John Searle begins his ``Consciousness, Explanatory Inversion and Cognitive Science'' with " ``Ten years ago in this journal I published an article criticising what I call Strong AI, the view that for a system to have mental states it is sufficient for the system to implement the right sort of program with right inputs and outputs. Strong AI is rather easy to refute and the basic argument can be summarized in one sentence: {it a system, me for example, could implement (...) a program for understanding Chinese, for example, without understanding any Chinese at all.} This idea, when developed, became known as the Chinese Room Argument.'' " The Chinese Room Argument can be refuted in one sentence. (shrink)

In consciousness studies, the first-person perspective, seen as a way to approach consciousness, is often seen as nothing but a variant of the third-person perspective. One of the most important advocates of this view is Dennett. However, as I show in critical interaction with Dennett’s view, the first-person perspective and the third-person perspective are different ways of asking questions about themes. What these questions are is determined by the purposes that we have when we ask them. Since our purposes are (...) different according to the perspective we take, each perspective has a set of leading questions of its own. This makes that the first-person perspective is an approach of consciousness that is substantially different from the third-person perspective, and that one cannot be reduced to the other. These perspectives are independent, although complementary approaches of the mind. (shrink)

William James has been characterized as “the major whipping boy of the later Wittgenstein,” and the currency of this impression of the relation between James and Wittgenstein is understandable. Reading Wittgenstein and his commentators can leave one with the impression that James was a badly muddled “exponent of the tradition in the philosophy of mind that [Wittgenstein] was opposing.” There have been recent attempts to resist this trend, but even these tend to focus on the affinities between the two philosophers, (...) still accepting the prevailing view that Wittgenstein was often critical of James, and that in such cases Wittgenstein was always right and James was always wrong. By contrast, by focusing on Wittgenstein’s discussion of James’s “if-feeling”, it will be argued that Wittgenstein’s criticisms of James are often not as damaging, or even as extensive, as has often been assumed. /// -/- NB: This was essentially an initial draft of the paper that became "William James on Conceptions and Private Language", which should also be available for download in the publications section of this page. (shrink)

In Why we Talk, cognitive scientist Jean-Louis Dessalles presents an original, in-depth account of the nature and evolution of human language. Written in a clear and engaging manner, Why we Talk is an impressive achievement. Dessalles reviews and contributes to most controversies about human language. He compares human language to other systems of communication found in the animal world, arguing for the originality of the former; he clearly shows that language is a biological trait and that we should study its (...) evolution as we do for other biological traits; he analyzes the nature of grammar; he distinguishes two distinct semantic contributions made by assertions; he proposes several distinct stages in the evolution of language; and, finally, he proposes a new hypothesis about the selective pressures explaining the evolution of our linguistic faculty. In what follows, I will focus exclusively on this new hypothesis: I will argue that it poorly accounts for several important aspects of linguistic communication. Here is how I will proceed. In Section 1, I will review Dessalles’s hypothesis about the evolution of language. In Section 2, I will empirically evaluate this hypothesis. (shrink)

We may suspect that quantum mechanics and consciousness are related, but the details are not at all clear. In this paper, I suggest how the mind and brain might fit together intimately while still maintaining distinct identities. The connection is based on the correspondence of similar functions in both the mind and the quantum-mechanical brain. Accompanying material for a talk at The Second Mind and Brain Symposium held at the Institute of Psychiatry, Denmark Hill, London on 20th October, 1990.

Positions taken in the current debate over free will can be seen as responses to the following conditional: If every action is caused solely by another event and a cause necessitates its effect, then there is no action to which there is an alternative. The Libertarian, who believes that alternatives are a requirement of free will, responds by denying the right conjunct of C’s antecedent, maintaining that some actions are caused, either mediately or immediately, by events whose effects could be (...) different, even if they were to recur under identical circumstances. We have here a denial of Laplacian Determinism (LD), according to which the condition of the world at any instant makes only one state possible at any other instant. 1 One prominent defender of this view, Robert Kane, holds that unless an agent’s neural mechanisms operated indeterministicly in forming her character she is not responsible for its manifestations. 2 This requirement is entailed by the principle of “ultimate responsibility” (UR) according to which an act is freely willed only if (a) its agent is personally responsible for its performance in the sense of having caused it to occur by voluntarily doing something that was avoidable and (b). (shrink)

Functional versus Subjective Consciousness The Example of Pain Dieting and Free Will The Production/Judgement Model Judgement is not Reward Feelings are Judgements Low-Bandwidth Channels Candidate Neural Control Channels Timing of Intention and Action Conclusion References _Abstract_.

One of the most certain truths in the world is Descartes' "I think, therefore I am". Descartes was so certain of the existence of some kind of essential _self_ that others have coined the term "Cartesian theater" to describe the sense that we all have of being the audience enjoying the rich play of our experiences. We tend to believe in an enduring self, independent of our individual percepts. Sometimes this virtual "self" in our mind, sitting in the audience of (...) the Cartesian theater who watches our thoughts is referred to as a homunculus. This is not necessarily to imply that most of us believe that the self or homunculus is an identifiable region of the brain like the pineal gland, just that at some level of organization, we assume that there is a self that is separate from the stuff that self experiences, remembers, thinks about, etc. (shrink)

Jackson and Jackson (1995) argue that most current tests used to assess awareness of sequential material are flawed because of their emphasis on accuracy. They propose to distinguish two forms of sequence knowledge: Serial knowledge, that is, knowledge about the specific sequence that stimuli follow, which involves information about the statistical relationship between many sequence elements, and statistical knowledge, or knowledge about the probability of different transitions between adjacent sequence elements. Further, they suggest a new method to analyze generation performance, (...) which involves considering the correlation between subjects' responses and the distribution of transition probabilities, regardless of the accuracy of generation performance. In this comment, we first suggest that the distinction between serial and statistical knowledge is unwarranted except in one case which is not addressed by Jackson and Jackson. We propose instead that all sequence knowledge is essentially statistical in nature. Second, we suggest that using probabilistic instead of deterministic sequences is a better way to approach the assessment of explicit knowledge, and illustrate this contention with empirical and simulated examples based on previous and current research (Cleeremans, 1993; Cleeremans and McClelland, 1991; Jimenez, Mendez and Cleeremans. (shrink)

Joe Campbell has identified an apparent flaw in van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument. It apparently derives a metaphysically necessary conclusion from what Campbell argues is a contingent premise: that the past is in some sense necessary. I criticise Campbell’s examples attempting to show that this is not the case (in the requisite sense) and suggest some directions along which an incompatibilist could reconstruct her argument so as to remain immune to Campbell’s worries.

This is indeed an auspicious time for Cognitive Science. I stand here before you this evening as the first Chair to give a presidential address to this austere body, to place on record before you what you are to accept as the Society's official view on the new science of the mind.

_This article articulates the presuppositions that psychology inherited from logical positivism, and how_ _those presuppositions effected the interpretation of data and research procedures. Despite the efforts of_ _Wundt, his most well known disciples, Titchener and Külpe, embraced an atomistic view of experience which_ _was at_ _least partly responsible for many of their failures. When the behaviorists rejected the_ _introspectionism of Titchener and Külpe, they kept their atomism, using the reflex_.

Classical physics is a theory of nature that originated with the work of Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century and was advanced by the contributions of James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein. Newton based his theory on the work of Johannes Kepler, who found that the planets appeared to move in accordance with a simple mathematical law, and in ways wholly determined by their spatial relationships to other objects. Those motions were apparently independent of our human observations of them.

This issue presents the research on early Chinese texts by Cao Feng, a philosophy professor at Tsinghua University. He is an expert in early Chinese political philosophy and philosophy of language found in transmitted and excavated texts. His extensive education in Japan has left him well versed in Japanese sinology. Although a critical researcher in the field of early Chinese thought and a very prolific writer in both Chinese and Japanese, Cao Feng is little known in the West. This issue (...) introduces three papers selected in consultation with the author: a reflection on the study of excavated texts, the "Huang" component of so-called Huang-Lao thought, and views on language in the Laozi. (shrink)

Throughout this manuscript, we introduce no new informational content; rather, we demonstrate that there exists at least one logical system, namely LP (Logic of Paradox), that accommodates our goals and thereby allows the project to proceed [1. Is this a contradiction in Mathematics? (The paradox and Foundation of Mathematics, First version), Philpapers 2026]. At this stage, the central objective is to remain as faithful to Classical Logic as possible. A more conclusive discussion will be presented later. It is evident (...) that the solution is not unique. Artificial intelligence tools were employed in the preparation of this manuscript. (shrink)

This paper (from 2006) is now defunct. I argue against "realist primitivism". One of my arguments is a kind of "evolutionary debunking argument". Some of the material of this was incorporated into “Can Disjunctivists Explain Our Access to the Sensible World?” and "How Does Color Experience Represent the World?".

In the archetypical action thriller, the plot turns on a critical moment of insight. A car with out-of-state license plates, the gold tooth of the man behind the counter— something tips us off, and loose strands of evidence are woven into a meaningful pattern. Substituting a runaway trolley for suspicious vehicles and dental anomalies, we suggest that a similar denouement is at hand in the field of moral psychology. A number of theoretical proposals that were at one time regarded as (...) unconnected at best, and contradictory at worst, now show hope of reconciliation. Unknowns abound, but there are hints of an emerging consensus. At its core is a recognition that moral judgment is the product of interaction and competition between distinct psychological systems. The goal of the present essay is to describe these systems to highlight important questions for future research. Recent research in moral psychology has focused on two challenges to the longdominant cognitive development paradigm conceived by Piaget and nurtured by Kohlberg (Kohlberg, 1969; Piaget, 1965/1932; Turiel, 1983, 2005). The first challenge claims that moral judgment is accomplished by rapid, automatic and unconscious intuitions (Damasio, 1994; Haidt, 2001; Hauser, 2006; Mikhail, 2000; Schweder & Haidt, 1993), contra the cognitive developmentalists' assumption that moral judgment is the product of conscious principled reasoning. This challenge is built in part on studies demonstrating people's inability to articulate a rational basis for strongly held moral convictions (Bjorklund, Haidt, & Murphy, 2000; Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006; Hauser, Cushman, Young, Jin, & Mikhail, 2007; Mikhail, 2000). The second and related challenge claims that moral judgment is driven primarily by affective responses (Blair, 1995; Damasio, 1994; Greene & Haidt, 2002; Schweder & Haidt, 1993), contra the cognitive developmentalists' assumption that moral judgment results from the application of general principles in a "cold" cognitive process.. (shrink)

Gabriel Vacariu, (October 2021 to 2014) The UNBELIEVABLE SIMILARITIES between the ideas of some people (2011-2021) and my ideas (2002-2008) in physics (quantum mechanics, cosmology), cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and philosophy (this manuscript would produce a REVOLUTION in right international academic environment!) here (the LIST is BELOW) .

What would judicious technology use look like? In this book, I use a mix of logical argumentation, phenomenological attention, and myth interpretation to champion caution in the face of uncritical consumption. If forced to choose, I would pick meaningful inefficiency over meaningless efficiency. Unfortunately, questioning technological development often gets dismissed as “Luddism.” As a philosopher trained to examine arguments on all sides of an issue, I do not find this lopsidedness helpful. Things would not turn out well for a driver (...) if their car could not slow down, stop, or go in reverse. So, when it comes to technology, I aim to make those three moves respectable and feasible. (shrink)

1891. The recovered manuscript of Aristotle's Constitutional History of Athens, now for the first time given to the world from the unique text in the British...

The main ideas of the EDWs perspective are in Gabriel Vacariu’s PhD thesis posted online by UNSW (Australia) in 2007!!! I have realized the GREATEST discovery in the history of human knowledge: the EDWs! With discovering the EDWs, I have changed everything in Philosophy, Physics and Cognitive Neuroscience! This has been the main reason, so many people have published UNBELIEVABLE similar ideas to my ideas, many years I published my first works! -/- UNBELIEVABLE, many (hundreds) “great” or small thinkers did (...) the same thing in 2006-2007 and later: they published the same ideas, UNBELIEVABLE similar to my ideas from 2002-2005! They believe they would be considered co-authors of the same new framework of thinking. They did not know that many “professors” would do the same thing: they plagiarized my ideas and they hurry up to published their work as soon as possible (in 2006-2007, depending when they discovered my article 2005). So, in the same 2 years, many people “discovered” the same new framework of thinking, the EDWs perspective, each of them did not think that there would be so many other people doing the same thing, that is, many people “discovered” the same new framework (the greatest challenge in the history of human thinking!) in the same period! Such coincidences (the discovery of the EDWs in the same two years!!!) are quite IMPOSSIBLE!! This is the reason nobody quoted my name, but nobody quoted any name who PLAGIARIZED my ideas… In 2006-2007, I was wondering why nobody quote my name, but in fact, they plagiarized my ideas. Nobody discovered this framework of thinking 2500 years, and in 2-3 years, many people discovered it!!!! IMPOSSIBLE!!!! There were some "professors" who published articles/chapters very close to Bohr's complementarity, Dirac, de Broglie's dualism before 2005 (for instance Carlo Rovelli 1996 or Ladyman), but their works were constructed within the "unicorn world" (Universe/world), therefore, these works had nothing in common with the EDWs perspective!!!! In reality, all of them plagiarized my ideas! It was like many people composed Beethoven Fifth’s Symphony, claiming that they never listen Beethoven! Who would be so stupid to believe them? (shrink)

This work pairs brief “allegorical tales” (yuyan 寓言) from the enigmatic ancient Chinese classic Zhuangzi (莊子; ca. 4th–3rd century BCE) with original watercolor paintings. It moreover includes copious translated annotations by Lin Yunming (林雲銘; 1628–1697), Xuan Ying (宣穎; ca. 1655–1730), and Liu Fengbao (劉鳳苞; 1826–1905), in an effort to keep the readings culturally grounded. We hope to provide a compelling alternative to dry academic analysis and popular oversimplification. (John R. Williams' note: The final revised version is from July 17th 2026. (...) With the proliferation of AI slop and my declining health, I no longer have stamina for the grueling work of translating traditional commentaries, thus this project will likely remain in its current state going forward. I hope those with an interest in the traditional reception of Zhuangzi discover this and get something out of it. These works changed my life and gave me the perspective to leave behind institutional life. I consider this together with the Routledge and Harrassowitz volumes the main output of my academic efforts.). (shrink)

This paper develops a systematic reconstruction of psychological theory grounded in the Philosophy of Belonging. It introduces a stratified ontology (SDBO–SDBEO–SDBEIO), dual temporality (synchronic structure and diachronic unfolding), and imperfect belonging as a constitutive condition of reality. -/- The central thesis is that the self is a diachronic trajectory of belonging rather than a pre-existing entity. Psychological phenomena are reinterpreted as relational processes, and pathology as the collapse or rigidification of belonging. -/- The paper proposes a six-step clinical architecture explaining (...) the limitations of cognition-first therapies and formulates the belonging mediation hypothesis. -/- This manuscript is circulated as a scholarly preprint and may differ from any future published version. (shrink)

This text is not merely a contribution to the discourse of metaphysics. It is a deliberate act of philosophical departure - a genesis point for what may become a new mode of inquiry: Fluctuational Metaphysics. At its heart lies a radical yet intuitive proposition - that ontological instability, far from being a philosophical problem, is the very substrate from which understanding emerges. -/- For millennia, metaphysical thought has sought grounding - in substance, essence, divinity, or logic. But what if the (...) pursuit of metaphysical stability has obscured reality’s truest impulse? What if instability itself is not a flaw to be corrected, but a generative field to be explored? -/- This manuscript ventures into that terrain. It affirms a paradox: the instability of all things includes the instability of instability itself. From this recursive edge, a new metaphysical ethos emerges - one not based on immutable truths, but on resonance, participation, and coherence under flux. -/- Fluctuational Metaphysics does not seek final answers. It seeks usable maps. It is philosophy not as judgment, but as design; not as authority, but as craft. It accepts that reality cannot be proven in the old sense - only co-created, navigated, and revised. -/- To those trained in traditional metaphysical schools, this work may feel destabilizing. That is its intent. This is not philosophy as ornamentation of legacy; it is a prototype for reality-making. Its goal is not to ask, “What is the world made of?” but rather, “How shall we make meaning amid what refuses to remain fixed?” -/- Let this not be read as a closing claim, but as an opening invitation. This is not a conclusion. It is a beginning. (shrink)

Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge stands at the threshold of his last major philosophical phase, the period from his retirement from the London School of Economics in 1969 until his death in 1994. The two great books that he wrote before he came to London, Logik der Forschung (1934) and The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), contain much more than the innovations in the theory of scientific method and the theory of democracy for which they are famous. Logik der Forschung, (...) translated into English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959), is by no means just a tract, even a revolutionary one, on the methods of science, since about one third of the text is devoted to searchingly original treatments of the frequency theory of probability and of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, whilst the unpublished manuscript on which the book was based, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie (1979), at whose content it often hints, presents a wealth of significant material on the psychology of human learning and its biological context. Popper had, after all, been a student of Karl B¨ uhler, and had absorbed the theories of problem solving developed within the W¨ urzburg School (Popper 1974a, § 15). The Open Society and Its Enemies, for its part, is not so much a book defending democratic liberalism as a defence of democratic liberalism nestling within a book that discusses every other topic under the sun. It offers profound and provocative studies of the thought of Plato and Marx (see Hacohen 2000, Chapter 9, for a critical appreciation), an abundance of scholarly, if often controversial, historical interpretations of the work of Heraclitus, Aristotle, Hegel, J. S. Mill, Wittgenstein, Mannheim, and others, the elements of a new theory of rationality, and many elucidations of the workings of science that go beyond what is explicit in Logik der Forschung. One insight worth mentioning, since it is little known, is the clear recognition in section II of Chapter 11 that the progress of science is typically revolutionary, not cumulative; a commonplace today perhaps, but one.... (shrink)

This manuscript argues to for representing social groups using hypergraphs for the purposes of social ontology. -/- The text has not been published before, as it never reached a form suitable for submission. However, the text has been cited as a manuscript in Kit Fine's article "The Identity of Social Groups". To complete the record and for the purpose of documentation, I provide the last version of the manuscript here. -/- I thank Kit Fine for comments on (...) the manuscript. (shrink)

This manuscript documents an iterative investigation into numerical scaling behaviors in discrete photonic lattices with anti-periodic boundary conditions — and the successive correction of three apparently robust findings. In the initial study (March 2026), coarse-resolution simulations suggested "perfect" mathematical constants; high-resolution analysis revealed these as artifacts of grid quantization. A subsequently observed √2 ratio between topologies was identified as an artifact of comparing different distance metrics (Manhattan vs. Euclidean); when harmonized, both topologies converge to the same scaling product (P (...) ≈ 1.11072). A step-wise dependence of critical curvature Kc on ⌊L/2⌋ initially appeared robust, but sensitivity analysis (April 18, 2026) falsified this as well: replacing the hard, discontinuous boundary condition with smooth alternatives caused immediate oscillatory instability at K=0, and the ⌊L/2⌋ pattern vanished entirely. Extended simulations (April 26, 2026) up to L=128 (N=16,384) confirm that the scaling product P ≈ 1.11072 remains stable across both topologies within this specific CME implementation, though whether this reflects a universal feature or a consistent artifact of the numerical scheme remains an open question. Beyond its numerical findings, this study serves as a documented case of how computational tools — the grid resolution, the choice of metric, the implementation of boundary conditions — can generate convincing but false patterns. Each "discovery" was an artifact of the method used, not a property of the system studied. This carries implications beyond computational topology: in any field where measurement and comparison are central, the distinction between a law of nature and a signature of the instrument constant vigilance is advised. Full data, code, and the detailed falsification analysis are available at GitHub(KatharinaJacoby). (shrink)

[This is an ealier English manuscript of the German book published by Brill/Mentis, see external link below.] Why are computers so smart these days? And why are humans apparently still a bit smarter? Does this have something to do with the difference between data and meaning? Does this in turn mean that at least some abstract entities, such as numbers, exist independently of human thought? Wouldn’t that require an expansion of our scientific world view? And would that at all (...) be compatible with what we know about our world from physics and chemistry, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and the theory of evolution? Finally, what would this tell us about ethical and aesthetic value theories? These and related questions will be discussed in this book. We will find that the difference between data and meaning, i.e. quantitative and qualitative information, does indeed appear to be of central importance for understanding both artificial and natural intelligence. And then the independent existence of abstract entities not only appears to be a particularly promising hypothesis, but also one that is entirely compatible with the sum of our scientific knowledge, especially with regard to value theories. The book thus arrives at the exploration of a scientifically tenable, panpsychistically inspired, objective idealism that can be derived from our most fundamental intuitions as subjects that perceive qualities, but that can also take into account the structuring of the world already at the micro-scale, found in the modern natural sciences. The result is a Platonic, but in a second step also a scientific realism and a naturalism in the sense that it is informed by the natural sciences in terms of an inductive metaphysics. An objective idealism, not in a rationalistic maximum form, but in a pragmatic minimum form; without eternal truths, but dependent on the continued philosophical-scientific and also philosophical-social dialog. The proposed model could offer interesting solutions to a number of problems at and near the mind/matter boundary: Proposals are being considered for the interpretation of quantum mechanics, the problem of molecular symmetry, the neuronal code and the binding problem in neuroscience, mental causation, a more holistic understanding of mental processes, and so on and so forth. However, the extent to which the model threatens to promise far too much is also being discussed. In sum, the core question is how we can imagine human thinking beyond physically conceived information processing. An alternative model of human thinking is then put up for discussion, for which not only machine-like cognitive performance, but above all the intentional perception of qualitative information, i.e. of abstract entities, would be central, as well as the free, ultimately creative linking of patterns of quantitative information (signals, data) with such qualities (meanings). (shrink)

It is often claimed that the many worlds theory is to be preferred over other realist interpretations of quantum mechanics for its ability to avoid the kind of action at a distance that plagues both hidden variables and collapse models. The aim of this paper is address the question of whether branching should be viewed as a causal process that spreads out from a localized region as some authors (Wallace (2012), Blackshaw, Huggett, and Ladyman (manuscript)) have such suggested, or (...) whether it occurs globally across the total quantum state at an instant as others insist (Sebens and Carroll (2018), McQueen and Vaidman (2019)). An appeal of the local branching model is it that it ensures that branching never involves superluminal influences. After clarifying these two models, the paper will consider the argument in favor of local branching, and then four concerns one might have about that model, that speak in favor of regarding branching as global and instantaneous. Ultimately, although the first three concerns may be addressed by advocates of local branching, the fourth is shown to be more convincing, and speaks in favor of regarding branching as a global, instantaneous change, even if it is a change that is triggered by a local, causal process (decoherence). The last part of paper clarifies the proposed model of branching as global, and explains how it is not in tension with relativity or the many worlds interpretations’ claim to avoid spooky action at a distance. (shrink)

[This manuscript is outdated; read chapter 5 and 6 of my book "Information, Intelligence and Idealism" instead, which is also available as full text on PhilPapers] The tremendous advances of research into artificial intelligence as well as neuroscience made over the last two to three decades have given further support to a renewed interest into philosophical discussions of the mind-body problem. Especially the last decade has seen a revival of panpsychist and idealist considerations, often focused on solving philosophical puzzles (...) like the socalled hard problem of consciousness.1–9 While a number of respectable philosophers advocate some sort of panpsychistic solution to the mind-body problem now, fewer advocate that idealism can contribute substantially to the debate. Interest in idealism has nevertheless risen again, as can be seen also from recent overview articles and collections of works.10–14 The working hypothesis here is that a properly formulated idealism can not only provide an alternative view of the mind/matter gap, but that this new view will also shed light on open questions in our common scientific, i.e. materialist, world view. To investigate this possibility, idealism first of all needs a model for the integration of modern science which allows for a mathematically consistent reinterpretation of the physical world as a limiting case of a both material and non-material world, which would make the outcome of idealistic considerations accessible to scientific investigation. To develop such a model I will first try to explain what I mean when I speak of a ‘scientifically tenable’ idealism, including a formulation of the emanation problem which for idealism replaces the interaction problem, then give a very brief summary of the available elements of such a theory in the philosophical literature, before sketching out some ‘design questions’ which have to be answered upon the construction of such models, and finally put forward a first model for a scientifically tenable objective idealism. (shrink)

This is the manuscript of an opinion piece published on the webpage of the Institute of Art and Ideas on 24 April 2025 under the title “Consciousness reveals there's no single objective world: Science as we know it won’t explain consciousness”.

1 This paper has been presented at the workshop “Time and Modality: A Round Table on Tense, Mood, and Modality”, Paris, December 2005, at a CUNY linguistics colloquium in May 2006, and at the 6th Workshop on Formal Linguistics in Florian´opolis, Brazil, August 2006. We thank the audiences at those presentations, in particular Orin Percus, Tim Stowell, Marcel den Dikken, Anna Szabolcsi, Chris Warnasch, Roberta Pires de Oliveira, Renato Miguel Basso, and Ana M¨uller. We thank Noam Chomsky, Cleo Condoravdi, and (...) Irene Heim for very helpful conversations about this material. We thank Bridget Copley for sharing with us her recent manuscript “What Should Should.. (shrink)

This book is a critical monograph on the problem of Chinese intellectuals, grounded in the philosophy of science as methodology, thermodynamics and complex systems as analytical tools, and the Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology (LYGC) as its ontological foundation. The title concept, Sage Entropy (圣人熵), names the book's core original contribution: the ontological error of Confucianism — substituting the subjective will of sages for the laws of the cosmic natural order — accumulates irreversible thermodynamic entropy within civilizational systems, driving the periodic collapse (...) of civilization and the desertification of thought that has recurred across two thousand years of Chinese history. The structural logic of the book follows a seven-layer chain of deduction: Artificial Order Is False (ontological verdict) → Sage Entropy (thermodynamic mechanism) → Knowledge-Power Conspiracy (institutional logic) → Intellectual Desertification (cognitive result) → Civilizational Decline (historical evidence) → Dao Follows Nature (cosmological way out) → Reconstruction of Natural Civilization (practical program) — The Seven-Layer Core Deductive Chain of This Book -/- The book is divided into seven parts (including the Prelude and Part Six, the Constructive section), comprising twenty-five chapters in total, with Appendices A through G and a bibliography. Summary of Each Part -/- [Prelude] Drawing on the Guodian Chu Slips (unearthed 1993), the Mawangdui Silk Manuscripts, and the Taiyi Shengshui as archaeo-philological evidence, this section argues for the Chu civilizational roots of Laozi's thought and establishes a documentary foundation for the LYGC cosmology reaching back two and a half millennia. [Part Zero: Ontological Premises] Using the LYGC cosmic hierarchy (humanity follows Earth → Earth follows Heaven → Heaven follows Dao → Dao follows Nature) as a normative baseline, this part systematically argues that Confucian artificial order (the Five Constants of ren, yi, li, zhi, xin plus the Three Bonds and Five Relationships) constitutes a fourfold subversion of the cosmic natural order: epistemological subversion, hierarchical subversion, energetic subversion, and subversion of knowledge production. [Part One: Diagnosis] A historical-institutional pathology: how Emperor Wu of Han's exclusive promotion of Confucianism established the institutional origin of intellectual serfdom; how the 'system overfitting' of the imperial examination system mass-produced cognitively domesticated intellectuals; why three waves of enlightenment (late Ming/early Qing, May Fourth, the 1980s) each ended with national salvation suppressing awakening; and the contemporary academic degeneration revealed by Li Bozhong's data, alongside Chinese universities' DeepSeek ambitions and DeepFake illusions. [Part Two: Critique of Confucianism] Deconstruction at the level of philosophical ontology: the verdict on the nature of the Five Constants under the proposition 'Artificial Order Is False'; the strict operational definition of Sage Entropy (dS/dt = ρ_r · DAF / ΔCCF) and its historical verification; the structural co-option mechanism behind the myth of 'Confucian-Daoist Complementarity'; and an ontological critique of Tu Weiming's New Confucian thesis of 'Mind as Ontological Foundation.' [Part Three: Roots] The ABCDE five-factor framework for civilizational failure, arguing that A (Confucian artificial order) is the core variable but not the sole one; an extended analysis of the Qian Xuesen case through engineering cybernetics; the Guo Moruo case; and a unified thermodynamic explanation for intellectual degeneration. [Part Four: Comparison] A comparison of the University of California system (self-organizing dissipative structure) versus Confucianized universities (heteronomously organized ritual coercion); an institutional analysis of Chen Yinke as the solitary historical witness to Chinese intellectual independence; and the third path offered by Laozi and Foucault. [Part Five: Transition] The naturalization of scholarship and the university: the convergence of Liang Qichao's 'academic independence' with Dao Follows Nature; a true ontology of the university; and the only possible path for Confucianism to be reborn within the framework of the Natural Way. [Part Six: Construction] Systematic reconstruction of the knowledge system of Natural Civilization: what constitutes genuine knowledge (three conditions: observable, falsifiable, transmissible); the institutional design of the Natural Civilization university; the personality model of the Natural Civilization thinker; and 'Students of the Dao' as the civilizational alternative to two thousand years of 'Disciples of the Sage.' . (shrink)

The article analyses the integration of Large Language Model (LLM)-based interfaces (editorial LLMs or eLLMs) in scholarly publishing workflows, focusing specifically on their growing role in editorial screening, manuscript preparation, and peer-review processes. It assesses the benefits eLLMs offer, including efficiency gains, improved compliance with journal guidelines, enhanced objectivity, and reduced editorial workload; and the risks, especially algorithmic biases, false positives and negatives, data privacy concerns, and potential opacity in automated decision-making. The article then offers some design recommendations for (...) eLLMs that prioritise transparency, fairness, and user-centredness, ensuring human oversight remains integral to the editorial process. It concludes by encouraging a proactive and thoughtful engagement with these technologies to enhance scholarly publishing rather than undermine its values. (shrink)

On September 29, 1961, Yang Xinping was born in Zhongxiang City, Hubei Province, China — the very site of Yingdu, the ancient capital of the Chu state. This was no geographical accident but a civilizational inheritance. Zhongxiang sits on the western bank of the Han River beneath the Jing Mountains — the most glorious heartland of Chu culture 2,500 years ago, when the state of Chu stood as one of the great civilizations of the ancient world. Even more remarkable: Guodian (...) Village, near his birthplace, is the site of Guodian Tomb No. 1. In 1993, archaeologists excavated the earliest known manuscript of the Dao De Jing from this tomb — bamboo strips dating to approximately 300 BCE — along with another crucial cosmological text, Taiyi Sheng Shui (The Primordial One Generates Water). This land revealed its buried secrets to the world more than thirty years after Yang Xinping's birth. Yet in a profound sense, those secrets had already been flowing in his blood. To stand where Yang Xinping was born is to stand at one of the great confluences of human civilizational history: the place where the earliest roots of Daoist philosophy were literally buried in the earth, waiting for the right moment to re-emerge — through archaeology, and through the mind of a man who would spend a lifetime carrying this ancient wisdom into conversation with modern science. -/- The Han River, China's longest inland tributary, winds through the Chu heartland, nurturing a distinctive civilizational model. In his later philosophical research, Yang Xinping systematically demonstrates the core characteristics of this civilization: low entropy, self-organization, and adaptive harmony. The water network, valley, and wetland composite ecosystem of the Jingchu region formed a highly dynamic yet self-balancing natural order — the very empirical foundation of Laozi's philosophy of Dao Chong. Three generations of Chu kings — King Wen, King Cheng, and King Zhuang — along with the great hydraulic engineer Sun Shu'ao, practiced a governance model of wu wei (non-forcing action) on this land. They governed without coercion, without centralization, without disturbing the natural order — instead harmonizing with rivers, respecting terrain, and guiding conditions rather than commanding them. This governance model is both the historical source of Laozi's philosophy and a crucial archetype of Yang Xinping's Natural Civilization theory. In Yang Xinping's philosophical framework, his birthplace is not a geographical accident but a civilizational inevitability. He argues in his research that the concept of 'chong' — a key term in the Dao De Jing — originates from the ecological environment of valleys and forests on the western bank of the Han River near Yingdu, characterized by flood regulation, buffering, and circulation forming a low-entropy stable system. This was precisely the air he breathed as a child, the land he walked, the mountains and rivers he witnessed. (shrink)

Suppose a committee, expert panel, or other group is making judgments on some issues, where these may be not just yes/no-questions, such as whether a defendant is guilty, but also variables with many possible values, such as macroeconomic or meteorological variables or travel directions. Furthermore, there may be interconnections between different issues, as in the case of economic or climate variables. How can the group arrive at “intelligent” collective judgments, based on the group members’ individual judgments? We investigate three challenges (...) raised by this judgment-aggregation problem. First, reasonable methods of aggregation (such as defining the collective judgment for each issue as the average or median judgment) can produce inconsistent collective judgments. Secondly, many methods of aggregation are manipulable by strategic voting. Finally, not all methods of aggregation are conducive to tracking the truth on the issues in question. We prove new impossibility or possibility theorems on all three challenges, identifying what it takes to produce collective judgments in a consistent, non-manipulable, and truth-tracking manner and thereby to achieve collective intelligence through aggregation. Overall, the median method, though imperfect, performs reasonably well. We also note the relevance of our analysis for non-human group decisions. (The manuscript has been accepted for publication in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B and is to appear in 2026.). (shrink)

This translation of Laozi's Dao De Jing (Wang Bi recension, c. 226 CE) emerges from six decades of intellectual formation — from doctoral studies in nuclear safety, Bayesian inference, and artificial intelligence at UCLA, through the pioneering of China's smartphone industry, to the philosophical synthesis of the Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology at Jingchuchong, Hubei Province, China. Three convictions shape every translation decision. First: the Dao De Jing is not a mystical text but a systems-scientific document — describing the generative, self-organizing, negative-feedback (...) structure of reality at every scale from cosmic genesis to political governance. Second: its core concepts have concrete ecological referents, many traceable to the Han River civilization of ancient Chu — the land of this translator's birth, near Guodian Tomb No. 1, where the earliest Dao De Jing manuscript was recovered in 1993. Third: the text's deepest insights converge with the most advanced frameworks of modern science — thermodynamics, Bayesian inference, complex systems theory, cybernetics — because both describe the same reality. Each chapter presents the complete Chinese original (Wang Bi recension), followed by the complete English translation, followed by an interpretation connecting the chapter to the Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology. This sequence — Chinese original → English translation → Lao-Yang interpretation — allows the reader to encounter Laozi's words first, then their translation, then their cosmological significance within the framework developed across Charles X. Yang's PhilArchive corpus. The Chinese text follows Wang Bi (王弼, 226–249 CE) — the most philosophically systematic of the classical recensions. The translation prioritizes structural clarity: every English word is chosen to make the systems-dynamic logic of the original visible to a scientifically literate reader. Key terms: 法 = follows (not models/imitates); 道 = the Milky Way Galaxy; 天 = the Solar System; 地 = the Earth; 人 = Humanity / all living beings; 自然 = Nature / the Cosmic Divine. To translate the Dao De Jing at Jingchuchong — the heartland of the ancient Chu state, on the shores of Xiaoyang Lake — is to complete a 2,500-year conversation. — Charles X. Yang / 杨兴平. (shrink)