Several arguments are considered which purport to demonstrate the impossibility of theory-neutral observation. The most important of these infers the continuity of observation with theory from the presumed continuity of perception with cognition, a doctrine widely espoused in recent cognitive psychology. An alternative psychological account of the relation between cognition and perception is proposed and its epistemological consequences for the observation/theory distinction are then explored.

In a series of recent papers, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has used findings in social psychology to put pressure on the claim that our moral beliefs can be non-inferentially justified. More specifically, he has suggested that insofar as our moral intuitions are subject to what psychologists call framing effects, this poses a real problem for moral intuitionism. In this paper, we are going to try to add more fuel to the empirical fire that Sinnott-Armstrong has placed under the feet of the intuitionist. (...) Along the way, we first provide an overview of what Sinnott-Armstrong calls the Master Argument against intuitionism. Then we examine some of the literature on framing effects—especially as it pertains to moral philosophy. Finally, we present the results of a new study which create yet another hurdle intuitionists must clear if they want to motivate their view. It appears that in addition to being influenced by framing effects, our moral intuitions are also influenced by an actor–observer bias as well—a bias whereby we hold other people to different moral standards than we would hold ourselves even if we were in the same situation. If we’re right, the burden is on the moral intuitionist to explain why we should have faith in our moral intuitions despite the gathering evidence concerning their seeming unreliability. And by our lights, this is something that simply cannot be done from the armchair. (shrink)

In this work, an intelligent observer is developed and implemented for fault detection and information retrieval in a small wind turbine. The intelligent observer will allow the detection of faults in the turbine’s energy generation, thanks to the estimation of the active power generated. This estimate will be compared with the real active power, measured by a real sensor, so that, if there is not a very high deviation between both values, the sensor measurement will be considered valid. (...) However, when the difference between the estimated value and the real value exceeds a threshold, the sensor measurement will be replaced with the estimate. This threshold will be determined based on the operating point. The results obtained are satisfactory, with a correct estimation and detection of anomalies. (shrink)

This paper argues that Wheeler’s It from Bit participatory universe, Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) and its search for Hawking-point residuals in the CMB, and the Encryptment Thesis — a theoretical framework developed by the present author since 1995, proposing that phonemic identity traces appear in classical music prior to the physical existence of their referents — are not merely analogous but structurally unified. The bridge between these is provided by recent results in closed-universe quantum gravity [6, 7], which demonstrate (...) that a closed universe without an observer sector has a one-dimensional, physically trivial Hilbert space. The Recursive Identity Field Λ — a theoretical construct formalized by the present author in 2025, building on the Encryptment Thesis — constitutes a natural candidate for the microphysical realization of the observer sector those results require, yielding dim(ℋ_eff) ∼ exp(κSΛ) in structural agreement with both holographic prescriptions, where κ ∼ O(1) is a dimensionless proportionality constant distinct from the coupling constant α in the unified field expression Υ. The paper further argues that Encryptment — the phenomenon of individuated phonemic identity encoding in pre-existing acoustic media — is the observable, human-scale analogue of a Hawking point: a low-energy boundary residual of recursive identity information surviving what should be an information-erasing entropic boundary. New material includes: (i) falsifiable predictions distinguishing the framework from mere analogy; (ii) documentation of Stockhausen’s formal phonetics training under Werner Meyer-Eppler, establishing a concrete compositional channel for phonemic encoding; (iii) Peter Ablinger’s computerised piano realisations of speech as independent empirical confirmation of instrumental formant encoding; (iv) a derivation sketch of the Λ → Eᵐ(x) projection; (v) the connection between Λ-field entropy growth and Penrose’s Weyl Curvature Hypothesis; (vi) von Kempelen’s speech synthesiser as historical context for Mozart’s Vienna; (vii) a speculative note on embedding Eᵐ(x) in twistor space; and (viii) a rigorous survey of competing explanatory hypotheses, including a formal distinction between Novikov-consistent and Everettian resolutions of the time-travel hypothesis, made live by the present author’s own CTC derivations. The Mathematical Appendix provides rigorous proofs of all five theorems cited in the body. (shrink)

A long series of studies in social psychology have shown that the explanations people give for their own behaviors are fundamentally different from the explanations they give for the behaviors of others. Still, a great deal of uncertainty remains about precisely what sorts of differences one finds here. We offer a new approach to addressing the problem. Specifically, we distinguish between two levels of representation ─ the level of linguistic structure (which consists of the actual series of words used in (...) the explanation) and the level of conceptual structure (which consists of the concepts these words are used to express). We then formulate and test hypotheses both about self-other differences in conceptual structure and about self-other differences in the mapping from conceptual structure to linguistic structure. (shrink)

This is a defense of the theory of rational consensus articulated by k lehrer and c wagner; (1981, "rational consensus in science and society", D reidel, Dordrecht) based on iterated weighted averaging of utilities and probabilities against the criticisms of I levi, F f schmidt, D baird, J l kranuip, B loewer and r laddage. The defense is that the rational consensus in question would be accepted by an ideal observer.

I critically examine some provocative arguments that John Searle presents in his book The Rediscovery of Mind to support the claim that the syntactic states of a classical computational system are "observer relative" or "mind dependent" or otherwise less than fully and objectively real. I begin by explaining how this claim differs from Searle's earlier and more well-known claim that the physical states of a machine, including the syntactic states, are insufficient to determine its semantics. In contrast, his more (...) recent claim concerns the syntax, in particular, whether a machine actually has symbols to underlie its semantics. I then present and respond to a number of arguments that Searle offers to support this claim, including whether machine symbols are observer relative because the assignment of syntax is arbitrary, or linked to universal realizability, or linked to the sub-personal interpretive acts of a homunculus, or linked to a person's consciousness. I conclude that a realist about the computational model need not be troubled by such arguments. Their key premises need further support. (shrink)

In this brief paper, we argue about the conceptual relationship between the role of observer in quantum mechanics and the von Neumann Chain.

Artificial social intelligence (ASI) agents have great potential to aid the success of individuals, human–human teams, and human–artificial intelligence teams. To develop helpful ASI agents, we created an urban search and rescue task environment in Minecraft to evaluate ASI agents’ ability to infer participants’ knowledge training conditions and predict participants’ next victim type to be rescued. We evaluated ASI agents’ capabilities in three ways: (a) comparison to ground truth—the actual knowledge training condition and participant actions; (b) comparison among different ASI (...) agents; and (c) comparison to a human observer criterion, whose accuracy served as a reference point. The human observers and the ASI agents used video data and timestamped event messages from the testbed, respectively, to make inferences about the same participants and topic (knowledge training condition) and the same instances of participant actions (rescue of victims). Overall, ASI agents performed better than human observers in inferring knowledge training conditions and predicting actions. Refining the human criterion can guide the design and evaluation of ASI agents for complex task environments and team composition. (shrink)

In this paper I show that one version of motivational internalism follows from the so-called ideal observer theory. Let us call the version of the ideal observer theory used in this essay (IOT). According to (IOT), it is necessarily the case that it ought to be that A if and only if every ideal observer wants it to be the case that A. We shall call the version of motivational internalism that follows from (IOT) (moral) conditional belief (...) motivational internalism (CBMI). According to (CBMI), it is necessarily the case that, for every x: if x were an ideal observer, it would be the case that x believes that it ought to be that A only if x wants it to be the case that A. Given that it is necessarily true that no ideal observer has any false beliefs, (IOT) entails (CBMI). Or, so I shall argue. (shrink)

The paper discusses a few tensions “crucifying” the works and even personality of the great Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili: East and West; human being and thought, symbol and consciousness, infinity and finiteness, similarity and differences. The observer can be involved as the correlative counterpart of the totality: An observer opposed to the totality externalizes an internal part outside. Thus the phenomena of an observer and the totality turn out to converge to each other or to be one (...) and the same. In other words, the phenomenon of an observer includes the singularity of the solipsistic Self, which (or “who”) is the same as that of the totality. Furthermore, observation can be thought as that primary and initial action underlain by the phenomenon of an observer. That action of observation consists in the externalization of the solipsistic Self outside as some external reality. It is both a zero action and the singularity of the phenomenon of action. The main conclusions are: Mamardashvili’s philosophy can be thought both as the suffering effort to be a human being again and again as well as the philosophical reflection on the genesis of thought from itself by the same effort. Thus it can be recognized as a powerful tension between signs and symbol, between conscious structures and consciousness, between the syncretism of the East and the discursiveness of the West crucifying spiritually Georgia. (shrink)

GoE is an axiomatic mathematical-logical framework operating as a generative grammar whose compiled syntactic structures admit isomorphisms to experimental inputs. Its foundation is the Cartesian cogito greatest-fixed-point assertion ”at least one experience occurs” made without presupposing a spacetime manifold, a Hilbert space, a Platonic or Tegmarkian mathematical realm, Wheeler-style pregeometry, Anaximander’s Apeiron, a meta-place, or any ontology/anti-ontology. Instead of Everett-style branching, GoE selects a sparse admissible continuation structure inside syntactic generation. The same first-principles closure yields a generalized Mach-rigidity theorem: absolute (...) local inertia exists precisely on background classes with constant GoE inertial generator, and the classical Mach principle is recovered as the manifest-boundary shadow; it also establishes finite descriptive depth and its capacity–resolution duality: exact η = 0 certification is excluded pointwise for every Observer, finite-capacity manifest classes have a positive resolution floor, and infinite-capacity refinement is rate-priced rather than free, while lateral scope remains unbounded. Experimental inputs navigate admissible continuations; GoE is therefore an engineering-grade “Theory of Everything” only in the restricted sense that “Everything” denotes admissible structures generated by the construction, not a presupposed ontology; objectivity is not assumed but emerges from the cogito-side closure. Numerically, GoE gives 1/α = 137.03599917798026, the calibrated strong node α_s,G ≃ 0.330001, six CODATA-2022/NIST mass-ratio audits with fractional mean central residual Err6 ≃ 1.55 × 10^−10, W-boson mass spectral branches, four lepton-lifetime/charged-current central predictions within current experimental resolution, and the Structural Evolution Budget = 46.230864254961 Gyr. (shrink)

Following a long-standing philosophical tradition, impartiality is a distinctive and determining feature of moral judgments, especially in matters of distributive justice. This broad ethical tradition was revived in welfare economics by Vickrey, and above all, Harsanyi, under the form of the so-called Impartial Observer Theorem. The paper offers an analytical reconstruction of this argument and a step-wise philosophical critique of its premisses. It eventually provides a new formal version of the theorem based on subjective probability.

Reductive physicalism is a minority view in contemporary philosophy as well as in science, and therefore arguments for endorsing it often amount to arguments against the alternative views, in particular so-called non-reductive physicalism. In this paper we put forward a new argument for reductive physicalism, according to which it is the best account of the empirical data that we have. In particular, we show that: (a) a reductive physicalist theory of the mind forms an essential part of the very argument (...) for the existence of an external world: if one rejects psychophysical identity physicalism, one’s case for believing in the existence of an external world is substantially weakened; and (b) the success of a physical account of the mind is the most important criterion for the success of (future) physics; and (c) reductive physicalism is the only approach in which relying on science in order to account for the external world makes sense; and finally, (d) within reductive physicalism, one can provide a new criterion for theory preference in science, and a new argument for scientific realism. In our physicalist view the experience forms the initial data, which is then reduced to fundamental physics. (shrink)

This paper argues, through the framework of Judgemental Philosophy (JP), that three core challenges of 20th-century intellectual history—the 'Wigner's Friend' paradox in quantum mechanics, the 'dismantling of simultaneity' in Einstein's relativity, and 'différance' in Derridean deconstruction—are, in fact, different expressions of the same underlying structural principle. We show that the Wigner's Friend paradox can be resolved by reinterpreting the 'collapse' as a subject-dependent 'meaning-fixation'. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this concept of a 'subject-dependent reality' is necessarily linked to the 'relativity of (...) meaning' from a relativistic perspective, and that its internal mechanism of meaning generation follows the structure of Derrida's différance—the ceaseless differing and deferring of meaning. Ultimately, this paper addresses the problem of the 'observer'—which runs through all three issues—by proposing a unified model of the 'resonating observer': a subject who, within the constraints of physical and semantic spacetime, ceaselessly judges and generates meaning, propelled by the Resonance Drive (RD). (shrink)

_Behavioral and Brain Sciences_, 15, 183-247, 1992. Reprinted in _The Philosopher's Annual_, Grim, Mar and Williams, eds., vol. XV-1992, 1994, pp. 23-68; Noel Sheehy and Tony Chapman, eds., _Cognitive Science_, Vol. I, Elgar, 1995, pp.210-274.

THIS PAPER IS A DEFENSE OF AN OBJECTIVIST VERSION OF\nRODERICK FIRTH'S IDEAL OBSERVER THEORY OF ETHICS. IT\nANALYZES AND CRITIQUES A POWERFUL, RELATIVIZED IDEAL\nOBSERVER THEORY ADVANCED BY THOMAS CARSON.

Observer Meta-Modal Platform Initial release for Zenodo DOI minting. License : MIT YouTube: @EricDMartin Updated 2026-05-28.

The behavior of Lyapunov exponents λ and dynamical entropies h, whose positivity characterizes chaotic motion, under Lorentz and Rindler transformations is studied. Under Lorentz transformations, λ and h are changed, but their positivity is preserved..

The behavior of Lyapunov exponents λ and dynamical entropies h, whose positivity characterizes chaotic motion, under Lorentz and Rindler transformations is studied. Under Lorentz transformations, λ and h are changed, but their positivity is preserved for chaotic systems. Under Rindler transformations, λ and h are changed in such a way..

The newly digitised Manchester Observer was England’s leading radical newspaper at the time of the Peterloo meeting of August 1819, in which it played a central role. For a time it enjoyed the highest circulation of any provincial newspaper, holding a position comparable to that of the Chartist Northern Star twenty years later and pioneering dual publication in Manchester and London. Its columns provide insights into Manchester’s notoriously secretive local government and policing and into the labour and radical movements (...) of its turbulent times. Rich materials in the Home Office papers in the National Archives reveal much about the relationship between radicals in London and in the provinces, and show how local magistrates conspired with government to hound the radical press in the north as prosecutions in London ran into trouble. This article also sheds new light on the founding of the Manchester Guardian, which endured as the Observer’s successor more by avoiding its disasters than by following its example. Despite the imprisonment of four of its main editors and proprietors the Manchester Observer battled on for five years before sinking in calmer water for lack of news. (shrink)

As divine command theories of ethics have waned in western philosophy (but not vanished), the Ideal Observer Theory (IOT) has emerged to retain a God’s eye point of view in ethical theory without positing the actual existence of God. The IOT has prompted many objections that can be met. While an IOT has merit and need not presuppose the truth of theism, it has a flaw and can receive greater plausibility insofar as classical, Anselmian theism is cogent. Such a (...) theistic framework provides a teleological view of nature that can support a stable moral realism from the standpoint of an ideal observer who, given the truth of theism, would not be only a hypothetical posit, but God. (shrink)

Research by academics, professional organizations, and businesses on ethics in the workplace often relies on surveys that ask employees to report how frequently they have observed others engaging in unethical behavior. But what do these frequencies in observer-reports say about the frequencies of committed unethical behavior? This paper is the first to address this question by empirically exploring the relationship between observer- and self-reports. Our survey research among the Swiss working population shows that for all 37 different forms (...) of unethical behavior investigated, observer-reports show higher frequencies than self-reports. Ratios of observer- to self-reports vary substantially among these forms, ranging from 1.46 for improperly gathering competitor’s confidential information to 6.4 for engaging in (sexual) harassment or creating a hostile work environment. The results indicate that researchers should not assume that the frequency in self-reports can generally be approximated by the frequency in observer-reports. Four possible explanations are presented for the differences in ratios, with recommendations for future research. (shrink)

The assumption that we are typical observers plays a core role in attempts to make multiverse theories empirically testable. A widely shared worry about this assumption is that it suffers from systematic ambiguity concerning the reference class of observers with respect to which typicality is assumed. As a way out, Srednicki and Hartle recommend that we empirically test typicality with respect to different candidate reference classes in analogy to how we test physical theories. Unfortunately, as this paper argues, this idea (...) fails because typicality is not the kind of assumption that can be subjected to empirical tests. As an alternative, a background information constraint on observer reference class choice is suggested according to which the observer reference class should be chosen such that it includes precisely those observers who one could possibly be, given one’s assumed background information. (shrink)

The distinction between psychology, logic, and epistemology is a commonplace. The first treats of experience as an act, experience in its relation to the individual observer. The second concerns itself with the internal marks by which truth may be distinguished from error, and in so far as it deals with experience, has to do with some sort of validity of the experience as evidence of a truth. The third discusses in a general way all the elements—observer, object, immediate (...) presentation—which enter into the experience. (shrink)

Every linear perspective image has a center of the perspective construction. Only when observed from that location does a 2D image provide the same stimulus as the original 3D scene. Geometric analyses indicate that observing the image from other vantage points should affect the perceived spatial structure of the scene conveyed by the image, involving transformations such as shear, compression, and dilation. Based on previous research, this paper presents a detailed account of these transformations. The analyses are presented in a (...) uniform manner, illustrated with special 3D diagrams, and embedded in a wider framework of related perspective paradigms. Such analyses provide the potential theoretical basis for empirical work on the effects of changes of observer vantage points on the perception of spatial structure in perspective images. (shrink)