scholarly journals Cultural and Biological Evolution

2021 ◽  
pp. 195-208
Author(s):  
Loet Leydesdorff
Keyword(s):  
Life Sciences ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Arrow Of Time ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Communication Dynamics ◽  
Selection Mechanisms ◽  
Evolutionary Control

AbstractAlthough there is no necessary relation between “big data” and “monism”—the program of reducing cultural and mental processes to computational and biological principles—both these programs reject a dualism between res extensa and res cogitans. Opposing this philosophy of science, I have argued in the above chapter that a second contingency of possible relations and expectations feeds back on the manifest relations. This second contingency cannot be studied from a natural-science or life-sciences perspective, but is the proper domain of the social sciences, where the focus is on what things mean as different from what they are. Next-order selection mechanisms can take evolutionary control. The complexity of the communication evolves against the arrow of time in terms of interacting codes, which generate redundancies and therefore new options. As human beings, we can follow the potentially unintended consequences of the communication dynamics reflexively. Both consciousness and communication are self-organizing and thus resilient against steering.

scholarly journals 人工智能時代的價值轉向及倫理秩序重構——評＜在ＡＩ醫生和病人之間——人工智能診斷技術的內在邏輯及其對病人主體性建構的影響＞一文

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-72
Author(s):  
Hui JIANG
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Disabled Persons ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Digital Commons ◽  
Traditional Chinese Culture

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract in English only.This paper comments on the article "Between AI Physician and Patient: The Logic of AI Diagnosis and its Impact on Patient Subjectivity." The article's content is clear and its expression is precise. However, due to the theme and focus of the article and limitations on space, it does not thoroughly analyze the problems with AI and its potential combination with traditional Chinese culture. For example, it does not consider the ethical relationship between AI and human beings; Confucianism, personality and emotion after the formation of AI self-consciousness; the development of the role of AI doctors; temporary disability and patients’ primary status in health care; the social environment, rights and obligations of disabled persons and patients with chronic diseases; or the interaction between genetic editing and life sciences. There is still much room to pursue these challenging directions for research.DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 46 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.

Current issues in aesthetics and beyond: Revisiting lookism

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 59-68
Author(s):  
Peter Takáč
Keyword(s):  
Plastic Surgery ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Common View ◽  
Aesthetic Medicine ◽  
Unequal Treatment ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
Public Status ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common

AbstractLookism is a term used to describe discrimination based on the physical appearance of a person. We suppose that the social impact of lookism is a philosophical issue, because, from this perspective, attractive people have an advantage over others. The first line of our argumentation involves the issue of lookism as a global ethical and aesthetical phenomenon. A person’s attractiveness has a significant impact on the social and public status of this individual. The common view in society is that it is good to be more attractive and healthier. This concept generates several ethical questions about human aesthetical identity, health, authenticity, and integrity in society. It seems that this unequal treatment causes discrimination, diminishes self-confidence, and lowers the chance of a job or social enforcement for many human beings. Currently, aesthetic improvements are being made through plastic surgery. There is no place on the human body that we cannot improve with plastic surgery or aesthetic medicine. We should not forget that it may result in the problem of elitism, in dividing people into primary and secondary categories. The second line of our argumentation involves a particular case of lookism: Melanie Gaydos. A woman that is considered to be a model with a unique look.

New Wars and Their Visual Representation: Dead Bodies without Graves/Mourne

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Tuncay Şur ◽  
Betül Yarar
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Public ◽  
Photographic Images ◽  
War Photography ◽  
New Wars ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

This paper seeks to understand why there has been an increase in photographic images exposing military violence or displaying bodies killed by military forces and how they can freely circulate in the public without being censored or kept hidden. In other words, it aims to analyze this particular issue as a symptom of the emergence of new wars and a new regime of their visual representation. Within this framework, it attempts to relate two kinds of literature that are namely the history of war and war photography with the bridge of theoretical discussions on the real, its photographic representation, power, and violence.  Rather than systematic empirical analysis, the paper is based on a theoretical attempt which is reflected on some socio-political observations in the Middle East where there has been ongoing wars or new wars. The core discussion of the paper is supported by a brief analysis of some illustrative photographic images that are served through the social media under the circumstances of war for instance in Turkey between Turkish military troops and the Kurdish militants. The paper concludes that in line with the process of dissolution/transformation of the old nation-state formations and globalization, the mechanism and mode of power have also transformed to the extent that it resulted in the emergence of new wars. This is one dynamic that we need to recognize in relation to the above-mentioned question, the other is the impact of social media in not only delivering but also receiving war photographies. Today these changes have led the emergence of new machinery of power in which the old modern visual/photographic techniques of representing wars without human beings, torture, and violence through censorship began to be employed alongside medieval power techniques of a visual exhibition of tortures and violence.

The Property Species

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart J. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
First Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Symbolic Thought ◽  
Core Property ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

What is property, and why does our species happen to have it? The Property Species explores how Homo sapiens acquires, perceives, and knows the custom of property, and why it might be relevant for understanding how property works in the twenty-first century. Arguing from some hard-to-dispute facts that neither the natural sciences nor the humanities—nor the social sciences squarely in the middle—are synthesizing a full account of property, this book offers a cross-disciplinary compromise that is sure to be controversial: All human beings and only human beings have property in things, and at its core, property rests on custom, not rights. Such an alternative to conventional thinking contends that the origins of property lie not in food, mates, territory, or land, but in the very human act of creating, with symbolic thought, something new that did not previously exist. Integrating cognitive linguistics with the philosophy of property and a fresh look at property disputes in the common law, this book makes the case that symbolic-thinking humans locate the meaning of property within a thing. The provocative implications are that property—not property rights—is an inherent fundamental principle of economics, and that legal realists and the bundle-of-sticks metaphor are wrong about the facts regarding property. Written by an economist who marvels at the natural history of humankind, the book is essential reading for experts and any reader who has wondered why people claim things as “Mine!,” and what that means for our humanity.

The Measure of Greatness

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Nature ◽  
Complex Trajectory ◽  
The Many ◽  
Human Excellence ◽  
Ethical Perspectives

Magnanimity is a virtue that has led many lives. Foregrounded early on by Plato as the philosophical virtue par excellence, it became one of the crown jewels in Aristotle’s account of human excellence and was accorded an equally salient place by other ancient thinkers. One of the most distinctive elements of the ancient tradition to filter into the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds, it sparked important intellectual engagements there and went on to carve deep tracks through several later philosophies that inherited from this tradition. Under changing names, under reworked forms, it continued to breathe in the thought of Descartes and Hume, Kant and Nietzsche, and their successors. Its many lives have been joined by important continuities. Yet they have also been fragmented by discontinuities—discontinuities reflecting larger shifts in ethical perspectives and competing answers to questions about the nature of the good life, the moral nature of human beings, and their relationship to the social and natural world they inhabit. They have also been punctuated by moments of controversy in which the greatness of this vision of human greatness has itself been called into doubt. This volume provides a window to the complex trajectory of a virtue whose glitter has at times been as heady as it has been divisive. By exploring the many lives it has lived, we will be in a better position to decide whether and why this is a virtue we might still want to make central to our own ethical lives.

scholarly journals Calcium isotopic patterns in enamel reflect different nursing behaviors among South African early hominins

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (8) ◽  
pp. eaax3250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Théo Tacail ◽  
Jeremy E. Martin ◽  
Florent Arnaud-Godet ◽  
J. Francis Thackeray ◽  
Thure E. Cerling ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Breast Milk ◽  
South African ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Tooth Enamel ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Milk Consumption ◽  
Interbirth Interval ◽  
Australopithecus Africanus ◽  
The Social ◽  
Life Behavior

Nursing is pivotal in the social and biological evolution of hominins, but to date, early-life behavior among hominin lineages is a matter of debate. The calcium isotopic compositions (δ44/42Ca) of tooth enamel can provide dietary information on this period. Here, we measure the δ44/42Ca values in spatially located microsized regions in tooth enamel of 37 South African hominins to reconstruct early-life dietary-specific variability in Australopithecus africanus, Paranthropus robustus, and early Homo. Very low δ44/42Ca values (<−1.4‰), indicative of milk consumption, are measured in early Homo but not in A. africanus and P. robustus. In these latter taxa, transitional or adult nonmilk foods must have been provided in substantial quantities relative to breast milk rapidly after birth. The results suggest that early Homo have continued a predominantly breast milk–based nursing period for longer than A. africanus and P. robustus and have consequently more prolonged interbirth interval.

Thinking technology for the Anthropocene: encountering 3D printing through the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Roberts
Keyword(s):  
3D Printing ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Anthropogenic Change ◽  
Technological Processes ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Thinking ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Gilbert Simondon ◽  
Do So

The notion that the Earth has entered a new epoch characterized by the ubiquity of anthropogenic change presents the social sciences with something of a paradox, namely, that the point at which we recognize our species to be a geologic force is also the moment where our assumed metaphysical privilege becomes untenable. Cultural geography continues to navigate this paradox in conceptually innovative ways through its engagements with materialist philosophies, more-than-human thinking and experimental modes of ontological enquiry. Drawing upon the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, this article contributes to these timely debates by articulating the paradox of the Anthropocene in relation to technological processes. Simondon’s philosophy precedes the identification of the Anthropocene epoch by a number of decades, yet his insistence upon situating technology within an immanent field of material processes resonates with contemporary geographical concerns in a number of important ways. More specifically, Simondon’s conceptual vocabulary provides a means of framing our entanglements with technological processes without assuming a metaphysical distinction between human beings and the forces of nature. In this article, I show how Simondon’s concepts of individuation and transduction intersect with this technological problematic through his far-reaching critique of the ‘hylomorphic’ distinction between matter and form. Inspired by Simondon’s original account of the genesis of a clay brick, the article unfolds these conceptual challenges through two contrasting empirical encounters with 3D printing technologies. In doing so, my intention is to lend an affective consistency to Simondon’s problematic, and to do so in a way that captures the kinds of material mutations expressive of a particular technological moment.

This Little Piggy Went to Market: The Xenotransplantation and Xenozoonose Debate

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret A. Clark
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
Recent Letter ◽  
Ethical Concerns ◽  
Private Citizens ◽  
Clinical Risks ◽  
Natural Barriers

New technologies are changing our lives radically and quickly. New biotechnologies are moving to commercial uses faster than government regulators or private citizens can monitor. This tension manifests itself in the current debates over xenotransplantation technologies in medicine. The possibility of removing cells, tissues, and organs from animals and transplanting them into human beings is startling and unnerving. Natural immunesystem barriers between species, and even between individuals within a species, are formidable. Typically, transplantation results in violent rejection and death of the grafted organ. But despite the natural barriers to transplantation, xenotransplantation aims specifically to overcome them.In this paper, I will discuss applications of xenograft technology, which raises clinical risks, ethical concerns, and policy issues. I conclude with a set of specific recommendations. As a recent letter to the journal Nature puts it, there is a “split between those who want to get it right, and those who want to get it right now.” No one knows what all the risks, benefits, and unintended consequences of xenotransplantation will be.

scholarly journals Introduction: Computer Simulations in Social Epistemology

Episteme ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Igor Douven
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Computer Simulations ◽  
Social Epistemology ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Housing Prices ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Friendship Networks ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Methodological Status

Over recent decades, computer simulations have become a common tool among practitioners of the social sciences. They have been utilized to study such diverse phenomena as the integration and segregation of different racial groups, the emergence and evolution of friendship networks, the spread of gossip, fluctuations of housing prices in an area, the transmission of social norms, and many more. Philosophers of science and others interested in the methodological status of these studies have identified a number of distinctive virtues of the use of computer simulations. For instance, it has been generally appreciated that as simulations require the formulation of an explicit algorithm, they foster precision and clarity about whatever conceptual issues are involved in the study. The value of computer simulations as a heuristic tool for developing hypotheses, models, and theories has also been recognized, as has been the fact that they can serve as a substitute for real experiments. This is especially useful in the social domain, given that human beings cannot be freely manipulated at the discretion of the experimenter (for both points, see Hartmann 1996). However, the main virtue of computer simulations is generally believed to be that they are able to deal with the complexities that arise when many elements interact in a highly dynamic system and which often evade an exact formal analysis (see, e.g., Humphreys 1991).

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