Hasil untuk "Speculative philosophy"

Botao Amber Hu

Speculative design uses provocative "what if?" scenarios to explore possible sociotechnical futures, yet lacks rigorous criteria for assessing the quality of speculation. We address this gap by reframing speculative design through an information-theoretic lens as a resource-bounded knowledge generation process that uses provotypes to strategically embrace surprise. However, not all surprises are equally informative-some yield genuine insight while others remain aesthetic shock. Drawing on epiplexity-structured, learnable information extractable by bounded observers-we propose decomposing the knowledge generated by speculative artifacts into structured epistemic information (transferable implications about futures) and entropic noise (narrative, aesthetics, and surface-level surprise). We conclude by introducing a practical audit framework with a self-assessment questionnaire that enables designers to evaluate whether their speculations yield rich, high-epiplexity insights or remain at a superficial level. We discuss implications for peer review, design pedagogy, and policy-oriented futuring.

Xaver Fabian, Marco Guarnieri, Boris Köpf et al.

Speculative execution enhances processor performance by predicting intermediate results and executing instructions based on these predictions. However, incorrect predictions can lead to security vulnerabilities, as speculative instructions leave traces in microarchitectural components that attackers can exploit. This is demonstrated by the family of Spectre attacks. Unfortunately, existing countermeasures to these attacks lack a formal security characterization, making it difficult to verify their effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for detecting information flows introduced by speculative execution and reasoning about software defenses. The theoretical foundation of our approach is speculative non-interference (SNI), a novel semantic notion of security against speculative execution attacks. SNI relates information leakage observed under a standard non-speculative semantics to leakage arising under semantics that explicitly model speculative execution. To capture their combined effects, we extend our framework with a mechanism to safely compose multiple speculative semantics, each focussing on a single aspect of speculation. This allows us to analyze the complex interactions and resulting leaks that can arise when multiple speculative mechanisms operate together. On the practical side, we develop Spectector, a symbolic analysis tool that uses our compositional framework and leverages SMT solvers to detect vulnerabilities and verify program security with respect to multiple speculation mechanisms. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Spectector through evaluations on standard security benchmarks and new vulnerability scenarios.

Dejan Grba

Speculative thinking about the capabilities and implications of artificial intelligence (AI) influences computer science research, drives AI industry practices, feeds academic studies of existential hazards, and stirs a global political debate. It primarily concerns predictions about the possibilities, benefits, and risks of reaching artificial general intelligence, artificial superintelligence, and technological singularity. It permeates technophilic philosophies and social movements, fuels the corporate and pundit rhetoric, and remains a potent source of inspiration for the media, popular culture, and arts. However, speculative AI is not just a discursive matter. Steeped in vagueness and brimming with unfounded assertions, manipulative claims, and extreme futuristic scenarios, it often has wide-reaching practical consequences. This paper offers a critical overview of AI speculations. In three central sections, it traces the intertwined sway of science fiction, religiosity, intellectual charlatanism, dubious academic research, suspicious entrepreneurship, and ominous sociopolitical worldviews that make AI speculations troublesome and sometimes harmful. The focus is on the field of existential risk studies and the effective altruism movement, whose ideological flux of techno-utopianism, longtermism, and transhumanism aligns with the power struggles in the AI industry to emblematize speculative AI's conceptual, methodological, ethical, and social issues. The following discussion traverses these issues within a wider context to inform the closing summary of suggestions for a more comprehensive appraisal, practical handling, and further study of the potentially impactful AI imaginaries.

João Pedro Ocanha Krizek

Visões distorcidas da natureza da ciência, que retratam os cientistas como gênios peculiares, neutros e isolados, justificam, em grande medida, tanto o insucesso de uma educação científica adequada, como a resistência à ciência por parte de muitos estudantes. Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) é um exemplo dessa representação e o presente artigo busca desconstruí-lo. Com o objetivo de oferecer elementos que tornem os processos de ensino e aprendizagem mais alinhados com uma abordagem realista da natureza da ciência, utilizou-se a sociologia da ciência latouriana para empreender uma análise acerca da inserção de Darwin no fluxo sanguíneo da ciência, valendo-se de fontes históricas primárias e secundárias. Os resultados mostram que Darwin estabeleceu conexões multifacetadas com uma variedade de atores. Eles também destacam as inter-relações e a interdependência entre diferentes circuitos que permearam a trajetória de Darwin – circuitos estes que envolveram não apenas aspectos científicos, como geologia, zoologia e botânica, mas também campos aparentemente distantes, como religião, política e cultura. Ao adotar a perspectiva latouriana sobre a ação conjunta de humanos e não humanos, esta pesquisa fornece material que pode enriquecer estudos em educação científica e a formação de professores.

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Luana Beatriz Xavier Nunes

William Harvey (1578-1656) apresentou a doutrina da circulação do sangue em 1628, em sua obra De motu cordis, considerada seu trabalho mais importante. O tratado foi resultado de nove anos de observações e demonstrações anatômicas de animais e humanos e causou grande impacto entre médicos, filósofos e anatomistas do período, gerando diversos comentários e refutações, principalmente porque as ideias de Harvey sobre a circulação implicavam a quebra de autoridade e do conhecimento tradicional que era aceito na época. Entretanto, a doutrina da circulação do sangue foi resultado de um conhecimento construído desde a Antiguidade até o início do século XVII e apesar de a obra de Harvey ser considerada um marco na mudança do pensamento fisiológico e anatômico e devido a seu estilo de pensamento lógico e sua firmeza em refutar ideias de seus antecessores, é inegável a contribuição de seus antecessores na construção do conhecimento sobre a circulação sanguínea. Este trabalho tem por objetivo apresentar alguns dos pressupostos que constituíram a tradição médica do período e como essas contribuições influenciaram Harvey, seu método e suas conclusões a respeito da anatomia cardiovascular, movimentos do coração e movimento do sangue em sistema fechado.

Sebastian De Haro

This is a review of James Read's insightful book, Background Independence in Classical and Quantum Gravity. The book introduces various notions of background-independence which it then makes precise, and uses to make verdicts about background-independence on a wide range of examples of spacetime theories in both classical and quantum gravity. This short book is, in several ways, a worthy example of how technical philosophy of physics ought to be done. I first discuss the content, then raise a number points where I disagree with the book.

Juan R. Loaiza, Miguel González-Duque

Data-driven approaches to philosophy have emerged as a valuable tool for studying the history of the discipline. However, most studies in this area have focused on a limited number of journals from specific regions and subfields. We expand the scope of this research by applying dynamic topic modelling techniques to explore the history of philosophy in Colombia and Latin America. Our study examines the Colombian philosophy journal Ideas y Valores, founded in 1951 and currently one of the most influential academic philosophy journals in the region. By analyzing the evolution of topics across the journal's history, we identify various trends and specific dynamics in philosophical discourse within the Colombian and Latin American context. Our findings reveal that the most prominent topics are value theory (including ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics), epistemology, and the philosophy of science. We also trace the evolution of articles focusing on the historical and interpretive aspects of philosophical texts, and we note a notable emphasis on German philosophers such as Kant, Husserl, and Hegel on various topics throughout the journal's lifetime. Additionally, we investigate whether articles with a historical focus have decreased over time due to editorial pressures. Our analysis suggests no significant decline in such articles. Finally, we propose ideas for extending this research to other Latin American journals and suggest improvements for natural language processing workflows in non-English languages.

Harikrishna Narasimhan, Wittawat Jitkrittum, Ankit Singh Rawat et al.

Cascades and speculative decoding are two common approaches to improving language models' inference efficiency. Both approaches involve interleaving models of different sizes, but via fundamentally distinct mechanisms: cascades employ a deferral rule that invokes the larger model only for "hard" inputs, while speculative decoding uses speculative execution to primarily invoke the larger model in parallel verification mode. These mechanisms offer different benefits: empirically, cascades offer better cost-quality trade-offs, often even outperforming the large model, while theoretically, speculative decoding offers a guarantee of quality-neutrality. In this paper, we leverage the best of both these approaches by designing new speculative cascading techniques that implement their deferral rule through speculative execution. We characterize the optimal deferral rule for our speculative cascades, and employ a plug-in approximation to the optimal rule. Experiments with Gemma and T5 models on a range of language benchmarks show that our approach yields better cost quality trade-offs than cascading and speculative decoding baselines.

Michał J. Gajda

Philosophy of science attempts to describe all parts of the scientific process in a general way in order to facilitate the description, execution and improvements of this process. So far, all proposed philosophies have only covered existing processes and disciplines partially and imperfectly. In particular logical approaches have always received a lot of attention due to attempts to fundamentally address issues with the definition of science as a discipline with reductionist theories. We propose a new way to approach the problem from the perspective of computational complexity and argue why this approach may be better than previous propositions based on pure logic and mathematics.

Daniel Špelda

In this paper, I would like to present the methodological views of two representatives of the early modern Cartesian school: Jacques Rohault and Pierre-Sylvain Régis. Firstly, I want to present the methodological objections of Cartesians to Aristotelian and Scholastic natural philosophy. Then, I want to show how Cartesians strived for a combination of empirical and speculative procedures in their explanations of natural processes. Lastly, I would like to explain the reasons and forms of the hypothetical methodology which was significant for Cartesian natural philosophy. My aim is to refute the idea of the methodological naivety of Cartesians and point out the importance of hypothetical reasoning in the genesis of modern science.

Michael te Vrugt

A long and intense debate in philosophy is concerned with the question whether there can be haecceistic differences between possible worlds, that is, nonqualitative differences that only arise from different de re representations. According to haecceitism, it can give rise to a different situation if the positions of two qualitatively identical particles are exchanged, while according to anti-haecceitism, this is not the case. It has been suggested that classical statistical mechanics might provide evidence for one of these positions. However, most philosophers of physics argue that it does not. In this article, we show that order-preserving dynamics, a novel method from statistical mechanics developed for the description of nonergodic systems, changes this situation: It is intrinsically haecceistic and makes different experimental predictions than non-haecceistic alternatives. Thereby, it provides an empirical argument for the existence of modality de re.

Wesley Felipe de Oliveira

Este artigo analisa a concepção educacional de Martha Nussbaum no contexto da Teoria das Capacidades e de uma crise na educação. Para isso, é apresentada a sua teoria de desenvolvimento humano baseada nas capacidades. Em seguida se identifica as características dessa crise educacional que se manifesta, principalmente, numa ameaça à democracia e aos seus valores. A partir disso, o artigo analisa como e por que as disciplinas de humanidades propiciam o desenvolvimento de habilidades e valores condizentes com essas capacidades humanas e com a prática da cidadania numa democracia pluralista. As três habilidades são a ética-pedagógica socrática, a concepção de cidadania numa perspectiva global e a imaginação narrativa. Cada uma delas é analisada criticamente neste artigo em sua importância para a sustentação da democracia e seus valores éticos e políticos.

Angela Monica Recupero

The dialectic between idem and ipse, in radical opposition to Descartes’ method on which the cogito is based, represents the hermeneutics of the self. Narrative identity performs a mediating function between self-sameness and hypseity: Ricœur hypothesizes a project, the foundation of which is traced in the imaginative variation generated in the story, which recognizes identity as a narrative identity. Even though the narrative text remains central, the interpretative perspective does not follow the direction or sense of the author of the text, but instead the world to which the text opens up in its entirety.

Mohammad Behnia, Prateek Sahu, Riccardo Paccagnella et al.

Recent security vulnerabilities that target speculative execution (e.g., Spectre) present a significant challenge for processor design. The highly publicized vulnerability uses speculative execution to learn victim secrets by changing cache state. As a result, recent computer architecture research has focused on invisible speculation mechanisms that attempt to block changes in cache state due to speculative execution. Prior work has shown significant success in preventing Spectre and other vulnerabilities at modest performance costs. In this paper, we introduce speculative interference attacks, which show that prior invisible speculation mechanisms do not fully block these speculation-based attacks. We make two key observations. First, misspeculated younger instructions can change the timing of older, bound-to-retire instructions, including memory operations. Second, changing the timing of a memory operation can change the order of that memory operation relative to other memory operations, resulting in persistent changes to the cache state. Using these observations, we demonstrate (among other attack variants) that secret information accessed by mis-speculated instructions can change the order of bound-to-retire loads. Load timing changes can therefore leave secret-dependent changes in the cache, even in the presence of invisible speculation mechanisms. We show that this problem is not easy to fix: Speculative interference converts timing changes to persistent cache-state changes, and timing is typically ignored by many cache-based defenses. We develop a framework to understand the attack and demonstrate concrete proof-of-concept attacks against invisible speculation mechanisms. We provide security definitions sufficient to block speculative interference attacks; describe a simple defense mechanism with a high performance cost; and discuss how future research can improve its performance.

Meng Wu, Chao Wang

Analyzing the behavior of a program running on a processor that supports speculative execution is crucial for applications such as execution time estimation and side channel detection. Unfortunately, existing static analysis techniques based on abstract interpretation do not model speculative execution since they focus on functional properties of a program while speculative execution does not change the functionality. To fill the gap, we propose a method to make abstract interpretation sound under speculative execution. There are two contributions. First, we introduce the notion of virtual control flow to augment instructions that may be speculatively executed and thus affect subsequent instructions. Second, to make the analysis efficient, we propose optimizations to handle merges and loops and to safely bound the speculative execution depth. We have implemented and evaluated the proposed method in a static cache analysis for execution time estimation and side channel detection. Our experiments show that the new method, while guaranteed to be sound under speculative execution, outperforms state-of-the-art abstract interpretation techniques that may be unsound.

Pierluigi Valenza

Beyträge zur leichtern Uebersicht des Zustandes der Philosophie beym Anfange des 19. Jahrhunderts, i cui sei tomi furono publicati da K.L. Reinhold tra il 1801 e il 1803 offrono in alcuni dei loro saggi um panorama della filosofia all’inizio del secolo XIX. Il punto di vista di Reinhold è influenzato dalla sua conversione al realismo logico e, di conseguenza, è orientato criticamente contro la filosofia trascendentale kantiana, così come contro l’idealismo fichtiano e schellinghiano. Nella prima parte di questo articolo presenterò l’idea reinholdiana di storia della filosofia come processo orientato verso una rivoluzione definitiva e ultima nella filosofia. Sosterrò che l’idea reinholdiana di una rivoluzione nella filosofia appare in un orizzonte articolato in cui sono coinvolte scoperta e fondazione della conoscenza. Nella seconda parte del saggio chiarirò i criteri reinholdiani per valutare la storia della filosofia e, in particolare, la differenza tra “vero” e “vero originario”, atrraverso la quale Reinhold interpreta Platone, Leibniz e il realismo logico come punti fondamentali della filosofia, ma anche attraverso un riferimento particolare a Descartes. La terza e ultima parte di questo articolo è volta a presentare la critica di Reinhold alla filosofia kantiana, fichtiana e schellinghiana. Per Reinhold la soggettività consiste in una attività libera dell’io che astrae da oggetti e riflette su se stessa e, infine, cade in una illusione psicologica. Allo stesso modo l’identà schellinghiana di soggettività e oggettività potrebbe apparire molto vicina al realismo logico. L’idea reinholdiana della filosofia contemporanea è tuttavia orientata a un confronto critico e rigoroso con la filosofia tarda di Schelling, unita, per altro verso, a una discussione della opposizione tra conoscenza e fede.

Karl Schlechta

This is a short (and personal) introduction in German to the connections between artificial intelligence, philosophy, and logic, and to the author's work. Dies ist eine kurze (und persoenliche) Einfuehrung in die Zusammenhaenge zwischen Kuenstlicher Intelligenz, Philosophie, und Logik, und in die Arbeiten des Autors.

Thomas Hardjono, Alexander Lipton, Alex Pentland

In this paper we discuss a design philosophy for interoperable blockchain systems, using the design philosophy of the Internet architecture as the basis to identify key design principles. Several interoperability challenges are discussed in the context of cross-domain transactions. We illustrate how these principles are informing the interoperability architecture of the MIT Tradecoin system.

Flavio Del Santo

It is not very well known that the philosopher Karl Popper has been one of the foremost critics of the orthodox interpretation of quantum physics for about six decades. This paper reconstructs in detail most of Popper's activities on foundations of quantum mechanics (FQM) in the period of 1950s and 1960s, when his involvement in the community of quantum physicists became extensive and quite influential. Thanks to unpublished documents and correspondence, it is now possible to shed new light on Popper's central - though neglected - role in this "thought collective" of physicists concerned with FQM, and on the intellectual relationships that Popper established in this context with some of the protagonists of the debate over quantum physics (such as David Bohm, Alfed Landé and Henry Margenau, among many others). Foundations of quantum mechanics represented in those years also the initial ground for the embittering controversy between Popper and perhaps his most notable former student, Paul Feyerabend. I present here novel elements to further understand the origin of their troubled relationship.