Archetype, Psyche, World

In our dialogues over the nature of archetypes, essence, psyche, and world, I further respond to Erik Goodwyn’s recent foray into establishing an ontological position that not only answers to the mind-body problem, but further locates the source of Psyche on a cosmic plane. His impressive attempt to launch a neo-Jungian metaphysics is based on the principle of cosmic panpsychism that bridges both the internal parameters of archetypal process and their emergence in consciousness and the external world conditioned by a psychic universe. Here I explore the ontology of experience, mind, matter, metaphysical realism, and critique Goodwyn’s turn to Neoplatonism. The result is a potentially compatible theory of mind and reality that grounds archetypal theory in onto-phenomenology, metaphysics, and bioscience, hence facilitating new directions in analytical psychology.

Photic Entrainment of the Circadian System

Circadian rhythms are essential for the survival of all organisms, enabling them to predict daily changes in the environment and time their behaviour appropriately. The molecular basis of such rhythms is the circadian clock, a self-sustaining molecular oscillator comprising a transcriptional–translational feedback loop. This must be continually readjusted to remain in alignment with the external world through a process termed entrainment, in which the phase of the master circadian clock in the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) is adjusted in response to external time cues. In mammals, the primary time cue, or “zeitgeber”, is light, which inputs directly to the SCN where it is integrated with additional non-photic zeitgebers. The molecular mechanisms underlying photic entrainment are complex, comprising a number of regulatory factors. This review will outline the photoreception pathways mediating photic entrainment, and our current understanding of the molecular pathways that drive it in the SCN.

‘When Hunger Makes Everything Better Looking!’: The Effect of Hunger on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Human Bodies, Faces and Objects

Background: Research evidence suggests that physiological state of hunger might affect preference for female body weight, such that hungrier, compared to satiate, men prefer heavier body weight and rate as more attractive heavier female figures. Here, we seek to extend these findings by comparing the effects of fasting and snack on aesthetics judgements of the bodies and faces of conspecifics and of objects in a sample of female and male participants. Methods: Forty-four participants (women: n = 21, mean age = 23.70yrs ± 0.62) provided aesthetic liking judgments of round and slim human bodies, faces and objects, under at least 12 h of overnight fasting and immediately after having eaten a snack (i.e., bananas). An anthropometric measure of adiposity (i.e., Body Mass Index, BMI) was also collected from each observer. Results: Overall, we found that participants’ aesthetic judgements were higher for slim stimuli compared to round ones. However, after fasting, participants rated round stimuli as more attractive compared to when they had a snack. This hunger-based shift in ratings not only was apparent when stimuli depicted a human body or face, but also when they depicted an object, thus suggesting a general modification of observers’ aesthetic preference related to hunger. Importantly, this effect was modulated by participants’ BMI so that only participants with a high BMI provided higher aesthetic judgements for round stimuli after fasting than after a snack. Conclusions: Our results demonstrated that both the modification of the physiological state and the individual differences in adiposity level of the observers might affect the aesthetic appreciation of the external world.

Prototype Implementation of Innovative Braille Translator for the Visually Impaired With Hearing Deficiency

Text-to-Braille conversion as well as speech-to-Braille conversion are not available in combined form so far for the visually impaired, and there is tremendous need of a device that can look after this special class of people. The present chapter deals with a novel model that is designed to help both types of impaired people, be it visual problem or related with hearing. The proposal is itself unique and is also supported by experimental results available within the laboratory condition. This device will help people to read from text with their Braille language and will also help to convert the same form to audio signal. Since text and audio are the two main interfaces for any person to communicate with the external world apart from functionalities of sensory organs, the work has relevance. With the help of DANET, the same data, in text or speech form, can be accessed in more than one digital device simultaneously.

Moore against the sceptics

Moore’s “Proof of an external world” and his “Four forms of scepticism” have long puzzled commentators. How are these adequate responses to sceptics? How, for that matter, is the so-called proof of an external world even pertinent to the challenge of scepticism? The notion of relativized burdens of proof is introduced: this is a burden of proof vis-à-vis one’s opponent that one takes on when trying to convince that someone of something. The relativized burden of proof is a making explicit (in the topic of rational discourse) the truism that if you argue with someone with the intent of trying to convince that someone of something, and if you fail to, you have not met your own conversational goal. Assuming Moore is implicitly relying on the notion of relativized burdens of proof illuminates his approach in these papers.

Management of Abnormal Visual Developments

When human beings recognize the external world, more than 80% of the information come from visual function and visual system. Normal visual development and normal binocularity are the fundamental of good visual acuity and visual functions. Any abnormal visual experience would cause abnormality, such as refractive error, strabismus, amblyopia and other diseases. The patients with abnormal visual developments were reported to have abnormal, lonely, and other psycho problems. In this chapter, we will describe the normal developmental of visual function, summarize the abnormal developments and the correction or treatment.

A Critical Analysis of Brentano’s Intentionality in Relation to Meinong’s Object Theory

Our thoughts are certainly about things(objects), however, what kind of things(object) are our thoughts directed at? What is the relationship between mental objects and external world object? What is the nature and character of mental and extra mental objects? An attempt at answering these meta-epistemological questions, brought to light the ideas of Franz Brentano on ‘Intentionality’ and Alexius Meinong’s Theory of object. Through proper method of philosophical analysis, it was discovered that both philosophers agreed that intentionality is a unique character exhibited by the human mind. However, Meinong went further to develop a more comprehensive object theory which attempts at clarifying some of the ontological difficulties associated with Brentano’s notion on intentionality. The research concluded that, though, both philosophers had areas of divergence and convergence in their respective epistemological thoughts, but insisted that the influence of Brentano’s ideas on Meinong cannot be overemphasized, which is to say, Meinong’s object theory, could be said to be a reaction towards the problem of referential opacity present in Brentano’s account of Intentionality.

Human latent-state generalization through prototype learning with discriminative attention

People cannot access the latent causes giving rise to experience. How then do they approximate the high-dimensional feature space of the external world with lower-dimensional internal models that generalize to novel examples or contexts? Here, we developed and tested a theoretical framework that internally identifies states by feature regularity (i.e., prototype states) and selectively attends to features according to their informativeness for discriminating between likely states. To test theoretical predictions, we developed experimental tasks where human subjects first learn through reward-feedback internal models of latent states governing actions associated with multi-feature stimuli. We then analyzed subjects’ response patterns to novel examples and contexts. These combined theoretical and experimental results reveal that the human ability to generalize actions involves the formation of prototype states with flexible deployment of top-down attention to discriminative features. These cognitive strategies underlie the human ability to generalize learned latent states in high-dimensional environments.

An internal model approach for motor behavior

Interacting with the environment requires a remarkable ability to control, learn, and adapt motor skills to ever-changing conditions. The intriguing complexity involved in the process of controlling, learning, and adapting motor skills has led to the development of many theoretical approaches to explain and investigate motor behavior. This paper will present a theoretical approach built upon the top-down mode of motor control that shows substantial internal coherence and has a large and growing body of empirical evidence: The Internal Models. The Internal Models are representations of the external world within the CNS, which learn to predict this external world, simulate behaviors based on sensory inputs, and transform these predictions into motor actions. We present the Internal Models’ background based on two main structures, Inverse and Forward models, explain how they work, and present some applicability.