Orthonyms as Shadow Selves

Fernando Pessoa has introduced the term ‘heteronym’ for the coterie of virtual subjects whose identity he variously assumes. Within this group there is one whose name is ‘Fernando Pessoa’. When Pessoa writes about someone called ‘Fernando Pessoa’ he is employing an orthonym, and doing so precisely because within the imagined scenario he is not Fernando Pessoa. An orthonym, like a heteronym, is a virtual subject, but it is one which stands in a distinguished relationship with a simulating subject. The concept of an orthonym explains that of a literary doppelgänger.

The Reality of Subjects

Pessoa often expresses hesitation in his ability to tell what is more real and what is less, the actual or the virtual, veridical experience or dream, fact or fiction. At other times Pessoa offers something like a criterion to distinguish the imaginary from the empirical. Imagined entities are ‘one-sided’ in a manner actual entities are not. Pessoa’s view seems to be that subjects of experience are grounded (and therefore are not Cartesian souls), and that the grounding of both actual and virtual subjects is the same. The intuitive view that unsimulated subjects ground simulated ones, that Shakespeare is ‘more real’ than Hamlet, is regarded as deeply suspicious if not rejected outright. What we need is a way to make sense of the idea that subjects of experience which are simulated in imagination are no ‘less real’ than the subjects of experience in everyday life. There have, indeed, been studies which suggest that there is a functional equivalence in the two cases, such as Tamar Gendler’s studies of imaginative contagion.

Virtual Subjects

Our task now is to talk about the types of entity which occupy the central position. What occupies that position? Given that it is evidently a self or subject which does so, the task is to say more about the nature of selves. What makes Pessoa’s heteronymic philosophy of self so fascinating is, precisely, that it stands as much opposed to both the Cartesian and the animalist pictures as it does, evidently, to the Humean account of selfhood. Heteronyms are virtual subjects. A virtual subject is an abstract entity, and there is a standard way to introduce and define abstract entities of any type. This is the method of definition by abstraction, first proposed by Gottlob Frege.

The Multiplicity of I

If in heteronymic simulation I am a subject other than the subject I am, there are evidently as many other I’s as there are possible acts of simulation. Pessoa, inhabiting countless lives, says that by creating in imagination a multiplicity of virtual subjects, each of which is him, he has ‘ubiquitized’ himself. So he affirms a thesis I will call ‘Subject Plurality’: I am many subjects other than the subject I am. We need, though, to distinguish two versions of this thesis, for it can be read as making either a diachronic claim or a synchronic one. Interpreters of Pessoa have been drawn to present the Pessoan self as a sort of parliament or confederation of souls. Despite Pessoa’s appeal, once, to the metaphor of a colony—and there only in connection with the phenomenal unity of consciousness rather than with reference to the multiplicity of heteronyms—the ‘confederation’ theory is not Pessoa’s. It is a Proustian, not a Pessoan, picture of multiplicity. An appreciation of this distinction is crucial to seeing why Pessoa’s multiplicity of I is not reducible to another mental illness, multiple personality disorder. The distinction between successive and simultaneous subject plurality has found a surprising application: understanding Afrofuturism’s experimentation with multiple sonic selves.

Heteronyms as Virtual Subjects

The authorial act of heteronymic self-transformation is quite different from that of inventing a character in a story. What is fundamental to the notion of a heteronym is that it is an othered I, ‘lived by the author within himself’, that is to say, lived first-personally. A heteronym is not a character because the relationship an author stands in to an invented character is a third-personal one. A closer analogy would be with one of those stories in which each section has a different narrator writing from a first-person position, such as Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red or William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Yet a sequence of distinct narrators writing in the first person is still not a display of heteronymy: they are distinct characters taking it in turn to speak about themselves. When one dreams it is not uncommon for one to oneself figure in the dream, as the one to whom the events in the dream are presenting. The ‘subject-within-the-dream’ is both a virtual subject and a simulation of the dreaming subject; and for this reason it would be entirely appropriate to describe the subject-within-the-dream as the dreaming subject’s heteronym in the dream. The idea of heteronymy is also well-captured in Yasumasa Morimura’s multiple self-portraiture under the assumed identities of famous historical artists.

Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) has become many things to many people in the years that have passed since his untimely death. For some he is simply the greatest Portuguese poet of the twentieth century. For others he has gradually emerged as a forgotten voice in twentieth-century modernism. And yet Pessoa was also a philosopher, and it is only very recently that the philosophical importance of his work has begun to attract the attention it deserves. Pessoa composed systematic philosophical essays in his pre-heteronymic period, defending rationalism in epistemology and sensationism in the philosophy of mind. His heteronymic work, decisively breaking with the conventional strictures of systematic philosophical writing, is a profound and exquisite exploration in the philosophy of self. Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves draws together the strands of this philosophy and rearticulates it in a way that does justice to Pessoa’s breathtaking originality. In applying the new theory to the analysis of some of the trickiest and most puzzling problems about the self to have appeared in the global history of philosophy, in thinkers from the Buddhist, Chinese, Indian and Persian worlds, Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves is exemplary of a newly emerging trend in philosophy, that of philosophy as a cosmopolitan endeavour.

Fluid Intelligence and Time Management and Artificial Neural Networks

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Our lab is currently conducting a pilot study to assess the effects of the online game Minecraft as a therapeutic video game (TVG) to train executive function deficits in children with ADHD. The effect of the TVG intervention in combination with stimulants is being investigated to develop a drug-device combination therapy that can address both the dopaminergic dysfunction and executive function deficits present in ADHD. Although the results of this study will be used to guide the clinical development process, additional guidance for the optimization of the executive function training activities will be provided by a computational model of executive functions built with artificial neural networks (ANNs). This model uses ANNs to complete virtual tasks resembling the executive function training activities that the study subjects practice in the Minecraft world, and the schedule of virtual tasks that result in maximum improvements in ANN performance on these tasks will be investigated as a method to inform the selection of training regimens in future clinical studies. This study first proposes the use of recurrent neural networks to model the fluid intelligence executive function. This model is then combined with a previously developed model using convolutional neural networks to model working memory and prepotent impulsivity to produce virtual “subjects” who complete a computational simulation of a Time Management task that requires the use of both of these executive functions to complete. The capability of this model to produce groups of virtual “subjects” with significantly different levels of performance on the Time Management task is demonstrated.

Estimating central blood pressure from aortic flow: development and assessment of algorithms

Central blood pressure (cBP) is a highly prognostic cardiovascular (CV) risk factor whose accurate, invasive assessment is costly and carries risks to patients. We developed and assessed novel algorithms for estimating cBP from non-invasive aortic haemodynamic data and a peripheral BP measurement. These algorithms were created using three blood flow models: the 2-and-3-element Windkessel (0-D) models and a one-dimensional (1-D) model of the thoracic aorta. We tested new and existing methods for estimating CV parameters (ejection time, outflow BP, arterial resistance, compliance, pulse wave velocity, characteristic impedance) required for the cBP algorithms, using 'virtual' subjects (n=19,646) for which reference CV parameters were known exactly. We then tested the cBP algorithms using 'virtual' subjects (n=4,064), for which reference cBP were available free-of-measurement error, and clinical datasets containing invasive (n=10) and non-invasive (n=171) reference cBP waves across a wide-range of CV conditions. The 1-D algorithm outperformed the 0-D algorithms when the aortic vascular geometry was available, achieving central systolic blood pressure (cSBP) errors ≤2.1±9.7mmHg and root-mean-square-errors (RMSEs) ≤6.4±2.8mmHg against invasive reference cBP waves (n=10). When the aortic geometry was unavailable, the 3-element 0-D algorithm achieved cSBP errors ≤6.0±4.7mmHg and RMSEs ≤5.9±2.4mmHg against non-invasive reference cBP waves (n=171), outperforming the 2-element 0-D algorithm. All CV parameters were estimated with mean percentage errors ≤8.2%, except for the aortic characteristic impedance (≤13.4%), which affected the 3-element 0-D algorithm's performance. The freely-available algorithms developed in this work enable fast and accurate calculation of the cBP wave and CV parameters from ultrasound or magnetic resonance imaging data.

Threshold-like associations as a function of disturbance

According to the intelligence-creativity threshold hypothesis, there should be a positive association between intelligence and creative potential up to a certain point, the threshold, after which a further increase in intelligence should have no association with creativity. In the present simulation study, the measured intelligence and creativity of virtual subjects were affected by their true abilities as well as a disturbance factor that varied in magnitude between subjects. The results indicate that the hypothesized threshold-like association could be due to some disturbing factor, for example, low motivation, illness, or linguistic confusion, that varies between individuals and that affects both measured intelligence and measured creativity, especially if the actual association between intelligence and creativity is weak. This, together with previous negative findings, calls the validity of the intelligence-creativity threshold hypothesis into question.