Concept Of Mind Research Articles

Legal Evidence of Subjective States: A Brain-Based Model of Chronic Pain Increases Accuracy and Fairness in Law.

Advances in structural and functional neuroimaging offer new ways to conceptualize chronic pain disorders and to prevent, diagnose, and treat chronic pain. Advances in pain science, though, do not entail changes in the concepts of chronic pain in law and culture. Authoritative legal and cultural conceptions of chronic pain continue to promote abstruse theories, characterizing these disorders as arising out of everything from a person's unmet need for love to resistance to "patriarchy." These constructs have consequences, impeding treatment and affecting whether individuals with chronic pain can obtain legal redress. Legal systems themselves are disadvantaged, as adjudicators struggle to make sense of regulations and presumptions at odds with the medical evidence that they must evaluate. Law's pain schema is so misdescriptive that, paradoxically, it can reward fraudulent claims and disadvantage legitimate ones. This review discusses advances in neuroimaging and related sciences that are contributing to an emerging neurological model of chronic pain. It then describes doctrines and cases in the United States and United Kingdom, demonstrating how law's pre-neurological model of pain complicates the legal process for all participants. It concludes with suggestions for doctrinal revisions, which may have broader effects on law's long-standing dualistic conception of body versus mind.

Dixon Chibanda—“Taking mental health to the community”

It might seem strange that a psychiatrist in a nation that is in dire need of mental-health specialists would discourage the construction of new mental-health facilities. But Dixon Chibanda, based in the Zimbabwean capital city of Harare, believes that “We should not think of building more institutions but should instead take mental health to the community.” With this concept in mind, Chibanda—along with psychologists Petra Mesu and Lazarus Kajawu—established the Friendship Bench: a network of lay workers trained to provide assistance to people with depression and anxiety. Many seeking help are victims of domestic violence or have HIV (current estimates put the national incidence at 13% among people aged 15–49 years), or both. Other common factors include poverty and unemployment, which were exacerbated by the nation's recent economic collapse.

DESCARTES ’O AR RYLE ’O MITAS ?

Straipsnyje Ryle’o „Sąmonės samprata“ traktuojama kaip poleminis veikalas. Keliamas klausimas, kokiu pagrindu jame kritikuojama „intelektualinė tendencija“ yra siejama su istoriniu Descartes’u. Ginama tezė, kad „Descartes’o mitas“ – tai retorinė konstrukcija, neatspindinti svarbių Descartes’o dualizmo aspektų. Daromos dvi išvados. Pirma, neduodamas aiškių analizės kriterijų, Ryle’as mėgina suteikti savo veikalui sistemiškumo pobūdį būtent retorinėmis priemonėmis. Antra, „Meditacijų“ ir „Descartes’o mito“ kontrastai atskleidžia, kad santykis su filosofine tradicija nėra Ryle’o pakankamai reflektuotas.

Topic Modeling the Hàn diăn Ancient Classics (汉典古籍)

There is a small but growing literature on large-scale statistical modeling of Chinese language texts. Ouyang analyzed a corpus of over 40,000 ancient documents downloaded from multiple sources. This was used to plot the temporal distributions of word frequencies and geographic distributions of authors. Huang and Yu modeled the SongCi poetry corpus, first converting it to tonally marked pinyin to conserve poetically important pronunciation information. Nichols and colleagues reported initial modeling of the Chinese Text Project corpus1 in a conference paper. (Further below, we describe differences between this corpus and the Handian.) With additional collaborators, this group has now conducted two studies that are currently unpublished but under review. In the first, they apply topic models to address scholarly questions about the relationships among important texts of Ancient Chinese philosophy. In the second, they use topic modeling to investigate the concepts of mind and body in ancient Chinese philosophy. Although we share similar scholarly objectives with these researchers, our approach in this paper is unique in that for the first time anywhere we bring the benefits of computational modeling of ancient Chinese texts to a robust public platform that is mirrored on both sides of the Pacific. Besides being just a useful portal to the texts, our approach foregrounds the interpretive issues surrounding topic models, and makes more sophisticated exploration and analysis of interpretive questions possible for experts and novices alike.

Thomas Reid on Consciousness and the Constitution of the Mental

This paper tackles the issue of consciousness as it features in Thomas Reid’s philosophy of mind. Section 1 shows that consciousness plays a pivotal role within what the Author calls a psychology, namely, Reid’s project of elaborating an empirical description of different mental operations. Section 2 highlights a conceptual difficulty which arises when some of Reid’s claims are taken together: if consciousness is a mental faculty standing on its own footing, but, at the same time, all mental operations are conscious, then a logical regress looms. Section 3 presents Reid’s account of natural powers, especially those relating to life phenomena. By advocating an animistic doctrine of vital functions, he seems to leave open the possibility that some mental activity is unconscious. Section 4 concludes by stressing that Reid’s problem with the regress reveals a deeper tension - a kind of failed synthesis - between a religious and a naturalistic conception of mind.

Probing the depth of infants' theory of mind: disunity in performance across paradigms.

There is currently a hot debate in the literature regarding whether or not infants have a true theory of mind (ToM) understanding. According to the mentalistic view, infants possess the same false belief understanding that older children have but their competence is masked by task demands. On the other hand, others have proposed that preverbal infants are incapable of mental state attribution and simply respond to superficial features of the events in spontaneous-responses tasks. In the current study, we aimed to clarify the nature of infants' performance in tasks designed to assess implicit theory of mind (ToM) by adopting a within-subject design that involved testing 18-month-old infants on two batteries of tasks measuring the same four ToM constructs (intention, desire, true belief, and false belief). One battery included tasks based on the violation-of- expectation (VOE) procedure, whereas the other set of tasks was based on the interactive, helping procedure. Replication of the original findings varied across tasks, due to methodological changes and the use of a within-subject design. Convergent validity was examined by comparing performance on VOE and interactive tasks that are considered to be measures of the same theory of mind concept. The results revealed no significant relations between performance on the pairs of tasks for any of the four ToM constructs measured. This pattern of results is discussed in terms of current conflicting accounts of infants' performance on implicit ToM tasks. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3vqfe_zdhA&feature=youtu.be.

Testing Domain Dependent Software Reliability Growth Models

Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) are supporting software industries in expecting and scrutinizing quality of software. Numerous SRGMs have been proposed; majority of which concentrate on testing period of software. For testing, domain specific knowledge plays a very crucial role. Based on necessity condition, a set of programmes are in testing phase of software development. “Domain testing is a software technique in which small number of test cases is selected for trial. These sets of testing paths, all of which are to be eventually influenced by designed test cases are called the testing domain which expands with the progress of testing”. Keeping this concept in mind, we propose SRGMs with the concept of testing domain with exponential coverage. Utility of proposed framework has been emphasized in this paper through some models pertaining to different distribution i.e Exponential, Logistic, Weibull and Rayleigh. Moreover, the data analysis is performed to find the estimates of parameters by fitting the models on authentic data sets.

Crowds in Nineteenth-Century Fiction and Historical Writing

An internalist perspective on the mind stresses those aspects that are inner, introspective, private, solitary, individual, psychological, mysterious, and detached. An externalist perspective stresses those aspects that are outer, active, public, social, behavioral, evident, embodied, and engaged. This article uses the term social mind to describe those aspects of the whole mind that are revealed through the externalist perspective. It applies the concept of a social mind to descriptions of crowd behavior in Walter Scott's Heart of Midlothian, Thomas Macaulay's History of England, and Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge. In particular, it examines the behavior of crowds as a whole, individuals (especially leaders), and subgroups in terms of the key notions of agency, moral responsibility, organization, and action. Finally, it places this debate within the context of nineteenth-century historiography to explore potential differences between fictional and historiographical treatments of crowds. It concludes that, while histories tend to be pragmatically inclined to treat crowds as social minds, the distinctive affordances of fiction allowed nineteenth-century novelists to be more flexible and to choose either to treat crowds as social minds where appropriate or, as Dickens did in Barnaby Rudge, to complicate or undermine this notion.

Psychological conceptions and practical results

When dealing with the question of the relation between William James’s pragmatism and his psychology, the usual answer consists in tracing back the pragmatist epistemology and theory of truth to his functionalist conception of mind. The aim of this paper is to outline another relation which often goes unnoticed. My contention is that we can find in James’s work a pragmatist conception of psychology itself as a science, which can be expressed in his formula about psychology being a “practical science of mind”. “Practical”, here, must be understood in two different but complementary meanings. On the one hand, psychology has to become a scientific practice, aiming at the discovery of causal laws and free from all metaphysical speculations (experimentalism). On the other hand, the constitution of psychology as a natural science is the necessary condition for it to have some practical applications, notably to education and medicine. The paper outlines the benefits that could be gained in the overall interpretation of James’ work by understanding such relationship between pragmatism and psychology.

The Application of Body-Mind-Spirit Integrated Psychotherapy in Nursing Practice

Body-mind-spirit integrated psychotherapy reflects the core value of nursing by emphasizing the inseparable concept of body, mind, and spirit and caring for the holistic needs of the patient. Body-mind-spirit integrated psychotherapy was developed based on Western psychotherapy (positive psychology and forgiveness therapy), traditional Chinese medicine, and the Eastern philosophies of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. The present paper describes the holistic concepts that underpin this therapeutic approach. Physical health is sustained through proper nutrition, physical relaxation, and harmonized breathing; psychological well-being helps maintain inner peace and harmony in interpersonal relationships; and spiritual well-being helps develop an optimistic and meaningful life. We report on several cases in which body-mind-spirit integrated psychotherapy was applied to the care of clients with depressive disorders and of breast cancer survivors and their partners as well as the related efficacy of this intervention in these cases. Finally, we discuss the potential for culturally-enriched psychotherapy to help clients transform illness suffering into life-growth experiences.

“The minde is matter moved”: Nehemiah Grew on Margaret Cavendish

ABSTRACTThis essay explores an unstudied compendium to Margaret Cavendish’s 1655 Philosophical and Physical Opinions that was composed by the learned physician, plant anatomist, and secretary of the Royal Society, Nehemiah Grew. Despite the growing body of scholarship on Cavendish, minimal attention has been dedicated to her early reception. But studying this compendium provides some fascinating insights into how one of the foremost thinkers of her day read, emended, and manipulated her ideas. I propose that Grew turned to Cavendish’s work when developing his substance theory in the years leading up to the publication of his 1682 The Anatomy of Plants, but that shifting intellectual tides led him to critique her version of material vitalism in his 1701 Cosmologia Sacra. Supported by a transcription of the compendium as an appendix, this article also sheds light on the role that early modern pedagogical techniques and memory tools played in shaping concepts of matter and mind.

Indigenising Eurocentric sociology: The ‘captive mind’ and five decades of sociology in Nigeria

Over the years, the social sciences and related disciplines in postcolonial societies have agitated against the dominant Eurocentric mode of knowledge production. In this case, the grouse against Eurocentric knowledge production is that it undermines attempts at indigenising Eurocentric sociology in Nigeria. This article is an engagement with efforts to evolve a Nigerian sociology. It draws upon the concept of the captive mind, developed by Syed Hussein Alatas, a Southeast Asian intellectual, to critically explore the indigenisation of sociology in Nigeria. In doing so, the article explores the development and entrenchment of Eurocentric sociology as well as attempts at indigenising it over five decades of the production of sociological knowledge in Nigerian universities. It portrays the ways in which the ‘captive’ Nigerian sociologists, students of sociology and the antagonistic material conditions of producing and propagating knowledge connive against the indigenisation of sociology in Nigeria.

Where There is Life There is Mind: In Support of a Strong Life-Mind Continuity Thesis

This paper considers questions about continuity and discontinuity between life and mind. It begins by examining such questions from the perspective of the free energy principle (FEP). The FEP is becoming increasingly influential in neuroscience and cognitive science. It says that organisms act to maintain themselves in their expected biological and cognitive states, and that they can do so only by minimizing their free energy given that the long-term average of free energy is entropy. The paper then argues that there is no singular interpretation of the FEP for thinking about the relation between life and mind. Some FEP formulations express what we call an independence view of life and mind. One independence view is a cognitivist view of the FEP. It turns on information processing with semantic content, thus restricting the range of systems capable of exhibiting mentality. Other independence views exemplify what we call an overly generous non-cognitivist view of the FEP, and these appear to go in the opposite direction. That is, they imply that mentality is nearly everywhere. The paper proceeds to argue that non-cognitivist FEP, and its implications for thinking about the relation between life and mind, can be usefully constrained by key ideas in recent enactive approaches to cognitive science. We conclude that the most compelling account of the relationship between life and mind treats them as strongly continuous, and that this continuity is based on particular concepts of life (autopoiesis and adaptivity) and mind (basic and non-semantic).

Tricks, lies and mistakes: identifying Theory of Mind concepts within storybooks shared with deaf children

ABSTRACTRecent years have seen a significant interest in Theory of Mind (ToM), the specific groups in which it may be restricted and the opportunities which might enhance or suppress development. Previous studies have identified gaps in the literature concerning ideas for intervention and strategies which may augment the development of ToM skills. Published work suggests the use of children’s fiction to support understanding of ToM for young children. However, the current body of evidence does not critically appraise the value of picture books in developing the ToM of deaf children or provide analysis of the elements of ToM they may contain. This paper considers the opportunities held in children’s fiction and details analysis based on a developmental perspective of ToM (Westby, C. and Robinson, L., 2014. A developmental perspective for promoting theory of mind. Topics in language disorders, 34 (4), 362–382). The books analysed were chosen by educators of deaf children and researchers in the field. The opportunity for practitioners and parents to see aspects of ToM in readily accessible fiction is considered with a view to exploiting booksharing for ToM discussion.

Left Radicalism and the Milky Way

Anton Pannekoek (1873–60) was both an influential Marxist and an innovative astronomer. This paper will analyze the various innovative methods that he developed to represent the visual aspect of the Milky Way and the statistical distribution of stars in the galaxy through a framework of epistemic virtues. Doing so will not only emphasize the unique aspects of his astronomical research, but also reveal its connections to his left radical brand of Marxism. A crucial feature of Pannekoek’s astronomical method was the active role ascribed to astronomers. They were expected to use their intuitive ability to organize data according to the appearance of the Milky Way, even as they had to avoid the influence of personal experience and theoretical presuppositions about the shape of the system. With this method, Pannekoek produced results that went against the Kapteyn Universe and instead made him the first astronomer in the Netherlands to find supporting evidence for Harlow Shapley's extended galaxy. After exploring Pannekoek’s Marxist philosophy, it is argued that both his astronomical method and his interpretation of historical materialism can be seen as strategies developed to make optical use of his particular conception of the human mind.

Konsep Kebenaran Ibnu Sina

Truth is an absolute that must be achieved by human beings. It is because there is an element of the human instincts characteristic in the truth; to seek, to understand and to comprehend. Without the truth, human life would lose a barometer of humanity values. There is a problem when a standard of truth is seized by some ideologies which come from human thought. Therefore, this paper tries to research the concept of truth deeper, including the process of its presence and its causes. To shorten the long discussion of the theory of truth, the author of this article tries to focus his research on Ibnu Sina’s theory of the truth. As a great philosopher of Islam, Ibnu Sina has an ideal concept of epistemology, so it is worthy to be studied. For the theory of truth, Ibnu Sina has an interesting view on it. According to him, the truth is contained in philosophical thinking which he describes as wisdom. He divides it into two main concepts. In addition, he also explains the the relation between the truth and the philosophy built upon three important reasons. This paper also explains the relation between the truth and the concept of mind, which is called kama>l al-awwal in Ibnu Sina’s terms. Further, this study also discusses the relation of intuition with the theory of truth. Ibnu Sina called intuition with some terms, such as ma’rifah, tah}s}i>l, and mula>h}az}ah

Inclusive Fitness Theory and the Evolution of Mind and Language

Philosophers have shown that the Aristotelian conception of mind and body (monism) is capable of resolving the problems confronting dualism. In this paper the resolution of the mind–body problem is extended with a scientific solution by integrating the (neo) Aristotelian framework with evolutionary theory. It is discussed how the theories of Fisher and Hamilton (two extensions of Darwin’s theory) enable us to construct and solve hypotheses about how the mind evolved out of matter. These hypotheses are illustrated by two examples: the evolutionary transition from cells to multicellular organisms (with internal and external organs), and the evolutionary transition from babbling to doing things with words and later reasoning and giving reasons. The first transitions resulted in the sensitive psyche of the other animals, the second in the rational psyche of humans. It is discussed how exploratory behaviour of lower-level entities facilitated these evolutionary transitions.

Partners of Humans: A Realistic Assessment of the Role of Robots in the Foreseeable Future

As robots are generally thought to perform human-like tasks, they depend on the successes of information technology in the area of artificial intelligence to succeed in such pursuits. But robots, through their anthropomorphic character and their weighty presence in science fiction, attract the attention of the press and the media in a way that, at times, blurs the distinction between the actual state of the art and exaggerated claims. This makes it hard to assess the true functional positioning of robots, how this is likely to move forward and whether the outcome of progress could be detrimental to human society. The aim of this paper is to review the actual level of competence that is being achieved in robotics research laboratories and a plausible impact that this is likely to have on human control over life and jobs. The key thesis here is that cognition in machines and even an artificial form of consciousness lead to operations in a set of tasks (the ‘algorithmic’ category) which is different from that available to truly cognitive and conscious human beings (the ‘life-need’ category): that is, in the paper it is argued that a major category error (Ryle in The concept of mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1949) looms in predictions of serious threats to humanity. As far as a threat to jobs goes, it is argued that early attention to education and re-skilling of humans in the workplace can lead to an effective symbiosis between people and robots.

The new frontier of diagnostics: Molecular assays and their role in infection prevention and control.

Recent advances in technology over the last decade have propelled the microbiology laboratory into a pivotal role in infection prevention and control. The rapid adaptation of molecular technologies to the field of clinical microbiology now greatly influences infectious disease management and significantly impacts infection control practices. This review discusses recent developments in molecular techniques in the diagnosis of infectious diseases. It describes the basic concepts of molecular assays, discusses their advantages and limitations, and characterizes currently available commercial assays with respect to cost, interpretive requirements, and clinical utility.

Against the “system” module

Modularity is a fundamental doctrine in the cognitive sciences. It holds a preeminent position in cognitive psychology and generative linguistics, as well as a long history in neurophysiology, with roots going all the way back to the early nineteenth century. But a mature field of neuroscience is a comparatively recent phenomenon and has challenged orthodox conceptions of the modular mind. One way of accommodating modularity within the new framework suggested by these developments is to go for increasingly soft versions of modularity. One such version, which I call the “system” view, is so soft that it promises to meet practically any challenge neuroscience can throw at it. In this paper, I reconsider afresh what we ought to regard as the sine qua non of modularity and offer a few arguments against the view that an insipid “system” module could be the legitimate successor of the traditional notion.