Prediction, Reduction, and Emergence: An Introduction to Rémy Lestienne’s Dialogues About Emergence

KronoScope ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Turner

We human beings face two insults to our knowledge: our ignorance of the future, and our inability to know how things work. Science retorts to these two insults by two means: trying out predictive hypotheses about outcomes by experiment, and understanding the workings of the whole by breaking it down into parts: prediction and reduction. Lestienne recognizes these two insults as being the same insult, and the two retorts as the same retort. If the insult is uncertainty, the retort is determinism. But determinism looks very much like selective hindsight; we see only what confirms our post-facto theory of the result. Lestienne invites us to consider a different answer: wholes emerge from parts as future emerges from present. Lestienne’s three characters debate the coherence of the concept of emergence: does it complicate the concept of cause to the extent of depriving science of its usefulness? Can cause be top-down, from wholes to parts, as well as bottom-up, from parts to wholes? Can future possible wholes be “waiting” to be caused by the right chance combination of parts? Can there be more than one possible future?

Philosophy ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 48 (186) ◽  
pp. 363-379
Author(s):  
A. C. Ewing

Philosophers have not been sceptical only about metaphysics or religious beliefs. There are a great number of other beliefs generally held which they have had at least as much difficulty in justifying, and in the present article I ask questions as to the right philosophical attitude to these beliefs in cases where to our everyday thought they seem so obvious as to be a matter of the most ordinary common sense. A vast number of propositions go beyond what is merely empirical and cannot be seen to be logically necessary but are still believed by everybody in their daily life. Into this class fall propositions about physical things, other human minds and even propositions about one's own past experiences based on memory, for we are not now ‘observing’ our past. The phenomenalist does not escape the difficulty about physical things, for he reduces physical object propositions, in so far as true, not merely to propositions about his own actual experience but to propositions about the experiences of other human beings in general under certain conditions, and he cannot either observe or logically prove what the experiences of other people are or what even his own would be under conditions which have not yet been fulfilled. What is the philosopher to say about such propositions? Even Moore, who insisted so strongly that we knew them, admitted that we did not know how we knew them. The claim which a religious man makes to a justified belief that is neither a matter of purely empirical perception nor formally provable is indeed by no means peculiar to the religious. It is made de facto by everybody in his senses, whether or not he realizes that he is doing so. There is indeed a difference: while everyone believes in the existence of other human beings and in the possibility of making some probable predictions about the future from the past, not everybody holds religious beliefs, and although this does not necessarily invalidate the claim it obviously weakens it.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rémy Masson ◽  
Yohana Lévêque ◽  
Geneviève Demarquay ◽  
Hesham ElShafei ◽  
Lesly Fornoni ◽  
...  

AbstractObjectivesTo evaluate alterations of top-down and/or bottom-up attention in migraine and their cortical underpinnings.Methods19 migraineurs between attacks and 19 matched control participants performed a task evaluating jointly top-down and bottom-up attention, using visually-cued target sounds and unexpected task-irrelevant distracting sounds. Behavioral responses and MEG/EEG were recorded. Event-related potentials and fields (ERPs/ERFs) were processed and source reconstruction was applied to ERFs.ResultsAt the behavioral level, neither top-down nor bottom-up attentional processes appeared to be altered in migraine. However, migraineurs presented heightened evoked responses following distracting sounds (orienting component of the N1 and Re-Orienting Negativity, RON) and following target sounds (orienting component of the N1), concomitant to an increased recruitment of the right temporo-parietal junction. They also displayed an increased effect of the cue informational value on target processing resulting in the elicitation of a negative difference (Nd).ConclusionsMigraineurs appear to display increased bottom-up orienting response to all incoming sounds, and an enhanced recruitment of top-down attention.SignificanceThe interictal state in migraine is characterized by an exacerbation of the orienting response to attended and unattended sounds. These attentional alterations might participate to the peculiar vulnerability of the migraine brain to all incoming stimuli.HighlightsMigraineurs performed as well as healthy participants in an attention task.However, EEG markers of both bottom-up and top-down attention are increased.Migraine is also associated with a facilitated recruitment of the right temporo-parietal junction.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Ruslan Ibrahim

This article explains the philosophical view of progressivism about learners. Progressive philosophy sees that education is not just transferring knowledge to learners, but training their abilities and skills by providing the right stimulus. In the field of education, this philosophy was pioneered by the educational leader, John Dewey, with the main jargon of education as an instrument of social reconstruction. Progressive philosophy has the principle that learners should be educated to be human beings who can understand life in the future. For that, learners should be allowed to be free, active, creativity, and dynamic in accordance with the context of life.


Author(s):  
Anton Fedosov

Online social networks have made sharing personal experiences with others mostly in form of photos and comments a common activity. The convergenceof social, mobile, cloud and wearable computing expanded the scope of usergeneratedand shared content on the net from personal media to individual preferencesto physiological details (e.g., in the form of daily workouts) to informationabout real-world possessions (e.g., apartments, cars). Once everydaythings become increasingly networked (i.e., the Internet of Things), future onlineservices and connected devices will only expand the set of things to share. Given that a new generation of sharing services is about to emerge, it is of crucialimportance to provide service designers with the right insights to adequatelysupport novel sharing practices. This work explores these practices within twoemergent sharing domains: (1) personal activity tracking and (2) sharing economyservices. The goal of this dissertation is to understand current practices ofsharing personal digital and physical possessions, and to uncover correspondingend-user needs and concerns across novel sharing practices, in order to map thedesign space to support emergent and future sharing needs. We address this goalby adopting two research strategies, one using a bottom-up approach, the otherfollowing a top-down approach.In the bottom-up approach, we examine in-depth novel sharing practices within two emergent sharing domains through a set of empirical qualitative studies.We offer a rich and descriptive account of peoples sharing routines and characterizethe specific role of interactive technologies that support or inhibit sharingin those domains. We then design, develop, and deploy several technology prototypesthat afford digital and physical sharing with the view to informing the design of future sharing services and tools within two domains, personal activitytracking and sharing economy services.In the top-down approach, drawing on scholarship in human-computer interaction (HCI) and interaction design, we systematically examine prior workon current technology-mediated sharing practices and identify a set of commonalitiesand differences among sharing digital and physical artifacts. Based uponthese findings, we further argue that many challenges and issues that are presentin digital online sharing are also highly relevant for the physical sharing in thecontext of the sharing economy, especially when the shared physical objects havedigital representations and are mediated by an online platform. To account forthese particularities, we develop and field-test an action-driven toolkit for designpractitioners to both support the creation of future sharing economy platformsand services, as well as to improve the user experience of existing services.This dissertation should be of particular interest to HCI and interaction designresearchers who are critically exploring technology-mediated sharing practicesthrough fieldwork studies, as well to design practitioners who are building and evaluating sharing economy services.


2010 ◽  
Vol 33 (6) ◽  
pp. 452-453
Author(s):  
Janek S. Lobmaier ◽  
Martin H. Fischer

AbstractWhat are the underlying processes that enable human beings to recognize a happy face? Clearly, featural and configural cues will help to identify the distinctive smile. In addition, the motivational state of the observer will influence the interpretation of emotional expressions. Therefore, a model accounting for emotion recognition is only complete if bottom-up and top-down aspects are integrated.


Challenges ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Glenn Laverack

Obesity is preventable but there is still no single model for prevention and no country has managed to convincingly reverse the growing trend, estimated in 2016 to be 650 million adults. Globally, the increase in obesity will have catastrophic consequences for the economy and for population health. ‘Desperate times breed desperate measures’ and this paper outlines the shift that many governments are being forced to make to halt the growth of obesity. Moving to the extremes means that the planning and coordination of strategies places an equal emphasis on top-down (policy, regulation, and taxation) and bottom-up (local actions, self-help groups, volunteerism) interventions. There is still an important role for communication, the middle-ground between the extremes of bottom-up and top-down, but governments must use ‘power-over’ measures to take control of the causes of obesity. Bringing the public with them will be crucial to success and can be achieved through a sharing of resources, a ‘power-with’, to combine top-down and bottom-up interventions in the future.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-49
Author(s):  
Mariwan Hasan ◽  
Saman Mohammed

The love relationship between couples can be influenced by several factors influencing it to become a strong one in one’s life or vice versa. Finding a real love is always considered to be the key point in the meeting of opposite sexes. In order not to face psychological problems in the future, everyone’s concern is to seek for the right person. This is true to some degree for many human beings. Real love can make one feel happy and pleased but it can sometimes make one upset and hopeless. Also, superficial love can be the same because it can be the cause of pleasure for the lover who only seeks a temporary relationship i.e., superficial love but similarly it can be the source of sadness for the partner whose intention in such a relationship is a real love. This strenuous power manifests itself in the behavior and sometimes in the appearance of the human beings. When one of the lovers stops his/her love relationship with his/her lover by starting a new relationship with another person, due to their beauty, this will be called superficial love. Such relations may culminate in deceiving and telling lies. This research will consider textual and psychological approaches in the analysis of the selected poems of Forough Farrokhzad to demonstrate real love and superficial love that may cause psychological and social impacts.


2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 219-228
Author(s):  
Yoyon Supriadi ◽  
Gen Gen Gendalasari

Each company established course aims to derive a profit or benefit that can be used for the welfare of the company owners or shareholders. In every company liquidity is an important part of measuring the extent to which companies are able to pay maturing obligations to its creditors. Liquidity is a measure of investor decision-making, in which investors learn the level of liquidity and profitability in order to take the right decision for the future. Through this research are expected to know how the liquidity of the company if it is in accordance with the standard value of liquidity compared with the same company with a view of the profit, if not then impact whether and how the best solution which can be given to the company. Regression coefficient PT. Medco Energi International Tbk shows that Return On Assets (ROA) has a positive effect on the current ratio. The result of F test for the company showed no significant effect between Return On Assets (ROA) of the current ratio, this is because there are other factors that affect the current ratio. PT. Medco Energi International has a significant effect between Return On Assets (ROA) on the current ratio.   Keywords : Return, Liquidity, Profit.


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