scholarly journals Reviving Hedonism about Well-Being: Refuting the Argument from False Pleasures and  Restricting the Relevance of Intuitive 'Evidence'

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Daniel Michael Turton
Keyword(s):  
Good Reason ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Sufficient Evidence ◽  
Warning Sign ◽  
Significant Information ◽  
The Road ◽  
Experience Machine ◽  
One Step ◽  
On The Road

<p>Throughout the vast majority of its history, hedonism about well-being has been perennially unpopular (Feldman 2004). The arguments in this essay take steps towards reviving the plausibility of hedonism about well-being. The main argument currently used to refute hedonism about well-being, the Argument from False Pleasures, is shown to lack sufficient evidence to be compelling. The main evidence provided for the Argument from False Pleasures comes in the form of two thought experiments, the Experience Machine (Nozick 1974) and the Deceived Businessman (Kagan 1998). These thought experiments typically produce strong intuitive responses, which are used to directly support the Argument from False Pleasures. This essay investigates how theories of well-being are currently evaluated by moral philosophers, with a specific focus on the place our intuitions have in the process. Indeed, the major role that moral intuitions play in evaluating theories of well-being, despite their sometimes dubious epistemic credentials, leads to an in-depth enquiry into their inner workings and potential for containing normatively significant information. The investigation, which draws on the work of Woodward and Allman (2007), concludes that intuitions about unrealistic thought experiments should not play an important role in evaluating theories of well-being. Rather, they should only act as a warning sign, highlighting moral propositions for further analysis. Based on these findings, a new method for assessing theories of well-being is suggested and applied to a specific internalist account of hedonism about well-being to show how the Deceived Businessman and Experience Machine thought experiments lack normative significance, leaving the Argument from False Pleasures without sufficient evidence to be compelling. Indeed, this essay concludes that the Argument from False Pleasures should no longer be thought to provide any good reason to believe that hedonism about well-being is implausible. This result is only one step on the road to reviving hedonism about well-being, but it is a very important one.</p>

scholarly journals Reviving Hedonism about Well-Being: Refuting the Argument from False Pleasures and  Restricting the Relevance of Intuitive 'Evidence'

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Daniel Michael Turton
Keyword(s):  
Good Reason ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Sufficient Evidence ◽  
Warning Sign ◽  
Significant Information ◽  
The Road ◽  
Experience Machine ◽  
One Step ◽  
On The Road

<p>Throughout the vast majority of its history, hedonism about well-being has been perennially unpopular (Feldman 2004). The arguments in this essay take steps towards reviving the plausibility of hedonism about well-being. The main argument currently used to refute hedonism about well-being, the Argument from False Pleasures, is shown to lack sufficient evidence to be compelling. The main evidence provided for the Argument from False Pleasures comes in the form of two thought experiments, the Experience Machine (Nozick 1974) and the Deceived Businessman (Kagan 1998). These thought experiments typically produce strong intuitive responses, which are used to directly support the Argument from False Pleasures. This essay investigates how theories of well-being are currently evaluated by moral philosophers, with a specific focus on the place our intuitions have in the process. Indeed, the major role that moral intuitions play in evaluating theories of well-being, despite their sometimes dubious epistemic credentials, leads to an in-depth enquiry into their inner workings and potential for containing normatively significant information. The investigation, which draws on the work of Woodward and Allman (2007), concludes that intuitions about unrealistic thought experiments should not play an important role in evaluating theories of well-being. Rather, they should only act as a warning sign, highlighting moral propositions for further analysis. Based on these findings, a new method for assessing theories of well-being is suggested and applied to a specific internalist account of hedonism about well-being to show how the Deceived Businessman and Experience Machine thought experiments lack normative significance, leaving the Argument from False Pleasures without sufficient evidence to be compelling. Indeed, this essay concludes that the Argument from False Pleasures should no longer be thought to provide any good reason to believe that hedonism about well-being is implausible. This result is only one step on the road to reviving hedonism about well-being, but it is a very important one.</p>

The Aftermath of GRIEF

Grief ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 61-93
Author(s):  
David Shneer
Keyword(s):  
War Crimes ◽  
Soviet Power ◽  
Art Exhibitions ◽  
The Road ◽  
Nikita Khrushchev ◽  
War Crimes Trials ◽  
Fundamental Challenge ◽  
One Step ◽  
On The Road ◽  
India And China

This chapter is engaged with photography’s fundamental challenge: it is both documentary evidence, in which the camera is a tool of a technician, and a work of art, in which the click of the shutter is but one step on the road to creating an art photograph. It opens with Baltermants’s soaring career with Izvestiia until June 1942, when he was fired for mislabeling a photograph of a blown-up tank and was sent to a penal battalion that fought at Stalingrad. The experience nearly cost him his life. After the victory by the Allies, photographs were used as evidence in war crimes trials, including Baltermants’s. At the end of the war, he returned to photographic preeminence. After Stalin’s death, he became a leading documenter of global Soviet power under Nikita Khrushchev. He took pictures in Vietnam, India, and China, and his work appeared in domestic and international art exhibitions.

scholarly journals Accurate whole-night sleep monitoring with dry-contact ear-EEG

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaare B. Mikkelsen ◽  
Yousef R. Tabar ◽  
Simon L. Kappel ◽  
Christian B. Christensen ◽  
Hans O. Toft ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
High Performance ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Extensive Study ◽  
Sleep Monitoring ◽  
The Road ◽  
Scalp Eeg ◽  
Dry Contact ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
On The Road

AbstractSleep is a key phenomenon to both understanding, diagnosing and treatment of many illnesses, as well as for studying health and well being in general. Today, the only widely accepted method for clinically monitoring sleep is the polysomnography (PSG), which is, however, both expensive to perform and influences the sleep. This has led to investigations into light weight electroencephalography (EEG) alternatives. However, there has been a substantial performance gap between proposed alternatives and PSG. Here we show results from an extensive study of 80 full night recordings of healthy participants wearing both PSG equipment and ear-EEG. We obtain automatic sleep scoring with an accuracy close to that achieved by manual scoring of scalp EEG (the current gold standard), using only ear-EEG as input, attaining an average Cohen’s kappa of 0.73. In addition, this high performance is present for all 20 subjects. Finally, 19/20 subjects found that the ear-EEG had little to no negative effect on their sleep, and subjects were generally able to apply the equipment without supervision. This finding marks a turning point on the road to clinical long term sleep monitoring: the question should no longer be whether ear-EEG could ever be used for clinical home sleep monitoring, but rather when it will be.

Telomerase activation: one step on the road to cancer?

1999 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 109-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol W Greider
Keyword(s):  
The Road ◽  
One Step ◽  
On The Road

scholarly journals Contradictions on the Road to Democracy and the Market in East Central Europe

1992 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 3-25
Author(s):  
Robin A. Remington
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
The Road ◽  
On The Road

This analysis focuses on the dilemmas facing policymakers attempting the transition from one-party hegemonic systems to multiparty democracies in post-communist Europe. It investigates the hypothesis that the political conditions for building democracy and the economic conditions required for establishing market economies in these societies are at cross purposes. The author examines the role of the international political economy in the process of democratization in terms of a framework of three primary variables: identity, legitimacy, and security. In applying these variables to post-communist East Central Europe, five significant arenas emerge in which political and economic imperatives come into conflict. The analysis concludes with policy implications for Western decision-makers whose own future security needs and economic well-being are tied to successful transition from communism to viable democracy in East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The evolution of public policy attitudes: comparing the mechanisms of policy support across the stages of a policy cycle

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 428-448
Author(s):  
Sverker C. Jagers ◽  
Simon Matti ◽  
Katarina Nordblom
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Policy Support ◽  
Policy Cycle ◽  
Governance System ◽  
The Road ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Policy Attitudes ◽  
One Step ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Political Decisionmaking

AbstractWe analyse the importance of legitimacy on public policy support by comparing how drivers of public policy attitudes evolve across the policy process consisting of the input (the processes forgoing acquisition of power and the procedures permeating political decisionmaking), throughput (the inclusion of and interactions between actors in a governance system) and output (the substantive consequences of those decisions) stages. Using unique panel data through three phases of the implementation of a congestion tax in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, we find that legitimacy is indeed important in explaining policy support. Moreover, we find a lingering effect where support in one phase depends on legitimacy both in the present and in previous phases. Hence, our study takes us one step further on the road to understand the complicated dynamic mechanisms behind the interactions between policymaking, policy support, and the legitimacy and approval of politicians and political processes.

scholarly journals Hedonism and Happiness in Theory and Practice

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Daniel Michael Weijers
Keyword(s):  
Meaning In Life ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Experience Machine ◽  
Good For ◽  
Philosophical Debates

<p>In this thesis, I investigate several different questions about happiness and hedonism in theory and practice and offer several arguments and theories. In addition to making progress in these happiness-related areas of inquiry, this thesis aims to demonstrate the complexity and variety of happiness-related problems and the broad range of real-world problems that considerations of happiness can help to resolve. Furthermore, nearly every chapter of this thesis demonstrates how interdisciplinary analyses can bring new movement to problems that have become insulated within one academic discipline. This thesis is divided into two main parts. Chapters 1 through 5 constitute Part 1, and Chapters 6 through 8 constitute Part 2. Part 1 of this thesis is focused on theory and questions about what we should believe. In particular, Part 1 is concerned with Prudential Hedonism, a theory of what is good for a person, which claims (roughly) that a preponderance of pleasure over pain (sometimes referred to as happiness) is what is ultimately good for people. After providing a broad overview of hedonism, and especially Prudential Hedonism, in Chapter 1, the remainder of Part 1 focuses on one main question from philosophical debates about well-being: does the experience machine thought experiment give us good reason to believe that internalist accounts of Prudential Hedonism are all false? The main conclusion that I argue for in Part 1 is that no, the experience machine thought experiment does not gives us good reason to believe that internalist accounts of Prudential Hedonism are all false. Part 2 of this thesis is focused on practice, and particularly on how considerations of happiness can inform certain practices and help us to understand what we should do in certain circumstances. Unlike Part 1, which has a smooth narrative flow from chapter to chapter, Part 2 contains three relatively unrelated chapters, each of which investigates a different question without relying on the conclusions of any previous chapters. Chapter 6 argues that an optimistic view about scientific and technological progress allows for two interesting new theories for the meaning of life debate, and discusses what people with certain kinds of belief might want to do to achieve true meaning in life. One of these theories posits that causing there to be infinite happiness can be a way to achieve a truly meaningful life. Chapter 7 demonstrates how considerations of human happiness can justify why a particular set of distributive principles are the fairest way to apportion the burdens associated with adapting to, and mitigating, the potentially devastating effects of rapid climactic change. Based on these considerations, Chapter 7 includes fairly specific policy recommendations about what governments should do about climate change. This thesis also includes a Postscript for Policymakers. Compared to Chapters 2 to 7, the Postscript for Policymakers takes a much higher-level approach; it seeks to provide general answers to two very broad questions. Given its broader scope and different intended audience, the Postscript for Policymakers does not include in-depth discussion of all likely objections. The two questions addressed in the Postscript for Policymakers are: should policymakers use findings from the science of happiness to guide their policy decisions, and how can they best do this? The Postscript for Policymakers concludes that findings from the science of happiness should be used to guide policymaking (with several qualifications), and it provides recommendations for how best to do this.</p>

scholarly journals Discretization, the Road to Quantum Computing?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesús Lacalle
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Computing ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Error Control ◽  
Quantum Physics ◽  
The Road ◽  
Road Map ◽  
Main Challenge ◽  
One Step ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Concrete Model

The main challenge we face in making quantum computing a reality is error control. For this reason it is necessary to study whether the hypotheses on which the threshold theorem has been proved capture all the characteristics of quantum errors. The extraordinary difficulties that we find to control quantum errors effectively together with the little progress in this endeavor, compared to the enormous effort deployed by the scientific community and by companies and governments, should make us reflect on the road map to quantum computing. In this work we analyze error control in quantum computing and suggest that discrete quantum computing models should be explored. In this sense, we present a concrete model but, above all, we propose that Quantum Physics should be taken one step further, in order to allow discretization of the quantum computing model.

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