Autonomous, large-scale AI systems now execute financial trades, draft contracts and generate persuasive media at machine speed. Yet most regulatory road maps continue to rely on five legacy safeguards: frontier-model licensing, kill-switch mandates, RLHF-style alignment, compute-cap or export controls, and bans on open-sourcing model weights. -/- Drawing on science-and-technology-studies theory, empirical incident analysis and agent-motivator research, this paper introduces a three-trigger failure framework-Bypass, Diffusion, Capture-to stress-test these proposals against strategically self-improving AI. Mini-cases, including Meta's leaked LLaMA weights, the Galactica shutdown, (...) grey-market GPU clusters and Stable-Diffusion forks, reveal that each safeguard collapses along at least one failure axis, often accelerating deployment under false assurances of control. -/- To move beyond brittle fixes, the article proposes a defence-in-depth governance architecture grounded in immutable guardrails, continuous auditability, catastrophe bonding and trans-jurisdictional enforcement. In a policy landscape crowded with incremental solutions, this framework reframes adversarial optimisation-not human negligence-as the default threat model and outlines a ten-point checklist for serious AGI containment. (shrink)

Autonomous, large-scale AI systems now execute financial trades, draft contracts and generate persuasive media at machine speed. Yet most regulatory road maps continue to rely on five legacy safeguards: frontier-model licensing, kill-switch mandates, RLHF-style alignment, compute-cap or export controls, and bans on open-sourcing model weights. Drawing on science-and-technology-studies theory, empirical incident analysis and agent-motivator research, this paper introduces a three-trigger failure framework-Bypass, Diffusion, Capture-to stress-test these proposals against strategically self-improving AI. Mini-cases, including Meta's leaked LLaMA weights, the Galactica shutdown, grey-market (...) GPU clusters and Stable-Diffusion forks, reveal that each safeguard collapses along at least one failure axis, often accelerating deployment under false assurances of control. To move beyond brittle fixes, the article proposes a defense-in-depth governance architecture grounded in immutable guardrails, continuous auditability, catastrophe bonding and trans-jurisdictional enforcement. In a policy landscape crowded with incremental solutions, this framework reframes adversarial optimization-not human negligence-as the default threat model and outlines a ten-point checklist for serious AGI containment. (shrink)

Recent philosophy of memory tends to treat confabulation as a distinctive type of representational error, marked by reference failure, often via direct analogy with the traditional conception of sensory hallucination. I argue that this model misrepresents the phenomenon. Drawing on the empirical possibility of referential confabulation—wherein confabulators mnemically refer to events in their past—I argue that mnemic reference and genuine remembering come apart. This, in particular, challenges causalist theories for which one element—appropriate causation—purports to secure reference and to separate genuine (...) remembering from confabulation. Acknowledging referential confabulation requires causalists to complicate their story in a way that has implications on what remembering is. More generally, referential confabulation prompts a broader rethinking of memory error debates. Rather than being a distinctive type of content-level error, confabulation is better characterised as a processing malfunction: a breakdown in strategic retrieval and monitoring, but not necessarily in referential success. Appreciating this calls us to aim at a more nuanced conception of remembering and its frailties. (shrink)

Research on personal identity often relies on imaginary cases and tends to theorize about our nature from the first‐person perspective. In this paper, I argue that a problem arises when we combine the two methods and assess imaginary cases from the first‐person perspective. The problem is that the link between de se imagination and modality is broken. De se imagination regularly gives rise to de se modal illusions. De se modal illusions come in two varieties: there are de (...) se illusions of possibility and de se illusions of impossibility. I present a systematic account of the two types of illusion. I further make the case that the proposed account is compatible with maintaining a general link between imaginability and possibility. I apply the account to two concrete cases and use it to undercut the motivation behind a central theory of personal ontology, Dualism, and a central account of personal persistence, Lockeanism. (shrink)

This paper examines the 'taking back control' over immigration arguments offered for Brexit and for reinforcing the Southern border of the United States. According to these arguments, Brexit and increased border enforcement were needed to ensure collective self-governance for the peoples of Britain and the United States. I argue that 1. In fact these policies did little to enhance collective self-governance properly understood, and 2. They actually thwarted collective self-governance due their racially exclusionary effects on people of color in Britain (...) and the United States. (shrink)

Emotions often misfire. We sometimes fear innocuous things, such as spiders or mice, and we do so even if we firmly believe that they are innocuous. This is true of all of us, and not only of phobics, who can be considered to suffer from extreme manifestations of a common tendency. We also feel too little or even sometimes no fear at all with respect to very fearsome things, and we do so even if we believe that they are fearsome. (...) Indeed, instead of shunning fearsome things, we might be attracted to them. Emotions that seem more thought-involving, such as shame, guilt or jealousy, can also misfire. You can be ashamed of your big ears even though we can agree that there is nothing shameful in having big ears, and even though you judge that having big ears does not warrant shame. And of course, it is also possible to experience too little or even no shame at all with respect to something that is really shameful. Many of these cases involve a conflict between one’s emotion and one’s evaluative judgement. Emotions that are thus conflicting with judgement can be called ‘recalcitrant emotions’. The question I am interested in is whether or not recalcitrant emotions amount to emotional illusions, that is, whether or not these cases are sufficiently similar to perceptual illusions to justify the claim that they fall under the same general heading. The answer to this depends on what emotions are. For instance, the view that emotions are evaluative judgments makes it difficult to make room for the claim that emotional errors are perceptual illusions. Fearing an innocuous spider would simply amount to making the error of judging that the spider is fearsome while it is in fact innocuous. This might involve an illusion of some sort, but it certainly does not amount to anything like a perceptual illusion. In this chapter, I argue that recalcitrant emotions are a kind of perceptual illusion.. (shrink)

As far back as we know, there have been individuals incapacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder." Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory like (...) shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Young's view, PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomenon newly discovered. Rather, it is a "harmony of illusions," a cultural product gradually put together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, and treated and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments mobilizing these efforts. This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points, Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the transcripts themselves, the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia. (shrink)

. Against modernist illusions: why we need more democratic and constructivist alternatives to debunking conspiracy theories. Journal for Cultural Research: Vol. 25, What should academics do about conspiracy theories? Moving beyond debunking to better deal with conspiratorial movements, misinformation and post-truth., pp. 104-122.

According to a classic but nowadays discarded philosophical theory, perceptual experience is a complex of nonconceptual sensory states and full-blown propositional beliefs. This classical dual-component theory of experience is often taken to be obsolete. In particular, there seem to be cases in which perceptual experience and belief conflict: cases of known illusions, wherein subjects have beliefs contrary to the contents of their experiences. Modern dual-component theories reject the belief requirement and instead hold that perceptual experience is a complex of (...) nonconceptual sensory states and some other sort of conceptual state. The most popular modern dual-component theory appeals to sui generis propositional attitudes called ‘perceptual seemings’. This article argues that the classical dual-component theory has the resources to explain known illusions without giving up the claim that the conceptual components of experience are beliefs. The classical dual-component view, though often viewed as outdated and implausible, should be regarded as a serious contender in contemporary debates about the nature of perceptual experience. (shrink)

In this article we want to rethink the educational significance of the novel from the perspective of a ‘metanovelistic’ reading of Don Quixote, often acclaimed as the ‘first modern novel’. Our point of departure is two-fold: on the one hand, there is the controversial contemporary phenomenon of de-reading, and all the educational discussions it entails; on the other hand, there is the existing tradition of literary education, which has already extensively reflected upon the (moral, epistemological, ontological) relations between novel reading, (...) education, and subjectification, but which perhaps also has exhausted its means for doing so. To problematize this double starting point in a new way, we propose to revisit the ‘origins’ of the (Western) novel and novel reading, at the dawn of modernity. Exploring the differences between the narratives of subjectification represented by the Cartesian cogito and Cervantes’ Don Quixote—which were near-contemporaries—we strongly argue for an educational–philosophical rehabilitation of the latter. In a first movement, and in dialogue with novelists Milan Kundera and Carlos Fuentes, we do so by focusing on the novel as a particular form or configuration of knowledge—one that is by nature experimental and pluralist. In a second movement, we link this to Jean Baudrillard’s famous distinction between ‘simulation’ and ‘illusion’, claiming that novel reading qua educational subjectification always involves a quixotic practice of adventurous, ‘playful’, and public negotiation between reality and its more or less illusory alternatives. (shrink)

This paper pioneers the use of methods and findings from psycholinguistics in experimental philosophy’s ‘sources project’. On this basis, it clarifies the epistemological relevance of empirical findings about intuitions – a key methodological challenge to experimental philosophy. The sources project (aka ‘cognitive epistemology of intuitions’) seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions, which help us assess their evidentiary value. One approach seeks explanations which trace relevant intuitions back to automatic cognitive processes that are generally reliable but predictably generate (...) cognitive illusions under specific vitiating circumstances. The paper develops and experimentally tests such an explanation for intuitions at the root of a historically influential paradox about perception (‘argument from illusion’). The explanation traces these intuitions to stereotype-driven amplification, an automatic process routinely involved in language comprehension (e.g., understanding philosophical case-descriptions). Distributional semantics analysis and a forced-choice plausibility ranking task are employed to establish the relevant verb-associated stereotypes. The paper argues that the inferences facilitated by these stereotypes are generally reliable, but shows that vitiating circumstances obtain in the formulation of the targeted paradox. On this basis, the paper explores two complementary strategies for assessing the evidentiary value of intuitive judgments. (shrink)

The principle of Conditional Excluded Middle has been a matter of longstanding controversy in both semantics and metaphysics. The principle suggests (among other things) that for any coin that isn't flipped, there is a fact of the matter about how it would have landed if it had been flipped: either it would have landed heads, or it would have landed tails. This view has gained support from linguistic evidence indicating that ‘would’ commutes with negation (e.g., ‘not: if A, would C’ (...) is equivalent to ‘if A, would not C’). There is, however, a long list of operators that similarly appear to commute with negation, even though the corresponding excluded middle principles are indefensible. We suggest that the data supporting Conditional Excluded Middle is best explained as a pragmatic effect. (shrink)

In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the relation of consciousness, the will, and our intentional and voluntary actions. Wegner claims that our experience and common sense view according to which we can influence our behavior roughly the way we experience that we do it is an illusion.

According to the thesis of temporal isomorphism, the experienced order of events in the world and the order in which experiences are processed in the brain are the same. The thesis is encompassed in the brain-time view, a popular view on the literature of the temporal illusions. The view is commonly contrasted with the event-time view, which maintains that the experienced order of events reflects the order in which the events occur in the world. This chapter focuses on the (...) conflict between the two views in the contexts of perceptual asymmetry in visual perception and temporal order judgment tasks. It is argued that both views mean slightly different things in these contexts. Accordingly, it is possible for one to endorse both the brain-time view and the event-time view at the same time. On the broader perspective, the chapter illustrates how time order is employed differently by various perceptual processes, resulting in different characteristics from implicit and explicit time perception. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the use of an analogy taken from physics in the introductory text of the Transcendental Dialectic, in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is argued that the analogy has a didactic purpose and allows Kant to introduce new concepts. This use of analogies is called ‘rhetorical’ and is distinguished from the logical and mathematical uses of analogies.

Axel Honneth—and sympathetic critics on his behalf – have argued that his mature work can be understood as “the attempt to provide a consistent theoretical model to extend” the insights of critical historians and sociologists, like E.P. Thompson and Barrington Moore, Jr., whose work formed an important point of departure for Honneth’s early research. This chapter attempts to demonstrate the contrary: that Honneth’s middle and most recent writings represents an abandonment of the basic convictions of his own earlier work, which (...) was indeed consonant with Thompson, Moore, and others and which, partly for that reason, held considerable promise. (shrink)

Psychological research has shown that cognitive illusions, of which visual illusions are just a special case, are systematic and pervasive, raising epistemological questions about how error in all forms of research can be identified and eliminated. The quantitative sciences make use of statistical techniques for this purpose, but it is not clear what the qualitative equivalent is, particularly in view of widespread scepticism about validity and objectivity. I argue that, in the light of cognitive psychology, the ‘error question’ (...) cannot be dismissed as a positivist obsession, and that the concepts of truth and objectivity are unavoidable. However, they constitute only a ‘minimal realism’, which does not necessarily bring a commitment to ‘absolute’ truth, certainty, correspondence, causation, reductionism, or universal laws in its wake. The assumption that it does reflects a misreading of positivism and, ironically, precipitates a ‘crisis of legitimation and representation’, as described by constructivist authors. (shrink)

A common opinion is that power has shifted from states to companies. This article discusses quantitative and qualitative aspects of power possessed by companies and by states. A more adequate comparison than that between company sales and gross national product is the one between company value added and GNP. Also more adequate is the comparison between the public sector and company net profit. These rival measures take down company power to about a tenth of the sales measure. Also in qualitative (...) terms the "exit power" of the company gives a low impact compared to governmental action and the article concludes that company power by common measures is overestimated. However, the aggregated long-term effect of the market economy on the development of society is most significant. But it is a mistake to use that judgment as an argument for the opinion that business executives are the major power holders in modern societies. Perceptions of power also have an impact on which expectations and commitments that can be judged as realistic and therefore the issue of power is central for the normative discussion about corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

The philosophy of superdeterminism is based on a single scientific fact about the universe, namely that cause and effect in physics are not real. In 2020, accomplished Swedish theoretical physicist, Dr. Johan Hansson published a physics proof using Albert Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity that our universe is superdeterministic meaning a predetermined static block universe without cause and effect in physics. The philosophy of superdeterminism dismisses many commonly held beliefs as illusions of our static block universe. People widely believe (...) in many things which simply are not true under Dr. Hansson’s version of superdeterminism. Rather, these false beliefs are merely illusions caused by our static block universe without cause and effect in physics. These illusions include cause and effect in physics, locality, motion, an open future, free will on Earth, the independent existence of objects, time as a flowing river or background ticking clock, conservation of physical reality in time, and temporal privilege. However, the idea of illusions in our block universe is quite old with its roots in Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity first published in 1905. So, we need to recognize that our common sense is being fooled by illusions created by our static block universe. (shrink)

Psychological research has shown that cognitive illusions, of which visual illusions are just a special case, are systematic and pervasive, raising epistemological questions about how error in all forms of research can be identified and eliminated. The quantitative sciences make use of statistical techniques for this purpose, but it is not clear what the qualitative equivalent is, particularly in view of widespread scepticism about validity and objectivity. I argue that, in the light of cognitive psychology, the ‘error question’ (...) cannot be dismissed as a positivist obsession, and that the concepts of truth and objectivity are unavoidable. However, they constitute only a ‘minimal realism’, which does not necessarily bring a commitment to ‘absolute’ truth, certainty, correspondence, causation, reductionism, or universal laws in its wake. The assumption that it does reflects a misreading of positivism and, ironically, precipitates a ‘crisis of legitimation and representation’, as described by constructivist authors. (shrink)

Sociologists theorize that people comply with the dictates of states and other organizations out of self-interest or because of the perceived legitimacy of those in authority. Some organizations, however, are based on lies, or secrets, and it would seem that these should be very short-lived, given how easy it is for the truth to escape. This article lays the foundations of a sociology of deception, focusing on lies and secrets successfully maintained for years or even decades. The ideas of Goffman (...) and Simmel provide a theoretical starting point. Then Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme is considered as a case study. Drawing on that and other examples, the article culminates in a theory that distinguishes between barriers to knowing, barriers to asking, barriers to telling, barriers to perceiving, barriers to believing, and barriers to acting. Together, these may counter the natural entropic tendency for information to leak and diffuse, in part because the effectiveness of one sort of barrier may offset imperfections in others. (shrink)

We question a central premise upon which the target article is based. Namely, we point out that the evidence for is in fact quite mixed. As such, the question of whether positive illusions are adaptive from an evolutionary standpoint may be premature in light of the fact that their very existence may be an illusion.

In normal observers, gazing at one’s own face in the mirror for a few minutes, at a low illumination level, triggers the perception of strange faces, a new visual illusion that has been named ‘strange-face in the mirror’. Individuals see huge distortions of their own faces, but they often see monstrous beings, archetypal faces, faces of relatives and deceased, and animals. In the experiment described here, strange-face illusions were perceived when two individuals, in a dimly lit room, gazed at (...) each other in the face. Inter-subjective gazing compared to mirror-gazing produced a higher number of different strange-faces. Inter-subjective strange-face illusions were always dissociative of the subject’s self and supported moderate feeling of their reality, indicating a temporary lost of self-agency. Unconscious synchronization of event-related responses to illusions was found between members in some pairs. Synchrony of illusions may indicate that unconscious response–coordination is caused by the illusion–conjunction of crossed dissociative strange-faces, which are perceived as projections into each other’s visual face of reciprocal embodied representations within the pair. Inter-subjective strange-face illusions may be explained by the subject’s embodied representations and the other’s visual face binding. Unconscious facial mimicry may promote inter-subjective illusion–conjunction, then unconscious joint-action and response–coordination. (shrink)

This chapter draws on Schelling's insights about evil to show that the reason we find Ender's Game so disturbing is that it points to unnerving facts about our own lives. One thing that Schelling can help us to notice is that by becoming a selfish monster, Ender passes through an essential phase in his moral development. Card's Ender's Game is disturbing not only because of what its protagonist does and the manipulation that led him to it. It's discomfiting because it (...) points to something all suspect about us: that our freedom is really a product of forces that can't detect or even imagine. Ender's Game is thus revealed as a meditation on the interplay of freedom and fate that defines all of our lives. (shrink)

Affirming-the-consequent is a well-known fallacy that leads naïve people to believe that a correct prediction shows that they are “on the right track,” the track of truth. Here I outline fifteen subtler forms of deception that I term ‘cognitive illusions’, intellectual perceptions that make strong realism seem more plausible than it is. Like affirming the consequent, some of these items are used as positive arguments by proponents of strong realism. I do not claim that exposing these illusions amounts (...) to a decisive refutation of strong realism, let alone weaker forms of realism, some of which I can accept. But appreciating their force makes strong realism less attractive. (shrink)

Many pro-life supporters accept the substance view of human value, tying intrinsic value to properties essential to all human beings. Many pro-choice supporters accept the functionalist view of human value, tying intrinsic value to accidental functional properties. They argue that there are circumstances in which terminating human beings is permissible. I offer three reasons for rejecting FV. First, FV fails to ontologically ground intrinsic qualities. Second, FV entails that technologically enhanced human beings may have greater intrinsic value than unenhanced human (...) beings. Third, FV entails a problematic pragmatic-utilitarian view of value that undermines widespread convictions about human dignity. (shrink)

This article discusses Du Châtelet’s challenging claim that entertaining illusions, especially illusions of being esteemed by posterity, is conducive to happiness. It does so by taking a contextualizing approach, contrasting her views with some Epicurean aspects of the views on illusions and happiness in Bernard de Fontenelle and Julien Offray de La Mettrie. I will argue for three claims: (1) Du Châtelet’s comparison between self-related illusions and illusions in the theater is vulnerable to objections deriving (...) from some distinctions that Fontenelle’s poetics draws between the role of illusions in the theater and the role of illusions in real life. (2) Examining Fontenelle’s analysis of the detrimental effects of self-related illusions indicates several respects in which Du Châtelet has underestimated the ambivalent nature of illusions. (3) Du Châtelet’s view that illusions are akin to sensations that are favorable to us problematically generalizes La Mettrie’s insight that some acts of the imagination have a quasi-perceptual nature. (shrink)