A Portable Waterproof EEG Acquisition Device for Dolphins

The acquisition and analysis of EEG signals of dolphins, a highly intelligent creature, has always been a focus of the research of bioelectric signals. Prevailing cable-connected devices cannot be adapted to data acquisition very well when dolphins are in motion. Therefore, this study designs a novel, light-weighted, and portable EEG acquisition device aimed at relatively unrestricted EEG acquisition. An embedded main control board and an acquisition board were designed, and all modules are encapsulated in a 162 × 94 × 60 mm3 waterproof device box, which can be tied to the dolphin’s body by a silicon belt. The acquisition device uses customized suction cups with embedded electrodes and adopts a Bluetooth module for wireless communication with the ground station. The sampled signals are written to the memory card on board when the Bluetooth communication is blocked. A limited experiment was designed to verify the effectiveness of the device functionality onshore and underwater. However, more rigorous long-term tests on dolphins in various states with our device are expected in future to further prove its capability and study the movement-related artifacts.

THE CONCEPT ‘DEMON’ IN THE WORKS BY FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

The article deals with the concept ‘demon’ in the works by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is found in various grammatical forms in the writer's works published in magazines in 1861 and 1877, in the story The Mistress, as well as in the novels The Idiot and Demons. In Dostoevsky's letters, this concept is not given a single mention. The paper reveals a number of specific features in the use of the concept by the writer. First, locality and compactness – the concept is always used within the same topic (in works published in magazines) or scene (in fiction). Second, the concept does not have any romantic connotation traditional for European and Russian literature; the writer always uses it in its main meaning fixed by the Church Slavonic language, where a demon is understood as an immaterial intelligent creature that is hostile to man. We consider these features to be related to the writer’s Orthodox worldview, which determined his ontology, epistemology and speech tactics. According to the Orthodox tradition, the use of the names of evil spirits should be extremely limited, therefore Dostoevsky used this concept only when it was impossible to express the idea otherwise without loss of meaning.In the writer's works published in magazines in 1861, the concept ‘demon’ is represented through the lexemes ‘Mephistopheles’ and ‘mephistophelity’, which serve to denote the apostasy processes of the Russian reality contemporary with the writer. In the novel Demons, this concept is represented through the lexeme ‘imp’, used to denote the spirit of the lower hierarchy in relation to a demon.The paper concludes that the concept ‘demon’ and the subordinate lexemes are used by Dostoevsky to depict the spiritual state of a character or to identify the spiritual causes of a particular social phenomenon.

EDITORIAL NEED OF OUR TIMES: IMPACT OF GENOME EDITING SCIENCES AND REQUISITE PREPAREDNESS FOR MOLECULAR BIOTERRORISM

The pace of human evolution has accelerated at an unprecedented rate in the last couple of decades. Never ever before the mankind could witness a global hostage situation by a tiny invisible RNA creature. While the global community struggles at large finding plausible solutions in the information replete era, there are seriouslessons to be learnt. The tiny RNA monster has exposed the vulnerabilities of one the considered most intelligent creature posing a question mark about how to strike the intricate balance between preventive approaches and acquiring the postexposure immunity. The rapidly improving genome editing methods along with synthetic genomics has emerged as a double-edged weapon where on one side it opens newer therapeutic avenues to cure disease, but also its malicious use could results in disasters of limitless magnitudes.The delicate boundaries nature may face terrorism in newer clothes at the hands of nano technological tools to modify genome and synthesizing newer life forms. Unstoppable if it becomes can create man-made disasters with issues leading to emergence of black markets for cloning, designer humans ethnic-specific nucleotide editing for worse and possibly much more. The fiction we saw yesterday is today’s science and can lead the human race to point of no return. “He Jiankui affair” is still one of the genome editing dilemma widely criticized for ethical concerns emerging from germ line editing two human embryos for HIV using Cluster RegularlyInterspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) Cas technology.

To the question on identification and differentiation of a philosophical zombie

This article examines the task of identification and differentiation of a so-called “philosophical zombie” in order to form a set of operational criteria for determining the agency of artificial intelligence systems. This task can be viewed as one of the possible ways towards solution of a “hard problem of consciousness”. Despite the fact that the proposed approach alone does not solve the “hard problem”, it reveals certain aspects of neurophysiology, cybernetics and information theory towards its solution. The relevance of this task results from the more extensive implementation of artificial cognitive agents in human life – the boundary that distinguishes an intelligent creature from an artificial cognitive agent, endows an object with agency. Therefore, the development of more complicated artificial cognitive agents (artificial intelligence systems) would ultimately lead to a contentious debate on the topic. The author attempts to introduce the procedure of identification of a philosophical zombie and its restrictions, as well as explores the idea whether or not the artificial cognitive agents would obtain qualia. The article is valuable of those interested in artificial intelligence in all of its aspects, as well as in the philosophy of consciousness.

Criteria of truth

This book is devoted to such an important problem as understanding the world. The latter is impossible without relying on certain criteria that allow us to assess how close our understanding is to the truth. The text is therefore divided into three chapters. The first examines the question of human perception of the world, showing the fundamental, immanent shortcomings and physiological structure of our body and our mind, which prevent the perception of reality in its present form. The second considers our intellect as something finite and limited, also capable only of distortions and half-truths. Finally, the third shows that any intelligence (any intelligent creature, which appeared at our stage of development) a priori and in its essence put in a rigid framework implemented. The monograph is provided with an introduction and a final code, which are framework in nature and are designed, respectively, to give the reader a General idea of the work and draw some conclusions.

Posidonius and Other Stoics on Extra-Sensory Knowledge

This chapter suggestes that Stoic conceptions of divinatory knowing promote the idea that the cosmos itself is a single unified animal. This notion is somewhat familiar, given the parallel conception in the Timaeus, a text that the Stoics use to build some of their own core views, but it will require a substantial amount of unpacking to see all the ways it is pertinent to the Stoics' thinking on divination. When approaching the topic, their main unit of analysis is no longer the discrete individual human being, with this or that hidden process humming away, but rather the cosmos as a whole, which has its own internal activities that result in surplus knowledge for the human individuals embedded in it. In the Stoic view, the human creature amounts to a tiny corpuscle moving about inside a vast intelligent creature. Human sentience is embedded in the sentience of the larger whole, and in some circumstances the lines between the two are not meaningfully distinct.