Age and Happiness

Contrary to the common belief that the age-happiness relationship is mountain shape (the middle aged being happier than children and the aged), it is really largely U shape, with the middle aged (at around mid 30’s or 40’s) least happy. The increase from around 60 to 70’s is particularly clear. However, happiness becomes lower over the last few years of illness before passing away. The decline in happiness from around 12 years old and the trough in happiness level around middle ages may partly be explained by the delay in sleep–wake cycles of teenagers, causing conflict with their mostly middle-aged parents. Recognizing the evolutionary ultimate explanation for this delay advanced here, the society should delay start hours for high schools to fit in with the delayed biological clock of teenagers.

The red-beard evolutionary explanation of human sociality

Recent evolutionary studies on cooperation devote specific attention to non-verbal expressions of emotions. In this paper, I examine Robert Frank’s popular attempt to explain emotions, non-verbal markers and social behaviours. Following this line of work, I focus on the green-beard explanation of social behaviours. In response to the criticisms raised against this controversial ultimate explanation, based on resources found in Frank’s work, I propose an alternative red-beard explanation of human sociality. The red-beard explanation explains the emergence and evolution of emotions, a proximate cause, rather than patterns of behaviour. In contrast to simple evolutionary models that invoke a green-beard mechanism, I demonstrate that the red-beard explanation can be evolutionary stable. Social emotions are a common cause of a social behaviour and a phenotypic marker and therefore cooperative behaviour cannot be suppressed without also changing the marker.

The Place of Africa in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

One can say that there is inadequate preparation, in Africa, to embrace the fourth industrial revolution. Two schools of thought argue as to the reason for this state of affair. While the Internalist school blames the situation on Africa’s culture and metaphysics, the Externalist school considers external factors as the ultimate explanation for Africa’s plight. We argue that both internal and external factors considered separately are not sufficient as the ultimate explanation for Africa’s lack of preparation, hence the need for a multi-dimensional approach which offers more than the conventional wisdom but critically considers what constitutes a complex explanation and solution for Africa’s plight. Furthermore, we suggest that more attention should be paid to Africa’s existential situation if she must rise to take her place in the emerging revolution. The study initiates a conversation around the theme of Africa’s fate in the looming fourth industrial revolution using phenomenological methods of research.

Ultimate Preference and Explanation

The articles by Corlett, McKenna and Waller in the present issue call for some further enlightenment on Lehrer’s defense of classical compatibilism. Ultimate explanation in terms of a power preference, which is the primary explanation for choice, is now the central feature of his defense. This includes the premise that scientific determinism may fail to explain our choices. Sylvain Bromberger (1965) showed that nomological deduction is not sufficient for explanation. A power preference, which is by definition a preference over alternatives, is the primary explanation when the power preference explains the choice without the need to appeal to anything else, including even anything that explains it. The author notes that explanation is not generally transitive. The power preference must stand alone as an ultimate explanation independent of other explanations. It is thus the ultimate preference over alternatives of choice.

Plato on Being and Knowing

This chapter examines how the exegesis of the passage in Phaedo in which Plato announces a turn from Naturalism to Platonism presumes the existence of Forms as explanatory entities, albeit recognizing their instrumental role in ultimate explanation. It looks at the distinction between “having” and “participating”—which may be expressed as the difference between unique and non-unique predication—as well as the distinction between “sense-perceiving” and “thinking.” The theory of Forms explains how sameness among things not numerically identical is possible, something that nominalism finds impossible. The chapter then considers nominalism and its connection to relativism, and explores the different accounts that Platonism and Naturalism each gives of eternity and time. It also reflects on the nature and possibility of knowledge, and presents some exigencies of knowledge and belief.

Up, down, or sideways: emplacement of magmatic Fe–Ni–Cu–PGE sulfide melts in large igneous provinces

The preferential localization of Fe–Ni–Cu–PGE sulfides within the horizontal components of dike–sill–lava flow complexes in large igneous provinces (LIPs) indicates that they were fluid dynamic traps for sulfide melts. Many authors have interpreted them to have collected sulfide droplets transported upwards, often from deeper “staging chambers”. Although fine (<1–2 cm) dilute (<10%–15%) suspensions of dense (∼4–5 g/cm3) sulfide melt can be transported in ascending magmas, there are several problems with upward-transport models for almost all LIP-related deposits: (1) S isotopic data are consistent with nearby crustal sources, (2) xenoliths appear to be derived from nearby rather than deeper crustal sources, (3) lateral sheet flow or sill facies of major deposits contain few if any sulfides, (4) except where there is evidence for a local S source, sulfides or chalcophile element enrichments rarely if ever occur in the volcanic components even where there is mineralization in the subvolcanic plumbing system, and (5) some lavas are mildly to strongly depleted in PGE >>> Cu > Ni > Co, indicating that unerupted sulfides sequestered PGEs at depth. Two potential solutions to this paradox are that (i) natural systems contained surfactants that lowered sulfide–silicate interfacial tensions, permitting sulfide melts to coalesce and settle more easily than predicted from theoretical/experimental studies of artificial/analog systems, and (or) (ii) sulfides existed not as uniformly dispersed droplets, as normally assumed, but as fluid-dynamically coherent pseudoslugs or pseudolayers that were large and dense enough that they could not be transported upwards. Regardless of the ultimate explanation, it seems likely that most high-grade Ni–Cu–PGE sulfide deposits in LIPs formed at or above the same stratigraphic levels as they are found.

Constructionism as Non-naturalism

Philosophical constructionism is far from being relativistic. This chapter will argue that it does not have to be naturalistic either. The discussion begins with a consideration of a strange predicament in which contemporary science seems to be caught. On the one hand, science holds a firm and reasonable commitment to a healthy naturalistic methodology, according to which explanations of natural phenomena should never overstep the limits of the natural itself. On the other hand, contemporary science is also inextricably and now inevitably dependent on ever more complex technologies, especially Information and Communication Technologies, which it exploits as well as fosters. Yet such technologies are increasingly ‘artificializing’ or ‘denaturalizing’ the world, human experiences, and interactions, as well as what qualifies as real. The search for the ultimate explanation of the natural seems to rely upon, and promote, the development of the artificial, seen here as an instantiation of the non-natural. In this chapter, I shall try and find a way out of this apparently strange predicament. I shall argue that the naturalization of our knowledge of the world is either philosophically trivial (naturalism as anti-supernaturalism and anti-preternaturalism), or mistaken (naturalism as anti-constructionism).

What Theological Explanation Could and Could Not Be

The worldview of theism proposes an ultimate and global explanation of existence itself. What could such “theological explanation” possibly amount to? I shall consider what is unsatisfactory about a widely accepted answer–namely that existence­ is to be explained as produced and sustained by a supernatural personal agent of unsurpassably great power and goodness. I will suggest an alternative way in which existence could be open to a genuinely ultimate explanation, namely in terms of its being inherently directed upon a supremely good end or telos and existing just because that telos is concretely realized. On this “euteleological” view, theological explanation, though it may need to be compatible with our best scientific theoretical explanations, operates in a clearly distinct explanatory dimension.

Data at the TEVATRON

Before the LHC, there was the Tevatron, which ran at the high-energy frontier for approximately 25 years. Many of the modern analysis tools used at the LHC were first developed at the Tevatron. In this chapter, benchmark data analyses (and related theoretical tools), such as for W/Z bosons, photons, and jets, are described. The apex of the Tevatron was the discovery of the top quark. Measurements of the top quark cross section and of the top quark mass are examined and tt¯ asymmetry measurements and predictions are reviewed. Although attributed to many Beyond-the-Standard Model scenarios, the ultimate explanation for the larger than expected asymmetry turned out to be higher order QCD. There were very active Higgs boson searches at the Tevatron. Although the Tevatron was able to somewhat exclude the allowed Higgs mass range, time ran out before any observation could be made. This was left to the LHC.