Life in Overabundance: Agar on Life-Extension and the Fear of Death

In Humanity’s End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement, Nicholas Agar presents a novel argument against the prospect of radical life-extension. Agar’s argument hinges on the claim that extended lifespans will result in people’s lives being dominated by the fear of death. Here we examine this claim and the surrounding issues in Agar’s discussion. We argue, firstly, that Agar’s view rests on empirically dubious assumptions about human rationality and attitudes to risk, and secondly, that even if those assumptions are granted, the fears that Agar adverts to are unlikely to dominate people’s lives if and when radical life-extension is made possible. Further, we claim that the structure of the decision-making process around life-extension is unlikely to be the way that it would have to be in order for Agar’s claims about fear of death to make sense. Finally, we argue that Agar is implicitly committed to a narrow conception of human value. In response, we suggest that the pursuit of life-extension can itself be seen as an expression of certain important aspects of our distinctively human nature.     

Symmetry of receiver operating characteristic curves and Kullback–Leibler divergences between the signal and noise populations

It is shown that the symmetry of the receiver operating characteristic curve implies that the Kullback–Leibler divergences between the signal and noise populations are equal when the arguments are interchanged.     

Does Absence of Hearing Ability Enhance Visual Vigilance? It Depends on Task Complexity

Successful performance of a vigilance task in a particular modality can be affected by the allocation of attentional resources to other cognitive processes using same or different modalities. The present study investigated whether loss of hearing affects visual vigilance task performance and also if it’s a function of increased task complexity. A sample of 30 adolescents ( 15 with hearing loss and 15 with normal hearing) were selected by matching them in pairs according to their working memory functioning and other relevant organismic variables. A software program measured the performance on vigilance task with varying task complexity levels. Analysis of the obtained data indicates that the effect of hearing impairment on visual vigilance is moderated by task complexity and that is contingent to attentional resources. Here, deprivation in hearing ability negatively affects functioning of visual vigilance significantly only when the task complexity increases. But no significant differences are observed in hearing and hearing impaired adolescents when the task demanded less attentional resources.     

Recognition of facial affect in depression

25 depressed patients recognized a sad face with more errors than 25 normal persons and labeled other expressions as sadness when affective content was not recognized. Correct recognitions for 6 affects were related to the portion of the face depicted. Comparisons of responses of 25 patients diagnosed as having anxiety neuroses showed differences in responses from the depressed patients and normal persons.     

Sibesh Bhattacharya,Understanding Itihasa

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research -