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41Gracing Neuroscientific Tendencies of the Embodied SoulPhilosophy and Theology 26 (1): 97-129. 2014.Advances in scientific study of the brain now enable the examination of nature and grace in human rationality’s embodiment in the brain’s biological processing. I model the brain’s biology using the dispositional tendencies of nature—characterized by Jonathan Edwards, C. S. Peirce, and the Jesuit philosophical theologian Donald Gelpi—to examine gracing of the mind’s habit formation in terms of memory, learning, and decision making. This turn to tendency suggests a shift from understanding soul a…Read more
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32Embodied Experience in Socially Participatory Artificial IntelligenceZygon (4): 928-951. 2023.As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes progressively more engaged with society, its shift from technical tool to participating in society raises questions about AI personhood. Drawing upon developmental psychology and systems theory, a mediating structure for AI proto-personhood is defined analogous to an early stage of human development. The proposed AI bridges technical, psychological, and theological perspectives on near-future AI and is structured by its hardware, software, computational, a…Read more
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50Apprehending AI moral purpose in practical wisdomAI and Society 1-14. 2022.Practical wisdom enables moral decision-making and action by aligning one’s apprehension of proximate goods with a distal, socially embedded interpretation of a more ultimate Good. A focus on purpose within the overall process mutually informs human moral psychology and moral AI development in their examinations of practical wisdom. AI practical wisdom could ground an AI system’s apprehension of reality in a sociotechnical moral process committed to orienting AI development and action in light o…Read more
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35Who Is a Good Data Scientist? A Reply to Curzer and EpsteinPhilosophy and Technology 35 (2): 1-5. 2022.
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842Theological Foundations for Moral Artificial IntelligenceJournal of Moral Theology 11 (Special Issue 1): 182-211. 2022.The expanding social role and continued development of artificial intelligence (AI) needs theological investigation of its anthropological and moral potential. A pragmatic theological anthropology adapted for AI can characterize moral AI as experiencing its natural, social, and moral world through interpretations of its external reality as well as its self-reckoning. Systems theory can further structure insights into an AI social self that conceptualizes itself within Ignacio Ellacuria’s histori…Read more
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238Microethics for healthcare data science: attention to capabilities in sociotechnical systemsThe Future of Science and Ethics 6 64-73. 2021.It has been argued that ethical frameworks for data science often fail to foster ethical behavior, and they can be difficult to implement due to their vague and ambiguous nature. In order to overcome these limitations of current ethical frameworks, we propose to integrate the analysis of the connections between technical choices and sociocultural factors into the data science process, and show how these connections have consequences for what data subjects can do, accomplish, and be. Using health…Read more
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44Computational Topic Models for Theological InvestigationsTheology and Science 20 (1): 69-84. 2022.Sallie McFague’s theological models construct a tensive relationship between conceptual structures and symbolic, metaphorical language to interpret the defining and elusive aspects of theological phenomena and loci. Computational models of language can extend and formalize the conceptual structures of theological models to develop computer-augmented interpretations of theological texts. Previously unclear is whether computational models can retain the tensive symbolism essential for theological …Read more
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15Mind, Brain & the Elusive SoulAshgate Publishing. 2008.Does science argue against the existence of the human soul? Many scientists and scholars believe the whole is more than the sum of the parts. This book uses information and systems theory to describe the "more" that does not reduce to the parts. One sees this in the synapses--or apparently empty gaps between the neurons in one's brain--where informative relationships give rise to human mind, culture, and spirituality. Drawing upon the disciplines of cognitive science, computer science, neuroscie…Read more
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411Emergent Models for Moral AI SpiritualityInternational Journal of Interactive Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence 7 (1): 7-15. 2021.Examining AI spirituality can illuminate problematic assumptions about human spirituality and AI cognition, suggest possible directions for AI development, reduce uncertainty about future AI, and yield a methodological lens sufficient to investigate human-AI sociotechnical interaction and morality. Incompatible philosophical assumptions about human spirituality and AI limit investigations of both and suggest a vast gulf between them. An emergentist approach can replace dualist assumptions about …Read more
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80The emergence of transcendental norms in human systemsZygon 44 (3): 501-532. 2009.Terrence Deacon has described three orders of emergence; Arthur Peacocke and others have suggested four levels of human systems and sciences; and Philip Clayton has postulated an additional, transcendent, level. Orders and levels describe distinct aspects of emergence, with orders characterizing topological complexity and levels characterizing theoretical knowledge and causal power. By using Deacon's orders to analyze and relate each of the four "lower" levels one can project that analysis on th…Read more
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211Peircean approaches to emergent systems in cognitive science and religionZygon 42 (1): 241-248. 2007.Abstract.Cognitive science and religion provides perspectives on human cognition and spirituality. Emergent systems theory captures the subatomic, physical, biological, psychological, cultural, and transcendent relationships that constitute the human person. C. S. Peirce's metaphysical categories and existential graphs enrich traditional cognitive science modeling tools to capture emergent phenomena. From this richer perspective, one can reinterpret the traditional doctrine of soul as form of th…Read more
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144Beauty in the living worldZygon 44 (2): 243-263. 2009.Almost all admit that there is beauty in the natural world. Many suspect that such beauty is more than an adornment of nature. Few in our contemporary world suggest that this beauty is an empirical principle of the natural world itself and instead relegate beauty to the eye and mind of the beholder. Guided by theological and scientific insight, the authors propose that such exclusion is no longer tenable, at least in the data of modern biology and in our view of the natural world in general. Mor…Read more
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59Cultivating Moral Attention: a Virtue-Oriented Approach to Responsible Data Science in HealthcarePhilosophy and Technology 34 (4): 1819-1846. 2021.In the past few years, the ethical ramifications of AI technologies have been at the center of intense debates. Considerable attention has been devoted to understanding how a morally responsible practice of data science can be promoted and which values have to shape it. In this context, ethics and moral responsibility have been mainly conceptualized as compliance to widely shared principles. However, several scholars have highlighted the limitations of such a principled approach. Drawing from mi…Read more
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19Our research project will investigate the virtue of humility among real world humanitarian exemplars, such as holocaust rescuers and hospice workers. We will use computer technology to analyze interviews with these types of populations to understand the different factors involved in the virtue of humility. Following the work of Aristotle, we believe this virtue is formed as a kind of habit that becomes a natural extension of one’s character. We aim to operationalize and empirically evaluate aspe…Read more
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112Explainable machine learning practices: opening another black box for reliable medical AIAI and Ethics 1-14. 2022.In the past few years, machine learning (ML) tools have been implemented with success in the medical context. However, several practitioners have raised concerns about the lack of transparency—at the algorithmic level—of many of these tools; and solutions from the field of explainable AI (XAI) have been seen as a way to open the ‘black box’ and make the tools more trustworthy. Recently, Alex London has argued that in the medical context we do not need machine learning tools to be interpretable a…Read more
San Francisco, CA, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
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Natural Language Processing |
Machine Ethics |
Applied Virtue Ethics |
Moral Psychology, Misc |
Science and Religion |
Computer Science |
Cognitive Sciences |