A richly transdisciplinary account of some fundamental characteristics of human societies and behavior In this book, acclaimed economist Herbert Gintis ranges widely across many fields—including economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, moral philosophy, and biology—to provide a rigorous transdisciplinary explanation of some fundamental characteristics of human societies and social behavior. Because such behavior can be understood only through transdisciplinary research, Gintis argues, Individuality and Entanglement advances the effort to unify the behavioral sciences by developing a shared analytical framework—one that bridges research on gene-culture coevolution, the rational-actor model, game theory, and complexity theory. At the same time, the book persuasively demonstrates the rich possibilities of such transdisciplinary work. Everything distinctive about human social life, Gintis argues, flows from the fact that we construct and then play social games. Indeed, society itself is a game with rules, and politics is the arena in which we affirm and change these rules. Individuality is central to our species because the rules do not change through inexorable macrosocial forces. Rather, individuals band together to change the rules. Our minds are also socially entangled, producing behavior that is socially rational, although it violates the standard rules of individually rational choice. Finally, a moral sense is essential for playing games with socially constructed rules. People generally play by the rules, are ashamed when they break the rules, and are offended when others break the rules, even in societies that lack laws, government, and jails. Throughout the book, Gintis shows that it is only by bringing together the behavioral sciences that such basic aspects of human behavior can be understood.
A richly transdisciplinary account of some fundamental characteristics of human societies and behavior In this book, acclaimed economist Herbert Gintis ranges widely across many fields—including economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, moral philosophy, and biology—to provide a rigorous transdisciplinary explanation of some fundamental characteristics of human societies and social behavior. Because such behavior can be understood only through transdisciplinary research, Gintis argues, Individuality and Entanglement advances the effort to unify the behavioral sciences by developing a shared analytical framework—one that bridges research on gene-culture coevolution, the rational-actor model, game theory, and complexity theory. At the same time, the book persuasively demonstrates the rich possibilities of such transdisciplinary work. Everything distinctive about human social life, Gintis argues, flows from the fact that we construct and then play social games. Indeed, society itself is a game with rules, and politics is the arena in which we affirm and change these rules. Individuality is central to our species because the rules do not change through inexorable macrosocial forces. Rather, individuals band together to change the rules. Our minds are also socially entangled, producing behavior that is socially rational, although it violates the standard rules of individually rational choice. Finally, a moral sense is essential for playing games with socially constructed rules. People generally play by the rules, are ashamed when they break the rules, and are offended when others break the rules, even in societies that lack laws, government, and jails. Throughout the book, Gintis shows that it is only by bringing together the behavioral sciences that such basic aspects of human behavior can be understood.
Age of Entanglement explores patterns of connection linking German and Indian intellectuals from the nineteenth century to the years after the Second World War. Kris Manjapra traces the intersecting ideas and careers of a diverse collection of individuals from South Asia and Central Europe who shared ideas, formed networks, and studied one another’s worlds. Moving beyond well-rehearsed critiques of colonialism towards a new critical approach, this study recasts modern intellectual history in terms of the knotted intellectual itineraries of seeming strangers. Collaborations in the sciences, arts, and humanities produced extraordinary meetings of German and Indian minds. Meghnad Saha met Albert Einstein, Stella Kramrisch brought the Bauhaus to Calcutta, and Girindrasekhar Bose began a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. Rabindranath Tagore traveled to Germany to recruit scholars for a new Indian university, and the actor Himanshu Rai hired director Franz Osten to help establish movie studios in Bombay. These interactions, Manjapra argues, evinced shared responses to the cultural and political hegemony of the British empire. Germans and Indians hoped to find in one another the tools needed to disrupt an Anglocentric world order. As Manjapra demonstrates, transnational intellectual encounters are not inherently progressive. From Orientalism and Aryanism to socialism and scientism, German–Indian entanglements were neither necessarily liberal nor conventionally cosmopolitan, often characterized as much by manipulation as by cooperation. Age of Entanglement underscores the connections between German and Indian intellectual history, revealing the characteristics of a global age when the distance separating Europe and Asia seemed, temporarily, to disappear.
An explosive collision between a pickup truck and a Volvo erases two momentous scientific discoveries. Quantum probability results in complex emotional entanglements. Voices return from the dead. A blood-stained piano becomes an heirloom. Although a picture-perfect family, Beth Sturgess divulges an ignominious past to her loving husband--who has deadly secrets. Mistakes are fatal. With deeply flawed, relatable characters, Entanglement--Quantum and Otherwise is an intricate literary crime story that unravels the generational impact on reality after a loved one's death.
This book suggests a radical departure in approaching the mind-body problem. Instead of trying to causally relate subjective experience to the functioning of the body, it begins with the notion of the psychosomatic unity of the individual and looks for its conditions of possibility. This text shows that what makes this unity possible is the generalized entanglement relation that connects a person's subjective experience with its body functioning in a specific way.In addition to providing a significant contribution to the long-standing philosophical debate about the nature of the mind-body connection, this change of perspective based on the concept of generalized entanglement allows for exploring a holistic approach to health. It can for example explain the existence of body memory and leads to a better understanding of the genesis and evolution of internal diseases, allowing for the development of mind-body therapies. This volume also provides new insights into mental disorders and sets the theoretical basis of self-healing methods appealing to students, researchers and professionals in the fields.
Unique in that it is jointly written by an experimentalist and a theorist, this monograph presents universal quantum computation based on quantum teleportation as an elementary subroutine and multi-party entanglement as a universal resource. Optical approaches to measurement-based quantum computation are also described, including schemes for quantum error correction, with most of the experiments carried out by the authors themselves. Ranging from the theoretical background to the details of the experimental realization, the book describes results and advances in the field, backed by numerous illustrations of the authors' experimental setups. Aimed at researchers, physicists, and graduate and PhD students in physics, theoretical quantum optics, quantum mechanics, and quantum information.
Investigates how data production and consumption territorialize the physical landscape filtered through Ireland’s role in global communications and, as told by the Irish Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, features an installation that focuses on the materiality of data infrastructure in space. As our everyday lives become increasingly entangled with data technologies, the book addresses the utopian fantasy that surrounds the Cloud, as transcending physical presence or resourcing. By bringing the physical infrastructure around data, and its impact on the environment under the spotlight, it hopes to reframe how we understand data production and highlight the myth that information technologies are hidden and without major material manifestations on the landscape. The context for the book is Ireland which has a significant historical role in the evolution of global communications and data infrastructure. In 1866, the world’s first transatlantic telegraph cable landed on the West coast of Ireland. In 1901, the inventor of the radio Guglielmo Marconi transmitted some of the world’s first wireless radio messages from Ireland across the Atlantic Ocean to Newfoundland. Today, Dublin has overtaken London as the data centre hub of Europe, hosting 25% of all available European server space. And by the year 2027, data centres are forecast to consume a third of Ireland’s total electricity demand. The book aims to raise awareness around the hardware of the global internet and Cloud services, which is interwoven with the Irish landscape—made manifest through the vast constellation of data centres, fibre optic cable networks, and energy grids that have come to populate its cities and suburbs over recent decades. The publication accompanies and supports Entanglement, the Irish Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale by archiving the production of the pavilion filtered through a series of poetic excerpts that describe the form, components, content and furniture that make up the installation. At the same time the book is conceived as more than just a catalog by positioning some of the cultural and spatial implications of data technologies in Ireland within a more universal context through contributions by ANNEX, the team selected to produce the pavilion, as well as invited contributors from the disciplines of Media Theory; Journalism; Computer Science, Geography; History and Architecture.
Honourable Mention, ICQI 2022 Outstanding Qualitative Book Award Entanglement in the World’s Becoming and the Doing of New Materialist Inquiry explores new materialist concepts and the ways in which they provoke an opening up of thought about being human, and about being more-than-human. The more-than-human refers, here, to the world that we are of – a world that includes humans, who are emergent and permeable, and all of the animal and earth others they intra-act with. It explores how we affect those others and are affected. This book engages intimately in encounters of various kinds, some drawn from the author’s everyday life, some from the research projects she has engaged in over several decades, and some from others’ research. It works at the interface of living- and writing-as-inquiry, delving into the rich seam of conceptual possibilities opened up by Deleuze and Guattari, and Barad, and by new materialist inquiry more broadly. It brings not just words to the task, but also art, photopraphs, movement, memories, bodies, sound, touch, things. It delves into the ways in which the entangled dynamics of social, material and semiotic flows and forces make up the diffractive movements through which life emerges, assembles itself, and endures. New materialist concepts, as they are explored here, offer new and emergent approaches to life itself, and to ways in which we might research our lives as they are intricately enfolded in the life of the earth.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “brilliant [and] entrancing” (The Guardian) journey into the hidden lives of fungi—the great connectors of the living world—and their astonishing and intimate roles in human life, with the power to heal our bodies, expand our minds, and help us address our most urgent environmental problems. “Grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of An Immense World ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, BBC Science Focus, The Daily Mail, Geographical, The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, London Evening Standard, Science Friday When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave. In the first edition of this mind-bending book, Sheldrake introduced us to this mysterious but massively diverse kingdom of life. This exquisitely designed volume, abridged from the original, features more than one hundred full-color images that bring the spectacular variety, strangeness, and beauty of fungi to life as never before. Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They are metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life’s processes. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. By examining fungi on their own terms, Sheldrake reveals how these extraordinary organisms—and our relationships with them—are changing our understanding of how life works. Winner of the Wainwright Prize, the Royal Society Science Book Prize, and the Guild of Food Writers Award • Shortlisted for the British Book Award • Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize
The philosopher Henry Richardson's short book is a defense of a position on a neglected topic in medical research ethics. Clinical research ethics has been a longstanding area of study, dating back to the aftermath of the Nazi death-camp doctors and the Tuskegee syphilis study. Most ethical regulations and institutions (such as Institutiional Review Boards) have developed in response to those past abuses, including the stress on obtaining informed consent from the subject. Richardson points out that that these ethical regulations do not address one of the key dilemmas faced by medical researchers -- whether or not they have obligations towards subjects who need care not directly related to the purpose of the study, termed "ancillary care obligations." Does a researcher testing an HIV vaccine in Africa have an obligation to provide anti-retrovirals to those who become HIV positive during the trial? Should a researcher studying a volunteer's brain scan, who sees a possible tumor, do more than simply refer him or her to a specialist? While most would agree that some special obligation does exist in these cases, what is the basis of this obligation, and what are its limits? Richardson's analysis of those key questions and the development of his own position are at the heart of this book, which will appeal to bioethicists studying research ethics, to policy makers, and to political and moral philosophers interested in the obligations of beneficence, one of the key issues in moral theory. " 'Philosophy recovers itself,' wrote John Dewey, 'when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.' Henry Richardson confronts a problem in the ethics of medical research that is often (as his many real-life examples show) a matter of life and death. The problem is unexplored and quite difficult: Richardson finds he must craft new theory to deal with it. The theory he creates shows how we become morally entangled with others without intending to, as we enter into intimacies with them. This theory of moral entanglement is a genuine discovery in philosophy, with application across a wide range of human relationships. Since the theory was designed for medical researchers it also provides a bespoke ethical framework, as well as specific guidance, for researchers in the field. This book shows practical philosophy at its best: inspired by real problems, responding with powerful solutions." -- Leif Wenar, Chair of Ethics, King's College London "A medical researcher investigating transmission of malaria may find that a subject has another disease. Does the researcher have an obligation to devote some of the team's resources to treating this disease? The traditional principles of research ethics do not ask much less answer this important question. In this theoretically and practically rich book, Henry Richardson seeks to provide an answer and to identify issues that need further exploration. He argues that "ancillary care obligations" are explained by "moral entanglement" and cannot be justified by traditional principles of justice or the duty to rescue. He is admirably soft-hearted and tough-minded in combining his long demonstrated philosophical acuity with a deep knowledge of the problems on the ground. Richardson's book is characterized by great generosity towards those who need help, towards the problems faced by researchers, and towards the scholarly community - even those with whom he disagrees." - Alan Wertheimer, Senior Research Scholar, Department of Bioethics, National Institutes of Health "In this important book, Henry Richardson sculpts a new path for research ethics, one that focuses on ethical obligations of ancillary-care in clinical trials and medical research, particularly in developing countries, but with relevance throughout the world. In Moral Entanglements, Richardson extends the reach of his analysis both deep within and outside the research itself, recognizing the broader moral backdrop relevant for society-wide judgments of justice, and the special relationships that exist within the medical research context, about what is or is not owed research participants in situations of medical need. Rather than leave such important decisions up to the vagaries of politics or ad hoc assessments, this book sets out a comprehensive theoretical framework with principles to guide such decisions in the everyday lives of both medical researchers and research participants. This book significantly contributes to the ethics of ancillary-care in medical and public health research and judiciously enlightens questions and potential resolutions to these vital global and domestic problems." - Jennifer Prah Ruger, Associate Professor, Yale Schools of Public Health and Medicine
