Han Li

Humanoid Buddhist robots are often discussed as novelties, as signs of a supposedly distinctive East Asian comfort with technology, or as prompts for metaphysical questions about whether a machine can become religious. This article argues that such framings miss the institutional and ritual problem that makes these cases sociologically significant. The more productive question is not whether robots can become monks, bodhisattvas, or ritual specialists in any ontological sense, but why religious institutions repeatedly place them in reception, explanation, sermon performance, guided meditation, and other carefully delimited forms of public pedagogy while stopping short of fully replacing human clerics. Building on scholarship on digital religion, mediation, ritualization, and bounded religious automation, the article develops the concept of bounded ritual automation. This concept highlights the selective delegation of visible, repetitive, and affective religious labor to machines together with the retention of high-risk forms of ritual authority by human actors. Through a comparative analysis of Kodaiji Temple’s android Kannon Mindar in Kyoto, Longquan Monastery’s robot monk Xian’er in China, and the use of Pepper in Japanese funerary settings, the article shows that East Asian Buddhist robotics does not represent frictionless technological substitution. Rather, it reveals calibrated strategies of institutional adaptation under conditions of demographic aging, temple decline, platformization, and state regulation. “Electronic Buddhas” are therefore best understood not as curiosities, but as diagnostic sites where authority, presence, labor, and legitimacy are renegotiated in contemporary East Asian religion.

Responsible AI in Business reframes the ethics of generative AI as a problem of organizational design and governance engineering. Rather than treating "trustworthy AI" as a set of abstract principles, the book argues that responsibility is enacted through standards, controls, documentation, evaluation, procurement, and assurance—mechanisms that decide what counts as evidence, whose concerns are actionable, and which trade-offs organizations accept. It develops an ethical and epistemic framework for enterprise GenAI, including inductive bias as corporate architecture, truth and justification in AI-mediated decision-making, governance of data sources (privacy, copyright, retrieval), fairness and value trade-offs, and transparency and provenance for synthetic content. The book concludes with a practical operating model for institutionalizing Responsible GenAI, integrating emerging regulatory expectations and management-system approaches into audit-ready, capability-based governance.

According to the Self-Indication Assumption (SIA), learning that you are an observer should make you more confident in hypotheses that posit more observers. SIA suggests a straightforward argument for multiverse hypotheses. The argument is of distinctive interest because it supports multiverse hypotheses using a mundane observation, not fine-tuning, quantum mechanics, or modal metaphysics. However, SIA is controversial: whereas many worry that SIA yields overly strong armchair verdicts about matters that call for empirical investigation, others are drawn to SIA as an antidote to the doomsday argument. This chapter contests the standard story about SIA’s motivations and problems and offers an alternative approach to SIA: we argue that SIA can be understood as a form of induction, that we should compromise between different versions of SIA, and that this approach offers solutions to problems for SIA and an appropriately modest version of the SIA argument for multiverse hypotheses.

Large language models (LLMs) now generate fluent, assertion-shaped text that circulates through scientific communication, public discourse, and institutional decision-making. This development pressures a familiar philosophical question: if LLMs do not literally believe what they output, can their outputs nevertheless be true in the sense targeted by classical theories of truth? This paper argues that they can. We model LLMs as belief-less asserters: systems that produce assertionshaped, truth-evaluable contents while lacking the psychological and normative profile of genuine asserters. We separate semantic questions about truth from normative questions about assertion, and we use three truth-theoretic lenses with distinct roles: deflationism to show that truth does not conceptually depend on belief, correspondence to address aboutness, reference, and derived intentionality in socio-technical settings, and Davidsonian truth-theoretic semantics to explain how interpretation and compositional meaning apply to sentence-incontext outputs without treating the producer as a believing agent. We then integrate leading objections as constraints on warranted reliance rather than on truth itself. The upshot is a sharpened distinction between truth and truthfulness: LLM outputs can be true even when epistemic accountability must be reassigned to surrounding human and institutional actors.

Aphantasia, the inability to generate voluntary visual images, affects an estimated 3–4% of the population and provides a valuable model for examining how the brain supports cognition without imagery. Functional MRI studies have reported diminished coordination between visual and higher-order association areas involved in imagery control. However, the temporal characteristics of these neural differences remain unclear, with electroencephalographic (EEG) evidence limited to single-case studies. Here we present the first group-level EEG investigation of aphantasia, comparing 62 individuals with the condition to 59 controls during rest and during tasks probing attention and working memory. Participants with aphantasia had smaller P300 amplitudes, an EEG index of attentional allocation and the updating of task-relevant information. Given the absence of behavioural differences between groups, this attenuation may reflect reduced engagement of imagery-related processes during attentional updating rather than diminished cognitive function. Under high working-memory load, individuals with aphantasia showed lower delta power—activity linked to regulating sensory input and maintaining internal representations. Delta power also scaled with imagery vividness, potentially indicating greater engagement of these processes in individuals with stronger imagery. This pattern suggests that aphantasics may rely more on non-visual strategies for information maintenance, thereby reducing sensory interference and demands on inhibitory control. Together, these results provide the first EEG evidence that aphantasia entails distinct but effective neural dynamics that support cognition without visual imagery.

In presence of predator population, the prey population may significantly change their behavior. Fear for predator population enhances the survival probability of prey population, and it can greatly reduce the reproduction of prey population. In this study, we propose a predator-prey fishery model introducing the cost of fear into prey reproduction with Holling type-II functional response and prey-dependent harvesting and investigate the global dynamics of the proposed model. For the system without harvest, it is shown that the level of fear may alter the stability of the positive equilibrium, and an expression of fear critical level is characterized. For the harvest system, the existence of the semitrivial order-1 periodic solution and positive order- q periodic solution is discussed by the construction of a Poincaré map on the phase set, and the threshold conditions are given, which can not only transform state-dependent harvesting into a cycle one but also provide a possibility to determine the harvest frequency. In addition, to ensure a certain robustness of the adopted harvest policy, the threshold condition for the stability of the order- q periodic solution is given. Meanwhile, to achieve a good economic profit, an optimization problem is formulated and the optimum harvest level is obtained. Mathematical findings have been validated in numerical simulation by MATLAB. Different effects of different harvest levels and different fear levels have been demonstrated by depicting figures in numerical simulation using MATLAB.

Knowledge of three-dimensional structures of each individual particles of asymmetric and flexible proteins is essential in understanding those proteins' functions; but their structures are difficult to determine. Electron tomography provides a tool for imaging a single and unique biological object from a series of tilted angles, but it is challenging to image a single protein for three-dimensional reconstruction due to the imperfect mechanical control capability of the specimen goniometer under both a medium to high magnification and an optimized beam coherence condition. Here, we report a fully mechanical control method for automating ET data acquisition without using beam tilt/shift processes. This method could reduce the accumulation of beam tilt/shift that used to compensate the error from the mechanical control, but downgraded the beam coherence. Our method was developed by minimizing the error of the target object center during the tilting process through a closed-loop proportional-integral control algorithm. The validations by both negative staining and cryo-electron microscopy suggest that this method has a comparable capability to other ET methods in tracking target proteins while maintaining optimized beam coherence conditions for imaging.

We happen to live in a world in which people stand in long chains of care: some people care about other people, who care about still other people, and so on. We explore an argument according to which chains of care expand the circle of prudential concern for carers. The argument’s upshot is that many individuals have a circle of prudential concern that encompasses the welfare of many people, including distant strangers. This result has a range of surprising implications about the scope of prudential concern and our ability to know and control the determinants of our welfare. Natural extensions of the argument suggest that our welfare is—to a surprising degree—dependent on the welfare of distant strangers. We consider several proposals for escaping this outcome. It turns out that they are either costly or that they do not provide an escape. We thus provisionally accept that, courtesy of care chains, our significant prudential interests include the welfare of individuals we do not care about or even know.

The multiverse theodicy proposes to reconcile the existence of God and evil by supposing that God created all and only the creation-worthy universes and that some universes like ours are, despite their evils, creation-worthy. Drawing on work in population ethics, this paper develops a novel challenge to the multiverse theodicy. Roughly, the challenge contends that the axiological underpinnings of the multiverse theodicy harbor a ‘mere addition paradox’: the assumption that creating creation-worthy universes would always make the world better turns out to have morally repugnant consequences akin to those of the assumption that adding worthwhile lives to a population would always make the overall welfare of the population better. Further, the challenge leverages this difficulty into an argument against God’s having created all and only the creation-worthy universes, and hence against the multiverse theodicy. Responses to this challenge are considered but found wanting, largely because of commitments of the multiverse theodicy that have no analogs in population ethics.

Panpsychism claims that the vast majority of conscious subjects in our world are inanimate and physical. Ensemble explanations account for striking phenomena by placing them within an ensemble of outcomes, most of which are not striking. This paper develops an explanatory problem for panpsychism: panpsychism renders two appealing ensemble explanations unsatisfactory. Specifically, we argue that panpsychism renders unsatisfactory the multiverse explanation of why a universe supports life and the many-planets explanation of why a planet supports life.

Morality is intrapersonally permissive: cases abound in which an agent has more than one morally permitted option. In contrast, there is a dearth of cases in which an agent has more than one epistemically permitted response to her evidence. Given the structural parallels between morality and epistemology, why do sources of moral permissiveness fail to have parallel permissive effects in the epistemic domain? This asymmetry between morality and epistemology cries out for explanation. The paper's task is to offer an answer to that call. We explain the asymmetry by tracing moral permissiveness to two factors to which rationality is morally but not epistemically sensitive.

Rationality is intrapersonally permissive just in case there are multiple doxastic states that one agent may be rational in holding at a given time, given some body of evidence. One way for intrapersonal permissivism to be true is if there are epistemic supererogatory beliefs—beliefs that go beyond the call of epistemic duty. Despite this, there has been almost no discussion of epistemic supererogation in the permissivism literature. This paper shows that this is a mistake. It does this by arguing that the most popular ways of responding to one of the major obstacles to any intrapersonally permissive all fall prey to the same problem. This problem is most naturally solved by positing a category of epistemically supererogatory belief. So intrapersonal epistemic permissivists should embrace epistemic supererogation.

Roger White (2015) sketches an ingenious new solution to the problem of induction. He argues from the principle of indifference for the conclusion that the world is more likely to be induction- friendly than induction-unfriendly. But there is reason to be skeptical about the proposed indifference-based vindication of induction. It can be shown that, in the crucial test cases White concentrates on, the assumption of indifference renders induction no more accurate than random guessing. After discussing this result, the paper explains why the indifference-based argument seemed so compelling, despite ultimately being unsound.

Conciliationism faces a challenge that has not been satisfactorily addressed. There are clear cases of epistemically significant merely possible disagreement, but there are also clear cases where merely possible disagreement is epistemically irrelevant. Conciliationists have not yet accounted for this asymmetry. In this paper, we propose that the asymmetry can be explained by positing a selection constraint on all cases of peer disagreement—whether actual or merely possible. If a peer’s opinion was not selected in accordance with the proposed constraint, then it lacks epistemic significance. This allows us to distinguish the epistemically significant cases of merely possible disagreement from the insignificant ones.

The uniqueness thesis states that for any body of evidence and any proposition, there is at most one rational doxastic attitude that an epistemic agent can take toward that proposition. Permissivism is the denial of uniqueness. Perhaps the most popular form of permissivism is what I call the Epistemic Standard View, since it relies on the concept of epistemic standards. Roughly speaking, epistemic standards encode particular ways of responding to any possible body of evidence. Since different epistemic standards may rationalize different doxastic states on the same body of evidence, this view gives us a form of permissivism if different agents can have different epistemic standards. Defenders of the ESV, however, have not paid sufficient attention to what it means to have a particular epistemic standard. I argue that any theory of epistemic standard possession must satisfy two criteria to adequately address the broader needs of the ESV. The first criterion is the normative criterion: a theory of standard-possession should explain why agents are rationally required to form beliefs in accordance with their own epistemic standard, rather than any other standard. The second criterion is the applicability criterion: a theory of standard-possession should rule that agents have the epistemic standards we intuitively think they have. I then argue that no extant theories of standard-possession can satisfy both these criteria. I conclude by diagnosing why these criteria are so hard to jointly satisfy. Defenders of the ESV are thus left with a serious obstacle to forming a complete and plausible version of their view.

Though there is a wide and varied literature on ethical supererogation, there has been almost nothing written about its epistemic counterpart, despite an intuitive analogy between the two fields. This paper seeks to change this state of affairs. I will begin by showing that there are examples which intuitively feature epistemically supererogatory doxastic states. Next, I will present a positive theory of epistemic supererogation that can vindicate our intuitions in these examples, in an explanation that parallels a popular theory of ethical supererogation. Roughly, I will argue that a specific type of epistemic virtue—the ability to creatively think up plausible hypotheses given a body of evidence—is not required of epistemic agents. Thus, certain exercises of this virtue can result in supererogatory doxastic states. In presenting this theory, I will also show how thinking about epistemic supererogation can provide us a new way forward in the debate about the uniqueness thesis for epistemic rationality.