Introduction: Recent Currents in Marxist Philosophy

Introduction: Recent Currents in Marxist Philosophy     

Disequilibrium in the mind, disharmony in the body

Although it is generally acknowledged that experiences of frustration, confusion, and anxiety are embodied phenomena, very little is known about how these processes modulate presumably unconscious, but constantly present, subtle bodily movement. We addressed this problem by tracking the low-level dynamics of body movement, using 1/f noise, pink noise, or "fractal scaling", during naturalistic experiences of affect in two studies involving deep learning and effortful problem-solving. Our results indicate that body movement fluctuations of individuals experiencing cognitive equilibrium was characteristic of correlated pink noise, but there was a whitening of the signal when participants experienced states that are diagnostic of cognitive distress such as anxiety, confusion, and frustration. We orient our findings within theories that emphasise the embodied nature of cognition and affect and with perspectives that view affective and cognitive processes as emergent products of a self-organising dynamical system (the brain) that is inextricably coupled to the body.     

A comparison of parental attention and preferred items during tummy time: A consecutive controlled case series evaluation

Tummy time is an activity for infants to practice their early motor skills. Although most pediatricians recommend tummy time, parents may avoid the procedures due to indices of infant discomfort during this period. This consecutive controlled case series evaluation compared the effects of preferred items selected from a preference assessment with those of parental attention on head evaluation and negative vocalizations during tummy time. In addition, we directly evaluated parental choice by inviting parents to select which tummy time treatment they wanted to implement. We found that both preferred items and parental attention effectively increased head elevation and decreased negative vocalizations during tummy time; however, parents tended to prefer the treatment that included the preferred item.     

Folk concepts of person and identity: A response to Nichols and Bruno

Nichols and Bruno (2010) claim that the folk judge that psychological continuity is necessary for personal identity. In this article, we evaluate this claim. First, we argue that it is likely that in thinking about hypothetical cases of transformations, the folk do not use a unitary concept of personal identity, but instead rely on different concepts of ‘person’, ‘identity’, and ‘individual’. Identity can be ascribed even when post-transformation individuals are no longer categorized as persons. Second, we provide new empirical evidence suggesting that the folk do not consider psychological continuity to be necessary for an individual to be categorized as a person or for ascribing identity over time and through transformations. In this, we assume, along with Nichols and Bruno, that folk judgments about identity can be read off the use of proper names. Furthermore, we raise some doubts about the ability of current experimental designs to adequately distinguish between qualitative and numerical identity judgments. We conclude that these claims give us a good reason to be skeptical about the prospects of using folk intuitions in philosophical theorizing about personal identity.     

The decision tree polytope and its application to sequential decision problems

This paper describes a new mathematical programming approach to sequential decision problems that have an underlying decision tree structure. The approach, based upon a characterization of strategies as extreme points of a 0–1 polytope called the ‘decision tree polytope’, is particularly suited to the direct examination of risk-return and other tradeoffs amongst strategies. However, it can also be used for conventional utility maximization if a utility function is available. Further, the approach requires no algorithmic development—it can be implemented using commercially available algebraic modeling software and can solve large problems. A related, and already known, approach can be used for some more general Markov decision problems. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Nietzsche,postmodernism and the phenomenon of Arvydas Šliogeris in contemporary Lithuanian philosophy

This article is based on the presupposition that postmodern philosophy has been largely influenced by Nietzsche’s writings. The author raises the question of how Nietzsche and postmodern philosophy are interpreted in the contemporary philosophical discourse in Lithuania. The conclusion drawn is that many philosophy critics in Lithuania are interested in Nietzsche’s philosophy (Mickevi?ius, Sodeika, ?erpytyt?, Sverdiolas, Baranova) and in the problems of postmodern philosophy (Ker?yt?, Rubavi?ius, ?ukauskait?, ?erpytyt?, Sverdiolas, Baranova, Norkus). The article also raises a second crucial question: beyond the critics, are there any truly authentic postmodern thinkers in Lithuania? This article’s main hypotheses is that Arvydas ?liogeris’ philosophy is the best and perhaps the only example of original Lithuanian postmodern thought; it is based on, and interconnected with, the deeply inherited roots of existential thought in Lithuanian philosophical culture. The arguments for these hypotheses are as follows: first, ?liogeris is the first philosopher in Lithuania who has tried to reason in an interdisciplinary manner, e.g. trying to overcome the modernistic distinction between philosophy and the arts (especially literature, poetry, and the visual arts); secondly, ?liogeris’s philosophizing is indispensable to his writings—his texts are examples of an experience of writing as thinking and thinking as writing; thirdly, following Deleuze’s presupposition that the philosopher is a creator, one can see this creative aspect in ?liogeris’s approach. His texts show how it is possible to synthesize insights from philosophy and poetry.     

Semantics boosts syntax in artificial grammar learning tasks with recursion

Center-embedded recursion (CER) in natural language is exemplified by sentences such as "The malt that the rat ate lay in the house." Parsing center-embedded structures is in the focus of attention because this could be one of the cognitive capacities that make humans distinct from all other animals. The ability to parse CER is usually tested by means of artificial grammar learning (AGL) tasks, during which participants have to infer the rule from a set of artificial sentences. One of the surprising results of previous AGL experiments is that learning CER is not as easy as had been thought. We hypothesized that because artificial sentences lack semantic content, semantics could help humans learn the syntax of center-embedded sentences. To test this, we composed sentences from 4 vocabularies of different degrees of semantic content due to 3 factors (familiarity, meaning of words, and semantic relationship between words). According to our results, these factors have no effect one by one but they make learning significantly faster when combined. This leads to the assumption that there were different mechanisms at work when CER was parsed in natural and in artificial languages. This finding questions the suitability of AGL tasks with artificial vocabularies for studying the learning and processing of linguistic CER.