Introduction: Sensing Justice

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Mónica López Lerma
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Moment

The meaning of justice and the meaning of the aesthetic may both be sensed, but they can never be codified or entirely understood. They lack an essence, or a definition; they exist in specific performances rather than as general propositions. The aesthetic and the just alike deny the application of a priori models or abstract understandings and instead focus on the tangible and unrepeatable experience of singular events. The artwork and the moment of judgment come each time differently. Reproduction is forgery....

scholarly journals Personalized Biometrics of Physical Pain Agree with Psychophysics by Participants with Sensory over Responsivity

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 93
Author(s):  
Jihye Ryu ◽  
Tami Bar-Shalita ◽  
Yelena Granovsky ◽  
Irit Weissman-Fogel ◽  
Elizabeth B. Torres
Keyword(s):  
General Population ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Summary Statistics ◽  
Physical Pain ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Self Reports ◽  
Theoretical Population ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Reported Data

The study of pain requires a balance between subjective methods that rely on self-reports and complementary objective biometrics that ascertain physical signals associated with subjective accounts. There are at present no objective scales that enable the personalized assessment of pain, as most work involving electrophysiology rely on summary statistics from a priori theoretical population assumptions. Along these lines, recent work has provided evidence of differences in pain sensations between participants with Sensory Over Responsivity (SOR) and controls. While these analyses are useful to understand pain across groups, there remains a need to quantify individual differences more precisely in a personalized manner. Here we offer new methods to characterize pain using the moment-by-moment standardized fluctuations in EEG brain activity centrally reflecting the person’s experiencing temperature-based stimulation at the periphery. This type of gross data is often disregarded as noise, yet here we show its utility to characterize the lingering sensation of discomfort raising to the level of pain, individually, for each participant. We show fundamental differences between the SOR group in relation to controls and provide an objective account of pain congruent with the subjective self-reported data. This offers the potential to build a standardized scale useful to profile pain levels in a personalized manner across the general population.

The Unbearable Lightness of the Image

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 109-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donatella Della Ratta
Keyword(s):  
Web 2.0 ◽  
Real Time ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Life Activity ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Ethical Discourse ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Web

In this essay, I reflect on the aesthetic, political and material implications of filming as a continuous life activity since the beginning of the 2011 uprising in Syria. I argue that the blurry, shaky and pixelated aesthetics of Syrian user-generated videos serve to construct an ethical discourse (Ranciére 2009a; 2013) to address the genesis and the goal of the images produced, and to shape a political commitment to the evidence-image (Didi-Huberman 2008). However, while the unstable visuals of the handheld camera powerfully reconnect, both at a symbolic and aesthetic level, to the truthfulness of the moment of crisis in which they are generated, they fail to produce a clearer understanding of the situation and a counter-hegemonic narrative. In this article, I explore how new technologies have impacted this process of bearing witness and documenting events in real time, and how they have shaped a new understanding of the image as a networked, multiple object connected with the living archive of history, in a permanent dialogue with the seemingly endless flow of data nurtured by the web 2.0.

scholarly journals Assessing biases, relaxing moralism: On ground-truthing practices in machine learning design and application

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 205395172110135
Author(s):  
Florian Jaton
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
William James ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Learning Algorithms ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Ground Truthing ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Moment

This theoretical paper considers the morality of machine learning algorithms and systems in the light of the biases that ground their correctness. It begins by presenting biases not as a priori negative entities but as contingent external referents—often gathered in benchmarked repositories called ground-truth datasets—that define what needs to be learned and allow for performance measures. I then argue that ground-truth datasets and their concomitant practices—that fundamentally involve establishing biases to enable learning procedures—can be described by their respective morality, here defined as the more or less accounted experience of hesitation when faced with what pragmatist philosopher William James called “genuine options”—that is, choices to be made in the heat of the moment that engage different possible futures. I then stress three constitutive dimensions of this pragmatist morality, as far as ground-truthing practices are concerned: (I) the definition of the problem to be solved (problematization), (II) the identification of the data to be collected and set up (databasing), and (III) the qualification of the targets to be learned (labeling). I finally suggest that this three-dimensional conceptual space can be used to map machine learning algorithmic projects in terms of the morality of their respective and constitutive ground-truthing practices. Such techno-moral graphs may, in turn, serve as equipment for greater governance of machine learning algorithms and systems.

Between Ethics and Aesthetics – Reception of Genetic Information and Narrative Experience

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (Special Issue) ◽  
pp. 144-144
Author(s):  
Raphaël Pfeiffer ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Genetic Information ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Suicide Attempts ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Ethical Reasoning ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Negative Feelings

"In a clinical context, the communication of genetic information is an event that can give rise to unexpected situations for health professionals. Several empirical studies have shown that, despite being presented with “good” presymptomatic test results, some patients develop negative feelings, depression, which can in extreme cases lead to suicide attempts. Here, genetic information takes full meaning when considered in a personal narrative. In this presentation, we would like to look at the specificities of this narrative experience in the light of works on the aesthetics of everyday life, with a particular focus on the works of John Dewey. For Dewey, the aesthetic experience is possible in all aspects of people’s daily lives, including clinical experience. In this case, “aesthetics” appears in the sensitive character of an experience rather than in a specific type of object. Through the examination of this thought, we will ask to what extent we can speak of an aesthetic experience when thinking of the communication of genetic information, and how this consideration can help ethical reasoning. We will begin by examining how the moment of the communication of genetic information to patients by the clinician can constitute a process of defamiliarization of everyday life. This will lead us to look at patients’ accounts of genetic information reception and to analyse how these appear to be more than mere testimonies about the experience of pathologies, but a means by which the patient is confronted with difficult experiences in order to reformulate them. "

Unspeakable Events

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Gikandi
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Standing ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
William Beckford ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Moment

This chapter presents two instances of how slave money shaped the moment of taste in both pragmatic and conceptual terms. It provides a substantive exploration of the cultural traffic between Britain and its colonial outposts in order to show how the experience of slavery was turned into an aesthetic object that was woven into the fabric of everyday life. It then seeks to connect slave money and the power and prestige of art by focusing on the aesthetic lives of William Beckford and Christopher Codrington, famous heirs to slave fortunes, who sought to remake their social standing through the patronage of art and the mastery of taste.

Impressions Received in The Ambassadors

2020 ◽  
pp. 155-197
Author(s):  
John Scholar
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Relationship ◽  
Moral Judgements ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Moment

Chapter 5 looks at The Ambassadors, arguing that its protagonist Lambert Strether’s impression is at different times empiricist (a means for him to discover the truth) and aesthetic (a means for him to appreciate beauty for its own sake). In its empiricist guise, Strether’s impression helps him to glimpse what is taking place behind the deceptive surfaces of Paris, behind the performative impressions engineered by Chad Newsome and Madame de Vionnet to disguise their sexual relationship: it helps him to discover facts and make moral judgements. By contrast, aesthetic impressions, including those confected for him by the lovers, help him to ‘live’, to make the most of life by imaginatively augmenting it, by offering him a fuller appreciation of the moment or a beautiful memento of it. The impression, then, lies at the fraught intersection of the aesthetic freedom of the imagination and the empiricist exigencies of experience.

Unconscious mental states

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georges Rey
Keyword(s):  
Computational Models ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Mental States ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Pupillary Dilation ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Moment

Unconscious phenomena are those mental phenomena which their possessor cannot introspect, not only at the moment at which the phenomenon occurs, but even when prompted (‘Do you think/want/…?’). There are abundant allusions to many kinds of unconscious phenomena from classical times to Freud. Most notably, Plato in his Meno defended a doctrine of anamnesis according to which a priori knowledge of, for example, geometry is ‘recollected’ from a previous life. But the notion of a rich, unconscious mental life really takes hold in nineteenth-century writers, such as Herder, Hegel, Helmholtz and Schopenhauer. It is partly out of this latter tradition that Freud’s famous postulations of unconscious, ‘repressed’ desires and memories emerged. Partly in reaction to the excesses of introspection and partly because of the rise of computational models of mental processes, twentieth-century psychology has often been tempted by Lashley’s view that ‘no activity of mind is ever conscious’ (1956). A wide range of recent experiments do suggest that people can be unaware of a multitude of sensory cognitive factors (for example, pupillary dilation, cognitive dissonance, subliminal cues to problem-solving) that demonstrably affect their behaviour. And Weiskrantz has documented cases of ‘blindsight’ in which patients with damage to their visual cortex can be shown to be sensitive to visual material they sincerely claim they cannot see. The most controversial cases of unconscious phenomena are those which the agent could not possibly introspect, even in principle. Chomsky ascribes unconscious knowledge of quite abstract principles of grammar to adults and even newborn children that only a linguist could infer. Many philosophers have found these claims about the unconscious unconvincing, even incoherent. However, they need to show how the evidence cited above could be otherwise explained, and why appeals to the unconscious have seemed so perfectly intelligible throughout history.

Modernism, Functionalism, and Tradition: The Music of Friedrich Goldmann

Tempo ◽  
1995 ◽  
pp. 27-30
Author(s):  
Alastair Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Socialist Politics

The current reappraisal of tradition, along with an interest in a music that deals with concrete emotions and which has a direct appeal to audiences, sounds a certain resonance with the aesthetic doctrines that prevailed in the former communist bloc. A sense of history is vital to socialist politics, but the availability of a symphonic tradition to Soviet composers after a break with that heritage suggests a state of posthistoire; a condition normally associated with postmodernism. The postmodernist reappraisal of the past is anticipated by, for example, Shostakovich's complex and sometimes ironic relationship to the symphonic tradition. Conservative traditionalism in the East maintained to be a critique of high modernist principles; in the West, ironically, a turn to tradition is now put forward as an alternative to the same rationalist modernism. At the moment when the achievements of the historical avant-garde and of high modernism have become fully available to the former Eastern Europe, the former Western Europe is engaged with the reappraisal of tradition. Even where a modernist music did develop in Eastern Europe – as, for example, it did in Poland – it was followed by a move back to more traditional techniques. The consequence of this inclination is that composers such as Górecki and Pärt, who employ traditionally-based expressive languages, have shot onto centre stage. The point is that composers from the former communist bloc have already encountered many of the issues that now preoccupy some contemporary composers in the capitalist West.

Independent a priori information for reduced intercomparison errors between TROPOMI and TCCON retrievals of methane and carbon monoxide

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Lutzmann ◽  
Ralf Sussmann ◽  
Huilin Chen ◽  
Frank Hase ◽  
Rigel Kivi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Polar Vortex ◽  
Total Carbon ◽  
Space Agency ◽  
Ongoing Work ◽  
The Status ◽  
Priori Information ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Stratospheric Intrusions

<p>Ground-based column measurements of trace gases by FTIR spectrometers within the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) provide accurate ground reference for the validation of the nadir-viewing hyperspectral Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) on-board the ESA satellite Sentinel 5 Precursor (S-5P). In such intercomparisons of two independent remote soundings, errors can occur as the a priori profiles used in the respective retrievals are i) differing from each other, and ii) both different from the true atmospheric state at the moment of observation. In certain conditions of atmospheric dynamics, e.g. polar vortex subsidence or stratospheric intrusions, which strongly alter the shape of vertical concentration profiles, these intercomparison errors can become considerable (Ostler et al., 2014).</p><p>In our work funded by the German Space Agency DLR and performed as part of the ESA AO project TCCON4S5P, we search for potential sources of realistic common a priori profiles for S-5P and TCCON CH<sub>4</sub> and CO measurements which reduce these large errors. We examine the performance of a number of chemical transport models and data assimilation systems in reproducing dynamical effects and in minimizing intercomparison errors. In-situ profiles measured by AirCores are used as validation where they are available. We present the status and results of our ongoing work.</p><p>Reference:</p><p>Ostler, A., Sussmann, R., Rettinger, M., Deutscher, N. M., Dohe, S., Hase, F., Jones, N., Palm, M., and Sinnhuber, B.-M.: Multistation intercomparison of column-averaged methane from NDACC and TCCON: impact of dynamical variability, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 7, 4081–4101, doi:10.5194/amt-7-4081-2014, 2014. Ostler, A., Sussmann, R., Rettinger, M., Deutscher, N. M., Dohe, S., Hase, F., Jones, N., Palm, M., and Sinnhuber, B.-M.: Multistation intercomparison of column-averaged methane from NDACC and TCCON: impact of dynamical variability, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 7, 4081–4101, doi:10.5194/amt-7-4081-2014, 2014.</p>

A Playwright Relaxed or Overworked?

1963 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-130
Author(s):  
R. Sri Pathmanathan
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Old Comedy ◽  
The Third ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Grotesque

Having been associated with a recent production of Euripides' Cyclops in the original Greek at Ibadan, I feel prompted to reply to Peter Arnott's charges against Euripides' adaptation of the well-known episode in Homer's Odyssey, ix. We know very little about the origin and nature of satyric drama, and it seems unfair to discuss the structure of the Cyclops on a priori grounds or to compare it with the form of Greek tragedy. We do not subject Old Comedy to this kind of treatment because we are aware in this case of the dissimilar elements which came together to produce the disjointed articulation that Old Comedy displays. It may well be that ‘the pattern of decline’ in the composition of the choruses and episodes noted by Arnott is not the result of hasty composition and overwork but is merely indicative of a looser structure allowed by the conventions of the satyr play. On the other hand, the intervention of the chorus in the Cyclops is always eminently dramatic— not too long-drawn-out or too brief—and gives a life and impetus to the play which modern audiences, unfamiliar with the choral tradition of Greek tragedy, miss in more regularly constructed plays. The ‘miserable couplet’ which serves as exodos is not unparalleled even in tragedy, although the iambics in place of the more usual anapaests are certainly unexpected. In general, the choral odes are admirably suited to the grotesque personalities of the satyrs; they include two haunting lyrics, lines 495–502 and 511–18 (unfortunately somewhat mutilated) which rank in rhythm and imagery with some of the best of Euripides, and at the moment of greatest tension, in the third and fourth stasima, are commendably brief and onomatopoeic.

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