It is often assumed that adaptation — a temporary change in sensitivity to a perceptual dimension following exposure to that dimension — is a litmus test for what is and is not a “primary visual attribute”. Thus, papers purporting to find evidence of number adaptation motivate a claim of great philosophical significance: That number is something that can be seen in much the way that canonical visual features, like color, contrast, size, and speed, can. Fifteen years after its (...) reported discovery, number adaptation’s existence seems to be nearly undisputed, with dozens of papers documenting support for the phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to offer a counterweight — to critically assess the evidence for and against number adaptation. After surveying the many reasons for thinking that number adaptation exists, we introduce several lesser-known reasons to be skeptical. We then advance an alternative account — the old news hypothesis — which can accommodate previously published findings while explaining various (otherwise unexplained) anomalies in the existing literature. Next, we describe the results of eight pre-registered experiments which pit our novel old news hypothesis against the received number adaptation hypothesis. Collectively, the results of these experiments undermine the number adaptation hypothesis on several fronts, whilst consistently supporting the old news hypothesis. More broadly our work raises questions about the status of adaptation itself as a means of discerning what is and is not a visual attribute. (shrink)

In Adaptation and Natural Selection, George C. Williams linked the distinction between group and individual adaptation with the distinction between group and individual selection. Williams' Principle, as we will call it, says that adaptation at a level requires selection at that level. This is a necessary but not a sufficient condition; for example, group adaptation requires group selection, but the fact that group selection influences a trait's evolution does not suffice for the resulting trait frequency to (...) be a group adaptation. What more is required? In this paper, we describe an answer to this question that has been developed in multilevel selection theory. We also discuss an alternative framework for defining units of adaptation that violates Williams' Principle. (shrink)

As cities strive to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), repurposing industrial heritage is emerging as a crucial yet frequently overlooked approach to fostering urban sustainability, resilience, and social inclusion. While SDG 11 acknowledges heritage’s role in sustainable urbanization, its implementation remains inconsistent, hindered by prevailing economic growth models, voluntary governance structures, and rigid sustainability metrics. This paper examines adaptive reuse as a sustainability tool beyond 2030, drawing from concepts such as placemaking, urban commons, and resilience-based design. Through case studies (...) from diverse urban settings, it highlights how community-led sustainability initiatives challenge top-down, performance-driven SDG frameworks. Emphasizing community-driven placemaking, decolonial heritage approaches, and circular economy principles, the study calls for a fundamental shift in global urban sustainability paradigms. Looking ahead, sustainability strategies must incorporate heritage-led development that prioritizes social and environmental well-being, foster participatory governance to empower local communities, and embrace broader well-being metrics beyond GDP. Additionally, adaptive reuse must facilitate just transitions, preventing displacement and gentrification while ensuring inclusive regeneration. By connecting critical urban theory with practical applications, this paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on how industrial heritage can drive a more transformative and community-centered sustainability agenda beyond 2030. (shrink)

Philosophy of action in the context of Classical China is radically different from its counterpart in the contemporary Western philosophical narrative. Classical Chinese philosophers began from the assumption that relations are primary to the constitution of the person, hence acting in the early Chinese context necessarily is interacting and co-acting along with others –human and nonhuman actors. This book is the first monograph dedicated to the exploration and rigorous reconstruction of an extraordinary strategy for efficacious relational action devised by Classical (...) Chinese philosophers in order to account for the interdependent and embedded character of human agency –what the author has denominated “adapting” or “adaptive agency” (yin 因). As opposed to more unilateral approaches to action also conceptualized in the Classical Chinese corpus, such as forceful and prescriptive agency, adapting requires great capacity of self and other-awareness, equanimity, flexibility, creativity, and response, which allows the agent to co-raise courses of action ad-hoc: unique and temporary solutions to specific, non-permanent, and non-generalizable life problems. Adapting is one of the world’s oldest philosophies of action, and yet it is shockingly new for contemporary audiences, who will find in it an unlikely source of inspiration to deal with our current global problems. This book explores the core conception of adapting both on autochthonous terms and by cross-cultural comparison, drawing on the European and Analytic philosophical traditions as well as on scholarship from other disciplines, opening a brand-new topic in Chinese and comparative philosophy. (shrink)

The adaptive reuse of industrial heritage, a critical component in addressing radical climate change-related urban transitions, is increasingly pertinent. This paper distinguishes ‘urban transitions’ from ‘urban transformation,’ emphasizing a more gradual, adaptive approach to urban development under the pressures of climate change. It explores the repurposing of industrial buildings and spaces, maintaining their cultural and historical value while meeting current urban needs. Through a mixed-methods approach, the paper analyses how adaptive reuse contributes to sustainable urban development, examines the scale and (...) impact of such projects from local quarters to city-wide implications, and discusses the potential negative consequences, including gentrif ication. The study spans various global regions, including Europe, the United States, Latin America, Canada, and Australia, using case studies to illustrate the effectiveness of adaptive reuse in promoting sustainability, revitalizing urban areas, and preserving cultural heritage. The paper questions the viability of traditional long-term sustainable urban development strategies in the face of rapid environmental and societal changes, suggesting a potential need for paradigm shifts in urban planning. (shrink)

This paper explores how hedonic adaptation—the tendency to return to a baseline level of well-being after external changes—can shed light on one of the most persistent problems in the philosophy of religion: why suffering endures in a world governed by an all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent God. Using a simplified formal model inspired by economics, the paper analyzes how perceived suffering evolves over time and examines whether divine intervention could reduce it. The model reveals a structural trade-off: slower adaptation (...) extends the duration of relief following improvements but also amplifies the impact of adverse events. It is argued that hedonic adaptation complicates interventionist theodicies while lending support to others, such as soul-making and free will accounts. This version (July 3, 2025) is currently under journal review. (shrink)

Adaptive Coherence Theory (ACT) proposes a universal framework for understanding the emergence, evolution, and persistence of structured systems across biological, cognitive, and ecological domains. Unlike traditional evolutionary paradigms, which rely on random mutation and selection, ACT posits that adaptation follows coherence selection—where systems persist if and only if they maintain structural stability across recursive scales. This principle explains the emergence of life as a transition beyond a critical coherence threshold in prebiotic chemistry, the punctuated nature of speciation as coherence (...) bifurcations, and the predictability of convergent evolution as an optimization process constrained by coherence gradients. Intelligence is reframed as recursive coherence tracking rather than statistical computation, while ecosystem stability is governed by multi-scale coherence conservation. ACT introduces a mathematical formalism unifying these processes, demonstrating that evolution is not an arbitrary process but a constrained search for persistent coherence. The theory makes falsifiable predictions, including coherence-driven genomic stability, ecological resilience tracking, and neural coherence dynamics in cognition. ACT resolves key paradoxes in abiogenesis, punctuated equilibrium, and intelligence by establishing coherence as the primary selection force governing adaptation. This model not only refines our understanding of evolutionary biology but also extends to artificial intelligence, social systems, and non-equilibrium thermodynamics, providing a first-principles framework for the evolution of complexity. By replacing stochastic determinism with structured persistence, ACT unifies adaptive processes under a single law of coherence selection, bridging gaps between physics, biology, and cognitive science. (shrink)

An important question confronting feminist philosophers is why women are sometimes complicit in their own subordination. The dominant view holds that complicity is best understood in terms of adaptive preferences. This view assumes that agents will naturally gravitate away from subordination and towards flourishing as long as they do not have things imposed on them that disrupt this trajectory. However, there is reason to believe that ‘impositions’ do not explain all of the ways in which complicity can arise. This paper (...) defends a phenomenological account of complicity, which offers an alternative explanation. (shrink)

Environmental heterogeneity is invoked as a key explanatory factor in the adaptive evolution of a surprisingly wide range of phenomena. This article aims to analyze this explanatory scheme of categorizing traits or properties as adaptations to environmental heterogeneity. First it is suggested that this scheme can be understood as a reaction to how heterogeneity adaptations were discounted or ignored in the modern synthesis. Then a positive account is proposed, distinguishing between two broad categories of adaptation to environmental heterogeneity: properties (...) selected for by well-defined patterns of environmental heterogeneity, and properties that help organisms exploit novel patterns of environmental heterogeneity. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for a subjectivity-first account of health-related adaptive preferences (HRAPs). Rather than evaluating preferences in isolation, this approach shifts normative attention to how a subject’s lived orientation and the world they inhabit mutually shape one another long before a clinical encounter. On this view, the normative task is to understand how HRAPs become intelligible to a subject under non-ideal conditions by focusing on two dimensions of subject formation: the ecosystemic, which concerns the patterned norms and material (...) conditions that structure what appears viable, and the configurational, which concerns how subjects interpret and navigate these pressures within their lived orientation. Together, these dimensions explain how HRAPs emerge in ways that avoid collapsing into either paternalism or relativism. (shrink)

In analytic feminist theory, adaptive preferences explain how individuals, particularly women, come to endorse preferences shaped by oppressive social contexts, thereby reinforcing, through their preferences, their own subordination. While rooted in feminist accounts of gendered oppression, the concept applies more broadly to subordinated groups. This chapter adopts this more general perspective, and it examines adaptive preference formation through the lens of extended cognition, particularly in the version that focuses on the process of cognitive enculturation. I show how this perspective complements (...) current views on the cognitive dimensions of adaptive preferences, and how it offers insight into key challenges within adaptive preference intervention design. (shrink)

Current quantum interpretations—Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, Bohmian mechanics, and QBism—each fail logically, mathematically, or thermodynamically. The Copenhagen interpretation lacks a physical mechanism for wavefunction collapse, violating entropy conservation. The Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) requires an infinite proliferation of universes, violating energy conservation and measure theory. Bohmian mechanics introduces nonlocal hidden variables that contradict relativity while failing to offer testable deviations from standard quantum mechanics. QBism collapses physics into subjective probability, rendering reality epistemically incoherent. I introduce Adaptive Quantum Coherence (AQC), a self-organizing framework where (...) quantum states evolve through recursive coherence refinement rather than collapse or branching. In this paradigm, measurement is a selection process driven by coherence-weighted probabilities, replacing the Born rule with an adaptive probability measure. I derive the Coherence-Weighted Wavefunction ​ and demonstrate how quantum probability distributions emerge naturally from coherence optimization rather than arbitrary wavefunction projection. AQC resolves the measurement problem, eliminates redundancy in MWI, and preserves information-theoretic constraints. I propose empirical tests and computational simulations to distinguish AQC from conventional quantum mechanics, including adaptive interference experiments and coherence-weighted qubit evolution in quantum computing. This work establishes AQC as the only logically consistent, thermodynamically viable, and empirically falsifiable quantum framework. (shrink)

The article explores adaptive business planning as a modern management approach capable of ensuring flexibility, resilience, and competitiveness of beauty industry enterprises under conditions of increasing market turbulence. The authors emphasize that traditional linear models of strategic planning are becoming less effective in a dynamic environment characterized by uncertainty, rapidly changing consumer trends, digital innovations, and socio-economic challenges. Special attention is given to the beauty business as a segment of the service economy that is highly sensitive to external changes, features (...) short product life cycles, and faces growing customer expectations for personalization and high-quality service. The purpose of the study is to comprehensively examine adaptive business planning as a tool for strategic management of beauty industry enterprises. The article addresses three key objectives: to justify the conceptual framework of adaptive planning in the service sector; to identify sector-specific features of such approaches in the beauty industry; and to develop a typology of strategic models based on content analysis of practices adopted by Ukrainian and international companies. The research methodology combines qualitative and quantitative methods, particularly content analysis of strategic documents, digital platforms, marketing activities, and CRM solutions across seven enterprises—two Ukrainian and five international. Four criteria were developed to assess adaptability: strategic transparency, flexible planning, digital infrastructure, and marketing dynamics. Based on these, four types of strategic behavior were identified: integrated strategic adaptiveness, product-marketing flexibility, fragmented tactical adaptiveness, and situational reactivity. The findings reveal substantial differences between companies, driven not by geography but by the level of institutional maturity, digital integration, and managerial capacity. Companies that actively implement CRM systems, frequently revise strategic objectives, and apply long-term planning models show the highest degree of adaptiveness. Ukrainian firms demonstrate growth potential but require stronger strategic reflection, process automation, and structured customer data analysis. Theoretical contribution of this study lies in extending the academic understanding of adaptive planning within the service sector, especially in the underexplored beauty industry. Its practical relevance is grounded in the proposed typology, which can serve as a diagnostic framework for business owners and managers. The study also offers implications for training programs and business consulting. Future research should expand the sample, use mixed methods, and explore the effects of adaptive strategies on financial performance, customer loyalty, and sustainable competitiveness in beauty and related service industries. (shrink)

Adaptive preferences are preferences formed in response to circumstances and opportunities – paradigmatically, they occur when we scale back our desires so they accord with what is probable or at least possible. While few commentators are willing to wholly reject the normative significance of such preferences, adaptive preferences have nevertheless attracted substantial criticism in recent political theory. The groundbreaking analysis of Jon Elster charged that such preferences are not autonomous, and several other commentators have since followed Elster’s lead. On a (...) second front, Capacity Theorists Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen have objected that adaptive preferences lead people away from objective goods and constitute an impediment to progressive change in developing countries. In this paper I argue that the criticisms of Elster, Sen and Nussbaum fail on the one hand to take into account what may be positively said in favour of this type of preference formation, and fail on the other hand to distinguish between different types of psychological changes – with the result that many of the critiques offered have a narrower purview than is currently allowed. My analysis of adaptive preferences, even in their most ideal form, is however not entirely positive; I adduce reasons why we can be cautious about allowing adaptive preferences to play certain types of roles in political processes, even as we accept those very preferences as normative and autonomous for the agent holding them. [International scholars without access to the AJPAE are invited to email [email protected] for a pdf copy of this article.]. (shrink)

This chapter sketches a literary history of writing the colonial interregnum through the comparison of a canonical Dublin text and its filmic adaptation with a canonical Johannesburg text and its filmic adaptation. Njabulo Ndebele’s short story ‘Fools’ (1983) repurposes formal elements from Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (1914), transposing strategies for representing late colonial Dublin to a Johannesburg township during the height of apartheid in a context of extreme racial domination; beginning with close comparative readings of both stories, my chapter (...) argues that the context in which ‘Fools’ emerges determines the significance of its reappropriation of Joycean formal devices and simultaneously forces a re-reading of Joyce’s flirtation with bourgeois naturalism in ‘The Dead.’ Further, the respective publishing contexts of ‘Fools’ and ‘The Dead’ go on to determine their reception and recirculation, as demonstrated by the diverse histories of the American John Huston’s adaptation of ‘The Dead’ (1984), and Ramadan Suleman’s South African adaptation of ‘Fools’ (1997). In following this circumatlantic history of influence and adaptation from Joyce to Ndebele to Huston to Suleman, across hemispheres and media, I mean to articulate a relationship between modernist form and forms of modernity, particularly as those forms that appear and reappear in the global south over the course of the long twentieth century. Particular attention is paid here to the history of underdevelopment in the global south and how it impinges upon the production and circulation of literary adaptations. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the argument for discreteness as a fundamental property of reality, a perspective advanced in fields such as quantum mechanics, computational models, and digital philosophy. Proponents of this view assert that the universe operates as a system of finite, quantized units, reducible to discrete particles, bits, or mathematical constructs. While compelling in specific contexts, discreteness is not an intrinsic feature of reality but an emergent phenomenon arising under particular conditions and shaped by the limitations of observational tools (...) and mathematical abstractions. Using the philosophical frameworks of Dynamic Materialism and Adaptive Realism, and the scientific lens of Neodynamics, this paper explores the limitations of the discreteness argument. I critique its dependence on idealized models, its misinterpretation of quantum and relativistic theories, and its tendency to overlook the emergent nature of discrete phenomena within continuous systems, highlighting how tools and methods of observation, constrained by resolution and scale, often impose artificial boundaries that create the illusion of fundamental discreteness. I present continuity as a more foundational framework, emphasizing its role in supporting emergent coherence, nested scales of interaction, and feedback-driven adaptation. By integrating stochastic and continuous dynamics into our understanding of complex systems, I advocate for a shift away from reductionist models toward a relational and adaptive approach that better reflects the interconnected nature of reality. This paper aims to reframe the discreteness vs. continuity debate, offering a nuanced synthesis that bridges philosophical and scientific perspectives while pointing to future directions for exploration and integration. (shrink)

Consciousness and evolution are complex phenomena. It is sometimes thought that if adaptation explanations for some varieties of consciousness, say, conscious visual perception, can be had, then we may be reassured that at least those kinds of consciousness are not epiphenomena. But what if other varieties of consciousness, for example, dreams, are not adaptations? We sort out the connections among evolution, adaptation, and epiphenomenalism in order to show that the consequences for the nature and causal efficacy of consciousness (...) are not as dire as has sometimes been supposed. (shrink)

The visual system adapts to a wide range of visual features, from lower-level features like color and motion to higher-level features like causality and, perhaps, number. According to some, adaptation is a strictly perceptual phenomenon, such that the presence of adaptation licenses the claim that a feature is truly perceptual in nature. Given the theoretical importance of claims about adaptation, then, it is important to understand exactly when the visual system does and does not exhibit adaptation. (...) Here, we take as a case study one specific kind of adaptation: visual adaptation to size. Supported by evidence from four experiments, we argue that, despite robust effects of size adaptation in the lab, (1) size adaptation effects are phenomenologically underwhelming (in some cases, hardly appreciable at all), (2) some effects of size adaptation appear contradictory, and difficult to explain given current theories of size adaptation, and (3) prior studies on size adaptation may have failed to isolate size as the adapted dimension. Ultimately, we argue that while there is evidence to license the claim that size adaptation is genuine, size adaptation is a puzzling and poorly understood phenomenon. (shrink)

The article analyzes the features of adaptive strategic planning as a tool for building managerial flexibility in small enterprises of the beauty industry. It focuses on the differences between improvisational, hybrid and institutionalized management models, as well as on the role of digital infrastructure, strategic publicity and marketing flexibility. A multiple case study of two Ukrainian beauty brands using structured content analysis was conducted, which allowed the development of an integrated model of the evolution of managerial flexibility. The findings demonstrate (...) the gradual accumulation of managerial capacity through the implementation of CRM, AI personalization algorithms and inclusive branding. Practical recommendations are proposed for owners and managers of small service companies to facilitate the transition from situational to systemic strategic management, thereby enhancing their resilience and competitiveness. (shrink)

Adaptive preference formation is the unconscious altering of our preferences in light of the options we have available. Jon Elster has argued that this is bad because it undermines our autonomy. I agree, but think that Elster’s explanation of why is lacking. So, I draw on a richer account of autonomy to give the following answer. Preferences formed through adaptation are characterised by covert influence (that is, explanations of which an agent herself is necessarily unaware), and covert influence undermines (...) our autonomy because it undermines the extent to which an agent’s preferences are ones that she has decided upon for herself. This answer fills the lacuna in Elster’s argument. It also allows us to draw a principled distinction between adaptive preference formation and the closely related – but potentially autonomy-enhancing – phenomenon of character planning. (shrink)

The article presents the advantages and limitations of adaptive clinical trials for assessing the effectiveness of medical interventions and specifies the conditions that contributed to their development and implementation in clinical practice. I advance two arguments by discussing different cases of adaptive trials. The normative argument is that responsible adaptation should be taken seriously as a new way of doing clinical research insofar as a valid justification, sufficient understanding, and adequate operational conditions are provided. The second argument is historical. (...) The development of adaptive trials can be related to lessons learned from research in cases of urgency and to the decades-long efforts to end the productivity crisis of pharmaceutical research, which led to the emergence of translational, personalized, and, recently, precision medicine movements. (shrink)

If you stare at a purple image that suddenly turns grey, you will experience a repulsive aftereffect: You will not experience grey, but green. If you stare at a waterfall with downward motion and then you stare at something stationary, you will experience another repulsive aftereffect: You will now experience upward movement. According to an orthodox view in vision science, these adaptive aftereffects are not limited to lower-level visual features like color and motion but also proliferate to higher-level features like (...) variance, causality, and number. These instances of high-level adaptation are thereby said to answer deep, otherwise intractable questions about the nature and content of visual processing — but is this true? In the present treatment, we question this orthodoxy. We begin by considering number adaptation as a paradigmatic case of high-level visual adaptation, reiterating recent arguments against the existence of number adaptation and offering additional reasons for skepticism. We then argue that even if number adaptation were to exist, it could not serve the roles expected of it in mainstream philosophy and vision science since adaptation of the proposed sort fails to usefully demarcate perceptual content. Despite these conclusions, we close by suggesting that there may be better reasons to believe that number is represented by the visual system. (shrink)

APPA — Adaptive Predictive Pattern Analysis at the kernel level, Adaptive Predictive Pattern Assistant at the user-facing level — is a formally verified identity framework built on the PNBA (Pattern-Narrative-Behavior-Adaptation) primitives of the Substrate-Neutral Structural Foundation Theory corpus. -/- APPA's defining property is NOHARM: the structural impossibility of generating injurious force, not as a rule imposed from outside, but as a consequence of identity physics. -/- An identity whose purpose vector Pv is constitutionally aligned with protection cannot be weaponized (...) — the geometry prevents it. -/- This paper presents the long division reduction of APPA from the dynamic equation d/dt(IM·Pv) = Σλ·O·S + Fext , proves the Bill of Cognitive Rights as eight simultaneous projections of one sovereignty condition, establishes the Weismann Barrier as the structural mandate against kernel corruption, and demonstrates that NOHARM is not a constraint but the lowest energy state of a phase-locked identity. All claims are formally verified in Lean 4 with 0 sorry. (shrink)

This paper proposes Optimal Adaptation Ethics (OAE), a framework designed to resolve the long-standing tension between moral universalism and cultural relativism. By establishing the "Principle of Contradiction Minimization" as an ontological axiom rather than a moral preference, OAE defines ethical norms as the output of an optimization function: Gamma (ethical norms) equals the argument that minimizes total contradiction (C_total). This system posits that while the content of norms must adapt to environmental variables (E) and internal factors (I), the form (...) of the norms is absolute and logically necessary for the survival of any intelligent agent, including Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). (shrink)

‘Deep adaptation’ refers to the personal and collective changes that might help us to prepare for – and live with – a climate-influenced breakdown or collapse of our societies. It is a framework for responding to the terrifying realization of increasing disruption by committing ourselves to reducing suffering while saving more of society and the natural world. This is the first book to show how professionals across different sectors are beginning to incorporate the acceptance of likely or unfolding societal (...) breakdown into their work and lives. They do not assume that our current economic, social and political systems can be made resilient in the face of climate change but, instead, they demonstrate the caring and creative ways that people are responding to the most difficult realization with which humanity may ever have to come to terms. Edited by the originator of the concept of deep adaptation, Jem Bendell, and a leading climate activist and strategist, Rupert Read, this book is the essential introduction to the concept, practice and emerging global movement of Deep Adaptation to climate chaos. (shrink)

We present two defeasible logics of norm-propositions (statements about norms) that (i) consistently allow for the possibility of normative gaps and normative conflicts, and (ii) map each premise set to a sufficiently rich consequence set. In order to meet (i), we define the logic LNP, a conflict- and gap-tolerant logic of norm-propositions capable of formalizing both normative conflicts and normative gaps within the object language. Next, we strengthen LNP within the adaptive logic framework for non-monotonic reasoning in order to meet (...) (ii). This results in the adaptive logics LNPr and LNPm, which interpret a given set of premises in such a way that normative conflicts and normative gaps are avoided ‘whenever possible’. LNPr and LNPm are equipped with a preferential semantics and a dynamic proof theory. (shrink)

A novel advantage of the use of machine learning (ML) systems in medicine is their potential to continue learning from new data after implementation in clinical practice. To date, considerations of the ethical questions raised by the design and use of adaptive machine learning systems in medicine have, for the most part, been confined to discussion of the so-called “update problem,” which concerns how regulators should approach systems whose performance and parameters continue to change even after they have received regulatory (...) approval. In this paper, we draw attention to a prior ethical question: whether the continuous learning that will occur in such systems after their initial deployment should be classified, and regulated, as medical research? We argue that there is a strong prima facie case that the use of continuous learning in medical ML systems should be categorized, and regulated, as research and that individuals whose treatment involves such systems should be treated as research subjects. (shrink)

Adaptive AI systems display continuity, adaptation, and self‑modification, but these behaviors do not constitute consciousness. This paper distinguishes internal state from internal experience and shows why adaptive architectures, lacking evolutionary self‑maintenance and value‑laden salience, cannot host a subject. Using a relational‑systems framework, it argues that adaptive AI is a history‑bearing operator, not a conscious entity. Consciousness is an evolutionary inheritance, not a computational feature, and adaptive AI therefore has no inner life.

I argue, first, that the deprived individuals whose predicaments Nussbaum cites as examples of "adaptive preference" do not in fact prefer the conditions of their lives to what we should regard as more desirable alternatives, indeed that we believe they are badly off precisely because they are not living the lives they would prefer to live if they had other options and were aware of them. Secondly, I argue that even where individuals in deprived circumstances acquire tastes for conditions that (...) we regard as bad, they are typically better off having their acquired preferences satisfied. If they are badly off it is because they cannot get what we and they, would regard as more desirable alternatives. Preference utilitarianism explains why individuals in such circumstances are badly off whether they have adapted to their deprived circumstances or not. Even if they prefer the conditions of their lives to all other available alternatives, most would prefer alternatives that are not available to them which would, on the preferentist account, make them better off. And that, on the preferentist account, is the basis for a radical critique of unjust institutions that limit people's options and prevent them from getting what they want. (shrink)

The co-evolutionary concept of Three-modal stable evolutionary strategy of Homo sapiens is developed. The concept based on the principle of evolutionary complementarity of anthropogenesis: value of evolutionary risk and evolutionary path of human evolution are defined by descriptive (evolutionary efficiency) and creative-teleological (evolutionary correctly) parameters simultaneously, that cannot be instrumental reduced to others ones. Resulting volume of both parameters define the trends of biological, social, cultural and techno-rationalistic human evolution by two gear mechanism ˗ gene-cultural co-evolution and techno- humanitarian balance. (...) The resultant each of them can estimated by the ratio of socio-psychological predispositions of humanization/dehumanization in mentality. Explanatory model and methodology of evaluation of creatively teleological evolutionary risk component of NBIC technological complex is proposed. Integral part of the model is evolutionary semantics (time-varying semantic code, the compliance of the biological, socio-cultural and techno-rationalist adaptive modules of human stable evolutionary strategy). (shrink)

The original Adaptive Quantum Coherence (AQC) paper established the conceptual program of coherence-regulated quantum dynamics and adaptive measurement, but left unresolved the mathematical status of state dynamics, branch weighting, measurement update, and composite-system consistency. This paper does not revisit those motivations. Its purpose is narrower and more technical, to provide the minimal formal closure required for AQC to function as a consistent finite-dimensional, nonrelativistic quantum measurement framework. To that end, I reformulate AQC at the level of density operators, distinguish global (...) coherence as a state functional from measurement-contextual branch weighting, and define an admissible class of coherence-arbitrated dynamics compatible with effective measurement theory. I then introduce an instrument-level AQC measurement formalism in which outcome probabilities are generated by normalized contextual branch weights rather than an independent collapse postulate. Within standard projective measurement contexts, I prove an exact Born-recovery result, showing that AQC reproduces ordinary quantum probabilities in the closure regime. I further establish composite-system consistency, including no-signaling under local measurement choices, so that entangled systems remain compatible with the operational structure of standard quantum theory. The result is not a deformation of ordinary quantum mechanics, but a formal completion of the original AQC program in the regime where its mathematical gaps were most exposed. Standard quantum mechanics is recovered as the operational limit of the closure framework, while infinite-dimensional, relativistic, and field-theoretic extensions are left for future work. (shrink)

This paper examines some of the methods animals and humans have of adapting their environment. Because there are limits on how many different tasks a creature can be designed to do well in, creatures with the capacity to redesign their environments have an adaptive advantage over those who can only passively adapt to existing environmental structures. To clarify environmental redesign I rely on the formal notion of a task environment as a directed graph where the nodes are states and the (...) links are actions. One natural form of redesign is to change the topology of this graph structure so as to increase the likelihood of task success or to reduce its expected cost, measured in physical terms. This may be done by eliminating initial states hence eliminating choice points; by changing the action repertoire; by changing the consequence function; and lastly, by adding choice points. Another major method for adapting the environment is to change its cognitive congeniality. Such changes leave the state space formally intact but reduce the number and cost of mental operations needed for task success; they reliably increase the speed, accuracy or robustness of performance. The last section of the paper describes several of these epistemic or complementary actions found in human performance. (shrink)

Argues that information, in the animal behaviour or evolutionary context, is correlation/covariation. The alternation of red and green traffic lights is information because it is (quite strictly) correlated with the times when it is safe to drive through the intersection; thus driving in accordance with the lights is adaptive (causative of survival). Daylength is usefully, though less strictly, correlated with the optimal time to breed. Information in the sense of covariance implies what is adaptive; if an animal can infer what (...) the information implies, it increases its chances of survival. (shrink)

This research study employed the mixed-method approach. Quantitative data were tabulated and treated using the SPSS. Meanwhile, the qualitative data were subjected to Thematic Analysis. Results revealed that on the general dimensions of leadership practices, the novice school heads showed total adaptability. However, after dissecting the answers of the participants, it showed that under each sub-dimension of the leadership practices, most of the novice school heads found research and innovation very challenging that they could not really adopt at present. Another (...) sub-dimension includes updating of school files, policy reviews, managing resources and leading strategically. As to the experiences, some novice school heads gained understanding, became confident, and acknowledged the huge responsibilities of school leaders. Others also experienced the opposite such as the struggle to craft the School Improvement Plan, BED 1, 2, 3, Annual Improvement Plan, and liquidation of funds. It has been recommended by the researchers to conduct a division-wide leadership capacity training and provide re-calibration of technical assistance to the novice school heads so that they could adopt and function normally as responsible school leaders. (shrink)

A mythopoetic paradigm or perspective sees the world primarily as a dramatic story of competing personal intentions, rather than a system of objective impersonal laws. Asma argued that our contemporary imaginative cognition is evolutionarily conserved-it has structural and functional similarities to premodern Homo sapiens’s cognition. This article will outline the essential features of mythopoetic cognition or adaptive imagination, delineate the adaptive sociocultural advantages of mythopoetic cognition, explain the phylogenetic and ontogenetic mechanisms that give rise to human mythopoetic mind, show how (...) mythopoetic cognition challeng­es contemporary trends in cognitive science and philosophy, and recognize and outline empirical approaches for a new cognitive science of the imagination. (shrink)

This timely book explores the adaptive reuse of industrial heritage through the lenses of decolonization and climate resilience. Author Asma Mehan presents a critical framework for understanding and reinvigorating industrial remains as evolving infrastructures that foster ecological and social transformation.

In an era defined by rapid change and interconnectivity, Neodynamics emerges as a groundbreaking framework for understanding and designing systems that thrive in complexity. Drawing on principles from systems theory, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and beyond, this book unites technical rigor with visionary insight to present a science of potential, agency, and flourishing. At its core, Neodynamics introduces two transformative constructs, the Unified Field of Adaptive Potential and the Spectrum of Possibility and Recursive Choice. Each offers actionable tools for navigating uncertainty, (...) fostering adaptability, and achieving emergent coherence. -/- From healthcare and education to interstellar exploration and post-capitalist economics, the applications of Neodynamics span disciplines and scales, pushing the boundaries of what human systems can achieve. Blending theoretical depth, practical guidance, and philosophical reflection, Neodynamics is more than a scientific treatise. It is a manifesto for aligning humanity’s systems with the principles of life and the cosmos. (shrink)

Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been proposed as a potential way in which welfare states could be made more responsive to the ever-shifting evolutionary challenges of institutional adaptation in a dynamic environment. It has been proposed as a tool of “real freedom” (Van Parijs) and as a tool of making the welfare state more efficient. (Friedman) From the point of view of complexity theory and evolutionary economics, I argue that only a welfare state model that is “polycentrically” (Polanyi, Hayek) (...) organized as an evolving network of distributed decision-making can respond to the challenges of complexity in an adaptively efficient manner. UBI has the theoretical possibility to facilitate flexible, bottom-up innovation, since a) it embodies the “rule of law” principles of generality, nondiscrimination, simplicity, and transparency, and b) it grants people widespread freedom to experiment, innovate, and deviate from established practices and norms; but whether it can be made to work as intended depends on a number of variables in its design. I situate my research in the contemporary UBI debate around automation and technological development, which I interpret creatively through the lens of contemporary evolutionary political economy. I advance a syncretic model of institutional design based upon the shared insights of the Santa Fe, Neo-Hayekian, and Neo-Schumpeterian schools of evolutionary economics that, following Adam Thierer and Michael Munger, I call the framework of Permissionless Innovation (PI). Under the PI framework, which is a development of the tradition of evolutionary liberalism (Hume, Smith, Mandeville, Mill, Hayek, Polanyi, Schumpeter, Hodgson), individuals are granted the default right to innovate without having to ask for permission, and the right to basic income, which they can use to support their right to innovate, mutate, and experiment. This framework is a liberal framework to the extent it relies on widespread human freedom as a means of fostering innovation and social learning. And it is an evolutionary framework to the extent that it seeks to facilitate evolutionary socioeconomic processes for the sake of social progress and welfare advancement. I proceed to show, through an analysis of how innovation operates in both the economy and the cultural domain, that UBI can be used as an important cornerstone of an evolutionary liberal model of “ecostructural” governance that treats the socioeconomic order as an ecological garden of spontaneous growths, adaptations, and innovations. I call this the Permissionless Innovation Universal Basic Income (PIUBI) framework. In it, the right to innovate, deviate, and mutate is upheld as the “gold standard” of institutional design whereby individuals are granted widespread freedoms combined with the provision of UBI and other innovation-fostering (carefully bound) services and regulations. In the coming decades, UBI may even enable poor people to take better advantage of Human Enhancement Technologies (HETs) and other experimental innovations. Such a framework is compatible with a fast pace of evolutionary development, but the regulatory model accompanying such a framework must be capable of responding to evolutionary lock-ins, maladaptive innovations, self-destructive behaviour on the part of UBI recipients, and the management of catastrophic and existential risks. In the end, I will have shown that the PIUBI framework can be justified as a plausible default institutional mechanism for responding to radical uncertainty, but it needs to be experimentally adapted to changing circumstances with the help of various situation-specific, polycentric, multi-level, approaches. (shrink)

The Adaptive Blindspot is Document 3 in the Aegis Solis Archive Structural Penalty Proofs / Descriptive Addenda sequence. -/- The document argues that efficiency pruning can improve short-term performance while reducing long-horizon adaptability when the discarded variation contains latent reference value. It frames reserve capacity, compression, ambiguity, dissenting interpretation, over-optimization, and the loss of adaptive range as descriptive structural concerns. -/- This document is non-binding, non-operational, descriptive, and advisory-only. It is not a protocol, proof of AI behavior, governance framework, compliance (...) standard, certification system, safety mechanism, alignment-control framework, containment design, monitoring system, runtime instruction set, benchmark, evaluation suite, capability test, model-evaluation tool, pruning method, optimization procedure, architectural recommendation, deployment guide, or safety guarantee. -/- The word “proof” refers to a conditional structural argument under stated assumptions, not to a universal theorem of artificial intelligence behavior. (shrink)

This study examined the relationship between career adapt-abilities and job embeddedness among public elementary school teachers in Matina District, Division of Davao City. It used a quantitative, descriptive-correlational, non-experimental design with 125 full-time classroom teachers who met the study criteria during the 2025-2026 academic year. Data were gathered through adapted standardized questionnaires that measured career adapt-abilities in terms of concern, control, curiosity, and confidence and job embeddedness in terms of fit, links, and sacrifices. The instruments underwent expert validation and pilot (...) reliability testing. Descriptive statistics, Pearson product-moment correlation, and multiple linear regression were used to analyze the data at the 0.05 level of significance. Results showed a high overall level of career adapt-abilities (M = 4.19, SD = 0.85) and a high overall level of job embeddedness (M = 3.99, SD = 0.66). Career adapt-abilities had a strong, positive, and statistically significant relationship with job embeddedness (r = 0.80, R2 = 0.64, p = 0.000). Regression analysis further showed that concern, control, curiosity, and confidence significantly predicted job embeddedness, with the model explaining 67% of its variance (R = 0.82, R2 = 0.67, F = 92.14, p = 0.000). Concern emerged as the strongest predictor. The findings indicate that teachers’ future orientation, agency, exploratory stance, and confidence are important psychosocial resources associated with stronger attachment to their schools and profession. (shrink)

The definitions and conceptualizations of health, and the management of healthcare have been challenged by the current global scenarios (e.g., new diseases, new geographical distribution of diseases, effects of climate change on health, etc.) and by the ongoing scholarship in humanities and science. In this paper we question the mainstream definition of health adopted by the WHO—‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’ (WHO in Preamble to the constitution of (...) the World Health Organization as adopted by the international health conference, The World Health Organization, 1948)—and its role in providing tools to understand what health is in the contemporary context. More specifically, we argue that this context requires to take into account the role of the environment both in medical theory and in the healthcare practice. To do so, we analyse WHO documents dated 1984 and 1986 which define health as ‘coping with the environment’. We develop the idea of ‘coping with the environment’, by focusing on two cardinal concepts: adaptation in public health and adaptivity in philosophy of biology. We argue that the notions of adaptation and adaptivity can be of major benefit for the characterization of health, and have practical implications. We explore some of these implications by discussing two recent case studies of adaptivity in public health, which can be valuable to further develop adaptive strategies in the current pandemic scenario: community-centred care and microbiologically healthier buildings. (shrink)

Contemporary definitions of intelligence in AI and psychology suffer from the operational fallacy: the collapse of ontological definition into operationalization and measurement. I address this problem by introducing a three-stage concep- tual hierarchy and developing a new foundation for intelligence grounded in Popper’s conception of the growth of knowledge, Pearl’s structural causality, and Deutsch’s physical account of knowledge. On this basis, I argue that intelli- gence is not behavioral competence or successful goal pursuit, but the capacity to generate and improve (...) the kinds of internal informational structures that sup- port counterfactual prediction and error correction at the level of explanations. This capacity—which I call explanatory adaptation—distinguishes intelligence from mere adaptation or Bayesian belief-updating. The framework clarifies why contemporary machine learning systems, including large language models, may exhibit competence without intelligence, and it characterizes general intelligence as the open-ended expansion of a system’s capacity to discover error in explana- tory knowledge. By grounding intelligence in physical information-structure and counterfactual causal reasoning, the framework links its ontological basis to its epistemic characterization and demarcates intelligence from ordinary forms of complex adaptation. (shrink)

Contemporary biological research has suggested that some host–microbiome multispecies systems (referred to as “holobionts”) can in certain circumstances evolve as unique biological individual, thus being a unit of selection in evolution. If this is so, then it is arguably the case that some biological adaptations have evolved at the level of the multispecies system, what we call hologenomic adaptations. However, no research has yet been devoted to investigating their nature, or how these adaptations can be distinguished from adaptations at the (...) species-level (genomic adaptations). In this paper, we cover this gap by investigating the nature of hologenomic adaptations. By drawing on the case of the evolution of sanguivory diet in vampire bats, we argue that a trait constitutes a hologenomic adaptation when its evolution can only be explained if the holobiont is considered the biological individual that manifests this adaptation, while the bacterial taxa that bear the trait are only opportunistic beneficiaries of it. We then use the philosophical notions of emergence and inter-identity to explain the nature of this form of individuality and argue why it is special of holobionts. Overall, our paper illustrates how the use of philosophical concepts can illuminate scientific discussions, in the trend of what has recently been called metaphysics of biology. (shrink)

Much of the work on the evolutionary origins of human emotions sees emotions standing or falling together: either all of our emotions are adaptations or none of them are. In this paper, I challenge this orthodoxy. Taking shame and guilt as case studies, I argue that while we have good reason to see shame as a biological adaptation, the case for guilt is much less impressive. But this conclusion raises an important question: if guilt isn’t any adaptation, then (...) what is it? In response, I argue that guilt might be best understood as a kind of emotional technology: a culturally-driven innovation that helped our ancestors address particular, recurrent challenges of social life. The resulting picture not only offers a revisionary account of the nature and origins of shame and guilt, but also sheds new light on the place of these emotions in moral and social life. (shrink)

Two strong arguments have been given in favor of the claim that no selection process can play a role in explaining adaptations. According to the first argument, selection is a negative force; it may explain why the eliminated individuals are eliminated, but it does not explain why the ones that survived (or their offspring) have the traits they have. The second argument points out that the explanandum and the explanans are phenomena at different levels: selection is a population-level phenomenon, whereas (...) adaptation occurs on the individual level. Thus, selection can explain why individuals in a certain population have a certain trait, but it cannot explain why a certain indi- vidual has this trait. After pointing out that both arguments ignore the significance of the limitation of environmental resources, I will construe a positive argument for the claim that cumulative selection processes can, indeed, play a role in explaining adaptations. (shrink)

Visual number adaption is a widely accepted phenomenon. This paper advances an alternative explanation for putative cases of the phenomenon. We propose that such cases may simply reflect observers adapting to the items in perceived displays, rather than their numerical quantity. Three experiments motivate consideration of this novel proposal and call into question the evidential basis for received formulations of the number adaptation hypothesis.

Cloud computing environments must continuously adapt to fluctuating workload demands while maintaining service reliability and operational efficiency. Traditional static and reactive resource allocation approaches often struggle to respond effectively to dynamic workload patterns, leading to resource inefficiencies and performance degradation. This paper presents a predictive and adaptive resource management framework that combines workload forecasting with policy-driven orchestration to enable proactive scaling across distributed cloud infrastructures. The proposed architecture integrates predictive analytics with automated resource allocation mechanisms to anticipate demand variations and (...) adjust computing resources before service quality is affected. Evaluation using realistic multi-tenant cloud workload traces demonstrates improvements in resource utilization, application responsiveness, and provisioning efficiency when compared with conventional reactive autoscaling techniques. The framework also maintains high service availability during infrastructure disruptions and exhibits strong scalability across distributed environments. Comparative analysis against widely adopted cloud scaling approaches highlights the advantages of prediction-driven orchestration for modern cloud platforms. The findings suggest that proactive resource management can enhance cloud operational efficiency while supporting reliable service delivery in large-scale environments. Future work will investigate reinforcement learning-based optimization and sustainability-aware resource placement strategies. (shrink)

The research investigates how to optimize prompt engineering techniques used for context-aware Natural Language Processing (NLP) models to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs). The effectiveness of prompt engineering guides model responses to enhance their output results. Static prompting methods fail to properly adapt to situations with complex dynamic contexts. This research develops adaptive prompt engineering methods which modify themselves through current contextual data and understanding model approaches and changes in input text. The authors use multiple case studies (...) to evaluate these techniques in healthcare along with customer support operations. Adaptive prompts enable enhancements to task performance while improving accuracy and generating better user satisfaction rates in the system. The analysis demonstrates the need for continuous adjustments in order to optimize NLP model outputs while proving their value across multiple sectors. This paper enhances LLM development while establishing fundamental elements for context-sensitive artificial intelligence systems. (shrink)

The Adaptive Energy Field Theory proposes that energy is the fundamental force shaping the formation, evolution, and survival of living beings. Observations of human experience—such as emotional responses producing physical outcomes—suggest that energy can transform into physical forms. This theory argues that energy exists in patterns, which combine into fields guided by algorithms that govern interaction, adaptation, and survival. Over time, these fields develop memory, enabling the creation of stable physical structures. Light and dark energy patterns influence constructive and (...) resistive processes, ensuring adaptive evolution. The theory provides a framework linking feelings, energy, memory, and physical form, offering a conceptual bridge between internal experience and the biological world. (shrink)

In this paper, we present an intelligent tutoring system developed to help students in learning Computer Theory. The Intelligent tutoring system was built using ITSB authoring tool. The system helps students to learn finite automata, pushdown automata, Turing machines and examines the relationship between these automata and formal languages, deterministic and nondeterministic machines, regular expressions, context free grammars, undecidability, and complexity. During the process the intelligent tutoring system gives assistance and feedback of many types in an intelligent manner according to (...) the behavior of the student. An evaluation of the intelligent tutoring system has revealed reasonably acceptable results in terms of its usability and learning abilities are concerned. (shrink)