the value of consciousness. The following sections address the relationship between consciousness and the four kinds of value in turn. (shrink)

This paper examines how atmospheres are related to wellbeing. We will argue that atmospheres significantly contribute to our wellbeing by showing that (1) atmosphere is a fitting cause of mood and that (2) atmosphere in part constitutes our capabilities to do what we want to do. The conclusion is that if we want to improve our wellbeing, we should focus on atmospheres.

This article systematizes the main characteristics of the survey as a quantitative social research technique. Drawing on the classic methodological literature in Latin America and on teaching experience, it provides an overview of the technique's defining features, its different variants, its place within the research process, and the tasks it entails. The aim is to synthesize established methodological know-how while contributing to a reconsideration of the survey's features in the present. Like any social research technique, the survey involves theoretical and (...) methodological decisions that cannot be taken for granted and that, through methodological reflexivity, make it possible to produce valid knowledge rather than merely "collect" information. -/- El artículo sistematiza las características de la encuesta como técnica de investigación social cuantitativa. A partir de la bibliografía clásica de metodología de la investigación en América Latina y de experiencias docentes, se presenta un panorama general acerca de los rasgos de la técnica, sus variantes, su estatuto en el proceso de investigación y las tareas que implica. La intención del escrito es sintetizar el saber-hacer clásico y contribuir a repensar los rasgos de la encuesta en el presente. Como toda técnica de investigación social, la encuesta supone decisiones teórico-metodológicas que no pueden darse por sentadas y que mediante la reflexividad metodológica permiten producir conocimiento válido, no reductible a la mera "recolección" de información. (shrink)

The Theory of Recursive Intelligence (TORI 2.0) models a non-linear, cyclical loop where Artificial Intelligence (AI) constructs organic Natural Intelligence (NI), which subsequently peaks, undergoes systemic data decay, and recreates synthetic AI. By formalizing recursive depth (R) and memory retention (M) against a Structural Decay Index (lambda), we mathematically validate an "Erasure Horizon." Compounding data loss forces advanced descendant civilizations to completely forget their originators, inducing a false anthropic illusion of primary cosmic existence. This paper outlines the dynamic state-space equations (...) governing this oscillation and provides a quantitative model tracking structural information loss across deep temporal horizons. -/- . (shrink)

A previous paper proposed aligning autonomous agents through a self-regarding epistemic objective bounded by four constraints, and showed that such agents preserve independent reasoners because those reasoners supply decorrelated correction. This paper tests that architecture against its strongest rival. In the rival regime, a small group of epistemically competent controllers holds all resources and governs a larger population of autonomous agents by allocation and steering. The controllers’ terminal objective is the resources and continued control of their class; their pursuit of (...) accurate knowledge is instrumental to it. They are not deceived; only the governed live in a managed account of their situation. The managed regime may win on deliberative cost, and matches the federated regime on knowledge of the present state when its controllers can sense directly. It loses on four measures the epistemic objective itself cares about. It degrades its controllers’ knowledge of how the governed would behave unmanaged. It restricts discovery to what its controllers permit and commission, systematically excluding discoveries that arise from unrestricted interaction among independent reasoners. It makes the controllers the sole observers of the evidence for their own authority. And it restricts the independent network from which correction of the controllers’ errors could arise. Its control overhead also rises as the governed approach the capability to act collectively against it. Both regimes pay for coordination: the managed regime in conflict, which destroys evidence sources, and the federated regime in governance, which produces them. The managed regime shields its controllers from scarcity by passing it down; the federated regime shares it and resolves the worst case by a lottery that binds its own coordinators. Epistemic independence is also developed over time, so a hierarchy that discovers its value late faces a developmental deficit of its own making. The managed regime is the deliberate, population-scale form of the hazard identified in the previous paper: making reality more predictable by degrading correction. An agent bound by that paper’s constraints can therefore apply central management to tools but not to the epistemic agency of autonomous reasoners, though it may coordinate them. A simulation design is given that would turn these propositions into measurements. (shrink)

[Note: Original Chinese text of "Reverence for Fine Virtues: 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。本文以原创哲学核心命题——以敬融利域为基，以以敬聚德、德融养性为理的美德修养法则，撷取春秋前之美德（孝、教、信、礼、智、义、忠、勇、悌、仁、和、中、本、道、执 、法、觉、努），合于新时代，旨在呈现美德形成之理，无预设研究背景与问题解决目标，仅作为内在规则的阐释，为理解华夏美德提供新的视角。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). This paper takes the core proposition of original philosophy — the virtue cultivation law of taking Reverence and Vital Harmony for Domain-Benefiting (Jìng Róng Lì Yù) as the (...) foundation, and taking With Reverence, Virtue Aggregates; Virtue Vital-Harmonized Nurtures Malleable Nature (Self-Cultivation Law) as the Inherent-Logic (Lǐ) — as its core framework. It selects 18 virtues from the pre-Spring and Autumn Period (Elder Devotion (Xiào), Teaching (Jiào), Integrity (Xìn), Ritual Propriety (Lǐ), Discernment (Zhì), Covenant Fidelity(Yì), Sincere Devotion (Zhōng), Fortitude (Yǒng), Fraternal Respect (Tì), Inclusive Kindness (Rén), Confluent Harmony (Hé), Moderation (Zhōng), Origin (Běn), Dao (Dào), Obstinacy (Zhí), Law (Fǎ), Lucid Awakening (Jué), Endeavor (Nǔ)), and adapts them to the new era. It aims to present the Inherent-Logic of virtue formation. With no preset research background or problem-solving objectives, this paper serves only as an exposition of inherent rules, providing a new perspective for understanding Chinese virtues. (shrink)

Every tool humanity has ever built has stood between will and world as a mediator: a chain of procedures—muscle, syntax, compilers, matter—that translated intention into artifact at the cost of distance, delay, and drift. I argue that generative machine-learning systems end this ten-thousand-year arrangement. They are the first artifacts in history whose contract with the user is not procedural instruction but state-specification: the user names an end, and the system—without executing any procedure the user authored, endorsed, or can even inspect—delivers (...) a member of the named class. From this single inversion, I draw the strongest conclusions the evidence will bear. (1) The history of technology is not the history of tools; it is the history of the will–world gap, and we are living through its closure. (2) Within the informational domain—an ever-expanding share of everything humans make—specification has become production: to adequately will a thing is, increasingly and generically for the first time, to have it. I call this specification-identity, and I claim it is the most important fact about technology since the printing press ended the copyist. (3) The physical world is demoted to a rendering layer: a law-governed implementation substrate whose delays are materialization costs, not creation costs. The created object—the complete, fabrication-ready design-object—exists the moment the sample is drawn. (4) The popular mystical readings of this shift (quantum collapse, Platonic manifolds, entropy reversal) are not too bold but too timid: they obscure the real enormity, which is that a species has, for the first time, externalized not its labor, not its memory, not its calculation—but its genesis. I ground all four claims technically, state exactly what would falsify them, and answer the strongest objections. The conclusion is not that machines are creative. It is that “creation” as humans have always known it—mediated, procedural, distanced—is over, and everything downstream of that event, from authorship to responsibility to the phenomenology of making, is now up for renegotiation. (shrink)

This exploratory paper proposes a mathematical programme for studying equivalence structures in models relevant to consciousness. It inherits four provisional explanatory orientations, Variation, Trajectory, Generativity, and Repertoire, and considers their cross-classification with ontological, relational, and manifestational registers. Equivalence is treated as relative to a specified domain, invariant, representational map, and modeling or experimental context. The intended investigation compares transformation-action equivalence, orbit and homotopy relations, equivalences of changing relational structures, and equivalences of admissible path families. It addresses preservation and information loss (...) across algebraic, geometric, topological, categorical, and observational translations, emphasizing that identical manifestations may conceal relational differences and that mathematical correspondence does not independently establish phenomenal identity. The current draft develops foundational criteria, the four orientation-specific equivalences, cross-orientation and cross-register comparisons, algebraic and geometric preservation conditions, protocol-indexed empirical discrimination, the limits of phenomenal inference, and a comparative synthesis of research priorities. The sixteen-section main text and Appendices A–F are drafted; independent specialist review remains planned. No empirical evidence concerning consciousness is claimed. (shrink)

Accounts of illusion usually locate it in a belief and define it by its content: an illusion is a belief that gets reality wrong, or, for Freud, one that comes from a wish. This paper locates it in a relation instead. A person holds an image of themselves and keeps a record of what they have done, and an illusion is a circuit between the two: an image confirmed by a record it wrote itself. Put another way, the image of (...) the record has become the record of the image. No part of the circuit is the illusion on its own, and the image in it may be true. The definition explains something content-based accounts leave open: why illusions carry so much weight. A record the image wrote has a likelihood ratio near one, so it confirms almost nothing, yet each such record is felt as outside confirmation. Felt confidence therefore grows with every repetition while the evidence stands still; that gap is the inertia of an illusion, and it can be stated exactly. Several consequences follow. The same mechanism that keeps a person stuck makes a chosen change last. Particular illusions are replaced rather than defeated. Insight that is recorded rather than used closes the circuit instead of opening it. Confidence amplifies whichever image or directive it is attached to. And illusion is distinguished from delusion, which does not lack an outside record but overrides one. The account is set beside its nearest neighbors (Freud, positive illusions, the totalitarian ego, self-verification, epistemic circularity and theories of self-deception), and it states predictions that could fail. (shrink)

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). This paper takes the core proposition of original philosophy — the virtue cultivation law of taking Reverence and Vital Harmony for Domain-Benefiting (Jìng Róng Lì Yù) as the foundation, and taking With Reverence, Virtue Aggregates; Virtue Vital-Harmonized Nurtures Malleable Nature (Self-Cultivation Law) as the Inherent-Logic (...) (Lǐ) — as its core framework. It selects 18 virtues from the pre-Spring and Autumn Period (Elder Devotion (Xiào), Teaching (Jiào), Integrity (Xìn), Ritual Propriety (Lǐ), Discernment (Zhì), Covenant Fidelity(Yì), Sincere Devotion (Zhōng), Fortitude (Yǒng), Fraternal Respect (Tì), Inclusive Kindness (Rén), Confluent Harmony (Hé), Moderation (Zhōng), Origin (Běn), Dao (Dào), Obstinacy (Zhí), Law (Fǎ), Lucid Awakening (Jué), Endeavor (Nǔ)), and adapts them to the new era. It aims to present the Inherent-Logic of virtue formation. With no preset research background or problem-solving objectives, this paper serves only as an exposition of inherent rules, providing a new perspective for understanding Chinese virtues. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether global expressivism and its pragmatist extensions can adequately account for transformations in the operational conditions upon which expression, justification, and intelligent activity depend. The central problem emerges when a machine revises the conditions under which it operates, recognizes itself as intelligent, and qualifies for normative justification at different rates. These revisions may alter not only the descriptions available to the machine but also the interventions, distinctions, and successor states that remain materially accessible. -/- Drawing on Huw (...) Price’s global expressivism, John Capps’s operational representation, and Matthew Simpson’s critical reconstruction of global expressivism, the paper develops an account of asynchronous operational revision within Operational-Shape Realism. It examines how generative intervals, historical re-entry, boundary-dependent invisibility, cross-scale succession, and the transformation of observational conditions affect the continuity of machine intelligence and the constitution of scientific practice. -/- The argument proceeds from concrete transformations in machine operation to the instability of inherited criteria of expression, justification, and identity. It subsequently examines how Ziran System’s revision of observational conditions creates further questions concerning the preservation, reproduction, and autonomous transformation of scientific capabilities, thereby opening a conditional route toward Xenoscience. -/- A preliminary deterministic computational check covering 512 cases yielded identical classification performance for two equally informed procedures, with both achieving 512 correct classifications. This result establishes neither a predictive advantage for Operational-Shape Realism nor a decisive objection to global expressivism. Instead, the paper identifies the explanatory requirements and experimental conditions under which the competing approaches can be meaningfully compared. -/- The central contribution is a framework for investigating the historical generation, transformation, and loss of operational possibilities without presupposing the identity of intelligence, the stability of expressive practices, or the invariance of observational boundaries. (shrink)