scholarly journals The Machine in the Ghost: Autonomy, Hyperconnectivity, and Residual Causality

Philosophies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Barry M. O’Reilly
Keyword(s):  
Software Design ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Software Systems ◽  
Design Decisions ◽  
Philosophical Position ◽  
New Methods ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Autonomy ◽  
The Individual

This article will examine the unnamed and potentially devastating constraining effect of software on human autonomy. I call this concept residual causality, where software design decisions made long ago in different circumstances for different reasons constrain human action in an unknown future. The less aware the designers of software systems are of complexity in social systems, the more likely they are to introduce residual causality. The introduction of intricate, ordered machines, to a world largely defined by disorder and heuristics, has caused philosophical perturbations that we have not fully dealt with. The machine in the ghost is the belief that machine thinking can be applied to the environment in which the machine will operate. As hyperconnectivity increases, the ghost becomes more unpredictable, unmanageable, and even less like the machine. If we continue to indulge the machine view of the world, the design of software systems presents real dangers to the autonomy of the individual and the functioning of our societies. The steadfastness of machine ontologies in the philosophies of software architects risks creating increasing residual causality as hyperconnectivity increases. Shifting the philosophical position of software architects opens up the possibility of discovering new methods that make it easier to avoid these dangers.

scholarly journals The Crisis of Ethically Neutral Science

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mile Babić
Keyword(s):  
Multinational Corporations ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Current Crisis ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Global Science ◽  
Global Responsibility ◽  
Do No Harm ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

Current crisis of morality in scientific and technical civilization leads us to a common ruin because modern science (which is free of morality) is inextricably linked to technology, and can therefore be called technoscience. As such, today it has a monopoly on knowledge of the world and therefore has the greatest power in history and is in tight collusion with the holders of power: the economy, politics, medicine, media, countries and multinational corporations. To have the greatest imaginable power (which, according to Kant, corrupts the freedom of mental reasoning), while being free from the morals that limit that power, means to turn the world into a world of the most modern barbarism and violence, destruction and self-destruction. Only morally responsible science is capable for future and it is the premise of a civilization capable of the future. Only responsible science can prevent science from turning into a comprehensive dogma. Therefore, science must be free from any ideology that depicts reality in black and white and thus produces vanity, hatred and violence. Global science requires a global ethos (global responsibility). Science cares about the truth that liberates us from lies and connects us into a single community. The fundamental ethical imperative primum non nocere (“first, do no harm”) is valid everywhere and forever. Ethically responsible science requires a change in the consciousness of the individual and a rediscovery of the idea of brotherhood. No human action should undermine and destroy existing reality, but rather improve it.

Narrative Intelligence: Empathy, Mimesis and the Equitable

2019 ◽  
pp. 137-158
Author(s):  
Jeanne Gaakeer
Keyword(s):  
Building Blocks ◽  
Individual Case ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Legal Practice ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Judicial Practice ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

This chapter discusses what it takes to become a ‘literary jurist’ by returning to the topic of narrative intelligence introduced in Chapter 1. It analyses Ricoeur’s view on mimesis and shows the relevance for legal practice. Mimesis as prefiguration refers to the temporality of the world of human action. In law, the stage of the “brute facts”. Configuration or the world of narrative emplotment of events, this chapter argues, is the translation of the brute facts into the manageable form of legal documents culminating in the trial. Refiguration is the stage when the reader appropriates the text into his or her own world. Success in judicial practice is also closely connected to the ability to empathise and to the equitable in the individual case. The building blocks that this chapter suggests for legal practice at the same time show the importance of the humanities for law.

A TOOL FOR CONSTRUCTING INTERACTIVE SOFTWARE

1991 ◽  
Vol 01 (01) ◽  
pp. 75-98
Author(s):  
W. DAVID HURLEY
Keyword(s):  
Software Design ◽  
Knowledge Engineering ◽  
Software Systems ◽  
Interactive Software ◽  
Design Decisions ◽  
Current Generation ◽  
Design Representation ◽  
Construction Knowledge ◽  
Software Construction ◽  
High Degree

The Tailor is a research tool for refining and evaluating a design representation for software systems that have a high degree of textual and graphical interaction. The design representation incorporates both software engineering and knowledge engineering techniques, providing a set of conventions for describing software design information and software construction knowledge. The Tailor demonstrates that the design representation, when embedded in a productivity tool, overcomes limitations of current generation user interface tools. For example, the Tailor has the capability to foresee construction difficulties arising from earlier design decisions. It uses this capability to provide active guidance in producing a software design that avoids problems otherwise overlooked during software specification and design.

scholarly journals The specifics of the evaluative metaphor in English (based on the texts of art discourse)

XLinguae ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-254
Author(s):  
Adilkhan Shorabek ◽  
Bakiza Pazilova ◽  
Gulzhan Manapova ◽  
Zhanna Tolysbayeva ◽  
Nurlan Mansurov ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Evaluation Criteria ◽  
Research Paper ◽  
Semantic Structure ◽  
Comprehensive Description ◽  
Philosophical Position ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Individual

This article deals with a comprehensive description of the evaluativeness of metaphors in modern English. The evaluation criteria underlying the evaluability of metaphors are determined, variations as an object of evaluation and an agent as a donor of evaluation in the semantic structure of metaphors are considered, axiological types of lexical and semantic groups of metaphors are differentiated, and the means and conditions for varying the evaluability of metaphors are systematized. This research paper depicts the pragmatic relevance of the evaluative metaphor and represents the typology of demographic, socio-cultural, and national-cultural signs of the evaluability of metaphors. The axiological status of the metaphor is established by a comprehensive description of the semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic features of the evaluation of the metaphor in modern English. The specificity of evaluativeness as a component of meaning in the semantics of a metaphor is determined. The results of the study of metaphor are presented in many linguistic works. However, some provisions concerning the functioning of the metaphor and its ability to reflect the individual author’s worldview have not yet been sufficiently studied. To study the metaphor as an assistant to the creation of images that express the author’s attitude to something and its social, political, philosophical position, and as a means by which we know the world around us, it is necessary to examine the existing theoretical material and subsequent analyses of specific cases of using the metaphor.

From Self to Sage

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Culliney ◽  
David Jones
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Deterministic Chaos ◽  
Fractal Dimensions ◽  
The Self ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

The traditions of Confucianism, Daoism, and their later adoption of and adaptation by Buddhism envisioned a world that, re-described in modern parlance, is composed of shifting, fractal dimensions in which emergence can happen along turbulent boundaries of attractors where tensions arise between opposites. For the ancients, these ways of thinking invoked nascent principles of our current understanding of deterministic chaos; they glimpsed self-organization proceeding toward complexity, and human beings moving through the world with wuwei, an adept sense of participation. This participatory ethos can be situated on a cultural spectrum of behavior that extends between integrity (individuality) and intimacy (sociality, cooperation). An approach to life that empathizes the intimacy portion of the spectrum leads to the highest expression of the self in Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist environments where an effortless expertise, ziran, may be achieved, arising from unforced participation within a particular sector or system of the world. The individual who attains such a state is recognized as a sage. Such a person is a cooperator in the broadest sense, very often an innovator and a catalyst, and, in social systems, a constructive leader. Sagely behavior is proposed as the supreme achievement of biotic and cultural evolution.

New walls to keep the bad out: populism and the totalitarian psyche

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-130
Author(s):  
Coline Covington
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Group Solidarity ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
Psychological Understanding ◽  
Psychic Development ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War

The Berlin Wall came down on 9 November 1989 and marked the end of the Cold War. As old antagonisms thawed a new landscape emerged of unification and tolerance. Censorship was no longer the principal means of ensuring group solidarity. The crumbling bricks brought not only freedom of movement but freedom of thought. Now, nearly thirty years later, globalisation has created a new balance of power, disrupting borders and economies across the world. The groups that thought they were in power no longer have much of a say and are anxious about their future. As protest grows, we are beginning to see that the old antagonisms have not disappeared but are, in fact, resurfacing. This article will start by looking at the dissembling of a marriage in which the wall that had peacefully maintained coexistence disintegrates and leads to a psychic development that uncannily mirrors that of populism today. The individual vignette leads to a broader psychological understanding of the totalitarian dynamic that underlies populism and threatens once again to imprison us within its walls.

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Simone
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Existential Perspective

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.

“Utopia First!” A Machiavellian Conception of Solidarity in More's Utopia

Moreana ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (Number 209) (1) ◽  
pp. 79-93
Author(s):  
Marie-Claire Phélippeau
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Farm Work ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Difficulties ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Democratic Elections ◽  
Communal Organization

This paper shows how solidarity is one of the founding principles in Thomas More's Utopia (1516). In the fictional republic of Utopia described in Book II, solidarity has a political and a moral function. The principle is at the center of the communal organization of Utopian society, exemplified in a number of practices such as the sharing of farm work, the management of surplus crops, or the democratic elections of the governor and the priests. Not only does solidarity benefit the individual Utopian, but it is a prerequisite to ensure the prosperity of the island of Utopia and its moral preeminence over its neighboring countries. However, a limit to this principle is drawn when the republic of Utopia faces specific social difficulties, and also deals with the rest of the world. In order for the principle of solidarity to function perfectly, it is necessary to apply it exclusively within the island or the republic would be at risk. War is not out of the question then, and compassion does not apply to all human beings. This conception of solidarity, summed up as “Utopia first!,” could be dubbed a Machiavellian strategy, devised to ensure the durability of the republic. We will show how some of the recommendations of Realpolitik made by Machiavelli in The Prince (1532) correspond to the Utopian policy enforced to protect their commonwealth.

Drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness: Linguistic insights into Sylvia Plath’s experience of depression

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zsófia Demjén
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Individual Experience ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Linguistic Methods ◽  
Linguistic Approach

This paper demonstrates how a range of linguistic methods can be harnessed in pursuit of a deeper understanding of the ‘lived experience’ of psychological disorders. It argues that such methods should be applied more in medical contexts, especially in medical humanities. Key extracts from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath are examined, as a case study of the experience of depression. Combinations of qualitative and quantitative linguistic methods, and inter- and intra-textual comparisons are used to consider distinctive patterns in the use of metaphor, personal pronouns and (the semantics of) verbs, as well as other relevant aspects of language. Qualitative techniques provide in-depth insights, while quantitative corpus methods make the analyses more robust and ensure the breadth necessary to gain insights into the individual experience. Depression emerges as a highly complex and sometimes potentially contradictory experience for Plath, involving both a sense of apathy and inner turmoil. It involves a sense of a split self, trapped in a state that one cannot overcome, and intense self-focus, a turning in on oneself and a view of the world that is both more negative and more polarized than the norm. It is argued that a linguistic approach is useful beyond this specific case.

The Attempt to Author the World: How Intellectualism Denies the Individual

2012 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth R. Wheelock
Keyword(s):  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Personal Relationships ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Human Interactions ◽  
Second Sex ◽  
Existential Theory ◽  
Feminist Scholar ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Existential Issues

Although primarily known as a feminist scholar and author of such works as She Came to Stay and The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir contributed heavily to French existential thought. The two writings upon which this paper focuses, The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Woman Destroyed, deal with the existential issues involved in human interactions and personal relationships. The Ethics of Ambiguity, famous as an exploration of the ethical code created by existential theory, begins with a criticism of Marxism and the ways in which it deviates from existentialism. Similarly, the first of the three short stories that make up de Beauvoir’s fictional work The Woman Destroyed follows the French intelligentsia and their similarities and digressions from Marxist and existential thought. In this paper, I seek to analyze Simone de Beauvoir’s criticism of Marxist theory in The Ethics of Ambiguity and its transformation into the critique of intellectualism found twenty years later in The Woman Destroyed. I will investigate Marxism’s alleged attempts to constrain the group it wishes to lead and the motivation behind these actions. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the efficacy of fiction as a medium for de Beauvoir’s philosophy.

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