P. M. S. Hacker

'Intellectual Entertainments' consists of eight philosophical dialogues, each with five participants, some living, some imaginary and some dead. The dialogues take place either in Elysium or in an imaginary Oxford Common Room. Each historical figure speaks in his own idiom with a distinctive turn of phrase. The imaginary figures speak in the accent and idiom of their respective countries (English, Scottish, American, Australian). The themes are the nature of the mind and the relation between mind and body; the nature of consciousness and its demystification; the nature of thought and its relation to speech; and the objectivity or subjectivity of perceptual qualities such as colour, sound, smell, taste and warmth. Each participant presents a different point of view and defends his position against the arguments of the others. No philosophical knowledge is presupposed.

Regulating emerging technologies involves balancing the mitigation of risks with the promotion of innovation; a balance frequently seen as a zero-sum "dilemma of control". Regulatory sandboxes offer a practical way to address this dilemma by enabling controlled, evidence-based testing of new technologies. In this article, we examine the regulatory sandbox framework introduced by the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). We argue that the AIA's multi-level governance structure represents a shift from traditional sandbox models by prioritizing regulatory learning over technological disruption and expanding public interest considerations to include strategically aligned commercial innovations. Afterwards, we identify governance challenges across three sandbox phases-pre-testing, testing, and post-testing-and propose structured solutions. Our analysis suggests that effective sandbox governance requires specific mechanisms: tailored entry criteria, precise pipeline placement guidance, and multi-agency coordination in pre-testing; experimental realism and continuous risk classification updates during testing; and clear graduation criteria with robust transition support in post-testing.

The origins of the word representation are traced from antiquity to modern times when representation is used in discussion of art objects, reports, maps and in a variety of other contexts. The idea of representing something is most at home in the domain of artefactual representations. These have the following feature, namely that the medium (viz. oil, pencil, marble etc) is clearly distinct from the message that is depicted or portrayed (and that does not have to exist). But what are taken as ‘mental representations’ (ideas, perceptions, images, etc) are all message and no medium. What justifies the extension of representation involving an artefactual medium, to that of mental images (the message) to a medium-less mental medium? The principal motivation for the internalization of representations were: (i) Galileo’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities; (ii) the inner/outer conception of the mind; (iii) the cognitive assumption (how does one know one perceives?). We show all of these are confused and so is the idea of the internalization of representations.

Kant defined representation as ‘inner determination of our mind in this or that relation of time’ and ‘perceptions’ are held to be conscious representations. Helmholtz held to this idea in the nineteenth century when he developed experimental psychology whereas the British clung to the ancient concepts of ideas and impressions. The expression ‘neural representation’ rapidly grew in use in the latter half of the twentieth century. What does it mean and how did this come about? Its origins can be traced to Charles Wheatstone, who at the beginning of the nineteenth century introduced the term representations while investigated the phenomenon of stereopsis. He stated that “the most complex figures of three dimensions may be accurately represented to the mind by representing their—two perspective projections to the two retinas”. It is taken for-granted that it is the mind that perceives objects in a human being’s field of vision. Helmholtz later says “our purpose is to identify the matter of sensation which occasions the formation of representations”—so adopting the Kantian view, which we have previously criticised.Fritz and Hitzig (On the electrical excitability of the cerebrum. In Some Papers on the Cerebral Cortex. Illinois: Charles C. Thomas, 1870) stimulated the cortex now known as ‘motor’ and obtained contractions of muscles on the opposite side to that of the stimulated cortex. Beevor and Hurley (A minute analysis (experimental) of the various movements produced by stimulating in the monkey different regions of the cortical centre for the upper limb, as defined by Professor Ferrier. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 153–167, 1887) showed an ‘extensive representation of movement’ in motor cortex. Subsequently Grunbaum and Sherrington (Observations on the Physiology of the Cerebral Cortex of Some of the Higher Apes. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 69, pp. 206–209, 1901–1902) showed ‘the arrangement of the representation of the various regions of the musculature follow the segmental sequelae of the cranio-spinal nerve to a remarkable extent. These various uses of representation amount to little more than ‘causal correlates’.The concept of ‘deep learning’ using neural networks with what they called the ‘back-propagation algorithm’, was due to Rumelhart and colleagues. It was first applied to the association parietal cortex by Zipser and Andersen who suggested that neurons functioned in this region of cortex that represented the transformation from retinal coordinates to those of eye-centered coordinates. The leader in ‘deep learning’ comments recently that “Deep-learning methods are representation-learning methods with multiple levels of representation, obtained by composing simple but non-linear modules that each transform the representation at one level (starting with the raw input) into a representation at a higher, slightly more abstract level”. We show that as far as humans are concerned this is conceptually flawed, both from the point of view of the Representational Fallacy enumerated above and from that of the Mereological Fallacy that we have spelt out in previous books.

Representation entered German psychology in the nineteenth century under the influence of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Representation entered Anglophone psychology from experimental psychology, straddling the boundaries between experimental psychology and neuroscience. Leading amongst these was William James, who defined introspection as looking into one’s own mind and reporting on what one found there. Herman Ebbinghaus set the stage for the study of representations in theories of memory at the end of the nineteenth century. His theory sets out how memory involves the encoding of that which is to be remembered in representations that are subsequently stored and retrieved, an idea we show to be erroneous. At the beginning of the twentieth century Jerome Brenner advanced the idea that thinking involves representations, however he confused concepts with words, thus vitiating this research program. By the late twentieth century it was taken for-granted that perception was a matter of mental representations. The idea is that perception involves receipt of information by sense organs which is then transformed into visual (auditory etc) experience by means of interpretation of sensations generating perceptions; these are in effect representations of the perceived environment. The leading exponents of this dogma were David Marr, with his ‘symbolic representations’ and ‘internal representations’ as well as J. Frisby with his ‘inner representations’. These are shown to be in error.

In this synoptic paper I should like to contribute to the formation and defence of a Secular conception of the Soul through elucidating the relation between the mind and the Soul, as well as the relations between Mind and body, and Soul and the flesh. Drawing on a Platonic conception of the Soul, but stripped of its metaphysical and ontological trappings, the paper argues that this conception fills a lacuna in the Aristotelean concept of the rational psuche, through its insight into human beings and their potentiality for evil-doing. This, then, is answering to a need of forming a practical and secularised conception of the Soul as part of human nature.

Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies consists of thirteen thematically linked essays on different aspects of the philosophy of Wittgenstein. After an introductory overview of Wittgenstein's philosophy the following essays fall into two classes. Some investigate connections between the philosophy of Wittgenstein and other philosophers or philosophical trends. Others enter into some of the controversies that, over the last two decades, have raged over the interpretation of one aspect or another of Wittgenstein's writings. These far-ranging essays, several of them previously unpublished or difficult to find, shed much light upon different aspects of Wittgenstein's thought, and upon the controversies which it has stimulated.

In this book, the author presents a series of essays that demonstrate the power and versatility of connective, contrastive, and contextual analysis, a novel and original approach to philosophical inquiry. Drawing on themes from his acclaimed tetralogy on human nature, the author shows how to solve, resolve, and dissolve philosophical problems by connecting, contrasting, and contextualizing different concepts, perspectives, and arguments. The book covers a wide range of topics, from the nature of consciousness and experience, to the place of value in a world of facts, to the problem of evil and the death of the soul. The book also includes a new essay on dreaming, as well as a comprehensive overview of the methodology of connective, contrastive, and contextual analysis. The book is written in an accessible and engaging style, with minimal technical jargon and no formal symbolism. It is suitable for anyone who is interested in philosophy and wants to learn how to think more clearly, creatively, and critically about philosophical problems.

Since the first publication of Insight and Illusion in l972, a wealth of Wittgenstein's writings has become accessible. Accordingly, in this edition Professor Hacker has rewritten six of his eleven original chapters and revised the others to incorporate the new abundant material.Insight and Illusion now fully clarifies the historical backgrounds of Wittgenstein's highly differing masterpices, the Tractatus and the Investigations, and traces the evolution of Wittgenstein's thought. Hacker explains all of Wittgenstein's writings in detail, focusing on his critique of metaphysics, his famous "private language argument," and his account of self consciousness.