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To this reader, it was Dworkin's meditations on the jurisprudence of death and dying that was so worthy of, at the very least, "cherry-picking" for the poetic insights that go beyond law and ethics to wider, almost spiritual significance. Maybe, thereby, there was the possibility to try and better understand the intell... |
In his 1993 book, Death's Dominion, Dworkin gives a timely reminder of the need for tolerance and humanity to permeate all ethical deliberations about the beginning and end of life, be they theoretical or clinical. The way we approach our deaths and those of our fellow human beings is an important ingredient in individ... |
Power-plant design should prepare for carbon capture SIR -Your News Feature "China's burning ambition" (Nature 435, 1152-1154; 2005) identifies gasification-based technologies as important for limiting future pollutant and CO 2 emissions from China, but it fails to consider another major requirement for any future larg... |
Criticism that science is being used as a cloak to hide the purpose of killing whales is inappropriate. The lethal method used for sampling is required to achieve our research objectives, including determination of age and detailed data on stomach contents. Also, parts of Japan's research programme use non-lethal techn... |
Although most discussions of natural kinds in evolutionary biology and systematics focus on metaphysical issues (e.g., what is a natural kind, or which biological things are kinds), epistemological considerations are at least as important (e.g., what epistemic-theoretical aims are pursued by using various natural kinds... |
While species had originally been considered as classes or natural kinds, the view that species are individuals (SAI) was proposed in response to the serious problems facing a construal of species as kinds (Ghiselin 1974; Hull 1978). Most importantly, species are historical entities: a species originates, it persists a... |
4 nature (e.g., all oxygen atoms share physical properties and can undergo the same chemical reactions). (2) The identity and boundary of a natural kind is metaphysically determined by an essence; an object belongs to the kind in virtue of having this essential property. The essence is epistemologically fundamental in ... |
Yet the view that species and higher taxa are natural kinds has been revived (Boyd 1999; Griffiths 1999; Keller et al. 2003; Rieppel 2005b Rieppel, 2006 Rieppel, 2007 Wilson 1999 Wilson, 2005, using the view of natural kinds as homeostatic property clusters (HPC) proposed by Boyd (1991). This new philosophical notion o... |
are characteristic of the kind, which is necessary for taxa to count as natural kinds. (2) These correlation of properties is brought about and maintained by causal processes (dubbed 'homeostatic mechanisms') in which the kind members figure. It is this set of homeostatic mechanisms that determines the identity of an H... |
Furthermore, in contrast to the tacit assumption (fitting chemical kinds) that an essence is an intrinsic property, the HPC view explicitly permits extrinsic / relational properties as part of the homeostatic mechanisms characterizing a natural kind. (For a more detailed philosophical account of the HPC construal of na... |
In the case of a species as a natural kind, the property cluster consists in shared phenotypic and genotypic features or a particular range of variation that several characters exhibit, which make the species a genetically and morphologically cohesive entity. The homeostatic mechanisms accounting for this are those des... |
Note that while the alternative SAI view does not explicitly invoke 'essences' (or homeostatic mechanisms), it is committed to there being some determining features that settle what makes some organisms (but not others) parts of a species and that determine the identity of this species-individual across time. These det... |
This provides a relevant motivation for SAI, but has to be qualified. Barker and Wilson (unpubl.) make the useful distinction between integrative and response cohesion. An entity has integrative cohesion if its parts are spatially contiguous and there are strong causal connections between the parts so as to facilitate ... |
"whatever is 'homeostatic' cannot, by definition, evolve" (p. 234). This is first a misconstrual of the HPC view, in that it takes the label 'homeostatic' too literally. 'Homeostatic mechanism' is a technical term that does not imply that the properties of a kind do not change or exhibit variation, rather, it refers to... |
Apart from the issue as to which metaphysical category taxa belong to, an important virtue of some discussions developing the HPC view has been to address epistemological issues in biology. While it is not committed to natural kinds being governed by genuine laws, the HPC view stems from the idea that any adequate scie... |
Several epistemic aims may attach to one and the same natural kind, and a beneficial feature inductions. In addition to this, some of the features shared by members of the kind are more basic in that they form the causal basis for the correlation of the other features. These features making up the homeostatic mechanism... |
The HPC approach views these different descriptive and explanatory interests (epistemic aims) as compatible. While one scientific account (e.g. one species concept) represents only some properties of a kind (because those are sufficient to accommodate the specific epistemic interests of a group of biologists), the HPC ... |
conventional. An individual likewise has a non-arbitrary boundary and distinctive unity across Although metaphysically both approaches are fully compatible, there may be pragmatic reasons to favor one over the other in a certain epistemic context. In evolutionary contexts where species (and sometimes higher taxa) are v... |
Discussions about biological kinds have focused on species and other taxa. However, the aim of this paper is to arrive at a broader perspective on natural kinds in biology, so that it is vital to together as homologues or structures of the same type (homologies across species). This taxonomic aspect of homology (stress... |
kinds-in fact, the question is which possible parts of a body are natural units in that they have a distinct developmental role and can function as independent taxonomic characters. Previous discussions and explicit defenses of the idea that homologues are natural kinds were given by Wagner (1996 Wagner (, 2001 ) and R... |
Which developmental-morphological properties of a structure determine its identity as a homologue and which do not (and thus can vary across species) has to be teased apart by detailed comparative developmental studies. For instance, Wagner (1989) suggested that homologues are characterized by shared developmental cons... |
Section 1 highlighted the idea that the identity of an HPC natural kind is not necessarily constituted by intrinsic properties, i.e., the homeostatic mechanisms specifying what the kind's members are can include extrinsic or relational properties. This is relevant in the present context because given that a homologue c... |
In sum, different instances of a homologue in different species may share a host of internal structural properties, which is important for systematics. Yet despite the focus on shared features in many discussions of natural kinds, different instances of a homologue may differ in their character states. The 'homeostatic... |
This developmentally based potential for evolution manifests itself in certain phylogenetic patterns, i.e., distributions of character states. Phylogenetic (taxic) approaches to homology simply focus on the phylogenetic manifestation of the potential for evolution in a character-by- Thus, taxic approaches focus on a ho... |
Apart from kinds defined in terms of structure and/or phylogeny, there are kinds defined in terms of function features, so that an account sensitive to the different kinds of biological kinds has to consider functionally defined kinds such as analogues and ecological kinds. Some philosophers assume that a functional ki... |
Analogues, in contrast, share significantly less properties than homologues because they are defined in terms of some function. Functional kinds are what philosophers call multiply realizable: there are many different possible physical systems (realizers) that perform the function. E.g., money is a functionally defined... |
To account for how a particular wing permits flight, the laws of physics have to be applied in a concrete model. 6 But different models are needed to understand different kinds of wings. For instance, modeling insect wing uplift involves non-linear effects resulting from the wing rapidly changing its orientation toward... |
However, while the members of a kind defined in terms of phylogeny and/or structure (such as homologues) may share more properties than members of a kind defined in terms of function (such as analogues), functional kinds are nonetheless scientifically relevant and figure in certain generalizations. In line with my abov... |
The HPC account maintains that a natural kind is characterized by a cluster of correlated properties, and that the metaphysical identity of the kind is determined by a set of homeostatic mechanisms, which form the causal basis for the correlation of the former properties. An HPC kind is a natural kind differing from an... |
are different homeostatic mechanisms specifying the identity of the kind. A higher taxon is defined by common ancestry, and possibly also by the operation of developmental constraints specific to that taxon, which together with common ancestry account for the character similarities among taxon members. A species can be... |
For instance, Boyd (1999) and Griffiths (1999) argue that social kinds and other kinds used in the special sciences can be natural kinds, and their examples make this point not by counting how many properties are correlated in such a kind or by assessing to which extent the generalizations they figure in count as laws,... |
In my view, the question as to whether or not a scientific kind is theoretically important cannot be conducted in terms of whether it is a natural kind or another kind. Rather than attempting to offer a unique metaphysical account of 'natural' kind, the more fruitful approach consists in the epistemological study of ho... |
Some kind concepts support mere descriptions (induction, inference, generalization), other concepts support causal-mechanistic explanations. Some species concepts serve only taxonomic descriptions and classifications, other species concepts support evolutionary explanations. Some meet several such biological demands on... |
While a kind concept abstracts away from many features of reality and is not able to serve all scientific purposes, the concept may very well succeed in meeting some epistemic aims, so that it is important to get clear about which theoretical-epistemic purposes a natural kind concept is meant to serve (Love, this issue... |
Can there be free agency, a capacity exemplified by humans as well as by many nonhuman animals, if the world is indeterministic? This question is arguably more important than its mirror image, the question whether free agency is compatible with determinism. But unlike that latter question, the compatibility of free age... |
To begin with the metaphysical side, by determinism we mean the metaphysical claim about our world that as of now, there is only one real possibility for the future to turn out. Indeterminism, on the other hand, is defined simply as the negation of determinism: as of now, there is more than one really possible way for ... |
Turning to action theory, we will use the expression 'free agency' and related terms in the following way: Free agency is a capacity of certain beings, free agents. These agents act freely at least some of the time. We contrast a free action with non-agentive, mere behavior. A case of behavior (typically, a bodily move... |
Traditionally, agency and freedom are most often discussed under the heading of 'free will'. There is a long discussion about the notion of free will itself as well as about its metaphysical preconditions. We will use some of the terminology that has been developed in that discussion, but in this paper we do not discus... |
11 This does not mean that we have to attribute free will to them, or to deny them freedom altogether when we find, quite sensibly, that they fall short of possessing free will. But neither would it be enough to attribute their behavior to them in a merely causal way. If a crow catches a worm, causal attribution is war... |
9 A note on philosophical terminology to avoid a misunderstanding: There is a large discussion about so-called 'freedom of action', meaning the absence of external obstacles (see note 2). What we are calling 'free agency' is not the same phenomenon as what is discussed as 'freedom of action'. The latter notion is emplo... |
10 On this point, see again Steward (2012). This important book has done a lot to show that the metaphysics of free agency is the proper place to discuss the issue of freedom vs. determinism. 11 We again refer to Steward (2012, esp. ch. 4) for an abundance of examples. Methodologically, it is important to note that we ... |
Free Agency under Indeterminism 223 explicate is a notion of free agency that allows for the attribution of an action to an agent in a way that lies between mere causal attribution and the demands of attributing an action out of free will. The former type of attribution does not distinguish a free action from a case of... |
Second, consider examples of feline agency. It may well be that for non-human animals, acting out of free will is out of the question: we do not praise or blame a cat in a moral sense. But we do make a distinction between the cat's mere behavior and her free agency. In the former case, we view that cat, as it were, mec... |
13 Take a case of mere behavior, e.g., the cat shedding hair on your dark carpet. In order to stop that behavior, you may decide to brush the cat, or perhaps to get her on a diet leading to less shedding: the aim is to alter the cat physically in a direct way. In a case of the cat's free agency, our attitude is differe... |
We have already established that we attribute free agency in many cases, including cases in which we do not attribute free will, and that we dismiss the attribution of free agency in cases of mere behavior, which we attribute causally but not as agency. In building on these examples, we are assuming that the attributio... |
14 It is possible to acknowledge the fact that we attribute free agency while denying that there is such a thing as free agency at all. Such a skeptical option (an error theory of agency attribution) is always available, but we can dismiss it as irrelevant for our approach, which aims at establishing the possibility of... |
This thought has to be unpacked in order to yield a list of criteria. We start with a precondition of all kinds of behavior: (1) causal influence. This criterion is, however, not yet specific; causal difference-making is not sufficient for free agency. Thermostats make a causal difference to what happens, but they cann... |
(3) Requiring flexibility and adaptivity is a way of spelling out in which way a free agent should be non-rigid. A thing that responds completely erratically, such as a lottery machine, is non-rigid, but we would not call such a thing a free agent. For free agents, non-rigidity plays a positive role on two different ti... |
Thomas Müller and Hans J. Briegel another, a free agent has a repertoire of possible variants which are employed, e.g., to overcome obstacles. Finding a route blocked, a reflex agent may be stymied, while a free agent can vary its behavior and thereby find new ways to proceed. On a longer time-scale, free agents adapt ... |
It is clear that we need to avoid talking about rightness and wrongnessmoral categories are not applicable when we limit ourselves to free agency. For intention, rationality, and the will, we do not take a stance on whether these notions can be fully accounted for on the basis of free agency alone. Rationality is somet... |
These claims are largely independent. Logical consistency dictates only that one not hold both (DetCom) and (DetInc), or both (IndCom) and (IndInc), since these pairs are contradictories. All other combinations of claims are logically consistent. Thus, somebody could argue for both (DetInc) and (IndInc), thereby provin... |
The four claims differ in the manner in which they can be established. Claims (DetCom) and (IndCom) are compatibility claims. Such claims can be proved directly by example, that is, by providing an actual or a possible scenario in which both notions are instantiated. Thus, in order to establish claim (DetCom) in this d... |
Note that the dialectical situation we have sketched so far is completely symmetrical between the notions of determinism and indeterminism. For both metaphysical positions, there is a compatibility claim and an incompatibility claim, and the methods for establishing such claims are exactly parallel. The only further re... |
Given the layout of the dialectical landscape just described, we can now say precisely what the aim of our paper is: We aim to establish claim (IndCom) of the compatibility of indeterminism and free agency, via a direct route: We will provide a possible scenario in which both free agency and indeterminism can be exempl... |
30 28 In fact, with a view to the cheapshot strategy mentioned in note 27, it seems nearly impossible to establish claim (IndInc) without thereby also establishing claim (DetInc). That is, those who hold on to the possibility of free agency can hardly hope to establish the impossiblity of free agency under indeterminis... |
Given that the dialectical situation is tidy and symmetrical, it is unfortunate that the terminology that has been established, especially in the recent free will debate, suggests asymmetries between the compatibility claims (DetCom) and (IndCom). An asymmetric treatment has become well entrenched in the debate, but as... |
34 As a symptom of the fact that the debate fails to reflect the symmetry of the positions, one can note that many simulations. There is universal agreement that the gold standard for certified randomness is so-called device-independent randomness, which is directly tied to the assumption of the fundamentality of quant... |
32 Belnap et al. (2001, 204) note that it would be better if claim (IndCom) were called 'compatibilism': It is the more important compatibility claim, as it pertains to our arguably indeterministic world. We agree that there should be a separate label for claim (IndCom), and that 'compatibilism' would be an apt label, ... |
Thomas Müller and Hans J. Briegel systematic overviews of possible positions in the free will debate, such as Fischer et al. (2007), are structured around the compatibility or incompatibility of various claims with determinism only. Given such an approach, the possible positions with respect to free agency can be given... |
In our view, libertarianism is not a helpful alternative to compatibilism because it is too specific, combining three (or even four) logically independent claims under one label. Of course, such a package deal is dialectically more fragile than compatibilism, since it can be attacked in many different ways, especially ... |
This table shows that, as we remarked above, a position that falls under the traditional label of compatibilism is not yet fully detailed: Compatibilism (DetCom) stands for the upper row of the table, which comprises two fully specified positions, (A) and (B). Of these, position (B) is the position advocated in the tit... |
38 That name is due to the fact that the paper, and other papers with similar claims, appeared in the journal, Mind, in the 1930s. See Van Inwagen (1983, 16 ) and Franklin (2011) for the terminology. 39 In that case, however, they will have to argue for claim (IndCom) in order to avoid commitment to position (B). 40 Su... |
Here is a first way in which randomness can be useful for an agent. The model to be described below goes far beyond this, but we offer the following considerations as a first step toward the idea that as an agent, randomness can be your friend. Consider tie-breaking: An agent is in a situation in which a particular cho... |
Free Agency under Indeterminism 235 way or the other, the creature has to find a way to break the tie if it wants to avoid starvation. Randomness can come in handy here: It is perfectly appropriate to tie the tie-breaking to some random event. And this is so independently of whether the randomness can be traced back to... |
Here is a next kind of situation in which randomness can really help an agent in a specific and crucial way. Animals trying to escape from a predator will be caught easily if their escape behavior is predictable. So it has great survival value for typical prey to show erratic, unpredictable escape behavior. And such be... |
Still, these tie-breaking examples only show that randomness can be useful for an agent in the sense that successful agents will profit from having sources of randomness available to handle special types of situations. 44 A model for free agency under indeterminism should provide more if it is to make a positive contri... |
Thomas Müller and Hans J. Briegel the current debate about free agency: Such a model should not stop at making the general point that randomness can be a useful resource, but show explicitly how randomness can be a useful element in the dynamical coming to be of an individual, specific action. At this point, two approa... |
The other approach, which we call deeply stochastic agency modeling, is not to start with a deterministic model at all, but to work out a stochastic model, in which indeterminism is the central resource for the model's dynamics. Stochastic models are well known in the sciences. Important examples include Einstein's exp... |
We now describe a stochastic process model of free agency under indeterminism based on an associative memory organization and random option selection. The 45 All the options for indeterministic theories of agency discussed in the overview by Franklin (2011), e.g., the so-called 'deliberative libertarian' theories of Me... |
The basic process of deliberation for a PS agent can be expressed within the percept-action framework of artificial agents (Russell and Norvig 2011) and goes as follows. Given a specific state (topology and weights structure) of the ECM and triggered by some perceptual input, a first memory clip is activated. Subsequen... |
Thomas Müller and Hans J. Briegel history and thus encode her past experience connecting sensory input to action output, including the consequences (good or bad) that these actions had for the agent. Weights are updated after an action has been performed and feedback has been received (as part of the perceptual input),... |
In one run of projective simulation, a given percept as input at time t 0 can lead to any of a number of actions as outputs, and output can be triggered at different times t 0 + mΔt corresponding to a deliberation length of m transitions (each taking the time Δt, assuming a simple model with uniform dynamics). Various ... |
First, it is clear that the model is indeterministic -it is based on an indeterministic random walk for each coupling of sensory input (percept) to motor output (action). It should also be noted that this indeterministic aspect is a fundamental feature of the model in the same way in which other well-known models in ph... |
We proceed by establishing that the model meets the criteria for free agency laid out in section 2.1.2. Thus, we have to argue that the actions of a PS agent can be causally relevant, non-rigid in a flexible and adaptive way, and sensible. Causal relevance is clear since a run of projective simulation is itself a causa... |
Thomas Müller and Hans J. Briegel In favor of our claim that a PS agent's actions are sensible, we can offer two main arguments that relate to the mentioned two different time-scales. First, while the projective simulation process is indeterministic, each single instance of that process makes sense before the backgroun... |
Second, on the longer time-scale of learning and forming behavioral dispositions, each individual deliberation-action process makes sense because it contributes to the agent's individual history and to its development as an agent. Each such process allows for learning through the feedback (in the simplest reinforcement... |
Also related to the longer time-scale of learning, we can note that based on indeterministic decision processes with learning through feedback, a PS agent can develop (almost) deterministic reactions to specific stimuli. PS agents thus need not be unreliable or haphazard. In some cases they can exhibit behavior typical... |
Within the PS model, therefore, we use indeterminism as a central and basic resource. Importantly, this does not mean that we expose an otherwise deterministic agent to certain random processes. The PS model is not based on an underlying deterministic deliberating agent that is somehow 'randomized' to arrive at the mod... |
It should be pointed out that the model of projective simulation, including its rules for transitions and compositions in clip space, represents a specific model of reinforcement learning in a physically inspired approach to (quantum) artificial intelligence. It is meant to be a simple model for natural and artificial ... |
Our description of the PS model and of its interpretation so far has been fairly abstract. In order to balance our description, we now give an (oversimplified) example of the dynamics of projective simulation in which the abstract talk of considerations is tied to a concrete situation. Here is our little story: We assu... |
We interpret these clips in the cat's memory, with reference to our little story, as follows: Percept s represents the situation that the cat is in: sitting on the floor, sunlight on the desk, her owner sitting at the desk typing. Action a 1 represents jumping, action a 2, walking away. The given percept s triggers con... |
Based on this network structure and given specific values for all the mentioned transition probabilities, we can describe the fine structure of the cat's possible courses of deliberation and action quantitatively. In order to simplify the math, let us assume that all transitions from a given node have equal weight, suc... |
Given our simple stochastic dynamics, the total probability that the cat's deliberation will finally lead to jumping at some time after the time of the percept s, t 0, under the assumed weights, is the sum of the probabilities of all paths leading to jumping, which comes down to p jump = 6/7. The probability for walkin... |
With our toy model we have illustrated a simple memory structure of considerations leading from perception to action via different paths. In Table 3 we have shown some of these paths in detail, including values for the paths' probabilities. These paths provide an internal description of the stochastic development of th... |
The basic worry behind any form of the luck objection is that if something happens indeterministically, it is due to chance, and thus not due to an agent. In this general form, the objection is easily dismissed -it construes chance as an agent herself and then invokes a rivalry between being due to chance and being due... |
Van Inwagen's replay argument is more specific than the two variants of the luck objection just mentioned, and therefore more serious. He considers a real action at some time (think of the cat walking away at time t 0 + 4Δt) and the indeterministic real possibilities at some previous time (think of the cat registering ... |
The replay argument, on the other hand, is phrased in terms of an external description that only considers the final step of the dynamics, which results in the action. This description lacks the detail to make an individual run understandable and thereby attributable. The external description shields the resulting acti... |
58 Second, the different actions need not be alternatives for the exact same time. In fact, in the network of Figure 2, if clip c 1 is activated, 57 We repeat that the replay argument is originally given in the context of a discussion of free will. In fact, Van Inwagen's actual example is of a woman who has to make a m... |
Free Agency under Indeterminism 247 action a 1 can result immediately, but the immediate alternative to action a 1 is not action a 2 (which would not make sense as flowing from the consideration c 1 ), but the associative activation of a different consideration, c 2, which can then lead to action a 2 in a sensible way.... |
Note that even if the agent's memory structure is such that the actions a 1 and a 2 in the end both occur with a probability of 1 2, 61 it is not adequate to think of the agent as tossing a fair coin to decide what to do. The indeterministic decision process does not just provide an outcome satisfying certain statistic... |
In this paper, we have proposed a novel approach to the question whether there can be free agency under indeterminism. That question is of crucial importance for our practical self-conception and for the freedom debate: There are good reasons to assume that our world is indeterministic, and we consider ourselves to be ... |
With respect to means, we opted for the direct route to establishing our compatibility claim via an explicit, mathematically well-defined and physically motivated class of models. We described the agency model of projective simulation and argued that it exhibits the sought-for combination of free agency and indetermini... |
In 1974, Peter Doherty and Rolf Zinkernagel published a landmark article in Nature [1] that described the ability of lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV)-specific cytotoxic T cells to lyse LCMV-infected, 51 Cr-labeled target cells if the target cells shared class I major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules ... |
Sure, it's a medical problem, but is a solution likely to come from focusing on this issue? How would you take it forward, either conceptually or practically? NG Specifically, would you accept a slight re-statement of MHC restriction such as the following: T cells recognize nominal (eg, viral) antigen in association wi... |
As I recall, I don't think Kindred and Shreffler concluded anything much and I know, for a fact, that (in 1975 at least) Don Shreffler (who was a good guy) thought our ideas were crazy. Katz and Benacerraf had come to some very premature conclusions regarding the "Ir gene products" (they thought they were the TCRs) tha... |
In 1995, after you won the Lasker Basic Medical Research Award [7], I congratulated you and expressed the view that you and Rolf deserved the recognition associated with a Nobel Prize despite my concerns about the limitations of such awards. What are your thoughts about your contribution, with Rolf, to elucidating the ... |
ith Ibn Sina great Canon came the "golden age of Arabic medicine", almost to its peak. Since the beginning of XI century, when Ibn Sina died, until the middle of XIII century, when creative was Ibn al-Nafis, medical science continues to develop and progress, and had its brilliant minds. For that time characteristic is ... |
He was born in the year 1210 in a village near Damascus called "Quersh' (1,2,3,4,5,6,7.8.9.10). He joins the circles of medicine at the age of 22 (in the year on occasion of 800th anniversary of Birth of ibn al-nafis -discoverer of Cardiac and Pulmonary Circulation 1232) in Aldakhoiriah School. Given the name of its fo... |
Ibn-Nafis lived in an age of political conflicts and chaos in the Muslim world-the rivality of dynasties, wars, and devastating invasion of the Mongols. However, despite all this, the academic activities in Damascus and Cairo were not significantly weakened, particularly in the field of medicine, for which there are ob... |
Ibn-Nafis wrote article about the pulse, which is important in terms of Ibn-Nafis learning influence in the West and the establishment of prominent medical schools. This work is not preserved in its original form, but it appears in Latin translation in the early 16th century. A doctor from that era Andrea Alpago is cre... |
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