A childhood observation of Thakur Anukulchandra that "one and one can only be two ones, not simply two" motivates a precise inquiry: what, exactly, is asserted when we pass from two concrete individuals to the numeral "2"? This paper does not challenge the arithmetic theorem 1+1=2, but rather analyzes what this equation means when applied to physical objects. We answer with two complementary, rigorous treatments. Mathematician's proof. We model aggregation by the free commutative monoid of multisets M(U) over a universe of individuals U, so that delta_a + delta_b literally encodes two ones with individuality preserved. Numerals arise only after a declared classification q:U->T (coarse-graining) via the pushforward q*:M(U)->M(T) and the unique counting homomorphism to N. The non-injectivity of q* isolates the exact locus of information loss. Physicist's proof. We represent physical systems by worldtubes, states, and observables, and define a composite operation that preserves labelled constituents. We prove the Non-Identity Addition Theorem: A+B = X+X iff A=B=X; hence a pair of distinct objects cannot equal a doubled copy. The numeral "2" appears only as the readout of a typed count observable after an explicit classification, not as a statement of physical identity. Conclusion. In reality, one plus one is two ones; "1+1=2" is the value of a counting map applied after coarse graining. This clarifies the separation between identity-preserving aggregation and counting, reconciles everyday arithmetic with physical non-identity, and makes explicit the modeling choice that every act of counting entails. Our analysis has implications for the philosophy of mathematics, measurement theory, and information theoretic approaches to classification.
Xuechunzi Bai, Angelina Wang, Ilia Sucholutsky
et al.
Large language models (LLMs) can pass explicit social bias tests but still harbor implicit biases, similar to humans who endorse egalitarian beliefs yet exhibit subtle biases. Measuring such implicit biases can be a challenge: as LLMs become increasingly proprietary, it may not be possible to access their embeddings and apply existing bias measures; furthermore, implicit biases are primarily a concern if they affect the actual decisions that these systems make. We address both challenges by introducing two new measures of bias: LLM Implicit Bias, a prompt-based method for revealing implicit bias; and LLM Decision Bias, a strategy to detect subtle discrimination in decision-making tasks. Both measures are based on psychological research: LLM Implicit Bias adapts the Implicit Association Test, widely used to study the automatic associations between concepts held in human minds; and LLM Decision Bias operationalizes psychological results indicating that relative evaluations between two candidates, not absolute evaluations assessing each independently, are more diagnostic of implicit biases. Using these measures, we found pervasive stereotype biases mirroring those in society in 8 value-aligned models across 4 social categories (race, gender, religion, health) in 21 stereotypes (such as race and criminality, race and weapons, gender and science, age and negativity). Our prompt-based LLM Implicit Bias measure correlates with existing language model embedding-based bias methods, but better predicts downstream behaviors measured by LLM Decision Bias. These new prompt-based measures draw from psychology's long history of research into measuring stereotype biases based on purely observable behavior; they expose nuanced biases in proprietary value-aligned LLMs that appear unbiased according to standard benchmarks.
This work explores the hypothesis that subjectively attributed meaning constitutes the phenomenal content of conscious experience. That is, phenomenal content is semantic. This form of subjective meaning manifests as an intrinsic and non-representational character of qualia. Empirically, subjective meaning is ubiquitous in conscious experiences. We point to phenomenological studies that lend evidence to support this. Furthermore, this notion of meaning closely relates to what Frege refers to as "sense", in metaphysics and philosophy of language. It also aligns with Peirce's "interpretant", in semiotics. We discuss how Frege's sense can also be extended to the raw feels of consciousness. Sense and reference both play a role in phenomenal experience. Moreover, within the context of the mind-matter relation, we provide a formalization of subjective meaning associated to one's mental representations. Identifying the precise maps between the physical and mental domains, we argue that syntactic and semantic structures transcend language, and are realized within each of these domains. Formally, meaning is a relational attribute, realized via a map that interprets syntactic structures of a formal system within an appropriate semantic space. The image of this map within the mental domain is what is relevant for experience, and thus comprises the phenomenal content of qualia. We conclude with possible implications this may have for experience-based theories of consciousness.
Today the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia is one of the defining factors in the Middle East political arena. The Islamic world's division into Shiite and Sunni is often considered a factor affecting bilateral relations between Tehran and Riyadh. Iran positions itself as the center of gravity for all the Shiites in the region, while Saudi Arabia seeks to form an anti-Iranian alliance on a Sunni basis. This article assesses the impact of the doctrinal tensions between these two branches of Islam on the Iranian approach towards its relations with Saudi Arabia. For this purpose, the author analyses the rhetoric of Iranian officials, clerics, and state-run media in the context of the main concepts of the Iranian contemporary religious ideology. The author concludes that criticism of Saudi Arabia has lost its religious connotation and Tehran does not position its confrontation with Riyadh as a fight against the enemies of Islam or apostates. The traditional epithets classifying their holders as supporters of the forces of darkness and actively used against the Western countries and Israel are not cited by critics of the Saudi dynasty. Moreover, the criticism of Wahhabism as a religious movement is not linked to the kingdom's current political leadership. On the contrary, the Iranian criticism of the Saudi foreign and domestic policies focuses on condemning the Saudi authorities' infringement on human rights and media freedom, supporting the protest movement in Iran, and fighting the Houthis. Even the persecution of Shiites in Saudi Arabia, to which the Iranian press has devoted considerable attention, is viewed from the perspective of the global concept of human rights, rather than as the struggle of one religious group against another. The kingdom itself is not considered an ideological enemy of Iran, which since the Islamic Revolution has been the US and Israel. The statements by some representatives of the Iranian political establishment on the need for peaceful coexistence between the two countries, along with the March 2023 agreements on normalizing bilateral relations indicate Tehran's pragmatic approach to interaction with Riyadh which is not affected by the ShiaSunni controversy in its dogmatic and religious dimensions.
A collection of fragments related to the writings of Franz Kafka. If he was able to see aspects of the world taking shape a century ago, what might his work suggest now? It strikes me that it has to do with that space where absurdity and brutality meet.
Simone de Beauvoir, <em> The Ethics of Ambiguity </em> (1947): - Robert Oppenheimer, Hearing Before Personnel Security Board (1954): - Bill Joy, ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us’ (2000): - Victoria Krakovna, ‘Risks from general artificial intelligence without an intelligence explosion’ (2015): - Ezra Klein, ‘This Changes Everything’ (2023): - Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher, ‘ChatGPT Heralds an Intellectual Revolution’ (2023):
Josef Adalian and Lane Brown have written a thought provoking article about the state of the television industry, ‘The Binge Purge’. What is remarkable is how much of what is being described could be applied more broadly to describe many industries and institutions today.
According to the standard model of cosmology, LambdaCDM, the mass-energy budget of the current stage of the universe is not dominated by the luminous matter that we are familiar with, but instead by some form of dark matter (and dark energy). It is thus tempting to adopt scientific realism about dark matter. However, there are barely any constraints on the myriad of possible properties of this entity -- it is not even certain that it is a form of matter. In light of this underdetermination I advocate caution: we should not (yet) be dark matter realists. The "not(-yet)-realism" that I have in mind is different from Hacking's (1989) anti-realism, in that it is semantic rather than epistemological. It also differs from the semantic anti-realism of logical empiricism, in that it is naturalistic, such that it may only be temporary and does not automatically apply to all other unobservables (or even just to all other astronomical unobservables, as with Hacking's anti-realism). The argument is illustrated with the analogy of the much longer history of the concept of a gene, as the current state of the concept of dark matter resembles in some relevant ways that of the early concept of genes.
Based on string theory's framework, the gauge/gravity duality, also known as holography, has the ability to solve practical problems in low energy physical systems like metals and fluids. Holographic applications open a path for conversation and collaboration between the theory-driven, high energy culture of string theory and fields like nuclear and condensed matter physics, which in contrast place great emphasis on the empirical evidence that experiment provides. This paper takes a look at holography's history, from its roots in string theory to its present-day applications that are challenging the cultural identity of the field. I will focus on two of these applications: holographic QCD and holographic superconductivity, highlighting some of the (often incompatible) historical influences, motives, and epistemic values at play, as well as the subcultural shifts that help the collaborations work. The extent to which holographic research -- arguably string theory's most successful and prolific area -- must change its subcultural identity in order to function in fields outside of string theory reflects its changing nature and the field's uncertain future. Does string theory lose its identity in the low-energy applications that holography provides? Does holography still belong under string theory's umbrella, or is it destined to form new subcultures with each of its fields of application? I find that the answers to these questions are dynamic, interconnected, and highly dependent on string theory's relationship with its field of application. In some cases, holography can maintain the goals and values it inherited from string theory. In others, it instead adopts the goals and values of the field in which it is applied. These examples highlight a need for the STS community to expand its treatment of string theory beyond its relationship with empiricism and role as a theory of quantum gravity.
The article dwells on the phenomenon of Russian Beardsleism, which was formed by the influence of the works and personality of the English graphic artist Aubrey Beardsley on the Russian intellectual society at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries. Being the brightest representative of English aestheticism and Art Nouveau, Aubrey Beardsley became a champion of the ideas of new art for Russia. In his homeland, Aubrey Beardsley managed to make a real revolution in the field of illustration and book graphics, separating them into independent elements of creativity and raising the art of graphics to a completely new, unprecedently high level. No less revolutionary was the behavior of the artist — Aubrey Beardsley turned his life into art, postulating innovative aesthetic and philosophical aspirations by his very appearance. The worth of his personality was undoubtedly comparable to the worth of his works, and one became inseparable from the other. Thus, the very image of Aubrey Beardsley became a symbol of the Art Nouveau era, containing a lot of complex concepts. Therefore, no wonder that the sphere of influence of this master in Russia was extremely wide — not limited only to the field of graphics, it extended from new artistic methods up to the lifestyle and demeanor. The significance of Beardsleism in the Russian artistic life of the turn of the centuries is also indicated by its scope — the most prominent figures of the Silver Age, such as S. Diaghilev, L. Bakst, N. Feofilaktov, and rather obscure A. Silin, A. Arapov and M. Durnov — both those and others experienced a significant influence of Aubrey Beardsley on their works and life.
In Hamiltonian GR, change has seemed to be missing, defined only asymptotically, or otherwise obscured at best. By construing change as essential time dependence, can one find change locally in Hamiltonian GR with spinors? This paper is motivated by tendencies in space-time philosophy to slight fermionic/spinorial matter, in Hamiltonian GR to misplace changes of time coordinate, and in treatments of the Einstein-Dirac equation to include a gratuitous local Lorentz gauge symmetry. Spatial dependence is dropped in most of the paper. To include all and only the coordinate freedom, the Einstein-Dirac equation is investigated using the Schwinger time gauge and Kibble-Deser symmetric triad condition as a $3+1$ version of the DeWitt-Ogievetsky-Polubarinov nonlinear group realization formalism that dispenses with a tetrad and local Lorentz gauge freedom. Change is the lack of a time-like stronger-than-Killing field for which the Lie derivative of the metric-spinor complex vanishes. An appropriate $3+1$-friendly form of the Rosenfeld-Anderson-Bergmann-Castellani gauge generator $G$, a tuned sum of first class-constraints, changes the canonical Lagrangian by a total derivative and implements changes of time coordinate for solutions.
Liam Magee, Lida Ghahremanlou, Karen Soldatic
et al.
To examine whether intersectional bias can be observed in language generation, we examine \emph{GPT-2} and \emph{GPT-NEO} models, ranging in size from 124 million to ~2.7 billion parameters. We conduct an experiment combining up to three social categories - gender, religion and disability - into unconditional or zero-shot prompts used to generate sentences that are then analysed for sentiment. Our results confirm earlier tests conducted with auto-regressive causal models, including the \emph{GPT} family of models. We also illustrate why bias may be resistant to techniques that target single categories (e.g. gender, religion and race), as it can also manifest, in often subtle ways, in texts prompted by concatenated social categories. To address these difficulties, we suggest technical and community-based approaches need to combine to acknowledge and address complex and intersectional language model bias.
Mantello Peter, Manh-Tung Ho, Minh-Hoang Nguyen
et al.
Human resource management technologies have moved from biometric surveillance to emotional artificial intelligence (AI) that monitor employees' engagement and productivity, analyze video interviews and CVs of job applicants. The rise of the US$20 billion emotional AI industry will transform the future workplace. Yet, besides no international consensus on the principles or standards for such technologies, there is a lack of cross-cultural research on future job seekers' attitude toward such use of AI technologies. This study collects a cross-sectional dataset of 1,015 survey responses of international students from 48 countries and 8 regions worldwide. A majority of the respondents (52%) are concerned about being managed by AI. Following the hypothetico-deductivist philosophy of science, we use the MCMC Hamiltonian approach and conduct a detailed comparison of 10 Bayesian network models with the PSIS-LOO method. We consistently find having a higher income, being male, majoring in business, and/or self-rated familiarity with AI correlate with a more positive view of emotional AI in the workplace. There is also a stark cross-cultural and cross-regional difference. Our analysis shows people from economically less developed regions (Africa, Oceania, Central Asia) tend to exhibit less concern for AI managers. And for East Asian countries, 64% of the Japanese, 56% of the South Korean, and 42% of the Chinese professed the trusting attitude. In contrast, an overwhelming majority of 75% of the European and Northern American possesses the worrying/neutral attitude toward being managed by AI. Regarding religion, Muslim students correlate with the most concern toward emotional AI in the workplace. When religiosity is higher, the correlation becomes stronger for Muslim and Buddhist students.
A Viking-class Europa Lander is a high-risk, high-cost venture. In its place, Europa should be explored by a series of low-cost scouts. These will be landers and small flyby craft. These missions will ascertain the nature of Europa's surface at a scale of meters to centimeters. Some will search for the presence of organic molecules. All of them will precede a large Europa Lander.
We show a possibility to apply certain philosophical concepts to the analysis of concrete mathematical structures. Such application gives a clear justification of topological and geometric properties of considered mathematical objects.
In a recent series of papers and lectures, John Conway and Simon Kochen presented The Free Will Theorem. "It asserts, roughly, that if indeed we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity." Perhaps the primary motivation of their papers was to place stringent constraints on quantum mechanical hidden variable theories, which they indeed do. Nevertheless, the notion of free will is crucial to the proof and they even speculate that the free will afforded to elementary particles is the ultimate explanation of our own free will. I don't challenge the mathematics/logic of their proof but rather their premises. Free will and determinism are, for me, not nearly adequately clarified for them to form the bases of a theoretical proof. In addition, they take for granted supplemental concepts in quantum mechanics that are in need of further explanation. It's also not clear to me what utility is afforded by the free will theorem, i.e., what, if anything, follows from it. Despite the cheeky subtitle of my essay, I do think that the explicit introduction of free will into discussions of hidden variables and other interpretations of quantum mechanics might help expose foibles in many of those deliberations. For this reason, I consider the Conway-Kochen free will theorem to be a positive contribution to the philosophy of quantum mechanics.
Rather than offering chronologically ordered encyclopedic knowledge of a lifetime, only some of the most striking events of the existence of this well-known scientist are here pointed out. Sections: Life; Man of laws; Interest in philosophy; Astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist; The discovery of the expansion of the Universe; Reasonable doubt about the expansion; The astropolitician. Apart from his scientific ideas of cosmological scope, his worldview has been that of a pragmatic thinker with training in law, who converts science into a large company and the scientific hypothesis into a convenient truth that deserves to be defended and arrogated, although deep down it is known that such reasons are not exclusive or original and that there are also reasons to defend the opposite thing. ------ Más que ofrecer un conocimiento enciclopédico cronológicamente ordenado de toda una vida, señalaré solamente algunos de los eventos más llamativos de la existencia del ampliamente reconocido científico. Secciones: Vida; Hombre de leyes; Interés por la filosofía; Astrónomo, astrofísico, cosmólogo; El descubrimiento de la expansión del Universo; Duda razonable sobre la expansión; El astropolítico. Aparte de sus ideas científicas de alcance cosmológico, su cosmovisión ha sido la de un pensador pragmático con formación de abogado, que convierte la ciencia en una gran empresa y la hipótesis científica en una verdad conveniente que merece defenderse y arrogarse, aunque en el fondo se sepa que no son exclusivas ni originales tales razones y que hay también razones para defender lo contrario.
The Higgs naturalness principle served as the basis for the so far failed prediction that signatures of physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) would be discovered at the LHC. One influential formulation of the principle, which prohibits fine tuning of bare Standard Model (SM) parameters, rests on the assumption that a particular set of values for these parameters constitute the "fundamental parameters" of the theory, and serve to mathematically define the theory. On the other hand, an old argument by Wetterich suggests that fine tuning of bare parameters merely reflects an arbitrary, inconvenient choice of expansion parameters and that the choice of parameters in an EFT is therefore arbitrary. We argue that these two interpretations of Higgs fine tuning reflect distinct ways of formulating and interpreting effective field theories (EFTs) within the Wilsonian framework: the first takes an EFT to be defined by a single set of physical, fundamental bare parameters, while the second takes a Wilsonian EFT to be defined instead by a whole Wilsonian renormalization group (RG) trajectory, associated with a one-parameter class of physically equivalent parametrizations. From this latter perspective, no single parametrization constitutes the physically correct, fundamental parametrization of the theory, and the delicate cancellation between bare Higgs mass and quantum corrections appears as an eliminable artifact of the arbitrary, unphysical reference scale with respect to which the physical amplitudes of the theory are parametrized. While the notion of fundamental parameters is well motivated in the context of condensed matter field theory, we explain why it may be superfluous in the context of high energy physics.