Evaluating moral alignment in agents navigating conflicting, hierarchically structured human norms is a critical challenge at the intersection of AI safety, moral philosophy, and cognitive science. We introduce Morality Chains, a novel formalism for representing moral norms as ordered deontic constraints, and MoralityGym, a benchmark of 98 ethical-dilemma problems presented as trolley-dilemma-style Gymnasium environments. By decoupling task-solving from moral evaluation and introducing a novel Morality Metric, MoralityGym allows the integration of insights from psychology and philosophy into the evaluation of norm-sensitive reasoning. Baseline results with Safe RL methods reveal key limitations, underscoring the need for more principled approaches to ethical decision-making. This work provides a foundation for developing AI systems that behave more reliably, transparently, and ethically in complex real-world contexts.
We introduce a framework uniting algorithmic randomness with exchangeable credences to address foundational questions in philosophy of probability and philosophy of science. To demonstrate its power, we show how one might use the framework to derive the Principal Principle -- the norm that rational credence should match known objective chance -- without circularity. The derivation brings together de Finetti's exchangeability, Martin-Löf randomness, Lewis's and Skyrms's chance-credence norms, and statistical constraining laws (arXiv:2303.01411). Laws that constrain histories to algorithmically random sequences naturally pair with exchangeable credences encoding inductive symmetries. Using the de Finetti representation theorem, we show that this pairing directly entails the Principal Principle of this framework. We extend the proof to partial exchangeability and provide finite-history bounds that vanish in the infinite limit. The Principal Principle thus emerges as a mathematical consequence of the alignment between nomological constraints and inductive learning. This reveals how algorithmic randomness and exchangeability can illuminate foundational questions about chance, frequency, and rational belief.
Interactive intelligent agents are being integrated across society. Despite achieving human-like capabilities, humans' responses to these agents remain poorly understood, with research fragmented across disciplines. We conducted a first systematic synthesis comparing a range of psychological and behavioural responses in matched human-agent vs. human-human dyadic interactions. A total of 162 eligible studies (146 contributed to the meta-analysis; 468 effect sizes) were included in the systematic review and meta-analysis, which integrated frequentist and Bayesian approaches. Our results indicate that individuals exhibited less prosocial behaviour and moral engagement when interacting with agents vs. humans. They attributed less agency and responsibility to agents, perceiving them as less competent, likeable, and socially present. In contrast, individuals' social alignment (i.e., alignment or adaptation of internal states and behaviours with partners), trust in partners, personal agency, task performance, and interaction experiences were generally comparable when interacting with agents vs. humans. We observed high effect-size heterogeneity for many subjective responses (i.e., social perceptions of partners, subjective trust, and interaction experiences), suggesting context-dependency of partner effects. By examining the characteristics of studies, participants, partners, interaction scenarios, and response measures, we also identified several moderators shaping partner effects. Overall, functional behaviours and interactive experiences with agents can resemble those with humans, whereas fundamental social attributions and moral/prosocial concerns lag in human-agent interactions. Agents are thus afforded instrumental value on par with humans but lack comparable intrinsic value, providing practical implications for agent design and regulation.
This is a work of hard physical philosophy, where Quantum Perspectivism is shown to function as both an interpretation of quantum mechanics and a physical model for understanding Nietzsche's perspectivism. This framework combines quantum logic, the principle of complementarity, and contextuality to examine how perspectives construct reality. In this model, measurements correspond to Perspectives and Meta-Perspectives, represented as Boolean subalgebras and Hilbert sub-lattices within the Hilbert lattice, respectively. The Hilbert lattice itself is reinterpreted as Jung's Unus Mundus, a unified ontological reality. A metaphysical observation, made by a metaphysical observer, of a given system (World) is identified with the set of all corresponding meta-perspectives in the Hilbert lattice/Unus Mundus, the ocean of reality. Perspectives, likened to islands in this ocean, correspond to single measurements of a system, capturing the logical structure of observed properties. Meta-perspectives, analogous to continents, represent the synthesis of multiple measurements, providing a broader yet inherently incomplete understanding of the system. This structure emphasizes the complementarity and contextual dependencies of measurements while exposing the limitations of classical objectivity in the quantum domain. Advocating for a perspectival view of both the world and truth, Quantum Perspectivism unites quantum mechanics and Nietzschean philosophy into a cohesive framework for exploring the interplay between consciousness, observation, and reality.
Accurate and reliable personality assessment plays a vital role in many fields, such as emotional intelligence, mental health diagnostics, and personalized education. Unlike fleeting emotions, personality traits are stable, often subconsciously leaked through language, facial expressions, and body behaviors, with asynchronous patterns across modalities. It was hard to model personality semantics with traditional superficial features and seemed impossible to achieve effective cross-modal understanding. To address these challenges, we propose a novel personality assessment framework called \textit{\textbf{Traits Run Deep}}. It employs \textit{\textbf{psychology-informed prompts}} to elicit high-level personality-relevant semantic representations. Besides, it devises a \textit{\textbf{Text-Centric Trait Fusion Network}} that anchors rich text semantics to align and integrate asynchronous signals from other modalities. To be specific, such fusion module includes a Chunk-Wise Projector to decrease dimensionality, a Cross-Modal Connector and a Text Feature Enhancer for effective modality fusion and an ensemble regression head to improve generalization in data-scarce situations. To our knowledge, we are the first to apply personality-specific prompts to guide large language models (LLMs) in extracting personality-aware semantics for improved representation quality. Furthermore, extracting and fusing audio-visual apparent behavior features further improves the accuracy. Experimental results on the AVI validation set have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed components, i.e., approximately a 45\% reduction in mean squared error (MSE). Final evaluations on the test set of the AVI Challenge 2025 confirm our method's superiority, ranking first in the Personality Assessment track. The source code will be made available at https://github.com/MSA-LMC/TraitsRunDeep.
The relevance of addressing the understanding of the geography of religion as a section of religious studies is on the one hand due to the growing popularity of this discipline in the modern scientific space, and on the other its insufficient conceptualisation. The high interest in the geography of religion on the part of the scientific community is caused by its focus on the comprehension of theoretical and practical problems related to the spatial characteristics of religious life. Nowadays, the study of territorial aspects of the coexistence of different religious traditions acquires a special urgency due to the combination of globalisation trends and the desire to preserve authentic identity. Historically, the problem field and scientific apparatus of the geography of religion has been formed with reliance on theoretical developments and methodological tools of philosophy and various scientific disciplines, which supports terminological and methodological polyphony within this discipline and hinders its conceptualisation. The aim of this work is to identify possible grounds for attributing the geography of religion to the sections of religious studies. To achieve this goal the following tasks were solved: the origins of the formation of geography of religion were revealed; the approach to the formation of geography of religion from the perspective of geographical science was analysed; the influence of philosophy of religion on the methodological foundations of geography of religion was shown; the main vectors of interrelation between geography of religion and religious studies were determined. The research is limited to the European tradition of studying the relationship between religion and geography. The study is based on the texts of the classics of philosophical thought, as well as the works of Russian and foreign scholars devoted to the comprehension of the geography of religion as a scientific discipline. To reconstruct the thinkers' position on the issues raised, to identify their dependence on the intellectual context and to compare them, such methods as historical and philosophical analysis of the text, discourse analysis and comparative analysis were used. The result of the study was the substantiation of the conclusion about the possibility and expediency of attributing the geography of religion to the branches of religious studies. Such positioning of geography of religion does not contradict the modern understanding of the problem field and tasks of this discipline as they are formulated within the framework of geographical science, and at the same time allows us to identify promising research strategies in interaction with various religious studies disciplines such as: philosophy of religion, history of religion, anthropology of religion, sociology of religion and psychology of religion.
AlphaGo plays chess and Go in a creative and novel way. It is natural for us to attribute contents to it, such as that it doesn't view being several pawns behind, if it has more board space, as bad. The framework introduced in Cappelen and Dever (2021) provides a way of thinking about the semantics and the metasemantics of AI content: does AlphaGo entertain contents like this, and if so, in virtue of what does a given state of the program mean that particular content? One salient question Cappelen and Dever didn't consider was the possibility of alien content. Alien content is content that is not or cannot be expressed by human beings. It's highly plausible that AlphaGo, or any other sophisticated AI system, expresses alien contents. That this is so, moreover, is plausibly a metasemantic fact: a fact that has to do with how AI comes to entertain content in the first place, one that will heed the vastly different etiology of AI and human content. This chapter explores the question of alien content in AI from a semantic and metasemantic perspective. It lays out the logical space of possible responses to the semantic and metasemantic questions alien content poses, considers whether and how we humans could communicate with entities who express alien content, and points out that getting clear about such questions might be important for more 'applied' issues in the philosophy of AI, such as existential risk and XAI.
Karina E. Caceres-Ravelo, Kay-Keyla B. H. Huanqui-Aliaga, Cristian E. Adriano-Rengifo
et al.
Abstract Background Academic procrastination is an increasingly pertinent issue among university students, impacting their academic performance, interpersonal relationships, and emotional well-being. However, brief assessment tools for timely intervention are scarce, especially in the Colombian context. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the psychometric properties of the academic procrastination scale and analyze its relationship with mental health and life satisfaction. Methods A total of 805 Colombian university students were selected through convenience sampling. Their ages ranged from 17 to 35 years, with an average age of 20.4 years (SD = 3.0). Results The findings reveal a modified two-factor structure of the scale, with adequate fit indices (χ2 = 65.65, df = 13, p < .001; CFI = .96, TLI = .93, RMSEA = .07 (90% CI .06 − .09), SRMR = .03) and loadings above .50. Furthermore, both factors of the scale exhibited high reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega coefficients greater than .80. The scale was also found to be gender invariant. Lastly, academic procrastination correlates positively with mental health and negatively with life satisfaction, while mental health relates negatively to life satisfaction. Conclusion The Modified Academic Procrastination Scale (EPA-C) demonstrates adequate psychometric properties and is gender-invariant for assessing academic procrastination among Colombian university students. Moreover, it has an impact on the mental health and life satisfaction of these students.
Xerxes D. Arsiwalla, Hatem Elshatlawy, Dean Rickles
How does one formalize the structure of structures necessary for the foundations of physics? This work is an attempt at conceptualizing the metaphysics of pregeometric structures, upon which new and existing notions of quantum geometry may find a foundation. We discuss the philosophy of pregeometric structures due to Wheeler, Leibniz as well as modern manifestations in topos theory. We draw attention to evidence suggesting that the framework of formal language, in particular, homotopy type theory, provides the conceptual building blocks for a theory of pregeometry. This work is largely a synthesis of ideas that serve as a precursor for conceptualizing the notion of space in physical theories. In particular, the approach we espouse is based on a constructivist philosophy, wherein ``structureless structures'' are syntactic types realizing formal proofs and programs. Spaces and algebras relevant to physical theories are modeled as type-theoretic routines constructed from compositional rules of a formal language. This offers the remarkable possibility of taxonomizing distinct notions of geometry using a common theoretical framework. In particular, this perspective addresses the crucial issue of how spatiality may be realized in models that link formal computation to physics, such as the Wolfram model.
We discuss in this work the contradictory position in modern Physics between the existence of a microphysical quantum Reality and macrophysical classical one. After discussing some basic concepts in Philosophy, we revisit the situation of Quantum Mechanics results, particularly after the confirmation of violations of Bell's Theorem, and its significance to create a tension between the micro and the macro world, which is very fundamental and unsolved.
The centre of Christian liturgy is the revelation of God in Jesus of Nazareth. In the first section of this article, the understanding of this liturgical centre is unpacked within different denominational contexts (mystery celebration, proclamation event, sacred play, staging of the gospel, etc.). Concepts of time and spatiality within liturgy, which are not only functional but also theologically enriched, are presented. The second section deals with the liturgical assembly and its structures, and the significance of assembly for the liturgy is explained. The place of assembly is addressed before looking at roles and ministries in worship. The third section explores the Bible and liturgy. It examines the different ways in which the Old Testament and New Testament are received in liturgy (e.g. readings and pericope systems, biblical prayers, readings of the Psalms, and sermons). The function of the Bible and place of intertextuality in liturgy (anamnetic, catechetical, etc.) are discussed. The fourth section focuses on different rites and textual forms and the significance of bodies in liturgy. The importance of different media for worship is unpacked before discussing different text types (oration, acclamation, etc.). The fifth section is devoted to the dynamics and diversity of liturgy. It briefly turns to historical phenomena and then demonstrates the factors at work in the dynamics of liturgy (top-down, bottom-up). The sixth section centres on theology and liturgical scholarship, in which different concepts of theology of liturgy and liturgical theology are explained. It also shows how liturgy has been reflected differently at different times in church history. Finally, current questions of liturgical scholarship on worship are explored.
Carnap's conception of linguistic frameworks is widespread; however, it is not entirely clear nor consensual to pinpoint what is the influence in his stance within the traditional realist/anti-realist debate. In this paper, we place Carnap as a proponent of a scientific realist stance, by presenting what he called "linguistic realism". Some possible criticisms are considered, and a case study is offered with wave function realism, a popular position in the philosophy of quantum mechanics.
We undertake a reconstruction of the epistemic significance of research on operational theories in quantum foundations. We suggest that the space of operational theories is analogous to the space of possible worlds employed in the possible world semantics for modal logic, so research of this sort can be understood as probing modal structure. Thus we argue that operational axiomatisations of quantum mechanics may be interpreted as a novel form of structural realism; we discuss the consequences of this interpretation for the philosophy of structural realism and the future of operational theories.
Johanna Freund, Claudia Buntrock, Lina Braun
et al.
Introduction: Farmers, forest workers and gardeners have a higher risk of developing depression compared to other occupational populations. As part of the German pilot project “With us in balance”, the potential of six guided internet- and mobile-based interventions (IMIs) to prevent depression among their insurants is examined. The IMI program is tailored to various risk factors of depression, individual symptoms, and needs. Although IMIs have been shown to be effective in reducing depressive symptoms, there is little qualitative research about the acceptance of digital preventive IMIs. The aim of this qualitative study is to gain insights into participants' experiences with the guided IMIs by focusing on determinants for acceptance and satisfaction. Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 22/171 (13 %) intervention group (IG) participants of a randomized controlled trial. The interview guide was developed based on theoretical models of user acceptance (Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology) and patient satisfaction (evaluation model, discrepancy theory). The interviews were evaluated independently by two coders performing a deductive-inductive content analysis and attaining a substantial level of agreement (K = 0.73). Results: The qualitative analysis revealed 71 determinants for acceptance and satisfaction across ten dimensions: performance expectancy, organisation, e-coach, usability, training content and structure, training usage, training outcome, financing, social influence, and behavioural intention. The most frequently identified drivers for the IMI use include “location independence”, “positive relationship to the e-coach” (each n = 19, 86 %), “personal e-coach guidance”, “expertise of the e-coach”, “target group specific adaptation” (each n = 18, 82 %), “flexibility”, “high willingness for renewed participation” (each n = 17, 77 %), “fast and easy availability”, “training of health enhancing attitudes and behaviours” and “content with figurative expressions” (each n = 16, 73 %). Discussion: The qualitative findings predominantly suggest the acceptance of and satisfaction with the IMI program for the prevention of depression in famers and related lines of work. Many identified positive drivers are related to the e-coach guidance, which emphasizes its importance in the preventive setting from the perspective of the participants. Nevertheless, some negative aspects have been identified which help to understand potential weaknesses of the IMI program. Participants indicated different needs in terms of IMI content and usage, which points towards the potential benefit of individualisation. The possibility of being able to use IMIs anonymously, flexibly and independently of location might be highly relevant for this specific target group.
Sergio A Useche,1,2 Francisco Alonso,1,2 Boris Cendales,3 Javier Llamazares4 1Faculty of Psychology, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain; 2DATS (Development and Advising in Traffic Safety) Research Group, INTRAS (Research Institute on Traffic and Road Safety), University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain; 3Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences, El Bosque University, Bogotá, Colombia; 4Department of Technology, ESIC Business and Marketing School, Madrid, SpainCorrespondence: Sergio A UsecheDATS, Carrer del Serpis 29, 3rd Floor, Valencia, 46022, SpainTel +34 611317890Email sergio.useche@uv.esIntroduction: Recent evidence consistently highlights the adverse work environment of long-haul professional drivers, whose task structure typically involves the performance of extensive shifts, driving under stressful working conditions. In this regard, job stress and fatigue – that are highly prevalent in this workforce – seem to play a crucial role in explaining this group’s negative traffic safety outcomes. The aim of this study was to assess whether work-related fatigue is a mechanism that mediates the relationship between job stress, health indicators and occupational traffic crashes of long-haul truck drivers (LHTD).Methods: The data used in this study were collected from 521 Spanish long-haul truck drivers (97% males) from all 17 regions of Spain, with a mean age of 47 years.Results: Utilizing structural equation models (SEM), it was found that work-traffic crashes of long-haul truck drivers could be explained through work-related fatigue that exerts a full mediation between job stress (job strain), health-related factors and traffic crashes suffered during the previous two years.Discussion: Overall, the findings of this research support that a) stressful working conditions and health issues of drivers have significant effects on traffic crashes, and b) fatigue is a mechanism relating stress-related factors and work-traffic crashes of long-haul drivers. This study highlights the need of stress- and fatigue-management policies and interventions, in order to reduce the crash risk of long-haul truck drivers.Keywords: psychosocial factors at work, long-haul truck drivers, job stress, fatigue, occupational accidents
Many macroscopic physical processes are known to occur in a time-directed way despite the apparent time-symmetry of the known fundamental laws. A popular explanation is to postulate an unimaginably atypical state for the early universe -- a "Past Hypothesis" (PH) -- that seeds the time-asymmetry from which all others follow. I will argue that such a PH faces serious new difficulties. First I strengthen the grounds for existing criticism by providing a systematic analytic framework for assessing the status of the PH. I outline three broad categories of criticism that put into question a list of essential requirements of the proposal. The resulting analysis paints a grim picture for the prospects of providing an adequate formulation for an explicit PH. I then provide a new argument that substantively extends this criticism by showing that any time-independent measure on the space of models of the universe must necessarily break one of its gauge symmetries. The PH then faces a new dilemma: reject a gauge symmetry of the universe and introduce a distinction without difference or reject the time-independence of the measure and lose explanatory power.
Kuppuraj Sengottuvel, Kuppuraj Sengottuvel, Arpitha Vasudevamurthy
et al.
Declarative memory abilities may be important for children who are learning to read in a second language. In the present study, we investigated declarative memory in a recognition memory task in 7-to-13-year-old, Kannada native-speaking, good (n = 22) and poor (n = 22) readers of English, in Karnataka, India. Recognition memory was tested shortly (∼10 min) after encoding (day 1) and again on the next (day 2). Analyses revealed that the two groups did not differ in recognition memory performance on day 1. On day 2, the good readers improved from day 1, whereas poor readers did not. A partial correlation analysis suggests that consolidation – the change in performance in recognition memory between the 2 days – is associated with reading skills in good readers, but not in poor readers. Taken together, these results suggest that children who struggle to read in a second language may have deficits in declarative memory consolidation.
Eleştiri/tenkit insanlığın doğruyu/hakikati ortaya çıkarmak için hiçbir zaman terk edemeyeceği bir uygulamadır. Başta Kur’ân-ı Kerîm olmak üzere hadisler ve tüm İslâmî ilimlerde tenkit/eleştiri vazgeçilmez bir husustur. Hz. Peygamber, kendilerine dini tebliğ ettiği ve bu doğrultuda yetiştirmeyi hedeflediği sahâbenin, olumsuz eylemleri karşısında onlara insan olmaları açısından yaklaşarak, davranışlarını bu çerçevede değerlendirmiştir. Hadislerde; Hz. Peygamber’in, yanlış fiilleri yapan sahâbe neslini kınama, tahkir etme ve aşağılama gibi tutumlardan kaçınarak, onların sergiledikleri bu tür eylemler karşısında genelde “bazılarına ne oluyor ki şöyle şöyle yapıyorlar”, “insanlara ne oluyor ki”, “benden değildir”, “bizden değildir”, “veyl/yazıklar olsun” ve “sizin hayırlınız değildir” gibi farklı cümle kalıplarıyla tenkit ettiği görülmektedir. Çalışmada Hz. Peygamber’in sahâbenin yanlış yapmaları durumunda direkt şahsı hedef almaması, onları rencide etmeden genel ifadeler kullanmak suretiyle kişilerin toplum içerisindeki konumunu da dikkate alarak hem kişiyi hem de müminleri eleştirerek eğitmeyi amaçlaması ve çeşitli olay/durum karşısında takındığı tavır, duyduğu ifadelere verdiği cevap ve yaptığı tenkitlerden örnekler alınarak konu değerlendirilmiştir.
From its earliest days, photography was linked to material remains of the past. Western pioneers of the medium were attracted to photographing Ottoman lands, especially the land of the Pharaohs, and the Holy Land. The Ottomans also seized upon photography themselves, turning the lens upon monuments and artefacts within their own Empire. The literature on archaeological photography in the region has focused on European travel photography, and on the upper echelons of state officialdom. This article shifts attention to Ottoman bureaucracy, and to the societal level. It discusses the relationship between photography and the daily tasks associated with the Ottoman administration of antiquities. Additionally, it looks at the ways that an important learned society, the Hellenic Literary Society at Constantinople, used photography. The article treats Ottoman archaeological photography in its own right, largely on the basis of primary material in Ottoman Turkish and Greek. The article argues that photography was a new, technologically advanced medium that - in tandem with other visual reproduction techniques - was instrumental in promoting visions of modernisation. Photography, and other visual media, helped the Ottoman state promote state centralisation and modernisation, while enhancing the Hellenic Literary Society’s civilising mission.
Indo-Iranian languages and literature, Literature (General)