Savulescu/Enhancing Human Capacities, 2014

Many chapters in this volume review current and future possibilities for enhancing human physical ability, cognition, mood, and lifespan. These possibilities raise the ethical question of whether we should enhance normal human capacities in these ways. We are not likely to agree on answers to this question without a clear and shared understanding of the concept of enhancement. The aim of this chapter is to offer such an account of enhancement. We begin by reviewing a number of suggested accounts of enhancement, and point to their shortcomings. We identify two key senses of "enhancement": functional enhancement, the enhancement of some capacity or power (e.g. vision, intelligence, health) and human enhancement, the enhancement of a human being's life. The latter notion, we suggest, is the notion of enhancement most relevant to ethical debate. We argue that it is best understood in welfarist terms. We will then illustrate this welfarist approach to enhancement by applying it to the case of cognitive enhancement. Although there is much debate about the ethical implications of new technologies, only a few authors have attempted to provide an explicit definition of enhancement. Often discussion focuses on a particular application such as muscle strength, memory or lifespan, or a definition of enhancement is implicitly assumed. However, without an adequate shared understanding of what is meant by "enhancement," we are not likely to resolve these debates and reach sound ethical conclusions. In the literature there is a great deal of uncertainty and confusion about the term "enhancement." Erik Parens (1998) states that: . . . some participants think the term enhancement is so freighted with erroneous assumptions and so ripe for abuse that we ought not even to use it. My sense is that if we didn't use enhancement, we would end up with another term with similar problems. Enhancing Human Capacities, edited by Julian Savulescu, Ruud ter Meulen and Guy Kahane.

Do the Achuar perhaps constitute an exceptional case 2 , one of the picturesque anomalies that ethnography occasionally discovers in some remote corner of the planet? Have I, out of a lack of perspicacity or a desire to be original, not been able or not wished to see the actual way in which they treat that dichotomy between nature and society? Just a few hundred kilometres to the north, in the Amazonian forest of eastern Colombia, the Makuna Indians present an even more radical version of a theory according to which the world is resolutely non-dualist 3 . Like the Achuar, the Makuna classify human beings, plants, and animals as 'people' (masa) whose main attributesmortality, social and ceremonial life, intentionality and knowldegeare in every way identical. Within this community, distinctions among living beings are based on the particular characteristics that mythical origins, diets, and modes of reproduction confer upon each class of beings. They are not based on the greater or lesser proximity of those classes to the pinnacle of achievement that the Makuna would exemplify. The interaction between animals and human beings is likewise conceived as a relation of affinity, although this is slightly different from the Achuar model, given that among the Makuna a hunter regards his prey as a potential marriage-partner rather than as a brother-in-law. However, the Makuna ontological classifications are far more flexible than those of the Achuar, by reason of a faculty of metamorphosis that is attributed to all: humans can become animals, animals can change into humans and animals of one species can change into animals of another species. Their taxonomic grasp of reality is thus always contextual and relative, for the permanent swapping of appearances makes it impossible to attribute stable identities to the environment's living components. The sociability that the Makuna ascribe to non-humans is thus richer and more complex than that recognized by the Achuar. Just like the Indians themselves, animals live in communities, in 'long houses' that tradition situates at the heart of certain rapids or inside hills that are precisely mapped. They cultivate manioc-gardens, move about in canoes and, led by their chiefs, perform rituals every bit as elaborate as those of the Makuna themselves. The visible form of animals is really just a disguise. When they get home, they shed their appearance and deck themselves in ceremonial feathers and ornaments, thus ostensibly becoming the 'people' that they have never ceased to be even as they swam in the rivers or roamed through the forest. This knowledge that the Makuna have relating to this double life that animals lead is part of the teaching dispensed by their shamans, for these are the cosmic mediators to whom society delegates the care of relations between the various communities of living beings. However, the premises upon which this knowledge is based are shared by one and all. Although they are, in part, esoteric, they nevertheless structure the conception of their environment that all Preliminary draft (January 2012)not for circulation 18 the non-shamans share and they dictate the manner in which the Makuna interact with that environment. Many cosmologies analogous to those of the Achuar and the Makuna have been reported from the forest regions of the lowlands of South America 4 . Despite clearly detectable differences in their internal organization, all these cosmologies, without exception, draw no clear ontological distinctions between, on the one hand, humans and, on the other, numerous animal and plant species. Most of the entities that people the world are interconnected in a vast continuum inspired by unitary principles and governed by an identical regime of sociability. Relations between humans and non-humans in fact appear to be no different from the relations that obtain between one human community and another. They are partly defined by the utilitarian constraints of subsistence, but they adopt different forms that are peculiar to each of the tribes and thereby serve to differentiate them. The example of the Yukuna, a group with an Arawak language, adjacent to the Makuna of Colombian Amazonia provides a good illustration. Like their neighbours who speak a Tukano language, the Yukuna have developed preferential associations with particular species of animals and particular varieties of the cultivated plants that provide them with their main foodstuffs. The mythical origin of the Yukuna and, in the case of the animals, the houses that these share are all situated within the limits of the Yukuna tribal territory. To the shamans falls the task of supervising the ritual regeneration of these species,species that are, in contrast, prohibited for the Tukano tribes that surround the Yukuna. Each tribal group is thus responsible for protecting the specific populations of the plants and animals that provide its nourishment. And this division of tasks helps to define local identities and systems of interethnic relations of the various tribal groups, for these vary according to their links with different non-humans. If the sociability of humans and that of animals and plants are so intimately connected in Amazonia, that is because their respective forms of collective organization stem from a common model that is quite flexible and that makes it possible to describe interactions between nonhumans by using the named categories that structure relations between humans or that represent some relations between humans on the model of symbiotic relations between other species. In the latter case, which is more rare, the relationship is not designated or described explicitly, since its characteristics are reputed to be familiar to everyone, thanks to their generally shared botanical and zoological knowledge. Among the Secoya, for example, dead Indians are thought to perceive the living in two different forms: they see men as oropendolas birds and women as Amazon parrots 6 . This dichotomy, which organizes the social and symbolic construction of sexual identities, is based upon the ethological and morphological characteristics peculiar to the Chapter 2 The wild and the domesticated Henri Michaux was not yet thirty when he set off to the Andes to visit an Ecuadorian friend whom he had met in Paris. Fired by the temptation of adventure and despite his fragile health, in 1928 he decided to return to Paris by way of the rivers of Amazonia. This involved one month in a canoe, exposed to the rain and the mosquitoes, all the way along the River Napo as far as the Marañon, followed by three weeks of relative comfort on a small Brazilian steamer, travelling down the Amazon to reach its estuary. It was there, at Belém de Pará that he witnessed the following scene: 'A young woman who was on our boat, coming from Manaus, went into town with us this morning. When she came upon the Grand Park (which is undeniably nicely planted) she emitted an easy sigh. "Ah, at last, nature", she said, but she was coming from the jungle 1 '. Indeed she was. For this citizen of Amazonia, the forest was no reflection of nature, but a disturbing chaos into which she seldom ventured, a place resistant to all attempts to tame it and by no means conducive to aesthetic pleasure. The main park in Belém, with its rows of palm trees and its plots of mown grass planted with a succession of mango trees, gazebos and stands of bamboo, guaranteed an alternative to the forest: tropical plants, to be sure, but ones tamed by human labour, testifying to culture's triumph over the forest wilderness. This taste for wellgroomed landscapes is evident everywhere, as can be seen from the colour-prints that preside over all the reception rooms, hotels and restaurants of the little towns of Amazonia. Walls blotched with humidity display nothing but alpine scenes showing flower-decked chalets, cottages snuggling into hedged farmland or austere rows of yew trees in French-style gardens,all no doubt symbols of exoticism, but necessary contrasts to the excessive proximity of vegetation run riot. Do we not all, like Michaux's fellow-traveller, draw elementary distinctions in our environment, according to whether or not it bears the marks of human action? Garden and forest, field and heath, cultivated terraces and shrubland, oasis and desert, village and bush: all are well-attested pairs that correspond to the opposition that geographers draw between ecumene

Life in the Flesh, 2008

This chapter discusses Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's philosophical reflections on mind and body. It first considers Leibniz's distinction between substance and aggregate, referring to the former as a being that must have true unity (what he calls unum per se) and to the latter as simply a collection of other beings. It then describes Leibniz's extension of the term "substance" to monads and other things such as animals and living beings. It also examines Leibniz's views about the union of mind and body, whether mind and body interact, and how interaction is related to union. More specifically, it asks whether mind and body together constitute an unum per se and analyzes Leibniz's account of the per se unity of mind-body composites. In addition, the chapter explores the problem of soul-body union as opposed to mind-body union and concludes by discussing Leibniz's explanation of soul-body interaction using a system of pre-established harmony.

Cicero’s De Finibus: Philosophical Approaches edd G. Betegh and J. Annas (Cambridge UP), 2016

Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 2010

Video games are complex, emergent systems that are difficult to design and test. This difficulty invariably leads to failures being present in the game, negatively impacting the play experience of some. We present a taxonomy of possible failures, divided into temporal and non-temporal failures. The taxonomy can guide the thinking of designers and testers alike, helping them expose bugs in the game. This will lead to games being better tested and designed, with fewer failures when released.

Including Disability, 2022

Surrendering to accept can be powerful, Not because you are giving up, But because you are embracing, Grabbing hold of what you can control, Letting go of all else, Becoming, Allowing, Radically accepting what is real. Untamed, Unadulterated, Realness without compromise, Waiting to be, To become. To become. To become.

APSA Conference (2004: Adelaide, …, 2004

Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MIND THAT FOUND ITSELF ***

Rhetoric of Health & Medicine

The phrase "looking for a mind at work" entered the vernacular through Lin Manuel Miranda's explosively popular musical, Hamilton, but the phrase owes its genesis to an earlier cultural phenomenon: Aaron Sorkin's US television program The West Wing, in which Sam Seaborn, Deputy White House Communications Director for a fictional White House, says, "I look for anything. I look for a mind at work" (2002). Academics, similarly, can readily act as minds at work, looking for and at other minds at work-a focus on intellectual perspectives and contributions that is critical but can also sometimes obscure or neglect to consider the full human context of their own or others' intellectual contributions. Academics with an interest in the rhetoric of health and medicine have a somewhat unique opportunity to consider the broader contexts of bodies as well as minds at work through their content focus, but may still neglect to consider the full spectrum of human conditions each scholar experiences. A mind is never at work on its own: minds are always operating within and inseparably from full humans with complex interpersonal, bodily, and emotional intersectionalities. This issue honors not only the minds, but also the bodies and hearts at work in scholarly pursuits. A crucial component of consistently considering bodies and hearts, as well as minds, arises in opportunities to offer scholarly feedback to one another. In "RHM Generosity," J. Blake Scott, Lisa Melonçon, and

2014

The NSEC is pleased to announce its upcoming courses Advanced Pediatric Life Support APLS "Ultrasound-Enhanced life Support "USLS-BL1 Target audience: This course, accredited by AAP and ACEP has been designed to meet the growing needs of emergency physicians, pediatricians, nurses and all other health care professionals. It provides them with a complete body of knowledge in Pediatric Emergency Medicine. A textbook on Pediatric Emergencies will be delivered to the candidates prior to the course. Each chapter or "module" of education of this textbook is case based and covers the key elements of assessment, diagnosis, testing, treatment, and disposition. Each chapter also includes references, helpful tables and charts, photographs and illustrations. The course is conducted in small group discussion format.