If an AI makes a significant contribution to a research paper, should it be listed as a co-author? The current guidelines in the field have been created to reduce duplication of credit between two different authors in scientific articles. A new computer program could be identified and credited for its impact in an AI research paper that discusses an early artificial intelligence system which is currently under development at Lawrence Berkeley National. One way to imagine the future of artificial intelligence (...) is that it will be much less expensive to develop new technologies than to create new ways of thinking. Now we have done this technology, and now we go and ask why in the end it is the artificial intelligence that takes over? Well, it is not that artificial intelligence is bad, but it is not as effective as human minds or as intelligent as machine minds. Even in the past, when computers were more intelligent than humans, not all the AI programs have been so intelligent as to be intelligent enough to be called intelligent. (shrink)

This paper is part of a book symposium for L. A. Paul (2014) Transformative Experience (OUP).

The purpose of the article is to reveal the scientific approach that substantiates the impact of the creation of strategic alliances (SA) on the digital transformation of business and the development of their innovative power based on identified success factors. The aim was achieved using the following methods: abstract logic and typification (for classification of SA's success factors), generalization (to determine the peculiarities of SA's influence on their innovation development), analytical and ranking method (to determine the relationship between the (...) dynamics creating of SA and the degree of acceleration of digital transformation), expert evaluation (to determine the degree of influence of SA success factors by business areas). Implementing a business-integrated approach to understanding digital transformation will accelerate implementation of innovation and organizational change, identifies future prospects for market, customer and business relationships, highlighting the importance of researching the factors that ensure their success. An alternative vision of SA’s success factors is suggested, which are determined by the possibilities the organization of partnerships and organizational culture, integration of business sectors, compatibility of management goals, external relevance, obtaining synergies. Innovation is considered by the authors as an integration factor that reconciles all groups of SA success factors, giving them the necessary focus to solve business problems. The results of the study show that the creation of SA has a significant impact on accelerating and changes priority of digital transformation of business areas involved in strategic partnerships, and the impact of SA on the development of their innovation power is crucial. (shrink)

This paper explores how transformative experience generates decision-making problems of particular seriousness in medical settings. Potentially transformative experiences are especially likely to be encountered in medicine, and the associated decisions are confronted jointly by patients and clinicians in the context of an imbalance of power and expertise. However in such scenarios the principle of informed consent, which plays a central role in guiding clinicians, is unequal to the task. We detail how the principle’s assumptions about autonomy, rationality and information handle (...) transformative experiences poorly, appealing to several difficult cases for medical decision-making to illustrate the resulting problem, and we consider how the existing literature on complications with consent fails to offer a resolution. We argue that recognition of the problem has a role to play in achieving a more effective response to transformative decisions. In Sect. 1 we introduce several representative cases of challenging patient decision-making that clinicians might face. In Sect. 2 we detail how transformative experience has been analysed in the recent literature, before outlining in Sect. 3 the theoretical basis of the principle of informed consent, which plays a central role in how clinicians are expected to support decision-making. In Sect. 4, having laid the groundwork for a clear description, we return to the cases given in Sect. 1 to confirm how their transformative nature presents a problem: either clinicians treat the decisions faced by these patients as ‘normal’, encouraging them to focus on information provision that patients may be unable to act on, or they treat them as transformative, in which case they lack the resources to recognise whether they are helping patients make (subjectively) good decisions. In Sect. 5 we argue that the existing literature does not offer any escape from this problem. We close in Sect. 6 by noting the significant impact that appreciating the problem of transformative experience could have on supporting transformative decisions in medicine and briefly suggesting how we might aim to develop new approaches to dealing with these. (shrink)

Psychedelic experiences are often compared to “transformative experiences” due to their potential to change how people think and behave. This study empirically examines whether psychedelic experiences constitute transformative experiences. Given psychedelics’ prospective applications as treatments for mental health disorders, this study also explores neuroethical issues raised by the possibility of biomedically directed transformation—namely, consent and moral psychopharmacology. To achieve these aims, we used both inductive and deductive coding techniques to analyze transcripts from interviews with 26 participants in psychedelic retreats. (...) Results indicate that psychedelic experiences can constitute transformative experiences. Twenty participants reported experiences or insights that were seemingly inaccessible or impossible to attain if not for the psychoactive effects of psychedelics. All participants besides one reported some change in identity, values, beliefs, desires, and behavior—changes in behavior being the most common. Participants also reported feeling capable deciding to use psychedelics in part due to information seeking prior to their retreats. Finally, several participants reported an enhanced capacity for enacting changes in their lives. Our results underscore both the importance of subjective embodiment to transformation and the role of transformative agency in shaping outcomes of the psychedelic experience. We examine our results relative to neuroethical issues and advocate for centering the person in psychedelic research and neuroethical inquiry about psychedelics to avoid pitfalls associated with psychedelics’ potential as moral psychopharmacological agents. (shrink)

Sometimes it is not us but those to whom we stand in special relations that face transformative choices: our friends, family or beloved. A focus upon first-personal rational choice and agency has left crucial ethical questions regarding what we owe to those who face transformative choices largely unexplored. In this paper I ask: under what conditions, if any, is it morally permissible to interfere to try to prevent another from making a transformative choice? Some seemingly plausible answers to this question (...) fail precisely because they concern transformative experiences. I argue that we have a distinctive moral right to revelatory autonomy grounded in the value of autonomous self-making. If this right is outweighed then, I argue, interfering to prevent another making a transformative choice is permissible. This conditional answer lays the groundwork for a promising ethics of transformative experience. (shrink)

This article presents Transformative Semalgebraic Ontology (OTS), a philosophical framework that takes transformation, rather than substance, as the primary ontological primitive. To be, on this view, is to be transformable: what we call entities are stable configurations within broader fields of semantic variation. The paper develops a formal apparatus — Semalgebra — that treats transformation as an operational primitive, offering new tools to describe meaning, cognition, and physical reality. It argues that the long-standing divide between philosophy of language (...) and philosophy of science is largely an artifact of substance-based thinking. Once transformation is placed at the foundation, the two fields appear as complementary perspectives on the same underlying process. After tracing a recurring “seam” of non-substantialist thought across Western and Eastern traditions, the article introduces the core ideas of the framework and explores its implications for large language models and cultural agency, the limits of numerical modeling in physics, education, and collective political realities. It then engages in dialogue with process philosophy, ontic structural realism, inferentialism, phenomenology, and Buddhist traditions. OTS proposes a non-totalizing transformativism capable of preserving the achievements of quantitative science while making better sense of semantic novelty, conceptual change, and reflexive thought. (shrink)

Abstract: The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the contemporary world has changed the dynamics of how businesses are run in the digital age by bringing new opportunities and, at the same time, disrupting the established methods. This study is aimed at evaluating the perception of the students on whether the use of AI is transforming how businesses are conducted in the digital era. The questionnaire was used to collect data and consisted of 219 respondents in seven universities in Albania (...) and Kosovo and was analyzed using linear regression. The results indicate that factors such as gender structure and concerns about privacy and security of personal data related to the use of AI do not have a statistically significant impact on business transformation. On the other hand, the use of AI is identified as a factor with a significant impact on creating new employment opportunities, while AI's role in deepening social and economic inequalities has a statistically significant effect on business transformation. Based on a new and original mentality, the research is a new and original interpretation of the dynamics of AI application in changing the business management processes. (shrink)

to appear in Lambert, E. and J. Schwenkler (eds.) Transformative Experience (OUP) -/- L. A. Paul (2014, 2015) argues that the possibility of epistemically transformative experiences poses serious and novel problems for the orthodox theory of rational choice, namely, expected utility theory — I call her argument the Utility Ignorance Objection. In a pair of earlier papers, I responded to Paul’s challenge (Pettigrew 2015, 2016), and a number of other philosophers have responded in similar ways (Dougherty, et al. 2015, Harman (...) 2015) — I call our argument the Fine-Graining Response. Paul has her own reply to this response, which we might call the Authenticity Reply. But Sarah Moss has recently offered an alternative reply to the Fine-Graining Response on Paul’s behalf (Moss 2017) — we’ll call it the No Knowledge Reply. This appeals to the knowledge norm of action, together with Moss’ novel and intriguing account of probabilistic knowledge. In this paper, I consider Moss’ reply and argue that it fails. I argue first that it fails as a reply made on Paul’s behalf, since it forces us to abandon many of the features of Paul’s challenge that make it distinctive and with which Paul herself is particularly concerned. Then I argue that it fails as a reply independent of its fidelity to Paul’s intentions. (shrink)

This work derives the necessary condition governing persistence under real transformation. Starting from minimal empirical requirements — distinguishability, physically realizable transformation, and irreversible constraint restoration — the following structural balance condition is shown to be necessary: dS_identity/dt = κ_R(t) · (R_Ω − β(t)·F*·I) The corresponding dimensionless constraint ratio IR = R_Ω / (β · F* · I) defines the persistence boundary: IR ≤ 1. IR is a constraint ratio, not a dynamical variable. It determines whether a system remains (...) the same system while undergoing transformation — not how it evolves. This condition is not postulated. It is forced by the structural requirements of persistence itself. For IR > 1, structural identity erosion is necessarily ongoing and cannot be halted without restoring IR ≤ 1. Collapse is the terminal consequence of sustained violation. The result is representation-invariant, operationally measurable, and applies to all scientifically well-posed persistence problems. Its universality follows from structural necessity, not from domain-specific dynamics. LP is not a dynamical law. It does not describe trajectories or forces. It specifies the necessary condition under which identity is preserved under transformation. LP identifies not a domain-specific law, but the universal persistence boundary that all domain-specific laws must satisfy in order for identity to be preserved under real transformation. The validity of LP does not follow from empirical instantiations. It follows from structural necessity. Empirical systems confirm the condition — they do not ground it. (shrink)

How can we make rational decisions that involve transformative experiences, that is, experiences that can radically change our core preferences? L. A. Paul (2014) has argued that many decisions involving transformative experiences cannot be rational. However, Paul acknowledges that some traumatic events can be transformative experiences, but are nevertheless not an obstacle to rational decision-making. For instance, being attacked by hungry sharks would be a transformative experience, and yet, deciding not to swim with hungry sharks is rational. Paul has tried (...) to explain why decisions involving ‘sharky’ outcomes are an exception to the rule. However, her putative explanation has been criticized by Campbell and Mosquera (2020). In this paper, I offer a different solution to this problem. Roughly, I argue that transformative experiences give rise a problem for rational decision-making only if the decision can lead to satisfying some of our (new) core preferences, but can also frustrate other (new) core preferences. I also argue that agents can partially project what traumatic transformative experiences are like. (shrink)

This paper develops a mathematical theory of identity persistence under admissible transformation. It asks what structure is required for a same/not-same judgment across recurrence to be meaningful, non-arbitrary, and non-trivial. The theory defines identity-bearing units, state spaces, admissible transformations, admissible redescriptions, quotient state spaces, continuation relations, invariant vectors, scalar governance functionals, drift bounds, verdict functions, and finite-state identity capacity. -/- The central claim is structural rather than ontological: a persistence judgment is coherent only when the identity-bearing unit, admissible (...) class='Hi'>transformation regime, quotient, invariant basis, continuation structure, governance rule, and drift bounds are specified. The paper introduces a finite verdict set: PERSIST, BREAK, BRANCH, UNDEFINED, and REGIME-CHANGE. -/- It also introduces C_I, a finite-state capacity quantity defined as the asymptotic logarithmic growth rate of admissible identity-preserving trajectories in a finite admissibility graph. In local finite regimes, C_I is given by the logarithm of the spectral radius of the admissible-transition matrix. For path-budget constraints, the state space is lifted to include accumulated drift. -/- The result does not settle ontology or replace probability, entropy, or communication theory. It supplies a formal framework for when “same system” claims are well-defined, plus a graph-theoretic measure of how many identity-preserving transformations a declared regime allows. (shrink)

Laurie Paul argues that, when it comes to many of your most significant life-changing decisions, the principles of rational choice are silent. That is because, in these cases, you anticipate that one of your choice options would yield a transformative experience. We argue that such decisions are best seen as ones in which you anticipate awareness growth. You do not merely lack knowledge about which possible outcome will arise from a transformative option; you lack knowledge about what are the possible (...) outcomes. We show how principles of rational choice can be extended to cases of anticipated awareness growth. (shrink)

This paper develops a geometric framework for modeling concepts, motivation, and influence across cognitively heterogeneous agents. Each agent is represented by a personalized value space, a vector space encoding the internal dimensions through which the agent interprets and evaluates meaning. Evaluative concepts are formalized as structured vectors -- abstract beings -- whose transmission is mediated by linear interpretation maps. An abstract being survives communication only if it avoids the null spaces of these maps, yielding a structural criterion for intelligibility, miscommunication, (...) and concept death. -/- Within this framework, I show how conceptual distortion, motivational drift, and the limits of mutual understanding arise from purely algebraic constraints. A central result -- the No-Null-Space Leadership Condition -- characterizes leadership as a property of representational reachability rather than persuasion or authority. More broadly, the model explains how abstract beings can propagate, mutate, or disappear as they traverse diverse cognitive geometries. -/- The account unifies insights from conceptual spaces, social epistemology, and AI value alignment by grounding meaning preservation in structural compatibility rather than shared information or rationality. I argue that this cognitive-geometric perspective clarifies the epistemic boundaries of influence in both human and artificial systems, and offers a general foundation for analyzing conceptual dynamics across heterogeneous agents. (shrink)

This article examines how certain transformative experiences – such as becoming a mother, joining the military, or attending college – can function as traps when framed through a rhetoric of individual agency and self-realization that obscures sociomaterial conditions and oppressive structural forces. We analyze three features of contemporary philosophical discourse on transformative experience that contribute to this entrapment: the emphasis on subjective value, the view of transformation as a rupture between old and new selves, and the appeal to higher-order (...) values like authenticity and self-authorship. Our case study on motherhood shows how these conceptual framings can render structural constraints invisible, sever individuals from the resources that might help them navigate the rigid roles into which they are cast, and ultimately isolate them in the aftermath of difficult or harmful outcomes, leaving them solely responsible to bear the burden. (shrink)

The transformer architecture, introduced by Vaswani et al. (2017), is at the heart of the remarkable recent progress in the development of language models, including widely-used chatbots such as Chat-GPT and Claude. In this paper, I argue that we can extract from the way the transformer architecture works a theory of the relationship between context and meaning. I call this the transformer theory, and I argue that it is novel with regard to two related philosophical debates: the contextualism debate regarding (...) the extent of context-sensitivity across natural language, and the polysemy debate regarding how polysemy should be captured within an account of word meaning. (shrink)

When people are making certain medical decisions – especially potentially transformative ones – the specter of regret may color their choices. In this paper, I ask: can predicting that we will regret a decision in the future serve any justificatory role in our present decision-making? And if so, what role? While there are many pitfalls to such reasoning, I ultimately conclude that considering future retrospective emotions like regret in our decisionmaking can be both rational and authentic. Rather than indicating that (...) one is about to make a mistake or that there is some underlying value that one already cares about but is overlooking, the prediction that one will regret a decision in the future makes one confront how her present values and priorities may change as a result of her choice in ways she cannot presently anticipate. (shrink)

We develop the operator layer of Basic Ontodynamics by interpreting nodes not as objects placed in a field, but as topological operators transforming an incoming actualization flow into an outgoing regime. The background flow is represented by the centripetal mode J4, while the outgoing mode J7 is not treated as an іndependent field but as the transformed continuation of the same flow through a localized closure structure. We show that a node must be described on three distinct levels: a topological (...) operator level, a nonlinear effective level, and a linearized local approximation. Within this framework, the closure scale R0 is identified as the metric projection of the operator, giving rise to the mass relation m = ℏ/(cR0), while the effective inertial factor μ(ρ123) is interpreted as a response projection of the same operator in a given coherence environment. This formulation clarifies the structural origin of the two-representation description of gravitational dynamics: the response sector is not an independent field but a projection of node topology. We outline a program in which particle properties correspond to structural invariants of flow-transformation operators, leaving their identification with known quantum numbers as an open problem. (shrink)

This essay reads the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) as a paradigm shift in cultural production and reception. Its primary object is not the economic or geopolitical impact of generative AI, but the micro-anthropological relationship between the individual human being and the generative linguistic machine. LLMs are treated here not as tools for textual automation, but as semantic machines that reshape the positions of author, reader, and researcher within the cultural ecosystem. If movable-type printing transformed text into a technically (...) reproducible object, the LLM transforms text into an operational environment, in which every content becomes a field of possible transformations: synthesis, translation, reformulation, comparison, expansion, critique, recombination. The figure that emerges from this shift is the semantic pilot: the subject who no longer merely reads or writes, but governs artificially assisted processes of meaning transformation. The argument develops in two movements. The first describes the constructive side of the shift, articulating the operations of semantic direction and the new literacy it demands. The second exposes its dark side: capture of direction, anesthesia of friction, manipulation of cognitive maps, poisoning of the transformative field, opacity of the model, erosion of authorial signature, narcissism of the pilot, and the risk of a culture without lived experience. The essay concludes on the distinction between grammar, which may be delegated to the machine, and orientation, which remains the inalienable task of the human being. (shrink)

Every system undergoes change. Yet some systems remain the same. This paper addresses the fundamental question: under what conditions does identity persist under real transformation? We show that this question admits a single structural answer. From three minimal assumptions — distinguishability, real transformation, and decidability — a unique structure follows: identity-bearing structure, transformation-processing capacity, and their coupling. These roles combine into a single capacity measure, yielding a necessary and sufficient condition for persistence. This condition is not a (...) modeling choice. It is the only admissible form consistent with the persistence problem itself. This paper derives LP from minimal axioms and establishes the dynamic persistence equation. Parts I–XIII constitute the formally closed core (Level A): derived from M1–M3 alone. Parts XIV–XXIII constitute formally derived extensions (Level B), applying M1–M3 to multi-system environments and higher-order structures. All structural hypotheses are formally closed. LP is precisely falsifiable. Physical stability results in thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, and quantum mechanics are special cases of IR ≤ 1. (shrink)

La Profilée (LP) establishes a necessary structural condition governing the persistence of any system under real transformation. The condition has been instantiated across domains ranging from quantum decoherence to cosmological structure, spanning approximately sixty orders of magnitude in physical scale. From two minimal assumptions — determinability and real transformation — it is derived that any persistent system must decompose canonically into three structural components: Frame (F), Module (M), and Coupling (C). The effective integration capacity of any such system (...) is IK = F · I · C, where I is total integration capacity. The persistence condition is: -/- IR = R / (F · I · C) ≤ 1 -/- where R is transformation pressure. This condition is not postulated. It is the uniquely determined quantitative expression of the structural constraints forced by determinability and real transformation. It is domain-independent, representation-invariant, scale-invariant, and falsifiable. -/- This paper provides a unified account of LP: the derivation from minimal assumptions, the formal architecture, the central theorems, the thermodynamic correspondence, the scale invariance result, the domain applications, and the falsification conditions. It is written as a single document in which a reader unfamiliar with the prior LP series can follow the complete argument. -/- LP is a constraint-law. It does not describe the dynamics of any system. It constrains the class of evolutions compatible with persistent identity — in the same formal sense as the second law of thermodynamics, Pauli's exclusion principle, and Landauer's principle constrain evolutions in their respective domains. Its universality follows from structural necessity, not from empirical induction. The persistence condition is not imposed on persistent systems. It is the structural condition any persistent system under real transformation must satisfy. (shrink)

According to its quietist readings, skepticism can be dissolved by demonstrating that the notion of ‘absolute objectivity’ is confused. The dissolution of this confusion is supposed to lead us to acquiesce in our finite and plain everyday life without being bothered anymore about the supposed need for objective knowledge. In contrast, I want to propose a transformative reading of skepticism according to which the philosophical practice of skepticism can be ‘epistemically transformative’. To this end, I will transpose L.A. Paul's notion (...) of ‘epistemically transformative experience’ from decision theory to the realm of philosophical practice and argue that the modern skeptical problem of an external standpoint can evoke transformative experiences that lead to a new, albeit non-propositional, insight into the finitude of the human condition. (shrink)

Social movements possess transformative and progressive power. In this paper, I argue that how this is so, or even if this is so, depends on one's explanatory framework. I consider three such explanatory frameworks for social movements: methodological individualism, collectivism, and complexity theory. In evaluating the various appeals and weaknesses of these frameworks, I show that complexity theory is uniquely poised to capture the complex and dynamic reality of the social world.

Abstract Consciousness is not a property of information, computation, or representation. It is a structurally constrained configuration. Every account of conscious processing requires that the system performing these operations persists as a coherent unit under ongoing transformation. This condition is not derived within those accounts. It is prior to them. La Profilée defines the necessary condition for persistence under real transformation: IR = R / (F · M · K) ≤ 1 This paper derives this condition from three (...) minimal requirements, proves that any persistent system is self-referential, and shows that consciousness corresponds to a specific structural configuration within the persistence domain: transformation becomes internally dominated while remaining structurally admissible. Consciousness is therefore not an additional principle. It is a structurally forced configuration of persistence under internally mediated transformation. (shrink)

Abstract -/- Identity persistence under transformation is not one unconstrained formal option among many wherever the identity-persistence problem is coherently posed. If a same/not-same relation across recurrence is to be meaningful, non-arbitrary, and non-trivial, then the formulation is already committed to a Tier-1 structural regime up to admissible equivalence: an identity-bearing unit, state domain, admissible transformations, admissible redescriptions, identity-relevant quotient, continuation structure, invariant basis, governance order, and drift bounds. A formulation that avoids these roles does not provide an alternative (...) account of the same identity-persistence problem; it changes, weakens, or fails to state the problem. -/- The Tier-1 role set governing identity persistence is therefore necessary, not assumed. For each fixed identity-bearing unit, identity-relevant continuation factors through the quotient X/~ into a primitive continuation order. The domain of this trunk is constrained by bounded re-comparability, coherent identity-domain support, and non-terminal recurrence. Under the one-dimensional manifold realization used here, the corresponding closed recurrence class is represented by S¹, inducing SO(2)/O(2) symmetry and a harmonic/chiral invariant vocabulary. Within the inherited admissible positive-linear functional class, identity governance collapses to: -/- PAS_h = Σ_k(w_k · r_k), w_k > 0 -/- unique up to positive affine gauge. These S¹, harmonic/chiral, and PAS_h results are realization- and functional-class results; they are not claims that P1–P3 alone force all persistence realizations into S¹/PAS_h. -/- This paper establishes the structural forcing theorem and, for finite declared identity regimes, the Shannon-style capacity/coding loop: admissible language, capacity C_I = log ρ(A), deterministic enforcement code, achievability, converse, replay determinism, maximality, and regime-equivalence. For compact-metric declared identity regimes, it establishes the analogous capacity/coding structure under declared continuity and homeomorphic-equivalence assumptions, with capacity C_I^cts = h(f_adm), the topological entropy of the admissible continuation map. -/- The result is structural, not ontological. It does not claim that every domain must assert identity persistence or that all reality instantiates one persistence geometry. It claims that wherever identity persistence under transformation is asserted coherently, the Tier-1 roles are not optional; and once a regime is declared, the corresponding persistence language can be bounded, classified, and, in finite regimes, exactly enforced. -/- Recurrence canonicalization from P1–P3 alone remains a proposed strengthening path through the RC → Archimedean → Hölder → S¹ route. The Archimedean hinge is outside the locked core pending independent verification. Stochastic and nonstationary extensions, canonical PAS_h weight ratios, broader regime canonicalization, and empirical bridge axioms also remain open. These open extensions do not reopen the Tier-1 forcing result or the finite/compact-metric capacity/coding closure established here. (shrink)

The hope that art could be personally or socially transformational is an important part of art history and contemporary art practice. In the twentieth century, it shaped a movement away from traditional media in an effort to make social life a medium. Artists imagined and created participatory situations designed to facilitate potentially transformative expression in those who engaged with the works. This chapter develops the concept of “transformative expression,” and illustrates how it informs a diverse range of such works. Understanding (...) these artworks in this way raises two interesting questions, one about the nature of aesthetic value and the other about the nature of action. Answers to these questions lie in understanding the social and aesthetic character of our capacity to distance ourselves from our commitments and act in the expressive, playful, spontaneous, or imaginative ways that participatory art invites. (shrink)

The institutional architecture of United States immigration enforcement underwent a fundamental and unprecedented restructuring between early 2025 and the beginning of 2026. This period, characterized by a rapid expansion of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) workforce, was driven by a confluence of aggressive legislative funding, a reconfiguration of recruitment strategies, and a systemic prioritization of enforcement velocity over traditional vetting and training protocols. Central to this transformation was the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) in (...) July 2025, which provided the fiscal engine for a 120% increase in agency manpower within a fiscal year. This report provides an exhaustive analysis of the demographic, ideological, and operational shifts within ICE, examining the claim that the majority of the current force is composed of new hires with predominantly White, male backgrounds and potential affiliations with far-right extremist organizations. -/- . (shrink)

In the face of planetary crises — from biodiversity loss to climate change to food security — transdisciplinary methods promise effective and just responses through equal collaborations. However, transdisciplinarity also creates complex challenges by bringing together different actors with different frameworks, like scientists, Indigenous and local communities, and policy makers. Successful collaboration among such actors requires navigating different forms of knowledge, worldviews, values, and positions of power. -/- In Transformative Transdisciplinarity, David Ludwig and Charbel N. El-Hani synthesize insights from the (...) philosophy of science and empirical action research to address these challenges through a framework of partial overlaps. On the one hand, the framework highlights the overlapping concerns and perspectives of actors that provide common ground for collaboration and mutual understanding. On the other hand, it emphasizes partialities that require navigating differences and tensions between actors. This book addresses the fundamental epistemological, ontological, and political questions of transdisciplinarity through this framework of partial overlaps, aiming for a transformative vision of collaborative science in the face of planetary crises. -/- This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. (shrink)

Chapter 6 considers how peer disagreement over religion presents an epistemological problem: How can confidence in any religious claims including their negations be epistemically justified? Here, it is shown that the transformative nature of religious experience poses a further problem: to transition between religious belief and skepticism is not just to adopt a different set of beliefs, but to transform into a different version of oneself. It is argued that this intensifies the problem of pluralism by adding a new dimension (...) to religious disagreement, for we can lack epistemic and affective access to our potential religious, agnostic, or skeptical selves. Yet, access to these selves seems to be required for the purposes of decision-making that is to be both rational and authentic. Finally, the chapter reflects on the relationship between the transformative problem and what it shows about the epistemic status of religious conversion and deconversion, in which one disagrees with one’s own transformed self. (shrink)

A discussion of L.A. Paul's 'Transformative Experience' from an Author Meets Critics session at the 2015 Pacific APA.

From ancient conceptions of becoming a philosopher to modern discussions of psychedelic drugs, the concept of transformation plays a fascinating part in the history of philosophy. However, until now there has been no sustained exploration of the full extent of its role. Transformation and the History of Philosophy is an outstanding survey of the history, nature, and development of the idea of transformation, from the ancient period to the twentieth century. Comprising twenty-two specially commissioned chapters by an (...) international team of contributors, the volume is divided into four clear parts: - Philosophy as Transformative: Ancient China, Greece, India, and Rome - Transformation Between the Human and the Divine: Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy - Transformation After the Copernican Revolution: Post-Kantian Philosophy - Treatises, Pregnancies, Psychedelics, and Epiphanies: Twentieth-Century Philosophy. Each of these sections begins with an introduction by the editors. Transformation and the History of Philosophy is essential reading for students and researchers in the history of western and non-western philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics. It will also be extremely useful for those in related disciplines such as religion, sociology, and the history of ideas. (shrink)

Douglas Yacek’s recent book The Transformative Classroom proposes a useful aspirational model of transformative education. In this critical commentary, I review this model and suggest that while it succeeds in overcoming some ethical shortcomings of other dominant models of transformative education, I would like to suggest that focusing on more subtle transformative gestures could have the benefit of being less dependent of the teacher’s intention to transform and of being less constrained by the expectation that transformation should take place (...) primarily in the classroom. When transformation is conceived as an educational fiction, it may be conceived as a retroactive experience constructed around memories of the teacher’s transformative gestures, thereby adding to Yacek’s aspirational model by allowing for transformation to continue beyond the walls of the classroom. (shrink)

Transformer architectures dominate modern artificial intelligence systems but exhibit persistent limitations when operating over long contexts. As sequence length increases, models experience degradation in long-range dependency tracking, token drift, and instability in internal representations. -/- This paper provides a structural interpretation of these limitations using the admissibility framework of the Paton System. Rather than treating context limits purely as engineering constraints, the analysis interprets Transformer context scaling as an admissibility-bounded recursion problem. -/- Each model state can be treated as a (...) compressed node representation propagated through an admissible structural frame defined by architectural constraints. Continuation of the system state is permitted only if the next state satisfies admissibility within that frame. -/- When context length grows beyond the compression capacity of the node representation, admissibility conditions fail. The resulting breakdown manifests as token drift, loss of long-range dependency tracking, and degradation of attention coherence. -/- This interpretation connects observed scaling limits of Transformer models to a general structural principle: recursive computational systems maintain continuity only while state compression remains admissible within the governing frame constraints. -/- The result provides a domain-neutral structural explanation for context limits in modern AI systems and situates Transformer scaling behaviour within the broader framework of the Paton System. (shrink)

This paper proposes a way to understand transformative choices, choices that change ‘who you are.’ First, it distinguishes two broad models of transformative choice: 1) ‘event-based’ transformative choices in which some event—perhaps an experience—downstream from a choice transforms you, and 2) ‘choice-based’ transformative choices in which the choice itself—and not something downstream from the choice—transforms you. Transformative choices are of interest primarily because they purport to pose a challenge to standard approaches to rational choice. An examination of the event-based transformative (...) choices of L. A. Paul and Edna Ullman-Margalit, however, suggests that event-based transformative choices don’t raise any difficulties for standard approaches to rational choice. An account of choice-based transformative choices—and what it is to be transformed—is then proposed. Transformative choices so understood not only capture paradigmatic cases of transformative choice but also point the way to a different way of thinking about rational choice and agency. (shrink)

This article is about the information relevant to decision-making capacity in refusal of life-prolonging medical treatment cases. We examine the degree to which the phenomenology of the options available to the agent—what the relevant states of affairs will feel like for them—forms part of the capacity-relevant information in the law of England and Wales, and how this informational basis varies across adolescent and adult medical treatment cases. We identify an important doctrinal phenomenon. In the leading authorities, the courts appear to (...) count the first-personal phenomenology of the available options among the information that adolescents seeking to refuse life-prolonging treatment must understand and appreciate in order to possess capacity; adults are not held to this (higher) standard. We evaluate this differential treatment in light of philosophical work on transformative choice—decisions involving options whose sensory character, and effect on our values and preferences, are grasped only through experience itself. (shrink)

Recent developments in biology and cognitive science have called into question the fecundity of the notion of an ‘agent’—conceived as a unitary and enduring locus of representation, evaluation, and autonomous action—for explaining the phenomenology of purposeful behavior across diverse substrates and spatio-temporal scales. A coherent account of goal-directed behavior in cognitive systems, without strong commitments to the aforesaid notion of ‘agent’, is therefore desirable, particularly in light of increasingly blurred boundaries between biological and artificial agentic systems. Here we propose that (...) Buddhist philosophy, with its central doctrine of no-self, offers a compelling foundation for substrate-independent accounts of agency by replacing autonomous and enduring agents with stable yet malleable goals. Furthermore, according to Buddhist views, goals systematically bias cognitive representations, resulting in distorted self-models which are the root cause of suffering. We therefore posit that Buddhist-based models of agency in cognitive systems can organically integrate the epistemic, phenomenological, and ethical aspects of purposeful behavior under a unified theoretical framework. We furthermore argue that a cross-disciplinary account of agency, drawing on Buddhist notions, can help address emerging risks posed by artificial and hybrid agentic technologies. (shrink)

In this paper, I will conduct three interrelated analyses. First, I will develop an analysis of various concepts in the history of biology that used to refer to individual-level phenomena but were then reinterpreted by the Modern Synthesis in terms of populations. Second, a similar situation can be found in contemporary evolutionary theory. While different approaches reflect on the causal role of developing organisms in evolution, proponents of the Modern Synthesis refrain from any substantial change by reinterpreting and explaining individual-level (...) phenomena from a population perspective. Finally, I will approach these historical and contemporary debates by arguing for the statistical reading of natural selection, which holds that explanations by natural selection are statistical. My main conclusion is that the historical conceptual reinterpretations belong to a new explanatory strategy developed by the Modern Synthesis based on population thinking. Adopting the statistical point of view has three advantages for the issues discussed in this paper. First, understanding historical conceptual change as part of an explanatory shift fits with the emergence of population biology as a discipline that employs statistical methods. Second, concerning current debates in evolutionary biology, the statisticalist reading can validate the goal of both sides of the dispute. It ascribes an invaluable role to the population statistical explanation of the MS and also commends the study of developmental and organismal causes of adaptive evolution. Finally, the division of explanatory roles in evolutionary biology, embarrassed by statisticalism, can be related to the different interpretations that important biological concepts have undergone throughout history and contemporary biology, i.e., that the division of explanatory roles allows for a division of conceptual interpretations. (shrink)

Today e-commerce has had tremendous growth in the past years primarily due to changes in technology and customer’s buying behavior. One of the big shifts in the process has been the use of ML in advertising which has the capability to transform the marketing domain together with consumer interactions. This paper discusses the viability of using machine learning for designing realistic models of advertising to increase effectiveness of target and personalized advertising, as well as conversion rates in e-commerce. Several techniques (...) are explored in the study, such as supervised and unsupervised learning, recommender systems, and content optimization with natural language processing. By using case studies and experimental models, we discuss how and to what extent ML is beneficial in e-commerce advertising transformation. The results presented in this paper indicate that using machine learning in advertising has a potential of dramatically improving the customer experience while simultaneously increasing brand recognition and sales. (shrink)

How should accounts that stress the embodied, embedded and engaged character of human minds accommodate the role of rationality in human subjectivity? Drawing on Matthew Boyle’s contrast between ‘additive’ and ‘transformative’ conceptions of rationality, I argue that contemporary work on embodied cognition tends towards a problematic ‘additivism’ about how mature human capacities to think and act for reasons stand to sensorimotor capacities to skillfully engage with salient features of the environment. Additivists view rational capacities to reason and reflect as a (...) distinct ‘layer’ or ‘storey’ of human cognition, with a normative structure that differs from that of the sensorimotor coping skills which support it. I argue that emphasizing the embodied and engaged character of human minds is better combined with a ‘transformative’ conception of rationality—one which holds that acquiring abilities to give and ask for reasons transforms the normative structure of our unreflective embodied dealings with the environment. And I argue that a transformative embodied cognitive science of human rationality is not only possible, but underway. Integrating existing work on embodied cognition with work on the cultural and developmental contexts that shape human minds suggests how human immersion in culture transforms the structure of sensorimotor engagements by bringing about the communicability and negotiability of the meanings to which those engagements attune us. (shrink)

This study presents a novel transformer-based model specifically designed for financial forecasting, integrating explainability mechanisms such as SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) values and attention visualizations to enhance interpretability. Unlike previous models, which often compromise between accuracy and transparency, our approach balances predictive accuracy with interpretability, allowing stakeholders to gain deeper insights into the factors driving market changes. By revealing critical market influences through feature importance and attention maps, this model provides both robustness and transparency, catering to the needs of high-stakes (...) financial environments. (shrink)

Even as globalization has, no doubt, catalyzed or served as a basis for advancements in several spheres of human endeavours across the globe, it is also pertinent to highlight or indicate some of its drawbacks, especially as it pertains to the preservation of culture and morality. Whereas some studies have already attested to the fundamental link between culture and morality, some others have moved on to indicate how globalization may have a negative impact on culture and morality, especially within the (...) African context. The present research queues with the latter group of studies as it investigates the extent to which the moral and cultural values associated with the Yoruba concept of Omoluabi has metamorphosed in the 21st century. The research relies on philosophical and hermeneutical analyses for its agenda as it discloses how the concept of ‘Omoluabi’, has evolved from its original usage and semantics to what now obtains in the 21st century. (shrink)

Irreversible transitions appear across physics, cognition, morality, social systems, and artificial learning systems, yet no existing framework provides a unified structural account of why certain transitions cannot be reversed or how identity reorganizes after collapse. This paper introduces the Gate–River Framework, a domain general theory of irreversible transformation grounded in identity, information, and constraint. The framework proposes that all identity bearing systems operate within basins of stability governed by basin internal laws. When internal contradiction exceeds structural coherence, the system (...) reaches a boundary at which the basin’s governing law can no longer sustain identity. This boundary—the Gate—acts as a non invertible transition operator that collapses the prior identity while preserving deeper informational invariants. Beyond the Gate lies a forbidden region in which the old identity cannot exist, followed by the River, the structural point of no return where reconstructability of the prior identity is lost. A new identity basin emerges only after reorganization under new constraints. The paper demonstrates that this architecture appears independently in General Relativity, quantum measurement, thermodynamic irreversibility, neural network catastrophic forgetting, human psychological transformation, moral collapse, ecological regime shifts, and social revolutions. The Gate–River Framework resolves the longstanding structural conflict between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics by showing that each governs a different layer of identity: GR governs the continuity of physical identity (kernel), while QM governs the continuity of information (generative layer). Neither law is universal; both fail at boundaries. The Gate provides the missing operator that connects them. Drawing on a structured dataset of over 460 transformation cases, the paper shows that while the mechanism of irreversible transition is invariant, the form of post collapse reorganization is shaped by environmental variables such as feedback quality, symbolic density, and knowledge structure. The Gate–River Framework therefore offers a unified, cross domain account of irreversible transformation and establishes a structural foundation for understanding identity, collapse, and reorganization across physical, cognitive, and social systems. (shrink)

Transformation is not a primitive. The persistence condition determines what counts as transformation, whether a transformation is admissible, and whether transformation can be defined at all. A transformation is a state transition that imposes a non-zero integration requirement on the persistence relation — and this definition is not a choice. Any alternative definition cannot generate a persistence-relevant admissibility condition. Three results follow necessarily: (1) the Transformation Constraint Theorem — admissibility of transformation is equivalent (...) to satisfaction of the persistence condition; (2) the Persistence Primacy Theorem — transformation is definable only for systems that admit a persistence relation; (3) the Monotonic Expansion Proposition — the admissible transformation set is ordered by integration capacity. Transformation is therefore derived, structured, and system-relative. It is not prior to the persistence condition. It is defined by it. (shrink)

Standard ways of conceptualizing moral development and measuring pedagogical interventions in ethics classes privilege the growth of moral judgment over moral sensitivity, moral motivation, and moral habits by too often conflating improvement in moral judgment with holistic moral development. I argue here that if we care about students’ construction and cultivation of their ethical selves, our assessment design principles ought to take seriously the transformative possibilities of philosophy as a way of life and be based on a more robust and (...) holistic account of moral development. I illustrate these principles of assessment design through an examination of the Character Project, which I created to help students engage in their own deliberate ethical transformation through self-directed, individualized, and concentrated practice. Finally, I conclude with a discussion about how to appropriately and fairly assess this kind of deeply personal learning. (shrink)

Note—Updated and extended version of a previously published paper titled “Representation Similarity And Transformation Stability: An Empirical Study of Structural Anti-Correlation in Neural Networks.” -/- We investigate the relationship between representation similarity and transformation-dependent stability in neural networks. While Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) is widely used to measure representational similarity, its relationship to functional robustness under input transformations remains insufficiently understood across architectures. -/- Across multiple experimental regimes—including architecture variation, dataset shifts, and input perturbations—we observe a statistically stable (...) coupling between CKA and a stability metric S(M) measuring sensitivity to structured transformations. -/- This relationship is stable under bootstrap analysis and persists across perturbation types, while exhibiting architecture-dependent sign inversion. -/- These results suggest that representation similarity is not a sufficient predictor of transformation-dependent stability in the evaluated settings. Instead, their relationship appears structured and is consistent with a role of architectural inductive bias. -/- We further propose a minimal structural interpretation in which this coupling depends on alignment between representation subspaces and transformation-sensitive directions. (shrink)

Equilibrium is typically understood as the stable end state of physical systems: a condition in which no net transformation occurs and all gradients are eliminated. This paper shows that equilibrium is structurally incompatible with persistent identity under real transformation. Within the framework of La Profilée, persistence requires distinguishable states, real transformation, and non-trivially invariant identity. These conditions imply directional transformation, finite integration capacity, and continuous throughput. Equilibrium violates each of these requirements: it eliminates transformation, collapses (...) differentiation, and renders the persistence problem either undefined or trivial. Equilibrium is not the stable limit of persistent systems. It is the structural state in which persistence ceases to be admissible. LP does not oppose thermodynamic equilibrium. It specifies its structural meaning: the termination of the conditions under which identity can be maintained. (shrink)

We introduce a measurement framework for analyzing how neural representations diverge under transformations of increasing complexity. Rather than proposing a universal theory of representation learning or invariance, we define a single observable, $\Delta(c)$, which measures inter-model variance in representation stability across heterogeneous neural architectures. The framework is designed as an empirical instrument: it specifies how to measure divergence, how to control for parameterization artifacts, and how to evaluate whether regime-like structure exists in representation sensitivity. We define a transition scale $c^*$ (...) operationally from the behavior of $\Delta(c)$ and provide a set of robustness stress-tests intended to distinguish structural effects from smooth nonlinear or metric-induced artifacts. We do not assume the existence of universal scaling laws, critical phenomena, or phase transitions. Instead, we propose a falsifiable protocol for determining whether structured divergence regimes emerge consistently across architectures, transformation families, and representation metrics. The contribution of this work is therefore methodological rather than ontological: a minimal experimental framework for detecting, testing, or rejecting the presence of structured divergence behavior in representation stability. (shrink)

La Profilée (LP) is a structural law of persistent identity under transformation. From three minimal assumptions — distinguishability (M1), real transformation (M2), determinable persistence relation (M3) — LP derives the complete persistence architecture: F·M·K decomposition, IR = R/(F·M·K) ≤ 1, the Frame Continuity Condition (FCC), and the two universal persistence conditions Q1 and Q2. This paper establishes LP's architecture across physical domains. -/- The central claim: every physical theory instantiates Q1–Q2 and the F·M·K architecture. No physical theory derives (...) them. -/- LP makes explicit what physics has always left implicit. -/- For each physical domain, LP derives the domain-specific F·M·K conditions that the domain presupposes without grounding: for GR — diffeomorphism invariance (F-condition), non-linearity (M-condition), and existence of stable geometric regimes (K-condition); for QM — unitarity (M-condition, derived from M3); for the pre-geometric level F₀ — spacetime emergence (F-condition), fundamental unitarity (M-condition), and the information bound (K-condition). Note on architecture: Q3–Q5 are not general persistence conditions. They are domain-specific consequences of the F·M·K architecture applied to self-modeling Σ-complete persistence subjects (P162, P167). Physics operates with Q1–Q2 and domain-specific F·M·K conditions. Q3–Q5 apply where LP-admissible systems reach Σ-completeness, self-modeling, and internal dominance — the structural threshold for subjectivity. (shrink)

Representation similarity metrics such as CKA are widely used to compare neural network representations across architectures and training conditions. In parallel, transformation-dependent stability measures quantify sensitivity to structured input perturbations. -/- This work empirically investigates the relationship between these two notions. We find that representation similarity and stability exhibit a consistent positive correlation under standard evaluation conditions. However, this relationship becomes significantly weaker and more variable under structured distribution shifts. -/- Rather than a fixed equivalence or independence, our results (...) indicate a regime-dependent coupling between representation similarity and transformation-dependent stability. These findings suggest that representation geometry alone is insufficient to fully characterize functional stability under distributional perturbations. (shrink)