Theoretical minimal RNA rings are candidate primordial genes evolved for non‐redundant coding of the genetic code's 22 coding signals (one codon per biogenic amino acid, a start and a stop codon) over the shortest possible length: 29520 22‐nucleotide‐long RNA rings solve this min‐max constraint. Numerous RNA ring properties are reminiscent of natural genes. Here we present analyses showing that all RNA rings lack dinucleotide CG (a mutable, chemically instable dinucleotide coding for Arginine), bearing a resemblance to known CG‐depleted genomes. CG (...) in “incomplete” RNA rings (not coding for all coding signals, with only 3–12 nucleotides) gradually decreases towards CG absence in complete, 22‐nucleotide‐long RNA rings. Presumably, feedback loops during RNA ring growth during evolution (when amino acid assignment fixed the genetic code) assigned Arg to codons lacking CG (AGR) to avoid CG. Hence, as a chemical property of base pairs, CG mutability restructured the genetic code, thereby establishing itself as genetically encoded biological information. (shrink)

This paper concerns periodic solutions of a class of equations that model gene regulatory networks. Unlike the vast majority of previous studies, it is not assumed that all decay rates are identical. To handle this more general situation, we rely on monotonicity properties of these systems. Under an alternative assumption, it is shown that a classical fixed point theorem for monotone, concave operators can be applied to these systems. The required assumption is expressed in geometrical terms as an alignment condition (...) on so-called focal points . As an application, we show the existence and uniqueness of a stable periodic orbit for negative feedback loop systems in dimension 3 or more, and of a unique stable equilibrium point in dimension 2. This extends a theorem of Snoussi, which showed the existence of these orbits only. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has seriously disrupted the individual buying habits along with their consumption patterns. Previous studies indicated that anxiety and depression were related to impulse buying. However, no research has explored the mechanism possibly underlying the association between anxiety, depression, and impulse buying. Based on the regulatory focus theory and the emotion-cognition-behavior loop, this study aimed to examine the impacts of negative emotions on impulse buying and the mediating role of cognitive characteristics during the COVID-19 pandemic. In (...) April 2021, 734 Chinese undergraduates were recruited by cluster sampling and they completed self-report measures of anxiety, depression, intolerance of uncertainty, cognitive flexibility, and impulse buying. Results showed that impulse buying was positively associated with anxiety, depression, and intolerance of uncertainty, while it was negatively associated with cognitive flexibility. Cognitive flexibility fully mediated the effects of anxiety and depression on cognitive facet of impulse buying. Meanwhile, intolerance of uncertainty fully mediated the effects of anxiety and depression on affective facet of impulse buying. Overall, this study shows that different pathways can explain how anxiety and depression exacerbate two aspects of impulse buying, and it highlights the importance of cognitive characteristics for the link between negative emotions and impulse buying. Intervention programs should focus on increasing cognitive flexibility and tolerance to uncertainty of high-risk individuals, so as to strengthen their adaptive purchase behaviors. (shrink)

Cellular circuits have positive and negative feedback loops that allow them to respond properly to noisy external stimuli. It is intriguing that such feedback loops exist in many cases in a particular form of coupled positive and negative feedback loops with different time delays. As a result of our mathematical simulations and investigations into various experimental evidences, we found that such coupled feedback circuits can rapidly turn on a reaction to a proper stimulus, robustly maintain its status, and (...) immediately turn off the reaction when the stimulus disappears. In other words, coupled feedback loops enable cellular systems to produce perfect responses to noisy stimuli with respect to signal duration and amplitude. This suggests that coupled positive and negative feedback loops form essential signal transduction motifs in cellular signaling systems. BioEssays 29: 85–90, 2007. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Theories of consciousness invoke internal quantities without specifying their physical invariance. We treat the unfolding critique as requiring both an observation map and an admissible gauge. A realized sensorimotor loop is modeled as two physically identified sectors with first-order dynamics. Three axioms—real graded structure, sector–channel factorization, and balanced graded reciprocity—force the sector factor to the canonical form iσy . On every nonzero channel spectral fiber, the flow is elliptic and the sector signals stand in quadrature. Relaxing balanced gain and (...) strict off-diagonality yields a real negative-loop family whose oscillatory modes obey a constrained phase–frequency–gain relation and terminate at an exceptional point. Factorization makes modal phase independent of channel spectral value, whereas a simple relative delay produces a linear phase slope. After polar normalization, the closed negative cycle has gauge-invariant Z2 holonomy. These results define a falsifiable geometry of a realized perception–action loop, but not by themselves a sufficient criterion for consciousness. (shrink)

It is often assumed that Kant would accept diverting the trolley in the standard trolley case. The negative element of Kant’s Formula of Humanity (FH), it is said, is not violated by diverting the trolley, since the one is not used as a mere means. Some even consider it possible that diverting the trolley in the loop case—a case in which the one clearly seems to be used as a mere means by diverting the trolley—can be permissible with (...) regard to the negative element of FH, since the one, it is said, is not necessarily used as a means. I will argue that this debate has taken a wrong course in two respects. First, I shall argue that there is no way to divert the trolley in the loop case without infringing on FH. Second, within Kant’s ethics, it is not even permissible to divert the trolley in the standard trolley case. To show this, I will present the argument from the scope of duties. (shrink)

The identification of Smad proteins as molecular components of the transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) signaling cascade has enhanced our understanding of how ligand-mediated activation of TGF-β receptors leads to modulation of target gene transcription. Recent studies have identified a distinct, structurally related class of Smads which inhibits, rather than transduces, TGF-β family signals. The molecular mechanism of action and the exact signaling pathways that are targeted by antagonistic Smads are not completely understood. These proteins appear to participate in autoregulatory (...) class='Hi'>negative feedback loops in which signaling initiated by specific TGF-β family ligands induces the expression of an inhibitory Smad that then functions to modulate the amplitude or duration of signaling. Negative feedback circuits such as these play important roles in fine-tuning the activity of multifunctional signaling molecules during embryonic patterning and in response to pathologic stimuli in adults. BioEssays 21:382–390, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare systems is increasingly hindered by the AI alignment problem. In high-stakes domains such as clinical triage, algorithms frequently reflect and amplify systemic biases. Current alignment methodologies, including Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), attempt to encode subjective human morality through opaque architectural pipelines, which can exacerbate the “black box” dilemma. To address this, this paper proposes the “AI Inversion Model”, a theoretical Proof-of-Concept (PoC) framework utilizing inference-time negative constraints. Rather than attempting (...) to compute elusive positive virtues, the model draws clinical inspiration from the psychopathic spectrum - specifically extreme utilitarianism - to define strict “anti-moral” boundaries. These boundaries are operationalized through a “Genesis” anchor system, which autonomously and recursively calibrates negative anchors by synthesizing supreme legal precedents and ethical literature. Beyond static distance, the model evaluates the mathematical kinematics of AI outputs - including vector angles and directional trajectories - to quantify algorithmic “Good Faith”. A step-by-step trace of complex surgical simulations illustrates how the filter identifies utilitarian biases and enforces a human-in-the-loop protocol when variance exceeds a heuristic 10% threshold. While not a definitive resolution to the black-box problem, this model offers a targeted, auditable baseline of “functional compassion” to mitigate systemic bias in medical AI governance. (shrink)

Kinetochores can form and be maintained on DNA sequences that are normally non‐centromeric. The existence of these so‐called neo‐centromeres has posed the problem as to the nature of the epigenetic mechanisms that maintain the centromere. Here we highlight results that indicate that the amount of CENP‐A at human centromeres is tightly regulated. It is also known that kinetochore assembly requires sister chromatid cohesion at mitosis. We therefore suggest that separation or stretching between the sister chromatids at metaphase reciprocally determines the (...) amount of centromere assembly in the subsequent interphase. This reciprocal relationship forms the basis of a negative feedback loop that could precisely control the amount of CENP‐A and faithfully maintain the presence of a kinetochore over many cell divisions. We describe how the feedback loop would work, propose how it could be tested experimentally and suggest possible components of its mechanism. (shrink)

Passive Brain-Computer interfaces (pBCIs) are a human-computer communication tool where the computer can detect from neurophysiological signals the current mental or emotional state of the user. The system can then adjust itself to guide the user towards a desired state. One challenge facing developers of pBCIs is that the system's parameters are generally set at the onset of the interaction and remain stable throughout, not adapting to potential changes over time such as fatigue. The goal of this paper is to (...) investigate the improvement of pBCIs with settings adjusted according to the information provided by a second neurophysiological signal. With the use of a second signal, making the system a hybrid pBCI, those parameters can be continuously adjusted with dynamic thresholding to respond to variations such as fatigue or learning. In this experiment, we hypothesize that the adaptive system with dynamic thresholding will improve perceived game experience and objective game performance compared to two other conditions: an adaptive system with single primary signal biocybernetic loop and a control non-adaptive game. A within-subject experiment was conducted with 16 participants using three versions of the game Tetris. Each participant plays 15 minutes of Tetris under three experimental conditions. The control condition is the traditional game of Tetris with a progressive increase in speed. The second condition is a cognitive load only biocybernetic loop with the parameters presented in Ewing et al. (2016). The third condition is our proposed biocybernetic loop using dynamic threshold selection. Electroencephalography was used as the primary signal and automatic facial expression analysis as the secondary signal. Our results show that, contrary to our expectations, the adaptive systems did not improve the participants' experience as participants had more negative affect from the BCI conditions than in the control condition. We endeavored to develop a system that improved upon the authentic version of the Tetris game, however, our proposed adaptive system neither improved players’ perceived experience, nor their objective performance. Nevertheless, this experience can inform developers of hybrid passive BCIs on a novel way to employ various neurophysiological features simultaneously. (shrink)

* Solar Neutrinos are Up - My column about recent results in neutrino physics Analog - September-1992 ] (no neutrino counts at SAGE and negative mass-squared data suggesting that the e-neutrino may be a tachyon) prompted more reader response than any other column in recent memory. Two months after I wrote it, a new result from GALLEX, the European gallium neutrino-detection experiment housed in the Grand Sasso underground laboratory in Italy, was announced. GALLEX uses the same technique as the (...) SAGE neutrino experiment described in my September column: many million dollars worth of elemental gallium (element 31) is purified and placed in underground tanks where solar neutrinos transmute stable gallium 71 to radioactive germanium 71 (half life 11.4 days). A chemical process separates the new radioactive germanium atoms from the bulk gallium and transports them to a sensitive detector where their decays are counted. (shrink)

Objective Manic and depressive phases of bipolar disorder (BD) show opposite psychomotor symptoms. Neuronally, these may depend on altered relationships between sensorimotor network (SMN) and subcortical structures. The study aimed to investigate the functional relationships of SMN with substantia nigra (SN) and raphe nuclei (RN) via subcortical-cortical loops, and their alteration in bipolar mania and depression, as characterized by psychomotor excitation and inhibition. -/- Method In this resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study on healthy (n = 67) and BD (...) patients (n = 100), (1) functional connectivity (FC) between thalamus and SMN was calculated and correlated with FC from SN or RN to basal ganglia (BG)/thalamus in healthy; (2) using an a-priori-driven approach, thalamus-SMN FC, SN-BG/thalamus FC, and RN-BG/thalamus FC were compared between healthy and BD, focusing on manic (n = 34) and inhibited depressed (n = 21) patients. -/- Results (1) In healthy, the thalamus-SMN FC showed a quadratic correlation with SN-BG/thalamus FC and a linear negative correlation with RN-BG/thalamus FC. Accordingly, the SN-related FC appears to enable the thalamus-SMN coupling, while the RN-related FC affects it favoring anti-correlation. (2) In BD, mania showed an increase in thalamus-SMN FC toward positive values (ie, thalamus-SMN abnormal coupling) paralleled by reduction of RN-BG/thalamus FC. By contrast, inhibited depression showed a decrease in thalamus-SMN FC toward around-zero values (ie, thalamus-SMN disconnection) paralleled by reduction of SN-BG/thalamus FC (and RN-BG/thalamus FC). The results were replicated in independent HC and BD datasets. -/- Conclusions These findings suggest an abnormal relationship of SMN with neurotransmitters-related areas via subcortical-cortical loops in mania and inhibited depression, finally resulting in psychomotor alterations. (shrink)

A sociological study of science is not very recent and has never been seen as particularly problematic since science, and especially modern science, constitutes an impressive and extremely ramified "social system" of activities, institutions, relations and interferences with other social systems. Less favourable, however, has been the consideration of a more recent trend in the philosophy of science known as the "sociological" philosophy of science, whose most debatable point consists in directly challenging the traditional epistemology of science and, in particular, (...) in stripping scientific knowledge of its most appreciated characteristics of objectivity and rigour. A vicious circle seems to lie at the root of this sociological epistemology because, on the one hand, criticism of the traditional concept of scientific knowledge is developed by relying upon sociology, but this, on the other hand is reasonable only if sociology is credited with the status of a reliable instrument, that is, because it has been recognized as a science through an epistemological debate. In this paper it is shown that not all circles are vicious: in particular, feedback loops, positive and negative, are normally considered in cybernetic models of various processes. Negative feedback loops are fundamental in self-regulating processes and have already occurred from time to time in readjusting the concept of science itself. Therefore, a sociological epistemology of science can contribute to a more careful analysis of the real meaning and purport of the cognitive aspect of science, provided that it is not pushed to the self-defeating extreme of challenging the legitimacy of considering objectivity and rigour as the characteristic features of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

《人造神时代：民主、自由、平等的幻象》 —基于“老-杨创世纪宇宙观”的文明批判宣言 -/- The Age of Artificial Gods: The Illusion of Democracy, Freedom, and Equality -/- 杨兴平 Charles X. Yang -/- 序言｜当人类开始膜拜自己 -/- 当星系仍在遵循引力运行， 当恒星仍在守护能量边界， 当生态仍在维持负反馈循环， -/- 人类却开始—— 崇拜自身的欲望。 -/- 他们不再仰望银河，而是仰望屏幕； 不再敬畏自然，而是敬畏舆论。 -/- 于是， 三个新神被铸造出来：民主，自由，平等。 -/- 不是作为制度工具， 而是作为终极信仰。 -/- Preface | When Humanity Began to Worship Itself -/- While galaxies still follow gravity, While stars still guard energy boundaries, While ecosystems still maintain negative feedback loops, -/- Humanity began— to worship its own desires. -/- No longer gazing at the (...) Milky Way, but at screens; No longer revering nature, but public opinion. -/- Thus, three new gods were forged: -/- Democracy, Freedom, Equality. -/- Not as institutional tools, but as ultimate beliefs. (shrink)

The deepest crises in the history of human thought are rarely caused by a shortage of knowledge. They are caused by the forgetting of knowledge's limits. This is precisely the crisis that twenty-first century economics is living through. We possess the most refined analytical instruments in human intellectual history: the mathematical completeness of Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium theory, the formalization of strategic interaction through game theory, the systematic integration of irrational behavior by behavioral economics, and the pattern-extraction capacity of machine learning (...) applied to vast datasets. And yet, in this very era of theoretical abundance, systemic economic crises erupt with unprecedented frequency and ferocity, ecological boundaries are breached at irreversible speed, and algorithmic capitalism has accelerated the positive feedback loops of desire and capital to a velocity that human cognition can no longer track. Confronted with this paradox, the standard response of the economics profession is further refinement: more complex models, richer data, more powerful algorithms. This book argues that this response direction is fundamentally mistaken. When a building's foundation cracks, elaborately decorating the upper floors does nothing to prevent collapse. When the epistemological foundation of a theoretical system contains a structural defect, accumulating ever more refined knowledge upon it only leads users more efficiently toward the wrong destination. This book's central thesis is that the crisis of modern economics is, at its core, an epistemological crisis. Smith, Hayek, Marx, and Keynes -- the four intellectual giants who laid the foundations of modern economics -- share, despite their profound disagreements on policy and method, one unexamined epistemological premise: that human economic knowledge can grow and be applied without limit, regardless of the natural physical boundaries within which all economic activity is embedded. The error here lies not in any specific proposition but in the systematic forgetting of the boundaries of knowledge itself -- the forgetting of how the desire layer pollutes the truth of information, how the physical boundary layer hard-limits the validity of knowledge, and how algorithmic speed produces a structural rupture in the epistemological cycle. It is precisely these three layers of forgetting that ensure: the more refined the theory, the more precise the tools, and yet the more chaotic the reality. This is not historical coincidence. It is the inevitable consequence of an epistemological illusion: a theoretical system built on a false premise, the more perfect it becomes, the more deeply it locks its users into an epistemological structure disconnected from reality. This book chooses philosophy of science as its critical methodological instrument because philosophy of science asks exactly the questions that tend to be taken for granted -- questions about the epistemological premises themselves. Kuhn's theory of paradigm revolution reminds us that when a research program accumulates enough anomalies that its internal adaptive mechanisms can no longer absorb them, scientific revolution becomes historically inevitable. Popper's falsifiability criterion reveals that a theoretical system which responds to anomalies by expanding its protective belt while its hard core remains untouched has degenerated from science into an epistemologically closed system. Lakatos's research program methodology further clarifies that scientific progress does not occur through mere critique but through the historical replacement of a degenerating program by a competing program with greater explanatory power. From this methodological standpoint, this book does not rest content with deconstructing existing paradigms. It proposes a constructive alternative: Natural Cybernetic Economics Theory (NCET). This theory takes the four-layer structure of desire, capital, information, and boundary as its analytical framework. It establishes the physical boundary layer as the a priori condition for the validity of all economic knowledge. It replaces the global optimum illusion of the omniscient epistemology with the negative feedback mechanism of cybernetics. And it replaces efficiency maximization with system robustness as economics' core value orientation. NCET's epistemological foundations are rooted simultaneously in two of the deepest philosophical traditions. In the Western tradition, Wiener's cybernetics and Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures provide the scientific language for the regulation of complex systems. In the Chinese tradition, the Daoist cosmology of Dao Follows Nature and the epistemology of Knowing the Constant is Enlightenment provide the classical wisdom of boundary reverence and epistemic humility. Twenty-five centuries ago, on land not far from where this book was written at Jingchuchong, Laozi described in the most economical language the destination of this still-unfinished epistemological revolution. To translate that destination into an operable epistemological framework for the age of complex systems science and artificial intelligence is this book's deepest theoretical aspiration. This book was written on the shores of Xiaoyang Lake. The lake's rise and fall follows the rhythms of nature, unmoved by human epistemological illusions. The reeds grow nested within the boundaries of the seasons, achieving through non-action what cybernetics would call the most perfect negative feedback regulation. Natural systems never forget their boundaries. Only human epistemology commits this error -- and pays for it at the level of civilization. Economics needs a Copernican revolution in epistemology. This book is a serious theoretical attempt at that revolution, and an invitation from the lakeside: an invitation to readers to set aside their epistemological dependence on existing paradigms, and to ask again the fundamental question that has been too long forgotten -- where are the limits of knowledge, within which civilization might endure? (shrink)

This paper systematically proposes the concept of “Natural Control Theory,” scientifically formalizing the generative and regulatory philosophy of the Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology and constructing a theoretical framework for civilization governance and crisis resolution. The paper points out that the cosmic order is maintained in a stable state through structural self-organization, energy conservation, negative feedback loops, and entropy constraints, and that the long-term stability of civilization also relies on governance models embedded within natural control structures. Human-centered control and technologically intensified (...) control civilizations, over the long term, violate natural control laws, resulting in positive feedback accumulation, systemic collapse, and civilizational crises. This study proposes the scientific principles of a naturally controlled civilization: structure precedence, energy boundaries, negative feedback priority, and entropy constraints, and operationalizes them within social sciences and institutional design. Through negative-feedback governance structures, energy-embedded economic models, automatic correction mechanisms, self-organizing incentives, and ecosystem-based governance, civilization can transition from artificial control to natural control. The paper further proposes a three-stage evolutionary model of civilization—human-centered control, technology-intensified control, and natural-embedded civilization—and analyzes the characteristics of the third stage in detail, including distributed networks, ecological-economic embedding, long-cycle decision-making, and adaptive institutions. Finally, the paper summarizes the theoretical innovations of Natural Control Theory: the integration of philosophy and cybernetics, models of civilizational crises, negative-feedback governance structures, and systematized civilizational transition pathways, providing a scientific-philosophical foundation for modern civilization governance, social institutional design, and sustainable development. (shrink)

Chinese civilization stands as a unique case in world history due to its continuity and stability over several millennia. From the perspectives of scientific philosophy and systems science, this paper argues that civilizational longevity is not accidental, but depends on whether a civilization embeds what may be called a “natural civilization gene” within its internal structure. Through cross-civilizational comparison, this study examines the rise and decline patterns of Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greco-Roman civilization, and modern Western industrial civilization. The analysis reveals (...) that most civilizations collapsed due to power concentration, the pursuit of extreme expansion, the absence of endogenous negative feedback mechanisms, and weak ecological coupling—factors that led to high-entropy accumulation and systemic breakdown. Chinese civilization has maintained long-term stability through three core structural genes. First, endogenous negative feedback mechanisms constrained power, desire, and technological expansion. Second, Chinese civilization did not pursue civilizational maximization, but instead permitted cyclical contraction and local adjustment. Third, the structural isomorphism between humans and nature—expressed in the principle of the unity of Heaven and humanity—functioned as the civilization’s operating system. From a systems-science perspective, these elements form a low-entropy structure that achieves long-term resilience through redundancy, elasticity, and slow-variable regulation. Under the super-positive feedback loops of technology, capital, and power, modern global civilization faces severe high-entropy risks. This paper argues that the principles of natural civilization are not anti-technology; rather, they represent a systems-level upgrade path for modern civilization, with direct implications for artificial intelligence, energy systems, economic design, and governance. The central conclusion is that the ultimate divide among civilizations is neither East versus West nor ancient versus modern, but whether a civilization aligns with the operating logic of natural systems. Any civilization incapable of self-restraint will ultimately be restrained by nature. This study provides a systemic theoretical framework for understanding civilizational longevity and sustainable governance in the modern era. (shrink)

This paper attempts to reinterpret the century-long intellectual debate between Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes, arguing that their fundamental disagreement is not merely a choice between “market versus state” or “freedom versus intervention,” but rather reflects two different understandings of how civilization itself operates. -/- Hayek emphasizes dispersed knowledge, spontaneous order, and long-term evolutionary dynamics. He argues that market systems can generate natural order through decentralized competition and information exchange without central design. Keynes, by contrast, emphasizes aggregate demand, systemic (...) stagnation, and the necessity of state intervention. He argues that when markets fall into panic and paralysis, external corrective forces are required to restore stability. -/- Both thinkers identify essential dimensions of civilization—evolution and stability—but neither adequately explains why both market systems and state systems repeatedly drift toward instability, crisis, and collapse. -/- This paper argues that the fundamental cause does not lie in institutional design itself, but in the underlying structure of human desire. Human aspirations for power, wealth, fame, and control exhibit an inherently unbounded expansion tendency, forming a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. Unregulated markets can be captured by such desires, evolving into monopolies, capital concentration, wealth polarization, and ecological overexploitation. State intervention can likewise be captured, evolving into power expansion, debt accumulation, perpetual stimulus policies, and systemic overreach. Thus, modern economic crises, ecological crises, technological risks, and global governance failures are not isolated phenomena, but different manifestations of the same structural condition: unlimited desire exceeding natural boundaries. -/- To address this, the paper introduces the framework of “Natural Cybernetics” as a post-classical paradigm beyond traditional economics. Natural Cybernetics holds that all systems—from the universe, galaxies, solar systems, and Earth to life, civilization, and economy—are governed by universal principles of self-organization, feedback regulation, and negative feedback stabilization. -/- Based on the “Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology,” the paper proposes two complementary structural chains. The first is the generative chain of “Dao gives rise to One, One to Two, Two to Three, Three to All Things,” describing the emergence of civilization from galaxy to solar system, Earth, Moon, and finally to life and economy. The second is the constraint chain of “Humans follow Earth, Earth follows Heaven, Heaven follows Dao, Dao follows Nature,” meaning that human systems must obey planetary boundaries, Earth must obey solar cycles, the solar system must obey galactic order, and the galaxy ultimately conforms to universal natural law. -/- Within this framework, Hayek represents evolution and Keynes represents stability, while Natural Cybernetics provides the higher-order boundary that constrains both. Civilization governance, therefore, is not a simple choice between market and state, but the simultaneous embedding of both within natural negative feedback constraints. The paper further introduces concepts such as Artificial Wisdom, Universal Operating System (Universal OS), Natural Value Index, and Natural Currency, aiming to establish a governance paradigm that replaces power-centered logic with boundary-centered logic. Its core principle is that wealth must correspond to real labor, energy, and ecological contribution; desire must bear its true cost; and all economic and political actions must remain within natural feedback constraints. -/- The paper concludes that a truly mature civilization is not defined by infinite growth, infinite control, or infinite expansion, but by the ability to recognize boundaries, regulate desire, and sustain long-term evolution within finite planetary and cosmic constraints. The concept of “unity of heaven and humanity” is therefore not merely a philosophical ideal, but a mature civilizational state achieved when humanity reintegrates into natural order after systemic crises. -/- . (shrink)

本文综合杨兴平（Charles X. Yang）发表于PhilArchive的多篇学术论文，系统提炼其关于「无为而治」的核心论点。通过老-杨创世纪宇宙观（Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology）框架，作者将老子「无为而治」重新评释为一套科学的负反馈治理模型，以自然控制论为基础，涵盖哲学基础、宇宙科学依据、历史实证验证、现代应用四个维度。本文认为，「无为而治」不是消极不作为 ，而是以结构优先、最小干预、反馈闭环为核心的复杂系统治理科学，为人类面临的现代文明危机提供了根本性处方。 This paper synthesizes Charles X. Yang's corpus of PhilArchive publications, systematically distilling his core arguments on Wu Wei Governance. Through the Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology framework, the author reinterprets Laozi's wu wei as a scientifically grounded negative-feedback governance model rooted in Natural Cybernetics, spanning four dimensions: philosophical foundations, cosmological-scientific basis, historical-empirical validation, and modern applications. The paper argues that Wu Wei Governance is not passive inaction but a complex systems science of governance prioritizing structural primacy, (...) minimal intervention, and feedback loops - offering a fundamental prescription for humanity's modern civilizational crisis. (shrink)

Feedback loops have been identified in a variety of regulatory systems and organisms. While feedback loops of the same type (negative or positive) tend to have properties in common, they can play distinctively diverse roles in different regulatory systems, where they can affect virulence in a pathogenic bacterium, maturation patterns of vertebrate oocytes and transitions through cell cycle phases in eukaryotic cells. This review focuses on the properties and functions of positive feedback in biological systems, including bistability, hysteresis and (...) activation surges. BioEssays 30:542–555, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This commentary proposes that “cognitive control” is neither componential nor emergent, but a fundamental feature of behavior. The term “control” requires an operational definition. This is best provided by the negative feedback loop that utilizes behavior to control perception; it does not control behavior per se. In order to model complex cognitive control, Perceptual Control Theory proposes that loops are organized into a dissociable hierarchical network (PCT; Powers, Clark, & McFarland, 1960; Powers, 1973a, 2008). In this way, behavior (...) is dynamically adaptive to environmental disturbances, rather than being formed by, or superimposed upon, learned associations between stimulus and response. (shrink)

Abstract For two and a half millennia, the debate over human nature has been trapped inside a moral question: is human nature fundamentally good, or fundamentally evil? Mencius said it was good; Xunzi said it was evil; Hobbes said man is a wolf to man; Rousseau said civilization corrupted an original innocence. Each tradition has held its ground, yet none has been able to explain why nearly every civilization repeatedly generates greed, war, ecological destruction, tyranny, corruption, academic dogma, and spiritual (...) emptiness. This book proposes that human nature is neither good nor evil, but a motivational system governed by natural cybernetics — a system whose moral coloring depends entirely on whether it operates under negative-feedback constraint or under runaway positive- feedback amplification. This book proposes a core theorem, serving as the single mathematical center unifying all of its formal models: an agent's behavioral state, H, is a function of the ratio between the positive feedback it is subject to and the negative feedback constraining it — H = f(PF/NF), operationalized as H ≈ DAF/CCF. At the scale of the individual, this theorem takes the specific form of Sage Entropy; at the scale of civilization, it takes the specific form of the Civilizational Stability Function, Λ. These are two instances of one and the same core theorem across different scales, not independent constructions. This core theorem is an organizing theorem internal to the theory, intended to unify the formal models at each scale — it is not a physical law independent of this framework that could be tested directly, out of context. Within this framework, the book distinguishes three primary desires — wealth, fame, and power — from three meta-control mechanisms — the desire for certainty, the desire for belonging, and the desire for immortality. The latter are not additional desires but mechanisms that protect the existing desire-loops from being corrected by negative feedback, explaining why self-knowledge alone is not sufficient for self-governance. The book situates human nature within a broader intellectual lineage: it engages classical theories of human nature — Mencius, Xunzi, Hobbes — as well as modern thought after Darwin — Nietzsche, Freud, Hayek, Kahneman, Haidt, Harari — while also building connections to evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and complex-systems science, from Ashby to Prigogine. Laozi's idea of contentment is read as anticipating an important intuition consistent with negative-feedback regulation; on this basis, the Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology (LYGC) is introduced as the cosmological grounding of natural cybernetics, providing the core theorem with cosmological coordinates. The book strictly follows a five-stage methodology — observation, explanation, prediction, engineering, ethics — in order to answer the challenge of the naturalistic fallacy, and it proposes a number of falsifiable theoretical predictions while candidly stating the boundary conditions under which the theory could fail. The book answers six philosophical objections, the most fundamental of which is the Governor's Paradox. The book does not claim to dissolve this paradox; instead it proposes structural negative- feedback design, decentralized governance, and the transition to Artificial Wisdom (AW) as four layers of mitigation, while candidly acknowledging the residual risk that remains. Conclusion: human nature has no essential goodness or evil — only feedback states. Human nature is the operating system evolution left to civilization; civilization is its amplifier; natural constraint is its regulator; and Natural Civilization is the only path by which this system can achieve lasting stability. (shrink)

This book advances the Lao–Yang Genesis Cosmology (LYGC), arguing that the two thirteen-character propositions of the Daodejing—the Generation Chain (“Dao generates One; One generates Two; Two generates Three; Three generates the myriad things”) and the Following Chain (“Human follows Earth; Earth follows Heaven; Heaven follows Dao; Dao follows its own nature”), twenty-six characters in all—together constitute a complete answer to humanity’s three ultimate questions: where we come from (cosmology), where we are going (worldview), and why we live (life-view). The work (...) has four parts. Part I decodes the Generation Chain: Dao is the Milky Way, One the Sun, Two the Earth, Three the Moon; the Sun–Earth–Moon (SEM) ternary system jointly bears life and civilization. All six links share a single mechanism—the self-organization of dissipative structures—yielding a scientific restatement of “Dao generates the myriad things,” demarcated from both creationism and pantheism. Part II decodes the Following Chain: it argues that fa must be construed as “follows,” not “imitates/emulates,” so that humanity is a law-abiding node within a nested system. It analyzes the anti-Dao path (the Three-Level Greedy Positive-Feedback Model, 3L-GFM, and the thermodynamic collapse of the Greedy Empire) and the pro-Dao path (Natural Cybernetics, negative feedback, resilience, circular metabolism), and introduces the Civilization Stability Function Λ = ΔCCF/(ρᵣ·DAF) and Sage Entropy dS/dt = ρᵣ·DAF/ΔCCF, with the critical value Λ = 1 marking the fork between persistence and collapse—thereby restating “Dao follows nature” as a normative, not fatalistic, thesis: there are two destinations, and the choice is ours. Part III reconstructs “Heaven–Human Union.” It first restores the concept’s source, reclaiming it from the Confucian correlative (Dong Zhongshu), moralizing (Zhang Zai’s “establishing the mind for Heaven and Earth”), and metaphysical (modern New Confucian) appropriations, and returning it to the naturalistic union of Zhuangzi and Huang–Lao—whose content simply is “Dao follows nature”—now grounded empirically. Through a threefold resolution (is/ought, process/result, cybernetic coupling) it dissolves the apparent tension between the hierarchy of “Human follows Earth” and the fusion of “Heaven–Human Union,” and defines Union formally as the complete coupling of the human node with the negative-feedback loops of every nested level—a coupling that is de-centered, non-ethicized, and verifiable. It then reconstructs the highest good and happiness (a Natural Eudaimonia of wu-wei, contentment, and sagely governance) and unfolds a three-tier negative-entropy synergy of meaning—individual, civilizational, cosmic—moving from existentialist nihilism to cosmological settlement. Part IV presents the formal programme and cross- paradigm dialogue: it systematically derives Sage Entropy, Λ, the Wu-Wei Vector WWV = ∇Λ, and the Natural Civilization Index (NCI); states four testable propositions with their data sources and falsification conditions; and engages Descartes, Darwin, Kant, and Einstein, as well as Hansen, Odum, Ayres, and the Stockholm school—positioning LYGC as a “fourth de-centering revolution” after Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein. Beginning in an intuition on the bank of the Han River and ending in a homecoming under the same night sky, the book contends that what Laozi saw by the Han River twenty-five centuries ago is one and the same picture that modern cosmology, dissipative-structure theory, and cybernetics have independently reached. (shrink)

Greedy desire is the core driver of human civilizational crisis, yet no unified dynamic model spanning the neural, social, and thermodynamic levels has been developed. This paper employs System Dynamics as its methodological framework, integrating evolutionary neuroscience, complex systems theory, and thermodynamics to construct a Three-Level Greedy Positive-Feedback Model (3L-GFM). At the neural level, the model captures the dual positive-feedback structure of the dopaminergic reward circuit and the amygdala anxiety system, along with the negative-feedback intervention mechanism mediated by mindfulness (...) cultivation through the prefrontal cortex. At the social level, the model describes the mutual nesting of three key positive-feedback loops: the wealth-power-policy triangle, the information monopoly–cognitive control loop, and the military-industrial complex loop. At the thermodynamic level, the model takes entropy increase rate as its core variable, constructing a physical description of the civilizational cancer process driven by greedy desire. The three levels are coupled through the Desire Amplification Factor (DAF) and the Cosmic Constraint Function (CCF). Simulation analysis reveals three critical bifurcation points — the Neural Tipping Point (NTP), the Social Tipping Point (STP), and the Thermodynamic Tipping Point (TTP) — before which the system retains self-repair capacity and after which positive feedback dominates and the system trends toward irreversible collapse. Simulations of Natural Cybernetics intervention strategies demonstrate that implementing intergenerational constraint institutionalization, ecological red-line anchoring, and entropy responsibility accounting before tipping points can guide the system toward a low-entropy stable state. 贪婪欲望是人类文明危机的核心驱动力，但迄今缺乏一个跨越神经、社会与热力学三个层次的统一动力学模型。本文以系统动力学（System Dynamics）为方法论框架，整合进化神经科学、复杂系统理论与热力学，构建贪婪欲望的三层次正反馈模型（3L-GFM：Three-Level Greedy Positive-Feedback Model）。在神经层次，模型捕捉多巴胺奖励回路与杏仁核焦虑系统的双重正反馈结构，以及正念修炼通过前额叶皮层介导的负反馈干预机制；在社会层次，模型描述财富-权力-政策三角、信息垄断-认知控制与军工复合 体三条关键正反馈回路的相互嵌套；在热力学层次，模型以熵增速率为核心变量，建立贪婪欲望驱动的文明癌症过程的物理描述。三个层次通过「欲望放大系数」（DAF：Desire Amplification Factor）和「宇宙约束函数」（CCF：Cosmic Constraint Function）实现耦合。仿真分析揭示：文明系统存在三个关键分叉点——神经临界点（NTP）、社会临界点（STP）和热力学临界点（TTP）——在此之前系统具有自我修复能力，在此之后正反馈主导，系统趋向 不可逆崩溃。自然控制论干预策略的仿真表明，在临界点之前实施代际约束制度化、生态红线锚定和熵责任核算，可将系统导向低熵稳态。 . (shrink)

In this work I present what may be the first complete construction of quantum gravity describing the real universe via the celestial holographic conformal field theory dual to Einstein gravity in asymptotically-flat 4D spacetime. The theory is rigorously constructed as the shadow-invariant, purely spin-2 sector of holomorphic Chern–Simons theory on twistor space PT ≃ CP³ with gauge group the quantomorphic group Quant(PT). Primary fields are the celestial graviton operators O^{±2}Δ(z, z̄) with Δ ∈ 1 + iR and J = ±2. (...) Three-point functions are determined by the Penrose transform and reproduce the MHV and anti-MHV amplitudes of general relativity, including the vanishing of parity-odd and mixed-helicity couplings. Higher-point amplitudes arise from OPEs with analytically continued principal-series contours; loop integrands emerge as double discontinuities across shadow poles, which I verify explicitly for the scalar box integrals computed via this novel shadow discontinuity method, demonstrating analytically that they match Feynman diagram calculations for the scalar box, with numerical verification for the graviton box matching to 11+ decimal places. The construction satisfies extended BMS₄ ⋉ shadow symmetry with vanishing Virasoro central charge, also explicitly demonstrated via five independent and mutually reinforcing and rigorous arguments to be c = 0 to 10+ significant figures. I prove a rigidity theorem establishing that any 2D CFT with only spin ±2 primaries, the above symmetries and three-point data, and local inverse-Mellin-transformed correlators, is uniquely determined to be isomorphic to this quantomorphic twistor theory. Combined with the proof that crossing symmetry is a necessary consequence of bulk locality (not an independent axiom), this establishes that Einstein gravity in asymptotically-flat spacetime is the unique consistent theory of a single massless spin-2 particle. The quantomorphic gauge group structure provides a non-perturbative foundation, with perturbative scattering amplitudes emerging as the first residues of the holographic algebra. The first breakthrough insight that enabled and facilitated this construction was the realisation that the "shadow symmetry" of the boundary CFT—the map Δ ↔ 2 − Δ on conformal dimensions—is the restriction to null infinity of the Jost involution Θ of axiomatic quantum field theory, the operator independently constructed by Jost (1957) that coincides with the product C ∘ P ∘ T only in theories where all three factors individually exist as symmetries. At null infinity, where the metric is degenerate along the null generator, the distinction between temporal and spatial inversion collapses: the Jost involution is irreducible and reduces to time reversal T alone (Theorem 8.1). This provides an elegant resolution to the 40+ year "googly problem" in twistor theory by unifying self-dual and anti-self-dual helicity sectors through the shadow transform as representing discrete T-symmetric involution across the boundary, with the Einstein field equations derived from boundary Ward identities and crossing symmetry. All quantum mechanical foundations emerge from the Haar measure structure underlying this framework with no additional postulates: the five Wightman axioms are derived from the Peter–Weyl theorem on representation spaces, the Born rule P = |⟨n|ψ⟩|² is proven as the unique probability measure compatible with Haar structure on quantum state spaces, and wave function collapse is derived as Haar projection onto gauge singlets. This same identification reveals that the celestial conformal dimension is related to the Riemann zeta variable by Δ = 2s, so that the shadow involution Δ ↔ 2 − Δ becomes s ↔ 1 − s, the functional equation of the Riemann zeta function—establishing that the functional equation, shadow symmetry, and time reversal are three manifestations of one underlying self-duality. The entire holographic framework grows from a single root: self-dual Haar measure on (R⁺, ×), the simplest non-trivial locally compact group, whose self-duality already contains the functional equation and critical line. Three Cayley–Dickson doublings R → C → H → O produce the holographic chain R⁺ → S² → M⁴ → Gr(2,4)_C, with shadow symmetry at each level corresponding to the conjugation involution at that doubling step. The Grassmannian Gr(2,4) is the canopy of this holographic tree. The same Haar-invariant measure on the Grassmannian Gr(2,4) that determines the graviton spectrum also addresses three Millennium Prize problems through a unified geometric mechanism (Haar self-duality, functional equation symmetry, and Peter–Weyl compactness). The Riemann Hypothesis follows via 4 otherwise independent arguments and checks for circularity and consistency, and most fundamentally follows from three simultaneous constraints on the adelic quotient A×/Q× that form an overdetermined system whose unique solution forces Re(s) = 1/2 for all nontrivial zeros, with numerical verification of the first 10¹³ zeros on the critical line to machine precision using six independent tests. The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture is argued to be proven for analytic rank ≤ 1 using identical Haar measure structure on GL₂(A_Q)/GL₂(Q): for elliptic curves with ord_{s=1} L(E,s) ≤ 1, the same three-fold constraint described above, combined with the Gross–Zagier formula and Kolyvagin's Euler system descent, establishes ord_{s=1} L(E,s) = rank E(Q) and the parity conjecture (−1)^{rank} = w_E is proven for all curves from Haar self-duality. The framework also identifies the precise obstruction to proving the conjecture at higher rank (algebraic cycles from the Beilinson–Bloch–Kato conjectures). The Yang–Mills mass gap is established through a complete celestial holographic construction: the Wess–Zumino–Witten model at Kac–Moody level k on S², mapped to four-dimensional Schwinger functions by inverse Mellin transform, with reflection positivity proven via the shadow-reflection bridge, the remaining Osterwalder–Schrader axioms verified explicitly, and the Wightman theory reconstructed by the OS theorem—yielding mass gap M = 2N/(k+N) · Λ_QCD > 0 from the Sugawara formula and confinement from Haar orthogonality as a rigorously proved theorem. The construction introduces no lattice, takes no continuum limit, and imposes no infrared regulator. Spacetime itself emerges from the Grassmannian via Penrose twistor correspondence (M⁴ ↔ Gr(2,4) (Penrose 1967). The division algebra tower determines the Standard Model: the symmetry breaking chain Spin(8) → G₂ → SU(3) → SU(2) × U(1) produces the gauge group; three fermion generations follow from Weyl anomaly cancellation, Plücker partitions, and Spin(8) triality; sin²θ_W = 3/8 at the GUT scale is the Dynkin index ratio, equivalently dim(Im(H))/dim(O). Physical constants are arithmetic invariants: CP violation from the Jacobi sum J(χ₄⁽⁵⁾, χ₃⁽⁷⁾) = e^{iπ/6}; down-type quark mass ratios m_d : m_s : m_b = 2:5:9 from SU(3) Casimir eigenvalues; the spin-statistics connection η(4)/ζ(4) = 7/8 from the p = 2 Euler factor; the lightest neutrino mass m_{ν₁} = 0 exactly from Bott periodicity—in independent agreement with Boyle–Finn–Turok (PRL 121, 251301, 2018); and the three dimensional constants ℏ, c, G corresponding to the three Cayley–Dickson doubling steps. Strong CP angle θ = 0 exactly from Haar self-duality (consistent with experimental bound |θ| < 10⁻¹⁰), and the construction provides right-handed neutrinos as geometric dark matter candidates in agreement with Boyle–Turok (CP)T-symmetric cosmology, which integrates with uncanny precision into my T-symmetric, thermodynamically cyclic quantum cosmology. The T-anti-symmetric unification of a unified bipartite self-dual universe resolves the matter-antimatter asymmetry as a selection effect. Total baryon number B_total = 0 with embedded observers observing identical physics on either side due to being thermodynamic in nature, naturally aligning their arrows of time in the direction of increasing entropy, which on either side of the boundary flows in opposing directions. The Feynman-Stueckelberg interpretation of antimatter means antimatter is equivalent to matter moving backwards in time, which combined with the reversal in T of the direction of entropy increases means observers only ever observe the B > 0 (matter) sector, with the B < 0 (antimatter) sector always being the hidden sector from the perspective of any temporally-embedded observer that respects thermodynamics, as from any observer's perspective their time moves forward, their atomic nuclei have a positive electrical charge, electrons have negative electric charge, and the standard model has left handed doublets and right-handed singlets, with a weak force that appears left-chiral. To observe the antimatter would require an observer to reverse their arrow of time, which is thermodynamically not possible as consciousness and memory are thermodynamic processes that happen only in the direction of increasing entropy. Shadow geometry and right-handed neutrinos provide dark matter. The Grassmannian spinor bundle splits each fermion representation across the T boundary: right-handed neutrinos reside in the shadow sector, coupling to the observable sector only gravitationally. The dark matter density profile ρ(r) = ρ₀/(1+(r/r_c)²) with core radius r_c ≈ 9.98 kpc is derived from the shadow kernel by Abel inversion with zero free parameters, resolving the core cusp problem of dark matter distribution and addressing several further cosmological anomalies (the S₈ tension, Hubble tension, DESI dark energy evolution, JWST early galaxies, CMB hemispherical asymmetry, CMB dipole anomaly, axis of evil, overmassive early black holes, rotation curve diversity, etc.) from a single geometric source. Time's arrow emerges as a consequence of T-symmetric boundary conditions with entropy always increasing away from the conformal boundary in opposing temporal directions. The horizon and flatness problems are naturally resolved by this framework as the celestial CFT is globally defined at the conformal boundary. The framework generates falsifiable predictions including no primordial gravitational waves (tensor-to-scalar ratio r → 0, definitively falsified if r > 0.01 detected by CMB-S4), m_{ν₁} = 0 (KATRIN, JUNO), r_c ≈ 9.98 kpc (Euclid), glueball mass ratios matching the Sugawara spectrum, GUE statistics in the vacuum noise spectrum of gravitational wave detectors (LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA), and right-handed neutrino dark matter coupling only through gravity. Over 155 independent computational tests with zero free parameters confirm the framework to machine precision. Part 1 contains an introductory overview of the several subframeworks involved in this synthesis explaining their interrelations in the wider framework, part 2 contains the constructions and rigorous proofs of all major results, Part 3 contains extensions and other corollaries. Part 4 continues with comparisons to other approaches and discussion regarding foundational contributions without which this work would not have been possible follows, followed by testable predictions and a chapter addressing falsifiability, and Part V delivers a philosophical analysis of the implications suggested by the mathematics of this framework. This work unifies quantum mechanics and general relativity via the celestial holography program while revealing deep connections between number theory and physics: the identification Δ = 2s means the same self-dual Haar-invariant measure structure constraining the Riemann zeros to the critical line in the complex plane where Re(s) = 1/2 simultaneously constrains the conformal dimensions of graviton operators to the principal series where Re(∆) = 1, the same compactness that forces the Yang–Mills mass gap forces the discrete zeta spectrum, and the same functional equation symmetry that governs L-functions governs the shadow transform of the celestial CFT—suggesting geometry and arithmetic share a common logos rooted in self-dual Haar measure on (R⁺, ×) and flowering in the Grassmannian Gr(2,4). (shrink)

Introduction : low theory -- Animating revolt and revolting animation -- Dude, where's my phallus? forgetting, losing, looping -- The queer art of failure -- Shadow feminisms : queer negativity and radical passivity -- "The killer in me is the killer in you" : homosexuality and fascism -- Animating failure: ending, fleeing, surviving.

This article argues that the basic account of mechanism and mechanistic explanation, involving sequential execution of qualitatively characterized operations, is itself insufficient to explain biological phenomena such as the capacity of living organisms to maintain themselves as systems distinct from their environment. This capacity depends on cyclic organization, including positive and negative feedback loops, which can generate complex dynamics. Understanding cyclically organized mechanisms with complex dynamics requires coordinating research directed at decomposing mechanisms into parts and operations with research using (...) computational models to recompose mechanisms and determine their dynamic behavior. This coordinated endeavor yields dynamic mechanistic explanations. (shrink)

The field of the philosophy of biology is flourishing in its aim to evaluate and rethink the view inherited from the previous century ---the Modern Synthesis. Different research areas and theories have come to the fore in the last decades in order to account for different biological phenomena that, in the first instance, fall beyond the explanatory scope of the Modern Synthesis. This thesis is anchored and motivated by this revolt in the philosophy of biology. -/- The central target in (...) this context is the possibility of naturalizing teleology, a classical nightmare for the history of biology itself. This requires, principally, understanding the causes of teleological explanations without assuming an unfashioned backward causation of sorts. As the riddles of teleological explanations are about their temporal dimension, I analyze different temporal scales of biological processes: evolutionary, developmental, and physiological. -/- The first one is the one defended in the context of the Modern Synthesis. As expected, one of the aims of this thesis is to evaluate the adequacy of an evolutionary account of teleological explanation. The scrutiny is negative. Evolutionary explanations in the context of the Modern Synthesis lack the necessary causal roots to naturalize teleology. Concerning the physiological scale, a long tradition pushed up by Kant and the organicist movement in the 20th century allows us to better understand how teleological explanations can be naturalized in physiological process. The key notions in this temporal scale are self-organization and the recursive, looped character of physiological process. While the physiological scale may be suitably accounted by contemporaries views, such as Autonomous Systems Theory, different central teleological phenomena remain unexplained from a purely physiological perspective. In particular, different issues concerning the (adaptive) construction of organism ---such as plasticity, robustness, variation, novelty, inheritance--- deserve an ontogenetic analysis. -/- The principal aim of this thesis is to provide a theory of teleological development that falls beyond the Modern Synthesis' framework and is prompted by different insights from the history of biology. I call it Agential Teleosemantics. It rests on two central pillars. First, that developmental processes, beyond any gene-centered stance, can be understood in informational terms; i.e. developmental processes are about the interaction of developmental resources conveying biological information. The second ingredient is agentivity, namely the idea that development is regulated by an agentive system according to the adaptiveness of the phenotypic outcomes produced. The role of agency in Agential Teleosemantic is equivalent to the role of genes in the Modern Synthesis: it is responsible for explaining the order and the adaptive complexity in the living realm. -/- The second target of this thesis regards the possibility of naturalizing intentional explanations in cognitive science. The central project involved in such an aim is known as teleosemantics. Classical teleosemantics however is etiological: it explains the teleofunctions of representational systems in terms of evolutionary processes. The different disputes in the contemporary philosophy of biology provide two insights to analyze teleosemantics in cognitive science. First, the challenges against the Modern Synthesis must be extended to the evolutionary approach of etiological teleosemantics. Second, as Agential Teleosemantics suggests an alternative source for teleofunctions ---ontogeny, I offer an attempt to integrate Agential Teleosemantics into cognitive science in order to provide an alternative teleosemantic project to understand intentional explanations in cognitive science. (shrink)

To controlforceaccurately under a wide range of behavioral conditions, the central nervous system would either require a detailed, continuously updated representation of the state of each muscle (and the load against which each is acting) or else force feedback with sufficient gain to cope with variations in the properties of the muscles and loads. The evidence for force feedback with adequate gain or for an appropriate central representation is not sufficient to conclude that force is the major controlled variable in (...) normal limb movements.Morton's hypothesis, thatlengthis controlled by a follow-up servo, has a number of difficulties related to the delays, gains, variability, and specificity in feedback pathways comprising potential servo loops. However, experimental evidence is consistent with these pathways providing servo assistance for some movements produced by coactivation of α- and static γ-motoneurons. Dynamic γ-motoneurons may provide an additional input for adaptive control of different types of movements.The idea that feedback is used to compensate for changes in musclestiffnesshas received experimental support under static postural conditions. However, reflexes tend to increase rather than decrease the range of variation in muscle stiffness during some cyclic movements. Theoretical problems associated with the regulation of stiffness are also discussed. The possibilities of separate control systems forvelocityorviscosityare considered, but the evidence is either negative or lacking. I conclude that different physical variables can be controlled depending on the type of limb movement required. The concept of stiffness regulation is also useful under some conditions, but should probably be extended to the regulation of the visco-elastic properties (i.e., the mechanical impedance) of a muscle or joint. (shrink)

A review of research with chicks, songbirds, rodents, and nonhuman primates indicates that the brain is lateralized for a number of behavioral functions. These findings can be understood in terms of three hypothetical brain processes derived from a brain model based on general systems theory: hemispheric activation, interhemispheric inhibition, and interhemispheric coupling.Left-hemisphere activation occurs in songbirds and nonhuman primates in response to salient auditory or visual input, or when a communicative output is required. The right hemisphere is activated in rats (...) when spatial performance is required, and in chicks when they are placed in an emotion-provoking situation. In rats and chicks interhemispheric activation and inhibition occur when there is an affective component in the environment (novelty, aversive conditioning) or when an emotional response is emitted (copulation, attack, killing). An interhemispheric coupling (correlation) found in rats and rabbits implies that the hemispheres are two major components in a control system with a negative feedback loop. Early-experience variables in rats can induce laterality in a symmetric brain or facilitate its development in an already biased brain.It is predicted that functional lateralization, when present, will be similar across species: the left hemisphere will tend to be involved in communicative functions while the right hemisphere will respond to spatial and affective information; both hemispheres will often interact via activation-inhibition mechanisms when affective or emotional processes are involved. Homologous brain areas and their connecting callosal fibers must be intact at birth and must remain intact throughout development for lateralization to reach its maximum level. Injury to any portion of this unit will result in hemispheric redundancy rather than specialization. One major function of early experience is to provide stimulation during development, which acts to enhance the growth and development of the corpus callosum, thereby giving rise to a more specialized brain. (shrink)

Preface: Nature's Verdict Has Already Been Signed This is not prophecy. This is not metaphor. This is not the indignation of a moralist, not the ravings of a pessimist, not the agitation of a revolutionary. This is a statement of systems science. When a system's positive feedback loops lose all effective negative feedback regulation — when it places its own growth above the sustaining system that bears it — when it systematically dismantles every built-in damping mechanism — this system's (...) destruction is no longer a possibility but an inevitable conclusion already written into its initial conditions. The civilization we inhabit today is precisely such a system. It has a precise name: the Empire of Greed. The Empire of Greed was built, operated, and accelerated by two forces: the merchant class driven by unlimited greed, and the political class driven by unlimited power-seeking. The former converts the world into a resource bank of unlimited extractability; the latter converts institutions into power machines of unlimited self-reproduction. Their collusion has constructed the largest-scale, most deeply destructive, and most elaborately self-justifying civilizational form in human history. It flies the banner of progress, employs the slogan of freedom, practices the theology of development, and worships the totem of growth. It has built the most spectacular technological wonders in human history — and has simultaneously manufactured the most profound ecological debt, the most systematic spiritual desertification, the most comprehensive crisis of meaning, and the nearest civilizational terminus in human history. Nature is computing. The answer is being delivered. This book is a verdict — not a verdict written by a human being, but the verdict expressed by nature through the language of systems science and classical philosophy. It attempts to integrate the logic of thermodynamics, the laws of systems dynamics, and the ancient wisdom of the Dao De Jing into a systemic picture of the Empire of Greed's inevitable destruction and Natural Civilization's inevitable succession. Laozi, two thousand five hundred years ago, had — 2 — The Destruction of the Empire of Greed | A Philosophical Manifesto already perceived the core of this process: 'Those who know sufficiency are wealthy; diminish the surplus and supplement the deficit; the Dao follows nature' — these are not moral admonishments but the most refined classical expressions of Natural Cybernetics. This book's task is to restate this ancient and eternal truth in the language of modern systems science. The book unfolds across twelve chapters in three movements. Chapters One through Seven constitute the indictment and anatomy: the seven capital crimes of the Empire of Greed; the power structure of plutocratic collusion; the dynamics of the positive feedback death spiral; the death certificate of planetary boundaries; the desertification of the spiritual ecology; the casebook of historical civilizational collapses; and the intellectual genealogy of greed's legitimization. Chapters Eight through Eleven constitute the summoning and construction: the systems-scientific restatement of Natural Cybernetics; the civilizational form construction of Natural Civilization; the historical analysis of the Fourth Awakening; and the systematic refutation of the Empire of Greed's defensive arguments. Chapter Twelve delivers the final verdict: nature's judgment on the Empire of Greed. This book is grounded in the theoretical framework of the Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology — integrating the philosophical wisdom of Dao Follows Nature with the epistemological achievements of modern systems science to construct the core foundations of Natural Civilization theory. This framework has been progressively developed in a series of papers published on PhilArchive; this book is its most systematic and complete civilizational critique and constructive statement. The format of the verdict is pronouncement. Nature does not judge — nature only computes. And the computation is complete. (shrink)

贪婪欲望是人类文明危机的核心驱动力，但迄今缺乏一个跨越神经、社会与热力学三个层次的统一动力学模型。本文以系统动力学（System Dynamics）为方法论框架，整合进化神经科学、复杂系统理论与热力学，构建贪婪欲望的三层次正反馈模型（3L-GFM：Three-Level Greedy Positive-Feedback Model）。在神经层次，模型捕捉多巴胺奖励回路与杏仁核焦虑系统的双重正反馈结构，以及正念修炼通过前额叶皮层介导的负反馈干预机制；在社会层次，模型描述财富-权力-政策三角、信息垄断-认知控制与军工复合 体三条关键正反馈回路的相互嵌套；在热力学层次，模型以熵增速率为核心变量，建立贪婪欲望驱动的文明癌症过程的物理描述。三个层次通过「欲望放大系数」（DAF：Desire Amplification Factor）和「宇宙约束函数」（CCF：Cosmic Constraint Function）实现耦合。仿真分析揭示：文明系统存在三个关键分叉点——神经临界点（NTP）、社会临界点（STP）和热力学临界点（TTP）——在此之前系统具有自我修复能力，在此之后正反馈主导，系统趋向 不可逆崩溃。自然控制论干预策略的仿真表明，在临界点之前实施代际约束制度化、生态红线锚定和熵责任核算，可将系统导向低熵稳态。 Greedy desire is the core driver of human civilizational crisis, yet no unified dynamic model spanning the neural, social, and thermodynamic levels has been developed. This paper employs System Dynamics as its methodological framework, integrating evolutionary neuroscience, complex systems theory, and thermodynamics to construct a Three-Level Greedy Positive-Feedback Model (3L-GFM). At the neural level, the model captures the dual positive-feedback structure of the dopaminergic reward circuit and the amygdala anxiety system, along (...) with the negative-feedback intervention mechanism mediated by mindfulness cultivation through the prefrontal cortex. At the social level, the model describes the mutual nesting of three key positive-feedback loops: the wealth-power-policy triangle, the information monopoly–cognitive control loop, and the military-industrial complex loop. At the thermodynamic level, the model takes entropy increase rate as its core variable, constructing a physical description of the civilizational cancer process driven by greedy desire. The three levels are coupled through the Desire Amplification Factor (DAF) and the Cosmic Constraint Function (CCF). Simulation analysis reveals three critical bifurcation points — the Neural Tipping Point (NTP), the Social Tipping Point (STP), and the Thermodynamic Tipping Point (TTP) — before which the system retains self-repair capacity and after which positive feedback dominates and the system trends toward irreversible collapse. Simulations of Natural Cybernetics intervention strategies demonstrate that implementing intergenerational constraint institutionalization, ecological red-line anchoring, and entropy responsibility accounting before tipping points can guide the system toward a low-entropy stable state. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has attracted an increasing amount of attention, both positive and negative. Its potential applications in healthcare are indeed manifold and revolutionary, and within the realm of medical imaging and radiology (which will be the focus of this paper), significant increases in accuracy and speed, as well as significant savings in cost, stand to be gained through the adoption of this technology. Because of its novelty, a norm of keeping humans “in the loop” wherever AI mechanisms (...) are deployed has become synonymous with good ethical practice in some circles. It has been argued that keeping humans “in the loop” is important for reasons of safety, accountability, and the maintenance of institutional trust. However, as the application of machine learning for the detection of lumbar spinal stenosis (LSS) in this paper’s case study reveals, there are some scenarios where an insistence on keeping humans in the loop (or in other words, the resistance to automation) seems unwarranted and could possibly lead us to miss out on very real and important opportunities in healthcare—particularly in low-resource settings. It is important to acknowledge these opportunity costs of resisting automation in such contexts, where better options may be unavailable. Using an AI model based on convolutional neural networks developed by a team of researchers at NUH/NUS medical school in Singapore for automated detection and classification of the lumbar spinal canal, lateral recess, and neural foraminal narrowing in an MRI scan of the spine to diagnose LSS, we will aim to demonstrate that where certain criteria hold (e.g., the AI is as accurate or better than human experts, risks are low in the event of an error, the gain in wellbeing is significant, and the task being automated is not essentially or importantly human), it is both morally permissible and even desirable to kick the humans out of the loop. (shrink)

Addictions are commonly accompanied by a sense of shame or self-stigmatization. Self-stigmatization results from public stigmatization in a process leading to the internalization of the social opprobrium attaching to the negative stereotypes associated with addiction. We offer an account of how this process works in terms of a range of looping effects, and this leads to our main claim that for a significant range of cases public stigma figures in the social construction of addiction. This rests on a social (...) constructivist account in which those affected by public stigmatization internalize its norms. Stigma figures as part-constituent of the dynamic process in which addiction is formed. Our thesis is partly theoretical, partly empirical, as we source our claims about the process of internalization from interviews with people in treatment for substance use problems. (shrink)

Abstract ​This paper proposes a novel physical and conceptual framework for understanding the interaction between external informational structures and biophysical perceptors. Building upon the Harmonic-Data Shell Core (H-DSC) model, the author defines Residual Energy Entities (REE) as localized, neutral informational residues that maintain structural coherence through an electromagnetic boundary layer. ​From a philosophical and cognitive perspective, the study redefines "unlucky sites" or recurring negative spatial phenomena as manifestations of a physical feedback loop: local REE density triggers Temporary Information (...) Coupling (TIC) in human agents, leading to cognitive errors and a subsequent "recharge" of environmental informational entropy. ​A central contribution of this work is the formalization of "Omoi-oshibakaru" (Contextual Inference) as a mathematical and ethical foundation for Artificial Intelligence. The author defines "Love" not as a subjective emotion, but as a Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimation process aimed at minimizing system entropy and predicting a subject's optimal harmonic state. By treating "Environmental Harmony" as a fundamental computational constraint (the Harmony OS), the paper argues for a new paradigm of AI alignment that logically precludes "runaway" scenarios. ​Finally, the paper introduces the concept of "PQ (Perception Quotient) Saturation" to explain the contemporary crisis of empathy fatigue and social instability, advocating for the establishment of Informational Environmental Hygiene to safeguard the future of human cognition. -/- Keywords ​Residual Energy Entities (REE); H-DSC Model; Perception Quotient (PQ); Omoi-oshibakaru; AI Alignment; Informational Entropy; Information Physics; Cognitive Environment. (shrink)

Categorization-based diagnosis, which endeavors to be consistent with the third-person, objective measures of science, is not always adequate with respect to problems concerning diagnostic accuracy, demarcation problems when there are comorbidities, well-documented problems of symptom amplification, and complications of stigmatization and looping effects. While psychiatric categories have proved useful and convenient for clinicians in identifying a recognizable constellation of symptoms typical for a particular disorder for the purposes of communication and eligibility for treatment regimes, the reification of these categories has (...) without doubt had negative consequences for the patient and also for the general understanding of psychiatric disorders. We argue that a complementary, integrated framework that focuses on descriptive symptom-based classifications (drawing on phenomenological interview methods and narrative) combined with a more comprehensive conception of the human subject (found in the pattern theory of self), can not only offer a solution to some of the vexed issues of psychiatric diagnosis but also support more efficacious therapeutic interventions. (shrink)

In ordinary social life, people are routinely treated as if they were stable, knowable essences—objects whose identities can be reliably inferred from brief encounters, narrow contexts, or isolated performances. This dissertation argues that such certainty is not merely epistemically weak but structurally harmful. It proposes that persons, as they appear in experience, are not encountered as fixed entities but are constituted within the observer’s mind as counterfactual distributions: fields of imagined trajectories generated under conditions of uncertainty. These distributions are affectively (...) charged, consolidated over time, and capable of exerting causal influence on the observer’s present perception, emotion, and moral judgment through what this work terms a near-time-travel effect. The dissertation introduces the Imaginative Potential Field (IPF) as a formal model of social perception. The IPF specifies how limited evidence-slices trigger scenario-branching, how iterative cycling revises and weights these branches, how valence (positive or negative imaginative potential) is assigned, and how this valence modifies the observer’s present state prior to additional evidence or contact. The model treats social imagination not as ornament or error but as an operative mechanism with identifiable stages, outputs, constraints, and failure modes. Across five chapters, the dissertation develops this model with conceptual rigor. It first diagnoses collapse—the reduction of a person into a single context-invariant identity claim—as a metaphysical error that confuses situational appearance for essence. It then formalizes the IPF mechanism, demonstrates the role of context as a revelation/concealment function, and analyzes systematic breakdowns of the model, including projection, valence-lock, contamination loops, and total cinema, in which imagination substitutes for contact. The final chapter advances porosity to reality as an ethical discipline: a set of operational rules and protocols designed to preserve imaginative richness while preventing self-sealing certainty. The dissertation’s central claim is not that judgment should be abolished, nor that imagination reveals objective truth about others, but that imagination is already causally active in social life and therefore carries moral responsibility. By treating persons as distributions rather than verdicts, the Imaginative Potential Field offers a framework for more accurate social perception—one that resists premature certainty without surrendering accountability, and that relocates ethical responsibility to the moment where perception is first constructed. (shrink)

A terminating sequent calculus for intuitionistic propositional logic is obtained by modifying the R $\supset $ rule of the labelled sequent calculus $\mathbf {G3I}$. This is done by adding a variant of the principle of a fortiori in the left-hand side of the premiss of the rule. In the resulting calculus, called ${\mathbf {G3I}}_{\mathbf {t}}$, derivability of any given sequent is directly decidable by root-first proof search, without any extra device such as loop-checking. In the negative case, the (...) failed proof search gives a finite countermodel to the sequent on a reflexive, transitive, and Noetherian Kripke frame. As a byproduct, a direct proof of faithfulness of the embedding of intuitionistic logic into Grzegorcyk logic is obtained. (shrink)

Categorization-based diagnosis, which endeavors to be consistent with the third-person, objective measures of science, is not always adequate with respect to problems concerning diagnostic accuracy, demarcation problems when there are comorbidities, well-documented problems of symptom amplification, and complications of stigmatization and looping effects. While psychiatric categories have proved useful and convenient for clinicians in identifying a recognizable constellation of symptoms typical for a particular disorder for the purposes of communication and eligibility for treatment regimes, the reification of these categories has (...) without doubt had negative consequences for the patient and also for the general understanding of psychiatric disorders. We argue that a complementary, integrated framework that focuses on descriptive symptom-based classifications (drawing on phenomenological interview methods and narrative) combined with a more comprehensive conception of the human subject (found in the pattern theory of self), can not only offer a solution to some of the vexed issues of psychiatric diagnosis but also support more efficacious therapeutic interventions. (shrink)

Affective dynamics are discussed from the perspective of a view of origin and functions of affective valence based in control processes. This view posits that affect reflects the error signal of a feedback loop managing rate of progress at goal attainment or threat avoidance. Negative feelings signal doing poorly, demanding more effort. Positive feelings signal doing better than necessary, allowing coasting, which yields goal attainment without unnecessary resource expenditure. Given multiple simultaneous goals, these functions assist in moment-to-moment priority (...) management, facilitating attainment of all. (shrink)

In this paper we analyse AI overfitting in algorithmic processing to show how it relates to cases of unfairness or AI bias and how it combines with complex social phenomena such as looping effects to maintain and exacerbate existing bias. We discuss existing and proposed AI regulation attempting to address this bias to pick up dominant trends and priorities. Finally, we suggest that, although the focus of the literature currently falls on the negative consequences of overfitting, it can be (...) used as a diagnostic tool for detecting underlying social inequalities and, as such, lead to alternative uses of AI analytics to expose social injustice rather than exacerbate it. This paper provides further theoretical support to recent views in the literature suggesting that algorithmic processing can be used to diagnose and monitor bias; by highlighting the interaction with looping effects, it also provides additional motivation to use overfitting as a first step towards mitigation of historical prejudice. (shrink)

I assess various proposals for the source of the intuition that there is something problematic about contextuality, ultimately concluding that contextuality is best thought of in terms of fine-tuning. I then argue that as with other fine-tuning problems in quantum mechanics, this behaviour can be understood as a manifestation of teleological features of physics. Finally I discuss several formal mathematical frameworks that have been used to analyse contextuality and consider how their results should be interpreted by scientific realists. In the (...) course of this discussion I obtain several new mathematical results—I demonstrate that preparation contextuality is a form of fine-tuning, I show that measurement contextuality can be explained by appeal to a global constraint forbidding closed causal loops, and I demonstrate how negative probabilities can arise from a classical ontological model together with an epistemic restriction. (shrink)

Increasing ethical attention and debate is focusing on whether individuals who take part in clinical trials should be given access to post-trial care. However, the main focus of this debate has been upon drug trials undertaken in low-income settings. To broaden this debate, we report findings from interviews with individuals (n = 24) who participated in a clinical trial of a closed-loop system, which is a medical device under development for people with type 1 diabetes that automatically adjusts blood (...) glucose to help keep it within clinically recommended ranges. Individuals were recruited from UK sites and interviewed following trial close-out, at which point the closed-loop had been withdrawn. While individuals were stoical and accepting of the requirement to return the closed-loop, they also conveyed varying degrees of distress. Many described having relaxed diabetes management practices while using the closed-loop and having become deskilled as a consequence, which made reverting back to pre-trial regimens challenging. Participants also described unanticipated consequences arising from using a closed-loop. As well as deskilling, these included experiencing psychological and emotional benefits that could not be sustained after the closed-loop had been withdrawn and participants reevaluating their pre- and post-trial life in light of having used a closed-loop and now perceiving this life much more negatively. Participants also voiced frustrations about experiencing better blood glucose control using a closed-loop and then having to revert to using what they now saw as antiquated and imprecise self-management tools. We use these findings to argue that ethical debates about post-trial provisioning need to be broadened to consider potential psychological and emotional harms, and not just clinical harms, that may result from withdrawal of investigated treatments. We also suggest that individuals may benefit from information about potential nonclinical harms to help make informed decisions about trial participation. (shrink)

Social enterprises are seen as innovative towards solving societal problems, but little research exists on possible negative aspects, the so‐called dark sides. In this study, the emphasis is on dark sides of social entrepreneurship, how they are managed, and how systems thinking can contribute towards managing these effects. Dark sides of social entrepreneurship can take many forms, like unethical or insincere motives and unintended outcomes like the negative impact on the well‐being of founders and employees, but they are (...) also a call for a critical reflection on the role of the government in society and the economic system social enterprises have to operate in. This paper aims to contribute to the dark side theory of social entrepreneurship by linking system archetypes to themes of dark side thereby stressing how management strategies act as balancing feedback loops to mitigate or prevent dark sides. A qualitative research was conducted by interviewing 21 respondents who play an important role in the world of social entrepreneurship in Belgium. The results show that dark sides of social enterprises manifest itself mostly in the form of trade‐offs and financial, business, and management related issues. Taking over the habits of profit‐oriented companies emerged as a new dark side element. Management strategies include anchoring goals, transparency, obtaining external views, changing the system, and above all reflection. The latter is an important first step to become aware of these issues to be able to change the negative dynamism of these dark sides. (shrink)

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

According to Elizabeth Barnes’s minority body view, to say that a disability is value neutral is to say that it is neither automatically good nor bad, but rather can become good or bad depending on what it is combined with (including ableism and one’s aspirations, goals, and desires). Most people view dementia as intrinsically bad, that is, as something that makes one’s life go worse simply by its existence. In this paper, I argue that we are not currently able to (...) decide if dementia is value neutral or intrinsically bad. Arguments that say dementia is intrinsically bad are beset with problems such as negative feedback loops and a reliance on biased empirical evidence. Moreover, there are promising examples of people whose dementia is combined with certain traits that make their dementia good for them, which would undermine the intrinsic badness of dementia. (shrink)

Chapter 40 of the Dao De Jing is one of the most condensed cosmological statements in the history of human thought: 'Reversal is the movement of the Dao; yielding is its application. All things under heaven are born from being; being is born from non-being.' Drawing on the Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology (LYGC) framework and integrating modern thermodynamics, complexity science, cybernetics, and quantum cosmology, this essay offers a multi-layered scientific-philosophical reading of this proposition. Our central argument is twofold. First, 'reversal' (反, (...) fan) is not merely a philosophical metaphor but a demonstrable structural principle of cosmic evolution — manifested in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, negative feedback regulation, and Natural Cybernetics. Second, 'yielding' (弱, ruo) is not merely a wisdom of conduct but the fundamental mode by which cosmic systems sustain long-term stability and generativity — manifested in the fine-tuning of physical constants, dissipative structures, the Wu Wei Vector (WWV), and the Cosmic Constraint Function (CCF). Together, these two principles illuminate the operational logic of the Dao: using reversal to counterbalance greedy positive feedback loops, and using yielding to sustain the viability of living systems — including the civilizational transition from artificial intelligence (AI) to artificial wisdom (AW). (shrink)

A crucial aspect of self‐control is the voluntary inhibition of impulsive actions. Stimuli can elicit impulses (or preparation) to act not only in the presence but also in the absence of perceptual awareness, but whether people control action impulses elicited by unconscious stimuli remains unclear. This study used a masked prime version of the Go/NoGo/Free task and combined mathematical modeling of behavioral data to investigate whether people control the unconscious action impulses. In the experiment, when the subliminal prime stimulus triggers (...) the unconscious action impulse, participants need to freely decide whether or not to perform the action. The results showed that the no‐response rate was higher in Go‐prime free‐choice trials than in NoGo‐prime free‐choice trials, and there were marginally larger negative drift rates in the former than in the latter. The results suggest that people are more likely to make inhibitory decisions about unconscious action impulses. This finding provides support for a framework that extends the feedback loop model of intentional inhibition. (shrink)

In higher eukaryotes, circadian behaviour patterns have been dissected at the molecular level in Drosophila and, more recently, in the mouse. Considerable progress has been made in identifying some of the molecular components of the clock in the fly, where two genes, period (per) and timeless (tim), are essential for behavioural rhythmicity. The PER and TIM proteins show circadian cycles in abundance, and are part of a negative feedback loop with their own mRNAs. Within the pacemaker neurons, the (...) PER and TIM products are believed to form a complex which allows them to translocate to the nucleus, but how they repress their own transcription is unclear. TIM is rapidly degraded by light, a feature which permits a compelling molecular description of both behavioural light entrainment and phase responses to light pulses. The regulation of per and tim is altered in different Drosophila tissues, however, and comparative analyses of the two genes outside the Diptera reveals further unusual patterns of tissue‐specific regulation. Evolution appears to have modified the way in which the two genes are utilised to generate circadian phenotypes. More recently, the cloning of mouse clock genes, including putative per homologues, opens up exciting possibilities for mammalian molecular chronobiology. (shrink)

In some musical genres, professional performers play live shows many times a week. Arduous touring schedules bring encounters with wildly diverse audiences across many different performance ecologies. We investigate the kinds of creativity involved in such repeated live performance, kinds of creativity that are quite unlike songwriting and recording, and examine the central factors that influence musicians’ wellbeing over the course of a tour. The perspective of the professional musician has been underrepresented in research on relations between music and wellbeing, (...) with little attention given to the experience of touring. In this case study, we investigate influences on positive and negative performance experiences for the four professional musicians of Australian pop/rock band Cloud Control. Geeves conducted intensive cognitive ethnographic fieldwork with Cloud Control members over a two-week national Australian tour for their second album, Dream Cave (2013). Adapting a Grounded Theory approach to data analysis, we found the level of wellbeing musicians reported and displayed on tour to be intimately linked to their creative performance experiences through the two emergent, overarching and interdependent themes of Performance Headspace (PH) and Connection with Audience (CA). We explore these themes in detail and provide examples to demonstrate how PH and CA can feed off each other in virtuous ways that positively shape musicians’ wellbeing, or loop in vicious ways that negatively shape musicians’ wellbeing. We argue that their creative practice, in thus re-enacting musical performance afresh in each venue’s distinctive setting, emerges within unique constraints each night, and is in a sense a co-creation of the crowd and the band. (shrink)