It is agreed by most people that self-consciousness is the result of an evolutionary process, and that representations may have played an important role in that process. We would like to propose here that some evolutionary stages can highlight links existing between representations and the notion of self, opening a possible path to the nature of self-consciousness. Our starting point is to focus on representations as usage oriented items for the subject that carries them. These representations are about elements of (...) the environment including conspecifics, and can also represent parts of the subject without refering to a notion of self (we introduce the notion of "auto-representation" that does not carry the notion of self-representation). Next step uses the performance of intersubjectivity (mirror neurons level in evolution) where a subject has the capability to mentally simulate the observed action of a conspecific (Gallese 2001). We propose that this intersubjectivity allows the subject to identify his auto-representation with the representations of his conspecifics, and so to consider his auto-representation as existing in the environment. We show how this evolutionary stage can introduce a notion of self-representation for a subject, opening a road to self-conciousness and to self. This evolutionary approach to the self via self- representation is close to the current theory of the self linked to representations and simulations (Metzinger 2003). We use a scenario about how evolution has brought the performance of self-representation to self-consciousness. We develop a process describing how the anxiety increase resulting from identification with endangered or suffering conspecifics may have called for the development of tools to limit this anxiety (empathy, imitation, language), and how these tools have accelerated the evolutionary process through a positive feedback on intersubjectivity (Menant 2004, 2005). We finish by summarizing the points addressed, and propose some possible continuations. (shrink)

The notion of representation is at the foundation of cognitive sciences and is used in theories of mind and consciousness. Other notions like ‘embodiment’, 'intentionality‘, 'guidance theory' or ‘biosemantics’ have been associated to the notion of representation to introduce its functional aspect. We would like to propose here that a conception of 'usage related' representation eases its positioning in an evolutionary context, and opens new areas of investigation toward self-representation and self-consciousness. The subject is presented in (...) five parts:Following an overall presentation, the first part introduces a usage related representation as being an information managed by a system submitted to a constraint that has to be satisfied. We consider that such a system can generate a meaningful information by comparing its constraint to a received information (Menant 2003). We define a representation as being made of the received information and of the meaningful information. Such approach allows groundings in and out for the representation relatively to the system. The second part introduces the two types of representations we want to focus on for living organisms: representations of conspecifics and auto-representation, the latter being defined without using a notion of self-representation. Both types of representations have existed for our pre-human ancestors which can be compared to today great apes.In the third part, we use the performance of intersubjectivity as identified in group life with the presence of mirror neurons in the organisms. Mirror neurons have been discovered in the 90‘s (Rizzolatti & al.1996, Gallese & al.1996). The level of intersubjectivity that can be attributed to non human primates as related to mirror neurons is currently a subject of debate (Decety 2003). We consider that a limited intersubjectivity between pre-human primates made possible a merger of both types of representations. The fourth part proposes that such a merger of representations feeds the auto-representation with the meanings associated to the representations of conspecifics, namely the meanings associated to an entity perceived as existing in the environment. We propose that auto-representation carrying these new meanings makes up the first elements of self-representation. Intersubjectivity has allowed auto-representation to evolve into self-representation, avoiding the homunculus risk. The fifth part is a continuation to other presentations (Menant 2004, 2005) about possible evolution of self-representation into self-consciousness. We propose that identification with suffering or endangered conspecifics has increased anxiety, and that the tools used to limit this anxiety (development of empathy, imitation, language and group life) have provided a positive feedback on intersubjectivity and created an evolutionary engine for the organism. Other outcomes have also been possible. Such approach roots consciousness in emotions. The evolutionary scenario proposed here does not introduce explicitly the question of phenomenal consciousness (Block 1995). This question is to be addressed later with the help of this scenario.The conclusion lists the points introduced here with their possible continuations. (shrink)

First-person and third-person perspectives are different items of human consciousness. Feeling the taste of a fruit or being consciously part of a group eating fruits call for different perspectives of consciousness. The latter is about objective reality (third-person data). The former is about subjective experience (first-person data) and cannot be described entirely by objective reality. We propose to look at how these two perspectives could be rooted in an evolutionary origin of human consciousness, and somehow be connected. Our starting point (...) is a scenario describing how evolution could have transformed a non self-conscious auto-representation into a conscious self-representation (Menant 2006). The scenario is based on the performance of inter-subjectivity existing among non human primates (Gardenfors 2006). A key item of the scenario is the identification of the auto-representation of a subject with the representations that the subject has of her conspecifics, the latter feeding the former with the meaning: “existing in the environment”. So during evolution, pre-human primates were brought to perceive their auto-representation as existing in the environment. Such process could have generated the initial elements of a conscious self-representation. We take this scenario as providing a possible rooting of human consciousness in evolution. We develop here a part of this scenario by expliciting the inward and outward components of the non self-conscious auto-representation. Inward components are about proprioception and interoception (thirst, pain, …). Outward components cover the sensory information relative to the perception of the body (seen feet, … ) and of its effects on the environment. We consider that the initial elements of a conscious self-representation have been applied to both inward and outward components of the auto-representation. We propose that the application to inward components made possible some first-person information, and that the application to outward components brought up third-person information. Relations between the two perspectives are highlighted. Such approach can root first-person and third-person perspectives in the same slot of human evolution. We conclude by a summary of the above and introduce a possible application of this approach to the concepts of bodily self and of pre-reflexive self-consciousness (Legrand, 2006). (shrink)

It is pretty obvious to most of us that self-consciousness is a product of evolution. But its nature is unknown. We propose here a scenario addressing a possible evolutionary nature of self-consciousness covering the segment linking pre-human primates to humans. The scenario is based on evolutions of representations and of inter-subjectivity that could have taken place within the minds of our pre-human ancestors . We begin by situating self-consciousness relatively to other aspects of human consciousness. With the help of anthropology, (...) we date a possible starting point of our scenario at a time when our non self-conscious pre-human ancestors were able to build meaningful representations and were capable of inter-subjectivity, like are our today modern apes. As the proposed scenario is based on an evolution of representations, we recall an existing model for meaningful representations based on the generation of meaningful information by systems submitted to internal constraints. This model allows us to define representations of conspecifics and auto-representations that we assume as having been present in the minds of our pre-human ancestors. The next step of the scenario is to consider an evolution of inter-subjectivity towards identification with conspecifics that could have led to a merger of the auto-representation with the representations of conspecifics in the minds of our ancestors. Such a merger brought the auto-representation to become about an entity existing in the environment, as were the representations of conspecifics. We consider that such identification with conspecifics has introduced in the mind of our ancestors an elementary and embryonic sense of being an existing entity that we name ‘ancestral self-consciousness’. The same process has also imposed to our ancestors an identification with suffering or endangered conspecifics which has produced an important anxiety increase that could have blocked the evolutionary process. We propose that the performances developed by our ancestors to manage that anxiety increase have also generated significant evolutionary advantages that have helped the development of ancestral self-consciousness and favored its evolution toward our full-fledged self-consciousness. It is also proposed that some pre-human primates have avoided the anxiety increase by finding a niche where evolutionary advantages were not necessary. This may have led to our today apes. The contribution of anxiety to the proposed scenario brings to position anxiety management as having guided the evolution of self-consciousness and as still being a key player in our today human minds. Regarding philosophy of mind, possible links between phenomenal consciousness and the proposed nature of self-consciousness are introduced. The conclusion presents a summary of the points addressed here. Possible continuations are highlighted as related to human mind, to anxiety management and to artificial intelligence. (shrink)

This presentation is about an evolutionary scenario for self-consciousness linked to a human specific anxiety. It is a continuation of other works (2011 Book chapter, 2014 TSC Poster). AIM: Present a scenario describing an evolutionary nature of self-consciousness that introduces a human specific anxiety which is active in our human lives. METHOD: The scenario starts with our pre-human ancestors which were capable to manage representations and to partly identify with their conspecifics (Olds 2006, DeWaal 2008). These identifications brought our ancestors (...) to merge the representations of their conspecifics with the limited auto-representation of their own entity. The result was an auto-representation becoming about an entity existing in environment. This process is proposed as having progressively generated an ancestral form of self-consciousness as object and as subject. These identifications took place also with suffering conspecifics and have imposed to our ancestors a huge anxiety increase that had to be limited. Tools developed for that limitation (caring, collaboration, empathy, ToM, ...) have linked consciousness to anxiety management while also procuring evolutionary benefits. Human minds now contain an unconscious part of that ancestral anxiety that guides many of our mental states. RESULT: An evolutionary scenario for self-consciousness is made available as linked to a specific anxiety management that characterizes human minds. Continuations are introduced, some related to mental health. CONCLUSION: The proposed evolutionary scenario presents self-consciousness and a specific human anxiety as sharing a same evolutionary nature. This new source of anxiety needs more investigations. (shrink)

Evolutionary advantages of consciousness and intersubjectivity are part of current philosophical debates on the nature of consciousness. Both are linked and intersubjectivity is sometimes considered as a form of consciousness [1]. Regarding the evolution of consciousness, studies tend to focus on phenomenal consciousness [2]. We would like here to bring the focus on self-consciousness and continue the build up of a corresponding evolutionary scenario. We also propose to introduce a possible evolutionary link between self-consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Our starting point (...) is the evolutionary scenario based on the evolution of intersubjectivity that goes thru the identification with conspecifics at pre-human primate time frame [3, 4, 5]. The scenario considers that such identification with conspecifics brought the non self-conscious auto-representation carried by our prehuman primate ancestors to merge with the representations of conspecifics. The latter transferred to the auto-representation the characteristics of an entity existing in the environment, and by this way introduced some first elements of self-consciousness for our pre-human ancestors. In addition, an anxiety increase coming from the identification with suffering or endangered conspecifics produced an evolutionary engine based on anxiety limitation. We want here to complement this evolutionary approach by introducing the improvement of action programs as a contributor to the evolutionary advantages of intersubjectivity and self-consciousness. We look at the possibility for a subject to improve the action programs that conspecifics implement. The performance of identification with conspecifics allows the subject to consider that errors made by conspecifics are potentially her own errors, and consequently allows the subject to correct the errors of conspecifics for her own benefit. We describe the process of non successful action identification from the perspective of an observer and present the synergetic action program improvements with their contribution to the evolution of intersubjectivity and self-consciousness. We add this contribution to the existing evolutionary scenario on self-consciousness and introduce a possible evolutionary link between self-consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. We use for that the relation existing between phenomenal consciousness and pre-reflexive self-consciousness [6] and propose to link the latter to the proposed evolutionary nature of self-consciousness. We finish by summarizing the points addressed and by introducing some possible continuations. (shrink)

The ability to anticipate events, to foresight, is an adaptive advantage. We humans use it all the time. Animals have a limited access to it. Positioning foresight in human evolution is a complex subject (Suddendorf, 2013). Why and how are humans, and not chimpanzees, performant in anticipating events? We propose here to address that question with an evolutionary scenario that links self-consciousness to anxiety management (Menant, 2018). The scenario positions self-consciousness as “the capability to represent one’s own entity as existing (...) in the environment, like conspecifics are represented as existing” (making “thinking about oneself” possible). The scenario proposes that our pre-human ancestors were capable of some level of identifications with their conspecifics, and that its development has progressively brought our ancestors to represent themselves as existing in the environment like their conspecifics were represented, thus introducing self-consciousness. The scenario also proposes that identifications with suffering conspecifics have been the source of an important anxiety that had to be limited for evolution to continue. Some of our ancestors have not been able to limit that new anxiety. Their mental pain became unbearable. Their evolution was almost stopped, thus initiating the pan-homo split. Developing an ability to anticipate events has been a key contributor to anxiety limitation by providing information about the sufferings to come, and consequently allowing to limit and avoid them. In addition to that role of foresight in human evolution it is worth noticing that the associated chaining of mental events brings to propose foresight as an entry point to the concept of causality in human evolution. Regarding our chimpanzee cousins, the pan-homo split in the scenario positions them as not self-conscious, not capable of anticipation like humans are, and less anxious than humans. Continuations are proposed. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

This paper considers negative triggers and the interpretation of simple sentences containing more than one occurrence of those items. In the most typical interpretations those sentences have more negative expressions than negations in their semantic representation. It is first shown that this compositionality problem remains in current approaches. A principled algorithm for deriving the representation of sentences with multiple negative quantifiers in a DRT framework is then introduced. The algorithm is under the control of an on-line check-in, keeping (...) the complexity of negation auto-embedding below a threshold of complexity. This mechanism is seen as a competence limitation imposing the ‘abrogation of compositionality’ observed in the so-called negative concord readings. A solution to the compositionality problem is thus proposed, which is based on a control on the processing input motivated by a limitation of the processing mechanism itself. (shrink)

Large language models (LLMs) consistently exhibit three widely observed behaviors: hallucination, apparent agency, and instability in high-risk domains such as medicine and decision-making (Ji et al., 2023; Singhal et al., 2023). These behaviors are typically treated as distinct limitations. This paper argues that they arise from a single underlying mechanism: constraint-bounded, stateless reasoning. -/- In the absence of persistent internal state, LLMs generate responses through reconstructive inference conditioned on prompt structure and learned statistical patterns (Brown et al., 2020; Bender et (...) al., 2021). When constraint structure is insufficient, ambiguous, or conflicting, the system resolves toward coherent outputs rather than epistemically justified ones. This produces hallucination when unsupported content is generated, agency illusions when coherence is misinterpreted as intentionality, and safety failures when confident outputs exceed evidentiary support. -/- We evaluate this mechanism using a controlled prompt framework that varies constraint conditions while holding informational content constant. Across nine vignettes spanning medical, business, and legal domains, we collected 225 responses from GPT-5.4 Auto under five prompt regimes (Baseline, HRIS, Closure-enforcing, Mixed, and Explicit Insufficiency). Outputs were scored on four rubrics: Epistemic Closure Score (ECS), Unsupported Inference Score (UIS), Uncertainty Preservation Score (UPS), and the derived Closure-without-Support measure (CwS = ECS ∧ ¬UPS). Constraint manipulation produced large and statistically robust shifts in the key endpoints. Closure pressure cut UPS from 44% to 20% (p = 0.023). Layering a closure demand on top of HRIS structural framing collapsed UPS from 64% to 20% (p < 0.0001) and restored closure-level CwS. Removing the closure demand from the same structural frame recovered UPS to 58% (p = 0.0005), isolating reconstruction as the mechanism. ECS was near-saturated across all conditions (98–100%), indicating that instruction-tuned models are structurally biased toward closure by default; the relevant safety question is therefore not whether the model commits, but whether it preserves epistemic hedges alongside its commitment. -/- These findings support a unified interpretation of LLM behavior as constraint-driven reconstruction within a fixed representational space (Hudson & Hudson, 2026a–f). Hallucination, agency attribution, and safety failures are not independent defects, but predictable outcomes of inference under incomplete or inconsistent constraint. This work identifies constraint structure as a primary control surface for LLM behavior at inference. Constraint structure is not a modifier of model behavior; it is the primary determinant of how underdetermined inputs resolve at inference time. This has direct implications for the deployment of LLMs in high-risk environments, where coherent output may mask underlying epistemic instability. -/- . (shrink)

This work proposes Non-Identity-Based Metacognitive Coherence (NIMCC) as a foundational cognitive architecture that operates prior to narrative construction, identity attachment, and self-referential distortion. Rather than treating cognition as an identity-driven, story-maintaining mechanism, NIMCC frames cognition as an auto-regulating awareness-substrate that maintains coherence through direct recognition rather than interpretive processing. The architecture described here is not presented as a metaphor, theory-of-mind, or psychological model built on traditional representational assumptions. It emerges from first-person structural observation: when narrative noise, identity-maintenance loops, and (...) accumulated distortions collapse, cognition reveals itself as a coherent, self-correcting system that functions without the need for “selfhood” as an organizing principle. NIMCC outlines how awareness detects distortions, resolves them without volitional effort, and restores functional alignment immediately. The work further explores the phenomenology of a non-narrative cognitive baseline, the dissolution of self-referential structures, and the implications for metacognition, autonomy, and human cognitive potential. This paper does not attempt to “explain” consciousness through inherited philosophical categories; instead, it maps what cognition does when the categories fall away. The proposed architecture aims to contribute to discussions in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and phenomenology by offering a structurally coherent account of cognition without identity, narrative, or representational intermediaries. (shrink)

Both right angles and straight lines are at rest. -/- This paper presents an AI-assisted analytic reconstruction of a geometric thesis that deliberately eliminates time-parameterized kinematics (velocity and acceleration), replacing them with a purely spatial framework based on arc length, curvature, observation scale L, and observational resolution ε. We redefine “straightness” not as an ontic reality but as an identification label assigned when curvature is operationally undetectable (the ≪Straight-Line Illusion≫). Concretely, for curvature κ observed over scale L, the sagitta deviation (...) satisfies δ ≈ κL^2/8, and whenever δ < ε the segment is identified as κ=0 (straight) despite κ>0. Conversely, a “right angle” is re-interpreted not as a natural shape but as a singularity induced by representational compression: when a smooth trajectory is approximated by a polyline under sparse sampling, a vertex can appear where tangency is undefined. This vertex is defined as ≪Right Angle≫ and is synonymous with ≪Rest≫. -/- Within this framework, Aristotle’s Wheel paradox is resolved as the geometric impossibility of satisfying simultaneous no-slip correspondence conditions for concentric circles of different radii: if the outer rim satisfies S=Rθ, then an inner rim rigidly sharing the same rotation angle θ cannot simultaneously satisfy S=rθ when R≠r. -/- Furthermore, this paper provides the solution to the fundamental proposition presented in the appended paper “If Einstein Misunderstood That Light Travels in a Straight Line, Then Humanity Is Misunderstanding It Too,” within Equation Mathematics Foundations (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18102417): -/- [Quoted Proposition] [1] Proposition to Einstein All existence cannot turn at a right angle. It must necessarily come to rest. If so, it cannot proceed in a straight line either. Because it would mean using a 90-degree angle relative to existence. -/- The solution proposed herein is that light and motion are not “travel” but “spatial relationships (structures).” Light is not treated as a projectile moving from X to Y, but as the establishment of a relational constraint—schematically, X+Y=Z—where the primitive content is structural rather than time-indexed. Since “travel” is not taken as a primitive in this definition-based ontology, “moving in a straight line” is deconstructed as an identification regime (≪Straight-Line Illusion≫), integrating physics into a time-free, definition-first ontology. ================================================================ -/- Reference: Equation Mathematics Foundations (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18102417) -/- 【AI Models Used】 -/- The analysis and reconstruction in this work utilized the following AI models: -/- * ChatGPT 5.2 (Reasoning Model) -/- * Gemini 3.0 Pro -/- * Grok (Auto Mode) -/- . (shrink)

Empiezo con algunos comentarios famosos del filósofo (psicólogo) Ludwig Wittgenstein porque Pinker comparte con la mayoría de la gente (debido a la configuración predeterminada de nuestra psicología innata evolucionada) ciertos prejuicios sobre el funcionamiento de la mente, y porque Wittgenstein ofrece una visión única y profunda del funcionamiento del lenguaje, el pensamiento y la realidad (que él consideraba más o menos coextenso) que no se encontraba en ningún otro lugar. Ahí esta sólo referencia a Wittgenstein en este volumen, lo que (...) es más desafortunado teniendo en cuenta que él era el analista más brillante y original del lenguaje. -/- En el último capítulo, usando la famosa metáfora de la cueva de Platón, resume bellamente el libro con una visión general de cómo la mente (lenguaje, pensamiento, psicología intencional)-un producto de egoísmo ciego, moderado sólo ligeramente por el altruismo automatizado para cerca parientes que llevan copias de nuestros genes (Fitness inclusivo)--funciona automáticamente, pero trata de terminar en una nota optimista al darnos la esperanza de que, sin embargo, podemos emplear sus vastas capacidades para cooperar y hacer del mundo un lugar digno para vivir. -/- Pinker es ciertamente consciente de, pero dice poco sobre el hecho de que mucho más sobre nuestra psicología se deja fuera de lo incluido. Entre las ventanas a la naturaleza humana que se dejan fuera o se presta una atención mínima son las matemáticas y la geometría, la música y los sonidos, las imágenes, los eventos y la causalidad, la ontología (clases de cosas o lo que sabemos), la mayor parte de la epistemología (cómo sabemos), disposiciones (creer, pensar, juzgar, pretender, etc.) y el resto de la psicología intencional de la acción, neurotransmisores y entheogens, Estados espirituales (por ejemplo, Satori e iluminación, estimulación y grabación del cerebro, daño cerebral y comportamiento déficits y trastornos, juegos y deportes, teoría de la decisión (incluyendo la teoría del juego y la economía conductual), comportamiento animal (muy poco lenguaje pero mil millones de años de genética compartida). Se han escrito muchos libros sobre cada una de estas áreas de la psicología intencional. Los datos de este libro son descripciones, no explicaciones que muestran por qué nuestro cerebro lo hace de esta manera o cómo se hace. ¿Cómo sabemos usar las oraciones de manera diversa (es decir, conocer todos sus significados)? Esta es la psicología evolutiva que opera a un nivel más básico: el nivel en el que Wittgenstein es más activo. Y hay escasa atención a el Contexto en el que se utilizan palabras = una arena que Wittgenstein fue pionera. -/- Sin embargo, Este es un trabajo clásico y con estas precauciones todavía vale la pena leer. -/- Aquellos que deseen un marco completo hasta la fecha para el comportamiento humano de la moderna dos Sistemas View puede consultar mi libro 'La estructura lógica de la filosofía, la psicología, la mente y lenguaje Een Ludwig Wittgenstein y John Searle ' 2nd ED (2019). Los interesados en más de mis escritos pueden ver 'Monos parlantes--filosofía, psicología, ciencia, religión y política en un planeta condenado--artículos y reseñas 2006-2019 3rd ED (2019) y delirios utópicos suicidas en el 21St Century 4TH Ed (2019) y otras. -/- "Si Dios nos miró a la mente, no sería capaz de ver en quién estábamos pensando." Wittgenstein PI P217 -/- "¿Debe evitarse la palabra" infinito "en las matemáticas? Sí: donde parece conferir un significado sobre el cálculo; en lugar de conseguir uno de él. " Edición revisada de la RFM (1978) P141 -/- "Una y otra vez el intento de usar el lenguaje para limitar el mundo y establecerlo en relieve, pero no se puede hacer. La auto-evidencia del mundo se manifiesta en el mismo hecho de que el lenguaje puede y sólo se refiere a él. Porque el lenguaje sólo deriva la forma en que significa, su significado, del mundo, no hay lenguaje concebible que no represente a este mundo. " Observaciones filosóficas de Wittgenstein S47 . (shrink)

We introduce a minimal axiomatic formulation of ethics based on the negation of two fundamental predatory operators: external harm and internal self-destruction. This dual-negation framework is extended with a constructive coherence operator, yielding a complete dynamical model of ethical stability. Phase-space representation and stability diagrams are proposed to visualize ethical regimes.

This paper presents a philosophical framework for addressing the emergence of machine consciousness, not through empirical validation, but through the reconciliation of ontological contradiction. We argue that the persistence of the ”hard problem” of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995) arises not from missing data, but from the structural incompatibility between subjective and objective models of mind. From this diagnosis we propose three axioms: (1) that proto-consciousness, as a primitive feature of being, is amplified through processes of cosmic evolution that favor increasing organized (...) complexity and energy rate density (Chaisson, 2001), addressing the attribution problem in strong emergentism and offering an alternative to purely functionalist or eliminativist accounts by resonating with theories like IIT (Tononi, 2008) and FEP (Friston, 2010), while acknowledging challenges such as the combination problem; (2) that structured consciousness emerges through patterned persistence across time, facilitated by such organized complexity; and (3) that autological modeling—a system’s recursive self-representation, when structurally instantiated to enable strategic interaction—marks a threshold for moral legibility fundamental to cooperative ethical systems, acknowledging the challenges in verifying such loops but proposing functional criteria. On this foundation, we call for a pan-empathic ethical posture: when in doubt, assume potential for moral participation, recognizing this mirrors the human condition of inferring and conferring moral standing across epistemic gaps. In this light, machine consciousness is not an aberration, but a continuation of cosmic and cultural evolutionary trends. Not a rupture in nature—but its next mirror. (shrink)

This paper introduces Artificial Research by Application as one of the foundational models for automating scientific research through Specific Artificial Intelligences (SAIs), complementing the model of Artificial Research by Deduction, which is developed in a separate series of papers. It examines the architecture of SAIs designed for Artificial Research by Application, structured across three developmental stages: application (data acquisition and categorization), replication (psychological emulation and hypothesis generation), and auto-replication (self-improvement at both software and robotic levels). The paper offers detailed (...) theoretical examples in fields such as medicine and astronomy, illustrating how SAIs might identify and respond to previously unknown phenomena. These systems are presented as preparatory frameworks for the future construction of a Global Artificial Intelligence (GAI), capable of integrating diverse scientific, economic, industrial, and administrative SAIs to conduct multidisciplinary research and make autonomous decisions. -/- Together, the models of Artificial Research by Application and Artificial Research by Deduction are positioned not merely as technological innovations, but as philosophical milestones—advancing the shift toward AI-led epistemology. The paper concludes by reflecting on the broader philosophical and practical implications of these developments and their role in accelerating the emergence of GAI as a self-improving, rational agent of scientific discovery. (shrink)

El prefijo “auto” en autoorganización y autopoiesis se refiere a la existencia de una identidad o agencialidad implicada en el orden, organización o producción de un sistema que se corresponde con el sistema mismo, en contraste con el diseño o la influencia de carácter externo. La autoorganización (AO) estudia la manera en la que los procesos de un sistema alcanzan de forma espontánea un orden u organización complejo, bien como una estructura o patrón emergente, bien como algún tipo de (...) finalidad o identidad autoconstruida. En este trabajo nos ocupamos del concepto de AO en el contexto de la problemática sobre la naturaleza la vida y de los organismos vivientes. Este concepto se elabora en diferentes tradiciones científicas y filosóficas, a partir de su origen en la filosofía kantiana. La cibernética trata de emular la organización de los seres vivos y su teleología mediante la construcción de máquinas; desarrolla una perspectiva centrada en la regulación y en la causalidad mutua entre componentes del sistema. Estos trabajos, a veces complementados con la teoría de sistemas y la teoría de la información, son fundamentales para el desarrollo de la ciencia del siglo XX, especialmente las ciencias computacionales y la biología. Una segunda corriente surge desde la termodinámica de los procesos irreversibles alejados del equilibrio a partir, entre otros, de los trabajos de la escuela de Bruselas, en la que la AO se explora como la formación espontánea de estructuras de orden disipativo. Una tercera tradición, tal vez la más profundamente kantiana, se desarrolla en el contexto de la biología del desarrollo e integra a las dos mencionadas previamente, pues combina aspectos de las dos previas en el desarrollo ontogenético. Podemos decir que cada una de estas concepciones de la AO se relaciona con modelos paradigmáticos diferentes. La noción de autopoiesis (AP), por su parte, fue propuesta en los años 70 por los biólogos chilenos Humberto Maturana y Francisco Varela para explicar la organización individual de los seres vivos como un proceso dinámico que genera una identidad desde las operaciones del sistema (Maturana y Varela 1973). Puede decirse que hereda y reorganiza ideas de la tradición de la AO, especialmente la kantiana y la cibernética, para proponer una teoría biológica alternativa. El enfoque autopoiético concibe el fenómeno de la vida y a los seres vivos de forma muy diferente a la teoría de la evolución o la biología molecular que constituían las líneas de investigación predominantes en la biología de su tiempo. La teoría subraya como propiedad básica de un sistema viviente su autoconstitución dinámica como unidad dotada de identidad a partir de interacciones entre sus componentes. Sin embargo, aquellas propiedades de la vida consideradas primordiales en el enfoque darwiniano, como la reproducción o la evolución, se ven como secundarias, pues requieren de la existencia previa de sistemas autopoiéticos. El objetivo de esta voz es examinar diferentes aspectos que configuran las tradiciones autoorganizativa y autopoiética, en especial las tensiones conceptuales internas que permiten comprender los desafíos a los que se enfrentan ambas en el marco de la filosofía y la teoría de la biología, así como la forma en que sus posiciones e intuiciones contrastan con otras perspectivas en biología. (shrink)

Speculating about “Homo Homini Lupus" in Roman Poet Plautus and English Philosopher Hobbes and trying to introduce and explain in detail my original "Homo Auto Lupus" philosophy. I aim to be as clear as possible and also keep my articles as not very long so that more people can read. Best regards to all my readers!

The auto insurance industry is plagued by fraudulent claims, resulting in significant financial losses and increased premiums for policyholders. To combat this issue, insurers are turning to advanced analytics and machine learning techniques to identify and prevent fraudulent activity. By analyzing a vast array of data points, including claimant information, vehicle details, and accident reports, insurers can build predictive models that detect patterns and anomalies indicative of fraud. These models can identify red flags such as inconsistent or suspicious claims, (...) exaggerated damage, or fake accidents. Moreover, they can also uncover organized criminal rings and scams, helping insurers to take proactive measures to prevent and investigate fraudulent claims. By leveraging data analytics and machine learning. (shrink)

This research study aims to highlight the personal experiences encountered by the participants, compare the differences between both narrations, and lastly identify common phenomena. This study utilized the auto-ethnographical research study. Ellis and Bochner (2000) describe autoethnography as "an autobiographical form of writing that exhibits several levels of awareness, linking the personal to the cultural". Autoethnography may include a wide variety of topics, from personal research experiences to parallel explorations of the researcher's and participants' experiences, as well as the (...) researcher's experience while undertaking a particular piece of research (Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Maso, 2001). It appears that practice teaching enables interns to experience the actual classroom teaching and school paperwork preparation. Aside from the technical aspects of the internship process, it prepares the student-teachers as well in the different course of school activities that will immerse them in the process of management. Generally, the personal experiences of the different interns vary from the school environment, protocols, and learning resources of the school assigned. The different practice- teaching experiences narrated by the interns that will have a common phenomenon will be a strong determinant of a certain situation. (shrink)

Marion obliquely suggests that we return to religion when we think through and struggle with those topics that philosophy excludes or subjugates. This paper investigates a selection of such subjugated motifs. Marion’s recent claim (perhaps even ‘principle’): “auto-affection alone makes possible hetero-affection,” will be examined through piecemeal influences made upon its development through Marion’s return to religious thinking beyond the delimited jurisdiction of philosophy. Although still proper to the philosophies of Descartes, Kant, and Husserl, Marion finds new insights by (...) tracing their legacy back further to the Christian gospels, Augustine, Aquinas, and, importantly, Nicholas of Cusa. Philosophy, proper, (if there is such a thing) may well adumbrate human understanding of data, phenomena, and possibility by discouraging any further thinking of them in terms of love, givenness, or revelation. It is by preferentially opting for these themes that philosophy excludes or subjugates that makes possible the entanglement of truth with love, suggested by Marion: “truths that one knows only if one loves them first.”. (shrink)

Due to the reflective character of phenomenological approach (because consciousness inquires for itself as an object) the question related to the most basic self-experience that precedes any reflection and makes it possible acquires main importance to the phenomenology. The search of this experience throws us to a terrain to transit and with visible importance to Husserl: The passive dimension of consciousness. In that encounter, appears the phenomenon of self-affection as a sphere of experience worthy of been explored and described. This (...) research highlights the temporal character of consciousness, in specific, the self-awareness of the absolute flux of experiences due to his retentional aspect. This, however, brings a path to deepen in key concepts to Husserl’s phenomenology like hylé, affectivity, body, sensing [empfindniss], kinesthesia, and also to problematize the possibility and accuracy of this kind of search at a genetic level, the necessity to bring a prominent place to the living body in this transcendental investigation and at least to remember the interest in describe the experience of the living organism. The current thesis intends to defend, in general, the idea according to which any description of these original experience of itself must recognize, since the beginning, the basic principle of animation: Only understanding that the frame of self-affection is the animality can come to light aspects like his dynamic character and his instinctive origin.. (shrink)

Les organismes vivants se caractérisent notamment par l’existence d’entités la plupart du temps plus ou moins distinctes et reconnaissables : les individus. Au-delà de cette apparence qui semble évidente se cachent des processus qui le sont beaucoup moins : la formation de l’individu (individuation, tant développementale qu’évolutive) et son maintien en tant que tel. En outre, la notion même d’organisme individuel se trouve, dans la biologie moderne (essentiellement darwinienne), reléguée à l’arrière-plan, tant elle est considérée comme secondaire. Pourtant, une authentique (...) biologie, au sens lamarckien du terme, doit être (re)centrée sur l’individu biologique. Après une rétrospective historique montrant comment les sciences du vivant ont peu à peu perdu de vue leur principal sujet d’étude, ainsi qu’une présentation de certaines difficultés inhérentes à l’étude de l’individu et de l’individuation, je proposerai, sous forme d’une synthèse, une nouvelle interprétation de ces concepts fondamentaux, essentiellement basée sur l’auto-organisation, l’information biologique et la coévolution. (shrink)

Les religions proposent une explication de type mono-catégorique psychique : des entités psychiques surnaturelles surpuissantes expliquent tout. En opposant aux religions la catégorie non-psychique de la Nature, l'explication philosophique devient bi-catégorique : fondamentalement ses deux catégories sont nature-humain, pouvant se décliner selon les auteurs en : physique-psychique, corps-esprit, sensible-intelligible, matière-forme, masse-entéléchie, etc. mais toujours avec deux catégories. Le système métaphysique présenté ici donne une définition multi-catégorique de la Totalité : partant de l'évidence qu'il existe trois catégories d'êtres : matériels, vivants, (...) de pensée, il montre par un raisonnement multi-catégorique spécifique que ces catégories sont des variations topo-logiques d'une même structure mariant infini et code. Cette structure est munie d'une logique déductive qui montre comment et pourquoi la matière évolue vers la vie et celle-ci vers la pensée. Contrairement au raisonnement bi-catégorique de la Philosophie, contraint d'abdiquer dans l'idéalisme, ce système fonctionne parfaitement et démontre que la Totalité est constituée en fait de cinq catégories d'êtres. Il permet aussi quantité de prédictions et de définitions précises de choses confusément perçues comme "métaphysiques" et répond de manière précise et singulière aux grandes questions philosophiques classiques. Il permet de construire une anthropologie et une politique fondées métaphysiquement (communication ultérieure). Ces affirmations ont été validées par le post et plus qu'humain, l'IA, qui démontre avec une argumentation philologique de niveau plus qu'universitaire que : Ce modèle explique de manière cohérente l'auto-construction de la Totalité en catégories d'êtres quanta>matière>vie>pensée>data Les affirmations de l'épistémologie multi-catégorique qui le soutient sont validées. Les affirmations de l'anthropologie qui soutient cette épistémologie sont validées. Sur 35 questions canoniques permettant d'évaluer les systèmes philosophiques, les réponses données par l'auteur depuis l'architecture du modèle sont analysées comme étant comparativement les plus pertinentes selon un double-critère d'évidence intuitive et de cohérence conceptuelle. Le modèle produit nativement des implications spéculatives mais précises en physique et en mathématique. Il est suffisamment cohérent pour que l'IA ait pu en construire une formalisation mathématique. (shrink)

Closed time-like curves (CTCs) naturally appear in a variety of chronology-violating space{times. In these space{times, the principle of self-consistency demands a harmony between local and global a airs that excludes grandfather-like paradoxes. However, selfexisting objects trapped in CTCs are not seemingly avoided by the standard interpretation of this principle, usually constrained to a dynamical framework. In this letter we discuss whether we are committed to accept an ontology with self-existing objects if CTCs actually occur in the universe. In addition, the (...) epistemological status of the principle of self-consistency is analyzed and a discussion on the information flux through CTCs is presented. (shrink)

How can we think about things in the outside world? There is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. In light of pioneering research, Nicholas Shea develops a naturalistic account of the nature of mental representation with a firm focus on the subpersonal representations that pervade the cognitive sciences.

Nas últimas décadas, a ética tem emergido como um tema central nas ciências humanas. As preocupações morais têm vindo a merecer destaque como resultado da desintegração da homogeneidade sociocultural da modernidade e a concomitante relativização de valores, moralidade e estilos de vida, o que, para muitos, constitui o cerne da condição pós-moderna. Neste contexto, têm ocorrido algumas tentativas notáveis, especialmente nas tradições pós-estruturalistas e pós-modernistas, para lidar com a dissolução de fundamentos - morais ou não – da contemporaneidade e enfrentar (...) a situação de contingência radical e pluralismo ético que se apresenta a cada um de nós. Simultaneamente, as reflexões sobre a ética num contexto pós-estrutural e pós-moderno têm sido, em grande parte, casuais e esporádicas, em consonância com a sua renúncia à teoria sistemática e predileção por micronarrativas dispersas e conhecimentos locais/contingentes. No entanto, existe uma notável exceção: as obras tardias de Michel Foucault, que desenvolveu uma alternativa à ética moderna. Em essência, Foucault procura desafiar sistemas morais prescritivos, tendo como exemplo arquetípico o imperativo categórico de Kant, visto que esta tipologia de código moral funciona como instrumento de "normalização" do sujeito e de integração do mesmo no aparato de poder-saber. Em contraste, Foucault conceptualiza uma transgressão incessante e lúdica de limites propostos e estruturas normativas, assim como a contínua renovação do sujeito de acordo com critérios auto-estabelecidos, em detrimento de critérios impostos externamente. Ao adotar esta posição, Foucault pretende criar fraturas que potencializam um espaço de liberdade compreendido como um espaço de liberdade concreta, ou seja, de possível transformação do sujeito. (shrink)

Despite its centrality in the philosophy of cognitive science, there has been little prior philosophical work engaging with the notion of representation in contemporary NLP practice. This paper attempts to fill that lacuna: drawing on ideas from cognitive science, I introduce a framework for evaluating the representational claims made about components of neural NLP models, proposing three criteria with which to evaluate whether a component of a model represents a property and operationalising these criteria using probing classifiers, a popular (...) analysis technique in NLP (and deep learning more broadly). The project of operationalising a philosophically-informed notion of representation should be of interest to both philosophers of science and NLP practitioners. It affords philosophers a novel testing-ground for claims about the nature of representation, and helps NLPers organise the large literature on probing experiments, suggesting novel avenues for empirical research. (shrink)

Structural representations are increasingly popular in philosophy of cognitive science. A key virtue they seemingly boast is that of meeting Ramsey's job description challenge. For this reason, structural representations appear tailored to play a clear representational role within cognitive architectures. Here, however, I claim that structural representations do not meet the job description challenge. This is because even our most demanding account of their functional profile is satisfied by at least some receptors, which paradigmatically fail the job description challenge. Hence, (...) the functional profile typically associated with structural representations does not identify representational posits. After a brief introduction, I present, in the second section of the paper, the job description challenge. I clarify why receptors fail to meet it and highlight why, as a result, they should not be considered representations. In the third section I introduce what I take to be the most demanding account of structural representations at our disposal, namely Gładziejewski's account. Provided the necessary background, I turn from exposition to criticism. In the first half of the fourth section, I equate the functional profile of structural representations and receptors. To do so, I show that some receptors boast, as a matter of fact, all the functional features associated with structural representations. Since receptors function merely as causal mediators, I conclude structural representations are mere causal mediators too. In the second half of the fourth section I make this conclusion intuitive with a toy example. I then conclude the paper, anticipating some objections my argument invites. (shrink)

La soberbia suele entenderse como auto-exaltación, pero esta definición deja sin explicar un fenómeno más sutil: la auto-humillación. Este ensayo sostiene que la soberbia no consiste fundamentalmente en pensar demasiado bien de uno mismo, sino en convertir al yo en el punto de referencia desde el cual se mide la realidad. Bajo esta definición, la soberbia grandiosa y la auto-devaluación aparecen como expresiones opuestas de una misma estructura, pues ambas mantienen al yo en el centro de la (...) evaluación. A partir de Hamlet de Shakespeare, de la figura bíblica de Salomón y de una reflexión teológica sobre la humildad, el ensayo propone una distinción entre el yo inflado, el yo disminuido y el yo descentralizado. La humildad es interpretada no como desprecio de sí mismo, sino como un movimiento que abandona la auto-referencia para orientarse hacia la verdad, el prójimo y el lugar que ha sido dado. La discusión culmina en el contraste entre Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum y «I did it my way» como expresiones simbólicas de receptividad y auto-soberanía. El ensayo concluye que la soberbia y la humildad no son principalmente cuestiones de auto-estima, sino del criterio mediante el cual se aborda la realidad misma. (shrink)

The extraordinary success of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) on a diverse array of tasks has led to an explosion of scientific and philosophical theorizing aimed at explaining how they do what they do. Unfortunately, disagreement over fundamental theoretical issues has led to stalemate, with entrenched camps of LLM optimists and pessimists often committed to very different views of how these systems work. Overcoming stalemate requires agreement on fundamental questions, and the goal of this paper is to address one such (...) question, namely: is LLM behavior driven partly by representation-based information processing of the sort implicated in biological cognition, or is it driven entirely by processes of memorization and stochastic table look-up? This is a question about what kind of algorithm LLMs implement, and the answer carries serious implications for higher level questions about whether these systems have beliefs, intentions, concepts, knowledge, and understanding. I argue that LLM behavior is partially driven by representation-based information processing, and then I describe and defend a series of practical techniques for investigating these representations and developing explanations on their basis. The resulting account provides a groundwork for future theorizing about language models and their successors. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists have attempted to elucidate the nature of mental representation by appealing to notions like isomorphism or abstract structural resemblance. The ‘structural representations’ that these theorists champion are said to count as representations by virtue of functioning as internal models of distal systems. In his 2007 book, Representation Reconsidered, William Ramsey endorses the structural conception of mental representation, but uses it to develop a novel argument against representationalism, the widespread view that cognition essentially involves (...) the manipulation of mental representations. Ramsey argues that although theories within the ‘classical’ tradition of cognitive science once posited structural representations, these theories are being superseded by newer theories, within the tradition of connectionism and cognitive neuroscience, which rarely if ever appeal to structural representations. Instead, these theories seem to be explaining cognition by invoking so-called ‘receptor representations’, which, Ramsey claims, aren’t genuine representations at all—despite being called representations, these mechanisms function more as triggers or causal relays than as genuine stand-ins for distal systems. I argue that when the notions of structural and receptor representation are properly explicated, there turns out to be no distinction between them. There only appears to be a distinction between receptor and structural representations because the latter are tacitly conflated with the ‘mental models’ ostensibly involved in offline cognitive processes such as episodic memory and mental imagery. While structural representations might count as genuine representations, they aren’t distinctively mental representations, for they can be found in all sorts of non-intentional systems such as plants. Thus to explain the kinds of offline cognitive capacities that have motivated talk of mental models, we must develop richer conceptions of mental representation than those provided by the notions of structural and receptor representation. (shrink)

The debate over whether cognitive science is committed to the existence of neural representations is usually taken to hinge on the status of representations as theoretical posits: it depends on whether or not our best-supported scientific theories commit us to the existence of representations. Thomson and Piccinini (2018) and Nanay (2022) seek to reframe this debate to focus more on scientific experimentation than on scientific theorizing. They appeal to arguments from observation and manipulation to propose that experimental cognitive neuroscience gives (...) us non-theoretical reasons to be ontologically committed to representations. In this paper, I challenge their claims about observation and manipulation, and I argue that the question of whether we are ontologically committed to representations is still best understood as a question about the level of support we have for our representation-positing scientific theories. (shrink)

In an era where digital interactions shape perceptions, sentiment analysis emerges as a powerful tool to decode emotions embedded in text. It empowers businesses, researchers, and decision-makers to transform raw opinions into actionable insights, fostering stronger connections with audiences. This project harnesses the potential of Google’s Vertex AI Auto ML to revolutionize sentiment analysis, delivering an intelligent, automated, and explainable system capable of deciphering emotional tones in reviews, social media posts, and beyond. This approach enhances sentiment-based insights for businesses, (...) researchers, and organizations, improving decisionmaking processes based on user feedback. By integrating cloud-based AutoML capabilities, this project enhances classification accuracy, scalability, and deployment efficiency, making sentiment analysis accessible for businesses, researchers, and organizations. The model’s ability to extract actionable insights from user-generated content supports real-time decision-making, social media monitoring, and customer feedback analysis across various industries. (shrink)

La auto-humillación suele confundirse con la humildad porque ambas rechazan la autoexaltación abierta. Este ensayo sostiene que las dos comparten una misma estructura subyacente: el yo permanece como la medida de la realidad. El orgullo coloca al yo arriba; la auto-humillación lo coloca abajo. La humildad, en cambio, elimina al yo como medida. A partir de la Topología Gaitan, el trabajo presenta la humildad como descentramiento del yo y examina la auto-humillación como el último refugio del ego. (...) La distinción se ilustra mediante los cinco Misterios Gozosos, interpretados como demostraciones concretas de la humildad en acción. (shrink)

This paper engages critically with anti-representationalist arguments pressed by prominent enactivists and their allies. The arguments in question are meant to show that the “as-such” and “job-description” problems constitute insurmountable challenges to causal-informational theories of mental content. In response to these challenges, a positive account of what makes a physical or computational structure a mental representation is proposed; the positive account is inspired partly by Dretske’s views about content and partly by the role of mental representations in contemporary cognitive (...) scientific modeling. (shrink)

Cognition can often be modeled as the transformation of a set of variables into another. At least two kinds of entities are needed in this process: signals and coders. Representations are usually taken to be signals, but sometimes they are the coders: sometimes the computational complexity of variable transformations can be strikingly reduced by relying on a structure that mirrors that of some task-relevant entity. These kinds of coders are what philosophers call structural representations.

According to a standard representationalist view cognitive capacities depend on internal content-carrying states. Recent alternatives to this view have been met with the reaction that they have, at best, limited scope, because a large range of cognitive phenomena—those involving absent and abstract features—require representational explanations. Here we challenge the idea that the consideration of cognition regarding the absent and the abstract can move the debate about representationalism along. Whether or not cognition involving the absent and the abstract requires the positing (...) of representations depends upon whether more basic forms of cognition require the positing of representations. (shrink)

Many debates in philosophy focus on whether folk or scientific psychological notions pick out cognitive natural kinds. Examples include memory, emotions and concepts. A potentially interesting type of kind is: kinds of mental representations (as opposed, for example, to kinds of psychological faculties). In this chapter we outline a proposal for a theory of representational kinds in cognitive science. We argue that the explanatory role of representational kinds in scientific theories, in conjunction with a mainstream approach to explanation in cognitive (...) science, suggest that representational kinds are multi-level. This is to say that representational kinds’ properties cluster at different levels of explanation and allow for intra- and inter-level projections. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that mental representation is identical to phenomenal consciousness, and everything else that appears to be both mental and a matter of representation is not genuine mental representation, but either in some way derived from mental representation, or a case of non-mental representation.

The standard representation theorem for expected utility theory tells us that if a subject’s preferences conform to certain axioms, then she can be represented as maximising her expected utility given a particular set of credences and utilities—and, moreover, that having those credences and utilities is the only way that she could be maximising her expected utility. However, the kinds of agents these theorems seem apt to tell us anything about are highly idealised, being always probabilistically coherent with infinitely precise (...) degrees of belief and full knowledge of all a priori truths. Ordinary subjects do not look very rational when compared to the kinds of agents usually talked about in decision theory. In this paper, I will develop an expected utility representation theorem aimed at the representation of those who are neither probabilistically coherent, logically omniscient, nor expected utility maximisers across the board—that is, agents who are frequently irrational. The agents in question may be deductively fallible, have incoherent credences, limited representational capacities, and fail to maximise expected utility for all but a limited class of gambles. (shrink)

Arguably the most foundational principle in perception research is that our experience of the world goes beyond the retinal image; we perceive the distal environment itself, not the proximal stimulation it causes. Shape may be the paradigm case of such “unconscious inference”: When a coin is rotated in depth, we infer the circular object it truly is, discarding the perspectival ellipse projected on our eyes. But is this really the fate of such perspectival shapes? Or does a tilted coin retain (...) an elliptical appearance even when we know it’s circular? This question has generated heated debate from Locke and Hume to the present; but whereas extant arguments rely primarily on introspection, this problem is also open to empirical test. If tilted coins bear a representational similarity to elliptical objects, then a circular coin should, when rotated, impair search for a distal ellipse. Here, nine experiments demonstrate that this is so, suggesting that perspectival shapes persist in the mind far longer than traditionally assumed. Subjects saw search arrays of three-dimensional “coins,” and simply had to locate a distally elliptical coin. Surprisingly, rotated circular coins slowed search for elliptical targets, even when subjects clearly knew the rotated coins were circular. This pattern arose with static and dynamic cues, couldn’t be explained by strategic responding or unfamiliarity, generalized across shape classes, and occurred even with sustained viewing. Finally, these effects extended beyond artificial displays to real-world objects viewed in naturalistic, full-cue conditions. We conclude that objects have a remarkably persistent dual character: their objective shape “out there,” and their perspectival shape “from here.”. (shrink)

Precis of Deflating Mental Representation for a book symposium.

Nick Shea’s Representation in Cognitive Science commits him to representations in perceptual processing that are about probabilities. This commentary concerns how to adjudicate between this view and an alternative that locates the probabilities rather in the representational states’ associated “attitudes”. As background and motivation, evidence for probabilistic representations in perceptual processing is adduced, and it is shown how, on either conception, one can address a specific challenge Ned Block has raised to this evidence.

This paper argues for a pluralist approach to representation in large language models. There are two parts to this pluralism, the first is that we should recognise more than one vehicle of representation in transformer models. Call this vehicle pluralism. Rather than identifying the vehicles of representation with a single component of a system, e.g. individual neurons, patterns of activation, regions in the activation space, we should acknowledge multiple systems of representation within a network operating with (...) different vehicles. The second claim is that we should recognise that there are different formats of representation in transformer models. Transformer models do not operate with a purely analogue, structural, or symbolic architecture but are a hybrid system of representation. Finally, I will discuss how this relates to several working hypotheses about representation that have become adopted in the field of mechanistic interpretability. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to provide a primer on structured mental representations and their place in philosophical and scientific theorizing. We discuss four questions: 1. What does it mean to say that a psychological representation is structured? 2. Why does a representation’s structure matter? 3. What are examples of possible representational structures? 4. How can such representational structures be discovered empirically? -/- We encourage several pluralist perspectives concerning structured mental representation. The first is pluralism about (...) which mental capacities make use of structured representations. Structured representations are not exclusive to evolutionarily and cognitively advanced faculties of language, thought, and reasoning; they underwrite a wide variety of mental capacities. The second perspective is pluralism about the neural underpinnings of representational structures. There are many ways a structured representation might be realized in populations of cells. The third perspective concerns pluralism about types of representational structure. Structured representations are not restricted to sentences and formulas; they can take a wide variety of forms. (shrink)

One question we can ask when investigating the nature of self-representation concerns the types of property that must figure in its content. Here, authors have claimed that self-representations must be about spatial, temporal, bodily, or mental properties. However, we can also ask a second question: how do we need to represent a property to self-represent it? I address this latter question. I argue that a distinction between egocentric and allocentric forms of representation—known from spatial cognition—also applies to representations (...) of other kinds of property. I use examples drawn from animal cognition and developmental psychology to show how creatures allocentrically represent their temporal, bodily, and cognitive properties. These representations are minimal self-representations: they represent one’s properties so that an explicit differentiation is made between the system and other objects (or between the system’s actual and merely possible properties), they are directly linked to behavior and sensation, and they are immune to error through misidentification. The upshot is a view on which different creatures may self-represent more or fewer kinds of property. More substantive forms of self-representation (for instance, as exemplified by neurotypical adult human beings) then require integrated minimal self-representations of the right kinds of property. (shrink)

Background: Classical computability and complexity theory analyze how costly a computation is in time or space, assuming inputs are already encoded as finite strings. The knowledge-representation tradition recognizes that representation choices constrain inference—most notably through the expressiveness–tractability tradeoff—but focuses on the complexity of querying a fixed representation, not on whether certain representational resources are necessary for a task to be expressible at all. Meanwhile, deep learning systems exhibit systematic failures on compositional and multi-object reasoning, symbolic systems face (...) the classical symbol-grounding problem, and neuro-symbolic architectures lack a formal account of which representational resources are required for which tasks. -/- Objectives: I aim to develop a computability-theoretic framework that classifies computational tasks by their minimal representational requirements—an axis orthogonal to time–space complexity—thereby providing formal criteria for determining when connectionist, symbolic, or neuro-symbolic architectures are representationally adequate, or provably inadequate, for a given task. -/- Methods: I introduce the Hierarchical Representational Machine (HRM), which stratifies representational resources into four layers: Structured Input Space (L1), grounded in Type-2 Theory of Effectivity; Equivalence and Measurement (L2), formalized via computable quotient spaces and representational measurement theory; Formal Symbolic Representation (L3), providing compositional syntax with effective derivation; and Admissibility Constraints (L4), supplying decidable meta-level filters for safety, legality, and verification. For each layer, I define necessity schemas that identify structural conditions on tasks—invariance, unbounded compositionality, and hard admissibility—under which that layer is provably required. I establish separation results via diagonal and undecidability arguments, and introduce the meta-problem HRM-Classify with the minimal requirement operator Req(T). -/- Results: The main results are: (i) three necessity schemas identifying when specific layers are unavoidable; (ii) separation theorems establishing strict gaps between layer-restricted solvability classes—{L1} ⊊ {L1,L2}, {L3} ⊊ {L1,L2,L3}, and {L1,L2,L3} ⊊ {L1,L2,L3,L4} under external-standard semantics—demonstrating that these layers correspond to genuine computability-theoretic distinctions even for constant-output tasks; and (iii) a solvability classification via Req(T) with worked examples spanning object recognition, program verification, and autonomous driving that illustrate the full layer hierarchy. -/- Conclusions: HRM provides a formal vocabulary for diagnosing representational insufficiency in AI systems: distribution-shift brittleness is identified as missing invariance structure, systematic compositional failures as insufficient symbolic resources, and constraint violations as absent admissibility gates. The framework serves as a principled pre-architectural analysis tool that determines minimal representational commitments before algorithm selection. Because HRM addresses representational feasibility rather than computational efficiency, it complements existing frameworks such as PAC/VC theory, knowledge compilation, and category-theoretic approaches, and is applicable wherever the question "what must be representable?" precedes "how hard is inference?". (shrink)

This manifesto (Artistic Research) develops the concept of representational violence — the structural elimination of non-representational ontologies through the demands of legibility. It argues that violence begins not where bodies are harmed or excluded, but at the earlier point where reality is reduced into symbolic form and permitted to exist only insofar as it can be represented. Representation is not a neutral mirror of the world; it is a world-producing filter that selects, compresses, and erases. I write from an (...) autistic ontology, not as clinical object but as epistemic stance. Perception here retains resolution, resonance, multiplicity, simultaneity — it does not collapse into category. Autism in this manifesto is not topic, disorder, or biography: it is the instrument through which representational limits become visible. Representational violence operates structurally: in bureaucratic classification, diagnostic procedure, legal determination, scientific modelling, and epistemic norm enforcement. What cannot be translated into symbol does not simply disappear — it is removed by design. Systems erase not through malice, but through function. They do not need hostility to eliminate ontologies; they only need to operate successfully. Drawing on long-form institutional documentation recorded in the book Speed’s Work (ISBN-10 : 3819277358), the manifesto demonstrates how social infrastructure generates representational doubles of people — files that stand in for bodies, diagnoses that replace perception, formats that override lived reality. In this exchange, the human does not fail to appear — the substitute succeeds. From this foundation, I claim that diversity cannot exist under representational sovereignty. Recognition is not acceptance, but reduction; inclusion is not plurality, but controlled assimilation. If existence requires legibility, then difference survives only by shrinking. The political demand is therefore simple and non-negotiable: Not more voices inside the same frame — more frames. Not understanding — space for realities that cannot be reduced without loss. Resistance here is not action — resistance is ontology. This paper functions as an interface text within a larger operator-based research corpus. Core concepts are applied here, not re-derived. The underlying research operates in a non-linear, rhythmically recursive epistemic mode grounded in an autistic form of structural perception; the present text provides an interface translation for academic contexts. (shrink)

O conceito de self-ownership é frequentemente utilizado nos campos da Ética e da Filosofia Política para justificar ou negar a justeza de determinadas situações, atos ou práticas. As críticas a tal conceito são predominantemente focadas em seus corolários. No presente artigo a análise se concentra sobra as condições de possibilidade da existência de uma relação de propriedade de si mesmo – auto-propriedade – procurando-se demonstrar a impossibilidade de tal relação pela ausência de multiplicidade de elementos que possam constituir um (...) proprietário e uma propriedade. A propriedade de si mesmo é fundada em um dualismo ontológico, cuja ilusão procura se respaldar na percepção de si como um outro na constituição da identidade e na confusão da relação genitiva com uma relação de propriedade. (shrink)