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Pitch Black for Fifteen Years is my true story. It starts at the age of thirteen and continues through today. I explain why I had to disappear from the life of my kids; how I became persecuted by the Swiss authorities for being a Chilean citizen; my torture by the Switzerland Federal Police; and how the government of Switzerland has controlled other governments including Chilean, Spanish, Canadian, Italian, French, and all European and international institutions. I am a simple man, but a fighter. My enemy, Angelo Valli, a Swiss mobster who started the persecution in 1997, was allied with Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, Silvio Berlusconi, Mohammad Kaddafi, Italian criminal organizations, and t...
"Gadamer’s Repercussions is a terrific collection of essays. While Gadamer is not the most precise of philosophers, he turns out, in this book at least, to be among the most generative. The essays prove that Gadamer’s idealizing of dialogue can actually be put in practice by careful attention to the frameworks he addresses. I was most impressed by the essays that situate his ethics, his aesthetics, his relation to romanticism, his understanding of the relation of law and morality, his engagements with Fascism, and several aspects of his vexed relationship with postmodern thinking, especially on the possibility of dialogue."—Charles Altieri, author of The Particulars of Rapture "Gadamer...
A “wide-ranging, witty, and astonishingly learned” scientific and cultural history of the concept of the capacity to act in nature (London Review of Books). Today, a scientific explanation is not meant to ascribe agency to natural phenomena: we would not say a rock falls because it seeks the center of the earth. Even for living things, in the natural sciences and often in the social sciences, the same is true. A modern botanist would not say that plants pursue sunlight. This has not always been the case, nor, perhaps, was it inevitable. Since the seventeenth century, many thinkers have made agency, in various forms, central to science. The Restless Clock examines the history of this prin...
This volume offers very selected papers from the 2014 conference of the “International Association for Computing and Philosophy” (IACAP) - a conference tradition of 28 years. The theme of the papers is the two-way relation between computing technologies and philosophical questions: Computing technologies both raise new philosophical questions, and shed light on traditional philosophical problems. The chapters cover: 1) philosophy of computing, 2) philosophy of computer science & discovery, 3) philosophy of cognition & intelligence, 4) computing & society, and 5) ethics of computation.
In these ground-breaking essays, Heinz von Foerster discusses some of the fundamental principles that govern how we know the world and how we process the information from which we derive that knowledge. The author was one of the founders of the science of cybernetics.
"Dazzling.” —Financial Times As lives offline and online merge even more, it is easy to forget how we got here. Rise of the Machines reclaims the spectacular story of cybernetics, one of the twentieth century’s pivotal ideas. Springing from the mind of mathematician Norbert Wiener amid the devastation of World War II, the cybernetic vision underpinned a host of seductive myths about the future of machines. Cybernetics triggered blissful cults and military gizmos, the Whole Earth Catalog and the air force’s foray into virtual space, as well as crypto-anarchists fighting for internet freedom. In Rise of the Machines, Thomas Rid draws on unpublished sources—including interviews with hippies, anarchists, sleuths, and spies—to offer an unparalleled perspective into our anxious embrace of technology.
Bestselling author David Shenk has written the ultimate story of how 32 carved pieces on a board illuminated our understanding of war, science and the human brain. Chess is far more than just a game. Its rules and pieces have served as a metaphor for society. It has appeared in the writings of Borges, Nabokov, Tolstoy, Canetti, Eliot, to name just a few. It has helped form the military strategies that conquered civilisations, influenced the mathematical understandings that have driven technological change, and served as a moral guide. It has been condemned by Popes as the devil's game, yet presidents have used it to promote diplomacy. Here, David Shenk chronicles its intriguing saga, from ancient Persia to medieval Europe to the dens of Benjamin Franklin and Norman Schwarzkopf. Along the way, he examines a single legendary game that took place in London in 1851 between two masters of the time, and relays his own attempts to become as skilled as his Polish ancestor Samuel Rosenthal, a nineteenth-century champion. With its blend of cultural history and Shenk's lively personal narrative, The Immortal Game is a compelling guide for novices and aficionados alike.
Can we make machines that think and act like humans or other natural intelligent agents? The answer to this question depends on how we see ourselves and how we see the machines in question. Classical AI and cognitive science had claimed that cognition is computation, and can thus be reproduced on other computing machines, possibly surpassing the abilities of human intelligence. This consensus has now come under threat and the agenda for the philosophy and theory of AI must be set anew, re-defining the relation between AI and Cognitive Science. We can re-claim the original vision of general AI from the technical AI disciplines; we can reject classical cognitive science and replace it with a new theory (e.g. embodied); or we can try to find new ways to approach AI, for example from neuroscience or from systems theory. To do this, we must go back to the basic questions on computing, cognition and ethics for AI. The 30 papers in this volume provide cutting-edge work from leading researchers that define where we stand and where we should go from here.
From the author of Emergence and The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open: Why You Are What You Think takes us on a journey to the frontiers of brain science and reveals exactly how we're hardwired to think and feel. 'You are part reptile, part mammal, part primate. You are a dopamine fiend. You are a walking assembly of patterns and waves, clusters of neurons firing in sync with one another...' Experimenting with the latest technology, Stephen Johnson discovers (among other things) that everything we do - from falling in love to forming a sentence - is caused by neurons firing and chemicals swirling around our heads; that there are gadgets which can enable us to control our own brainw...
An examination of the fundamental role cybernetics played in the birth of cognitive science and the light this sheds on current controversies. The conceptual history of cognitive science remains for the most part unwritten. In this groundbreaking book, Jean-Pierre Dupuy—one of the principal architects of cognitive science in France—provides an important chapter: the legacy of cybernetics. Contrary to popular belief, Dupuy argues, cybernetics represented not the anthropomorphization of the machine but the mechanization of the human. The founding fathers of cybernetics—some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, including John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and W...