Israel Huerta Castillo

This paper examines whether the euro-area macro regime is associated with empirically observable distributional pressures operating through (i) inflation composition and (ii) balance-sheet revaluation. Using harmonised consumer price statistics from the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) by COICOP and Eurosystem Distributional Wealth Accounts (DWA), we construct two tractable distributional objects: a necessities inflation wedge, capturing how far essentials-driven inflation departs from headline inflation, and wealth polarization indicators based on macro-consistent net-wealth aggregates by distributional group. The analysis is implemented on a quarterly panel (2017Q3–2025Q2) and combines windowed difference-in-differences with country and time fixed effects, an event-study centred on the 2021 inflation break, and an HICP contribution decomposition that isolates necessity-loading. Results show that the post-2021 inflation surge was systematically necessities-loaded: the necessities wedge is positive and economically meaningful across a large share of country–quarter observations, averaging on the order of 3–3.5 percentage points in 2021–2023, and the event-study indicates a sharp increase after the break (about 1.6 percentage points on impact, rising to roughly 2.8 percentage points after one year). Consistent with this, the necessities contribution share rises by about 5 percentage points in the post-2021 window in euro-area countries relative to non-euro comparators. Wealth polarization measures move in the direction predicted by valuation-based transmission, but are estimated with lower precision than inflation-composition effects. Overall, the findings support a regime-structured view in which distribution is part of macro transmission: essentials-driven inflation pressures basic consumption security, while balance-sheet dynamics condition resilience and the incidence of subsequent adjustment.

This article theorizes a late-capitalist conjuncture in which legitimacy is increasingly manufactured at the intersection of two regimes that are often analyzed separately: an aesthetic regime that binds subjects through seduction and livable selfhood, and an audit regime that binds them through evaluation, commensuration, and the procedural authority of numbers. Reworking Walter Benjamin’s “capitalism as religion” as an operator rather than a master key, the paper argues that contemporary capitalism can be specified as an aesthetic religion in a strict sociological sense: a cultic grammar whose rituals of verification continuously authorize what counts as credible, comparable, and real for consequential purposes. The central mechanism is audit power as veridictive semiotic governance: commensuration stabilizes hierarchies, hierarchies are operationalized as incentives and sanctions, and subjects are returned to themselves via continuous feedback loops. Methodologically, the argument is interpretive and theory-building but evidence-facing: it anchors the model in documentary cultural analysis of audit artifacts (rankings, scoring schemas, dashboards, accreditation protocols) and uses the governance of mental health and neurodiversity as a limit case that renders the “turning of signs into social being” institutionally observable. The payoff is diagnostic: specifying boundary conditions under which measurement coordinates versus consecrates.

Everyday social life increasingly takes the form of a control panel: bodies, relationships, institutions, and reputations are translated into indicator arrays that offer the reassurance of clarity even as they quietly recode what clarity is taken to be. This paper theorizes that shift as metric sovereignty: the relocation of authority from situated judgment to quantified evaluative devices that set partitions of reality, impose threshold verdicts, and generate feedback loops that reorganize conduct around what is measurable rather than what is meaningful. The argument synthesizes and sharpens established insights in the sociology of quantification, valuation, and audit by specifying a portable grammar of rule composed of five mechanisms—commensuration, thresholding, feedback, reputation, and chronometry—and by showing how these mechanisms assemble into stable “stacks” that intensify under performance pressures. Through comparative qualitative mechanism tracing across three anchor arenas—education, criminal legal governance, and platform-mediated work and sociality—the paper demonstrates how metric sovereignty becomes consequential for life chances, institutional legitimacy, and subject formation. The analytical payoff is diagnostic rather than moralizing: the central problem is not measurement per se, but the conditions under which measurement becomes sovereign, displacing judgment and converting “quality” into an administrative residue of what escapes commensuration.

Contemporary science increasingly depends on cross-disciplinary integration, yet dominant accounts of scientific rationality still tacitly privilege a law-centred template that renders conjectural, trace-sensitive, and integrative reasoning epistemically secondary. This article reconstructs interdisciplinary discovery as an indiciary–abductive process in which salient traces and anomalies function as evidential prompts, abduction generates candidate hypotheses, and pragmatist constraints filter, stabilize, and revise cross-domain linkages through their downstream consequences for prediction, explanation, measurement, and intervention. Two concepts structure the model. Linking grounds are explicit warrants that license the transfer or coordination of models, propositions, or explanatory schemas across disciplinary boundaries and that can be articulated, contested, and strengthened. Theory constellations are structured sets of mutually constraining linking grounds whose stability is achieved without reduction to a single theory, via the emergence of shared or jointly satisfiable lawlike constraints. The paper offers criteria to distinguish legitimate linking from analogy-driven “cheap bridges”, and it proposes a workflow for constellation engineering with checkpoints for semantic drift, evidential heterogeneity, and validation across epistemic styles. Finally, it specifies an operational role for philosophical expertise as interfield work on inferential warrants and conceptual interfaces. The result is a general framework for responsible holism in discovery under heterogeneous evidence.

Under transmodern conditions—marked by convergent life sciences and computational paradigms, ubiquitous connectivity, and accelerating AI–IoT infrastructures—the classical Enlightenment architecture of knowledge (institution-centred authority, relatively stable publics, and slower epistemic rhythms) is displaced by infrastructure-mediated conditions of perception, production, and justification. The paper develops a quadrangular conceptual framework—poiesis–technē / aisthēsis–epistēmē—to show how contemporary digital systems externalize and govern aisthēsis (through distributed sensing and datafication), accelerate poiesis (through generative synthesis and automation), and reconfigure epistēmē by reshaping practical norms of evidence, credibility, and closure. Against both technoutopian and fatalistic readings, the argument treats the emancipatory content of Digital Enlightenment as conditional: it depends on whether DIY epistemologies and autodidactic learning ecologies become civic infrastructures of participation, contestability, and repair, rather than being absorbed into platform spectacle or epistemic dependency. The normative core is an infrastructural expansion of epistemic justice, where harms and asymmetries increasingly track unequal access to interpretability, auditing, and intervention rights in AI–IoT environments. The conclusion articulates a transmodern pedagogical program in which digital and AI literacy function as justice-relevant capabilities for autonomy and collective empowerment under hybrid agency.

Ageing research has achieved major advances by cataloguing recurrent mechanistic motifs—most prominently in the hallmarks framework—yet it still lacks a sufficiently explicit account of what deteriorates at the level of organism–environment engagement as ageing progresses. This article proposes contextual semiodynamics as a mid-level theoretical object that complements mechanistic pluralism by redescribing ageing as a time-dependent decline in biological sense-making competence, formalized as a minimal profile σ(t)=⟨D(t),T(t),R(t),C(t)⟩ spanning discrimination, transduction, adaptive response, and organisational coherence. The framework derives a constrained set of dynamical expectations—concerning resilience and recovery kinetics, modular organisation and compensatory coupling, multiscale physiological complexity, and vulnerability to state transitions—thereby reorganizing hallmarks as contributors to competence failure modes rather than as a substitute catalogue. Evo-devo and life-history theory are introduced as principled constraints on trajectory shape and cross-taxon variation, clarifying why similar mechanistic motifs can yield divergent ageing patterns across organisms and environments. Finally, the article specifies a disciplined, conditional role for a quantum-compatible modelling layer: not as a hypothesis about quantum-biological mechanisms, but as a formal resource for cases where context dependence yields empirically robust incompatibilities between partitions, order effects, or failures of a single classical joint-probability representation. Contextual semiodynamics thus offers a parsimonious bridge between mechanistic inventories and dynamical competence trajectories, with a clear agenda for stressor-based, multiscale, and comparative testing.

This paper argues for bio–artificial continuity: under a pragmatist–enactive view of cognition, there is no principled ontological discontinuity between biological and artefactual agency, provided that the artefact realises a minimal semiotic organisation that is (i) nontrivially context-sensitive and (ii) normatively constrained by its own persistence conditions. To avoid both anthropomorphic projection and deflationary mechanism, the paper introduces a Semiotic Agency Thesis (SAT) and renders it operational through four attribution criteria (C1–C4): normative closure, context-sensitive interpretive coupling, intervention sensitivity, and endogenous context reconfiguration. These criteria are linked to measurement via two parameters—relational semiotic density (ρ) and contextual reconfiguration rate (κ)—together with an explicit intervention operator do(I) drawn from interventionist causal modelling. On this basis, biomimesis is reconceived as semiotic training: not the copying of biological form, but the engineering of learning trajectories that can yield stable, do(I)-sensitive increases in ρ and, in stronger cases, sustained acceleration of κ through reconfiguration of contextual boundaries. The paper further introduces interpretive phase transition (IPT) as an operational notion for regime changes in semiotic organisation and derives three discriminant prediction families (P1–P3) that separate scaling-driven compe-tence from domain-bounded semiotic surrogacy and IPT-like regimes.

AI-enabled medicine and digital health increasingly instantiate an implicit philosophical anthropology: the person is treated as an improvable system whose deviations from an ideal baseline can be detected, predicted, and corrected through continuous data capture and algorithmic mediation. In this framing, health is reinterpreted as optimisation and longevity becomes a technical horizon of open-ended extension. This article argues that the decisive conflict is not between being for or against enhancement, but between two rival conceptions of enhancement grounded in divergent valuations of embodiment and divergent political grammars of governance. Building on recent clarifications that separate human enhancement from transhumanism, the paper develops a prohumanist philosophical anthropology oriented to dignified longevity: bounded improvement accountable to dignity, vulnerability, justice, and meaning, rather than perfection as an end-state. The transmodern condition—platformised infrastructures, behavioural nudging, and asymmetries of expertise—intensifies the risk that optimisation becomes the default norm in health governance. Against this backdrop, the article proposes four prohumanist constraints for AI-mediated health systems: proportionality, contestability, non-totalisation, and epistemic autonomy. These constraints are translated into design and regulatory criteria for high-stakes health settings, yielding a set of evaluative questions intended to discipline enhancement claims and to protect agency and dignity under conditions of pervasive digital mediation.

Can an artefactual system preserve the operative semantics of a person without claiming to be that person? This paper presents an audit protocol for semantic footprints: domain-bounded, intervention-grounded traces of stable sign–object–interpretant commitments in an artefactual system. The protocol operationalises semantic surrogacy as a falsifiable competence claim, rather than a metaphysical identity thesis, and provides a discipline for avoiding common partition artefacts (context leakage, cue-based overfitting, and stylometric ‘ghost’ persistence). Building on a companion framework that defines a Semiotic Adequacy Test (SAT) for minimal agency in bio–artefactual continuity, we treat SAT’s criteria C1–C4 as inherited infrastructure and contribute four audit-facing components: (i) a formal negative criterion (Π*) for non-generating partitions, (ii) an admissibility firewall for estimators of semiotic density ρ and context plasticity κ, (iii) a minimal intervention suite do(I) suitable for replication, and (iv) a catalogue of failure modes with diagnostics suitable for pre-registration and third‑party review. The result is a practical, intervention-auditable methodology for evaluating semantic surrogacy claims in artefactual systems without collapsing them into avatars/proxies, stylometry, or human-likeness scores.

Population ageing is increasingly framed as a fiscal and administrative burden, yet the UN Decade of Healthy Ageing sets a different normative horizon: healthy ageing aligned with the final decade of the Sustainable Development Goals. This article offers a conceptual and bioethical analysis of why “active ageing” can become rhetorically attractive while remaining materially unattainable for many older persons. It distinguishes two governance regimes: passive-assisted ageing, organised around downstream risk containment, scarcity triage, and administrative burden; and active ageing reconstructed as dignified longevity, assessed by functional ability and its social preconditions. The analysis introduces the “malaise state” to name structural welfare drift under demographic pressure and political–economic incentives, and develops the epistemic–existential paradox: societies can be knowledge-rich yet equity-poor because scientific and digital proliferation does not translate into health without upstream action on social and commercial determinants. Extending the argument globally, the paper contrasts longevity with inequality in high-income settings and premature mortality in low-income contexts, arguing that the Decade must be treated as a justice project rather than a behavioural exhortation. It concludes with a Decade-alignment checklist and policy-relevant ethical commitments.

Ageing research has achieved powerful syntheses by cataloguing mechanistic “causal reservoirs” (e.g., hallmark-style frameworks) and by modelling late-life vulnerability as changes in dynamical resilience and multiscale variability. Yet these approaches often leave underspecified what, functionally, deteriorates when an organism becomes less able to sustain viable engagement with its internal and external conditions. This article proposes semiodynamics as a theoretical object for ageing: the time-dependent decline of biological sense-making competence. Sense-making is analysed into a minimal four-function scaffold: discrimination (relevant difference-making under noise), transduction (faithful propagation through coherent pathways), adaptive response (flexible viability-preserving action), and organizational coherence (cross-scale integration under perturbation). A deliberately thin formalisation represents competence as a time-dependent profile, enabling principled connections to evo-devo commitments about developmental timing, canalisation and its decay, and life-history variation. The framework yields a constrained set of empirically risky consequences: structured shifts in effective noise, recovery kinetics, modular reconfiguration, and cross-scale coupling. An empirical programme is outlined that prioritises perturbation–response designs and multiscale time-series/network measures to test (and potentially falsify) the competence-decline hypothesis across taxa, domains, and interventions.

This theory note introduces semiodynamics, a theoretical framework for understanding ageing as the progressive loss of biosemiotic plasticity. Semiodynamics studies the temporal evolution of signal–response relations by analysing four core functions of biological semiosis: discrimination, transduction, adaptive response, and organisational coherence. Drawing on biosemiotics, systems biology, basal cognition, and complexity theory, the article argues that ageing can be conceptualised as a decline in interpretive competence, wherein organisms increasingly fail to differentiate signals, propagate them coherently, respond adaptively, and maintain systemic integration. By reframing biomarkers and physiological changes as indicators of semiodynamic degradation rather than isolated hallmarks, this framework provides a unified account of ageing grounded in meaningful interaction between organisms and environments. Semiodynamics thus offers a novel conceptual lens for gerontology and positions ageing as a fundamentally interpretive phenomenon.

This article offers a philosophical micro-history of the genesis of quantum theory (1900–1930) through what is termed an indiciary–abductive paradigm. Against standard narratives centred on axioms, formalism or “revolutions,” the paper reconstructs early quantum episodes as sequences of clue-driven inferences, where small phenomenological mismatches and structural regularities acquire normative weight disproportionate to their empirical modesty. Drawing on Ginzburg’s indiciary paradigm, Peircean abduction and recent work on epistemic aesthetics, the article develops a formal decision rule in which candidate hypotheses are evaluated by a composite functional of indicial weight, aesthetic value (parsimony, symmetry, coherence of limits, unification), programme fecundity and correspondence constraints. This framework is then applied micro-historically to canonical cases in the quantum germ—Planck, Einstein, Bohr, de Broglie, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Pauli—each analysed as a transition from a specific clue set and background model to an abductively introduced hypothesis that opens a research programme. The reconstruction shows that quantum theory emerged not from an abrupt repudiation of classical rationality but from a disciplined practice of reading traces, in which aisthesis (trained sensitivity to experimental and conceptual detail) and epistēmē (formal, aesthetic and statistical criteria of theory choice) are tightly coupled. The conclusion generalises this indicial logic as a model of scientific discovery under weak, heterogeneous evidence, with implications for model selection, the role of aesthetic criteria in physics, and the design of comparative micro-histories of other scientific “revolutions.”

This article develops a quantum-compatible formalisation of minimal semiosis as the foundational organisational condition for a theory of consciousness grounded in triadic normativity and should be read as a direct extension of the Semiotic Theory of Consciousness previously formulated. In that earlier framework, a system counts as a minimal interpreter just in case it satisfies operational criteria C1–C4 (plurality and conflict of signals, manipulable interpretant, explicit normativity and sensori-motor closure), supports a stream of Elementary Semiotic Events (ESEs) with rate p, and realises a basal consciousness magnitude Cb = k ⋅ p for some system-specific scaling parameter k. Conscious experience is thereby understood as the phenomenological halo coextensive with normatively constrained interpretive dynamics in an Umwelt-indexed state space. The present contribution supplies a quantum-compatible logical–mathematical envelope for this semiotic core. It models the space of interpretive states as a structured domain on which families of contextual partitions induce non-Boolean event algebras and, in appropriate cases, non-commutative operator structures. Instead of postulating genuine quantum microphysics, the proposal adopts quantum probability and Hilbert-space techniques purely as a modelling grammar for contextuality, order sensitivity, non-commutativity and systematic violations of classical total probability—features independently observed in biological and cognitive systems. Drawing on Atmanspacher’s and beim Graben’s theory of contextual emergence, together with quantum-like models of cognition, the article shows how non-generating partitions of the semiotic state space give rise to complementary macro-descriptions of meaning, whereas generating partitions recover a classical, Kolmogorov-like regime. Within this architecture, the central operator of the semiotic theory—the intervention do(I)—is rendered as a contextual state-selection map acting on probability measures (or state vectors) over interpretive configurations, thus linking causal intervention with the algebraic structure of contextuality. The resulting hybrid framework assigns semiosis the role of ontology and quantum-compatible probability the role of mathematics, enhancing explanatory and predictive power without additional metaphysical commitments about quantum substrates. The article concludes by specifying empirical conditions—concerning the identification of ESEs, estimation of p and k, and experimental implementations of do(I) in organisms and robots—under which such quantum-compatible models can advance the study of minimal consciousness in both biological and artificial systems.

This article proposes a philosophical reformulation of ageing in the light of do-it-yourself biology (DIY biology) and citizen science. Rather than treating ageing solely as physiological decline or a problem of health-care management, it is described as a biosemiotic and biopsychosocial process: a continuous interpretation of bodily, environmental, and cultural signs, mediated by technologies, institutions, and communities. Drawing on contemporary work in biosemiotics, the biopsychosocial model of health, and the disease–illness–sickness triad, the article argues that ageing cannot be adequately understood or governed without the active participation of citizens as co-interpreters and co-producers of the knowledge that concerns them. Within this framework, DIY biology and community laboratories are presented as privileged arenas of epistemic and ethical experimentation, where relations between citizenship and biomedicine are reconfigured. The discussion contrasts the imaginary of transhumanist perfection—which seeks to suppress ageing as a design flaw—with a prohumanist account of improvement grounded in measure, shared vulnerability, and the notion of dignified longevity. On this basis, the concept of ‘DIY active ageing’ is introduced as a programme of citizen gerontology in which body, knowledge, and community form feedback loops of semiotic and practical transformation, illustrated through the heuristic figure of an ideal community laboratory, DIY-Aging Lab®.

The main goal that motivates the writing of this paper lies in the defence of a thesis: some living organisms of the plant kingdom would manifest in their life form a hypothetical modality of conscious agency. For this purpose, a preliminary outline of a semiotic theory of basal consciousness is offered, that works in the present research as an attempt at the onto-epistemological foundation on which the argumentative product is erected as a resource for the defence of the thesis advocated. First of all, the unfolding of this argumentation is then set out by means of an interdisciplinary exposition of those theoretical corpus that have been selected to provide sense and referential meaning to a potential “Theory of Plant Consciousness”. It manifests, therefore, the logically relational conjugation of conceptual systems belonging to a finite series of theoretical-experimental research spaces of recent emergence in the Western scientific community, such as embodied cognition (with its proposal of basal cognition), "plant neurobiology" and, finally, biosemiotics (with the extension of the semiotic paradigm to the plant kingdom, giving rise to phytosemiotics). Finally, it concludes with a series of considerations on the research carried out.

This text exposes, from a general historical perspective, the emergence and recent development, within the western scientific community, of the so-called “Quantum Theories of Consciousness” (QTC). A brief explanation is carried out attending, in chronological order of first publication, to the main QTC proposals that address the so-called “hard problem of consciousness”, starting from postulates of philosophy and quantum physics, theoretical springs that maintain an open and transversal dialogue with other disciplines such as neuroscience, chemistry, biology, psychology or cognitive sciences.

This essay registers an intellectual effort to displace the axis of the so-called “hard problem of consciousness” toward the onto-epistemological threshold at which meaningfulness is instituted as a factum of selective operativity. Drawing upon the intellectual lineage of double-aspect monism and Peircean synechism, it advances the central thesis that wherever triadic mediations with normative valence—sign, object, interpretant—are experientially verified, there emerges a minimal phenomenological halo, perceptible and coextensive with minimal semiosis. Upon the Umwelt minimum—namely, a plurality of signals (p, q), a common effector (a), and a manipulable interpretant (I)—logically operative definitions (D1–D4) and thresholds of information, latency, and robustness are fixed, thereby enabling the demarcation and quantification of Elementary Semiotic Events (ESE) and certifying triadicity via do(I) intervention. The inferential architecture is formulated as a semiotic-abductive logic of intervention. In the non-saturated regime the Psychophysical Similarity Theorem is stated, Cb = κ p —with Cb the basal phenomenological magnitude and p the ESE rate—while beyond that margin curvature phenomena arise by saturation and interaction. The empirical program (Axes A–B–C) spans identification/counting, causal assignment by intervention, and hierarchical estimation of κ, deployed across bacterial, vegetal, and soft-robotic platforms while preserving inter-domain comparability. The theory is stratified (basal/intermediate/superior), local and non-monotonic (admitting curvatures and hierarchical Bayesian adjustment), and thereby circumvents both reductive physicalism and indiscriminate panpsychism.

This article analyzes BDSM as a consensual sexual practice situated at the intersection of Spanish criminal law and bioethics. Drawing on a theoretical framework centred on consent, autonomy, and human dignity, it examines the relevant statutory provisions (arts. 147–150 and 155 of the Código Penal [Spanish Criminal Code]), the leading case law (STS 1049/2002 of the Tribunal Supremo [Spanish Supreme Court]), and the constitutional limits deriving from public order under the Constitución Española [Spanish Constitution]. From a pragmatist consequentialist standpoint, the article proposes a set of minimal regulatory criteria—harm thresholds, verifiable and revocable consent, and evidentiary safeguards—designed to reconcile sexual freedom with the protection of bodily integrity, reduce legal uncertainty, and avoid incentives for clandestine practices.

This article advances three theoretical proposals that unsettle the traditional notions of representation in Western art and aesthetics, engaging the work of Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Aby Warburg, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Luis Puelles. Each proposal foregrounds the need to reconceive artistic representation in terms of singularity, difference, immanent forces, psychism, and the spectator’s active co-participation. Taken together, they provide a deeper understanding of contemporary aesthetics and its resistance to homogenizing narratives.

This article examines whether chronic hunger meets agent-neutral criteria for treatment as a non-communicable pandemic in global health. It integrates Twaddle’s disease–illness–sickness triad with Engel’s biopsychosocial model and operationalizes “pandemic” using six criteria (transnational spread, high burden, socioeconomic disruption, international coordination, externalities, and stable governance/funding). An explicit bioethical anchor is incorporated: right to food, distributive justice, structural non-maleficence, solidarity, and intergenerational responsibility. Verification is based on recent institutional evidence and literature on population nutrition, social determinants, syndemics, and governance. Multilevel packages (community, national, global) with countercyclical financing and integrated surveillance are derived, and objections (dilution, medicalization, terminology, thresholds) are addressed. The proposal is linked to SDG-2 and the 2030 Agenda. It is concluded that the agent-neutral pandemic framework does not dilute the term but rather refines it for decision-making when the burden and disruption so require.