Aristotle and Aristoxenus on Effort

The discussions of conatus – force, tendency, effort, and striving – in early modern metaphysics have roots in Aristotle’s understanding of life as an internal experience of living force. This paper examines the ways that Spinoza’s conatus is consonant with Aristotle on effort. By tracking effort from his psychology and ethics to aesthetics, I show there is a conatus at the heart of the activity of the ψυχή that involves an intensification of power in a way which anticipates many of the central insights of early modern and 20th century European philosophy. The first section outlines how Aristotle’s developmental conception of the soul as geometrically ordered lays the foundation for his understanding of effort. The developmental series of powers of the soul are analogous to the series of shapes in mathematics. The second section links the striving of the soul to the gradual acquisition of virtues as a directed activity unifying multiplicity. The third examines the paradigm of self-awareness that Aristotelian effort involves. In the final section I show how ancient Greek theories of music were founded on the experience of striving. The “nature” of music is defined by Aristoxenus, and Theophrastus, in relation to the passion and intentionality of the soul. The geometrical order, as a synthesis of elements in geometry, music, or ethics, is a generative process in which past elements are retained and reintegrated in later stages of development. It requires effort to think geometrically, and the progress of knowledge itself is an integral aspect of all effort. Effort is the lived and self-aware cause which, moving step by step in an orderly and deliberate way, grows and advances upon itself. For both Spinoza and Aristotle, effort is the immanent intelligence which accomplishes what is in the purview of its understanding. Thus, will, in this conception of effort, is not something we already possess innately, but emerges gradually by an effort aimed at improvement.

An explicit, generative, and automatic syntactic representation of multi-digit numbers

Representing the base-10 structure of numbers is a challenging cognitively ability, unique to humans, but it is yet unknown how precisely this is done. Here, we examined whether and how literate adults represent a number’s full syntactic structure. In 5 experiments, the participants repeated sequences of 6-7 number words, and we systematically varied the order of words within the sequence. Repetition was more accurate when the sequence was grammatical (e.g., ninety-seven) than when it was not (seven-ninety). The performance monotonously improved for sequences with increasingly longer grammatical segments, up to a limit of ~4 words per segment, irrespectively of the number of digits, and worsened thereafter. We conclude that at least for numbers up to 6 digits long, participants represented the number’s full syntactic structure and used it to merge number words into chunks in short-term memory. Short chunks improved memorization, but oversized chunks disrupted memorization. The existence of a chunk size limit suggests that the chunks are not memorized templates, whose size limit is not expected to be so low. Rather, they are created ad-hoc by a generative process, such as the hierarchical syntactic representation hypothesized in Michael McCloskey’s number-processing model. Chunking occurred even when it disrupted performance, and even when external cues for chunking were controlled for or were removed; we conclude that the above generative process operates automatically rather than voluntarily.

Network Bending: Expressive Manipulation of Generative Models in Multiple Domains

This paper presents the network bending framework, a new approach for manipulating and interacting with deep generative models. We present a comprehensive set of deterministic transformations that can be inserted as distinct layers into the computational graph of a trained generative neural network and applied during inference. In addition, we present a novel algorithm for analysing the deep generative model and clustering features based on their spatial activation maps. This allows features to be grouped together based on spatial similarity in an unsupervised fashion. This results in the meaningful manipulation of sets of features that correspond to the generation of a broad array of semantically significant features of the generated results. We outline this framework, demonstrating our results on deep generative models for both image and audio domains. We show how it allows for the direct manipulation of semantically meaningful aspects of the generative process as well as allowing for a broad range of expressive outcomes.

Designing Depression Screening Chatbots

Advances in voice recognition, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence have led to the increasing availability and use of conversational agents (chatbots) in different settings. Chatbots are systems that mimic human dialogue interaction through text or voice. This paper describes a series of design considerations for integrating chatbots interfaces with health services. The present paper is part of ongoing work that explores the overall implementation of chatbots in the healthcare context. The findings have been created using a research through design process, combining (1) literature survey of existing body of knowledge on designing chatbots, (2) analysis on state-of-the-practice in using chatbots as service interfaces, and (3) generative process of designing a chatbot interface for depression screening. In this paper we describe considerations that would be useful for the design of a chatbot for a healthcare context.

Introduction: Sustainability Science as Co-Creative Research Praxis

This chapter explores the relationship between collaboration and creativity within social sustainability research. Aimed at stimulating further reflection and debate on the role of ‘co-creativity’ in enabling transformative sustainability agendas, the chapter acts also as an introduction to the entire edited collection. A key guiding question posed from the outset is how co-creative research practice, as a generative process, can best support the emergence of alternative—potentially even transformative—ways of being in the world. The discussion proceeds with a conceptual review of creativity, followed by a detailed explanation of how co-creativity is defined for the purposes of this edited collection. The remainder of the chapter looks towards the nurturing of co-creative practice within social sustainability research; particular attention is given to socially inclusive forms of co-creative and engaged research praxis. The term co-creativity is used in reference to both individual methods and overarching research approaches that, through action and reflection, stimulate alternative understandings of why and how things are, and how they could be. Accordingly, emphasis is placed throughout this chapter on co-creative research practice as requiring a retained sensitivity to the importance of researching ‘with’.

An investigation into the deep learning approach in sentimental analysis using graph-based theories

Sentiment analysis is a branch of natural language analytics that aims to correlate what is expressed which comes normally within unstructured format with what is believed and learnt. Several attempts have tried to address this gap (i.e., Naive Bayes, RNN, LSTM, word embedding, etc.), even though the deep learning models achieved high performance, their generative process remains a “black-box” and not fully disclosed due to the high dimensional feature and the non-deterministic weights assignment. Meanwhile, graphs are becoming more popular when modeling complex systems while being traceable and understood. Here, we reveal that a good trade-off transparency and efficiency could be achieved with a Deep Neural Network by exploring the Credit Assignment Paths theory. To this end, we propose a novel algorithm which alleviates the features’ extraction mechanism and attributes an importance level of selected neurons by applying a deterministic edge/node embeddings with attention scores on the input unit and backward path respectively. We experiment on the Twitter Health News dataset were the model has been extended to approach different approximations (tweet/aspect and tweets’ source levels, frequency, polarity/subjectivity), it was also transparent and traceable. Moreover, results of comparing with four recent models on same data corpus for tweets analysis showed a rapid convergence with an overall accuracy of ≈83% and 94% of correctly identified true positive sentiments. Therefore, weights can be ideally assigned to specific active features by following the proposed method. As opposite to other compared works, the inferred features are conditioned through the users’ preferences (i.e., frequency degree) and via the activation’s derivatives (i.e., reject feature if not scored). Future direction will address the inductive aspect of graph embeddings to include dynamic graph structures and expand the model resiliency by considering other datasets like SemEval task7, covid-19 tweets, etc.

Babel, a Neverending Story? Language and Fantasy Identities

"The end of the 19th century brought a major change in regards to humanity’s relationship with divinity and with the idea of creation. According to Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘God is dead’, so no one holds the supreme authority upon the creation act anymore. As a result, man himself began to create fictional worlds through logos, in order to fill the void left by the disappearance of divinity. Among the many methods that explain the generative process of these worlds there is the archetypal one from the Jungian psychology, the relational one from reader-response theories and the ‘chaotic’, theoretically objective one, based on hazard theories. Starting from here, this essay will try to analyze comparatively Michael Ende’s novel, The Neverending Story, and Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, The Library of Babel, with the purpose of exploring the contrast that is prefigured – at a structural, interpretive and text-reader relationship level – between the unconscious and the mechanical patterns of creating new worlds."

Atmosphere within the Artificial

<p>The Olympic Games are celebrated around the world; however, each Games puts pressure on the host city and its infrastructure as well as the people that reside there, which was evident for the latest host country Brazil. This is a global and political topic and my design aims to provide a solution to the unsustainable construction of sporting infrastructure every four years. This thesis will investigate atmosphere through the design of an artificial Olympic island and the resulting architecture resolved within this artificial environment. The proposition that structures this thesis is how to amplify atmosphere within an artificial environment. The proposition of this research was resolved through materiality, light and threshold in order to amplify the atmospheric qualities of the architecture. This was explored through three scales; a design investigation, a domestic scale, and a public scale, using a ‘design as research’ methodology allocated to the research stream. The result of this research came through the development of a boat club for the Olympic Island, showing the rowing and canoe events at the Games. The architecture was resolved through the composition of atmospheric techniques from Zumthor and the formal strategies of Eisenman. The material qualities, juxtaposed with the formal structures generated thresholds through the change in material and lighting qualities. To conclude, it was found that amplifying atmosphere was achieved through a generative process based on the composition of design techniques.</p>

Atmosphere within the Artificial

<p>The Olympic Games are celebrated around the world; however, each Games puts pressure on the host city and its infrastructure as well as the people that reside there, which was evident for the latest host country Brazil. This is a global and political topic and my design aims to provide a solution to the unsustainable construction of sporting infrastructure every four years. This thesis will investigate atmosphere through the design of an artificial Olympic island and the resulting architecture resolved within this artificial environment. The proposition that structures this thesis is how to amplify atmosphere within an artificial environment. The proposition of this research was resolved through materiality, light and threshold in order to amplify the atmospheric qualities of the architecture. This was explored through three scales; a design investigation, a domestic scale, and a public scale, using a ‘design as research’ methodology allocated to the research stream. The result of this research came through the development of a boat club for the Olympic Island, showing the rowing and canoe events at the Games. The architecture was resolved through the composition of atmospheric techniques from Zumthor and the formal strategies of Eisenman. The material qualities, juxtaposed with the formal structures generated thresholds through the change in material and lighting qualities. To conclude, it was found that amplifying atmosphere was achieved through a generative process based on the composition of design techniques.</p>

Naming and Cosmology: The Role of Names in the Onto-Generative Process

The article takes the excavated cosmological texts as a basis for reinterpreting the relationship between cosmology, epistemology, and action in Warring States period thought, by focusing on the role of names in situatedness and self-actualization of being. It proposes to view the speculative and the practical concerns in terms of a dynamic union of the receptive and the creative within the onto-generative cycle. Building on Chung-ying Cheng’s onto-generative approach and Heidegger’s hermeneutics of Dasein in Sein und Zeit, the article identifies names as the centre (Gadamer’s Mitte) in which the receptive and the creative aspect of being come together.