Miguel Garcia

Este artículo examina la filosofía de la biología de Leonardo Polo a través del principio vita in motu, quizá la tesis más fundamental de la biología filosófica de Aristóteles. La vida solo puede existir y mantenerse mediante procesos de cambio y transformación. Polo contrasta los procesos vitales con la kinēsis, o movimiento transitivo, y sugiere que los seres vivos se distinguen por su prāxis teleia: una actividad inmanente y regulada desde el interior. Al reanalizar las cuatro causas aristotélicas, Polo reinterpreta la psychē como una potencia formal que se manifiesta a través de procesos como el crecimiento, la diferenciación y la unidad reguladora –entre los cuales el código genético es ejemplo elocuente.

The aim of this study is to use a wearable system for monitoring spinal posture and mobility among nursing professionals in intensive care units (ICUs) and operating rooms (ORs). It is also aimed to identify the biomechanical demands in each environment and assess the potential of the wearable device to reduce the risk of musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). A longitudinal descriptive observational study was conducted. The wearable device tracked spinal mobility in the cervical, thoracic, and lumbar levels. Data were collected from 12 nursing students during their clinical rotations in ICU and OR services at the University Hospital of Salamanca. Spinal mobility data were captured in real-time, and pain levels were asked using the visual analog scale (VAS) before and after working shifts.

This paper reassesses Searle’s Chinese Room argument in light of Large Language Models (LLMs). While Searle criticized computational systems for being mere “syntax manipulators,” transformer models of the kind exemplified by LLMs complicate this characterization. Earlier computational systems relied on a more rigid logical foundation, based largely on pattern recognition and mechanical substitution. By tracking patterns of use, maintaining rich contextual dependencies, and exploiting implicit regularities in large datasets, LLMs show an unprecedented capacity for semantic modelling. And yet, LLMs remain limited in several respects. For instance, even the most advanced AI model suffers from impaired referential grounding and a good model of the external world. I argue that this is because they fail to successfully reproduce the spontaneous, nonsymbolic, biologically entrenched forms of semiosis that characterize the simplest biological organizations. After examining two plausible strategies to cope with these deficits, I conclude that the algorithmic implementation of formal symbol systems diverges in fundamental ways from experience-based intentional representations. This, in turn, warrants skepticism toward bald attributions of intentionality to LLMs and substantiates the core of Searle’s original argument against strong AI.

The claim that knowledge is grounded on a basic, non-inferentially grasped set of principles, which seems to be Aristotle’s view, in contemporary epistemology can be seen as part of a wider foundationalist account. Foundationalists assume that there must be some premise-beliefs at the basis of every felicitous reasoning which cannot be themselves in need of justification and may not be challenged. They provide justification for truths based on these premises, which Aristotle unusually call principles (archái). Can Aristotle be considered a foundationalist? Are his first principles necessary premises to right inferences? We will look at the issue here.

Book Z of the Metaphysics of Aristotle focuses on the idea of the subject, which is one of the senses in which the term “substance” is used. Z is an important book, because it establishes how substance relates to change and matter. One school of interpretation of Z considers one sense of form to be prior to and more important than matter, and has proposed a different reading of the book. I will call this the “formalistic” approach to substance. Supporters of this school hold that the form comprises itself as a whole individual which may be considered as independent of matter. This school focuses especially on Z 3, 1029a-b, where Aristotle seems to challenge the status of matter as an essential part of substance. This paper deals with two formalist approaches, and stresses some difficulties in understanding Z when following the ideas of D. W. Ross.

In contrast to an RNA-first origin-of-life scenario, we describe an alternative proto-life process called “autogenesis” to explain how a molecule’s structure (for example, nucleotide sequence) can become exapted to record and convey information about other molecular relationships. No attempt is made to account for the evolution of the genetic code. Instead, we only explore the necessary and sufficient conditions for molecular information to initially evolve. Beginning with a model system described as an autogenic (that is, nonparasitic) virus, constituted only by peptides, we show how reciprocal constraints produced by self-organizing molecular interactions can become self-maintaining and then offloaded onto a nucleotide polymer like an RNA molecule. We argue that nucleotide monomers may have initially evolved as by-products of autogenesis because of their energy-transfer capacity and were preserved by polymerization when free energy would be deleterious. In polymeric form, an RNA molecule can assume both linear and “folded” 3D configurations depending on surrounding conditions. In its 3D configuration, it can serve as a catalyst by biasing the probability of specific peptide interactions due to the ways they bind to it. Because the 3D folding of an RNA polymer is largely determined by the affinities of its complementary bases, there is a high correlation between its linear nucleotide sequence and its 3D configuration. This correlation enables a replicable nucleotide sequence to correspond to a specific catalytic function and thereby become susceptible to selection for its information-conveying capacity. This provides an evolutionary scenario that accounts for the plausible de novo origin of molecular information, whereas all other current origin-of-life paradigms merely equate information with pattern replication or else just assume it as an intrinsic molecular property.

From how a whirlpool is formed behind a rock to how temperature speeds up a chemical reaction, constraints are pervasive in nature. They are also essential for explaining the emergence of dissipative structures, the far-from-equilibrium systems responsible for increasingly complex forms of organization. In this article, we argue that the constraints on change exert a non-derivative causal influence on microphysics by introducing selection rules, and that they are causal not by what they produce, but by what they prevent. However, recent approaches in the philosophy of science, such as the one we call “higher-level causal eliminativism” (HLCE), deem constraints as non-causal explanations or derivative causal explanations. HLCE is a microphysicalist perspective according to which reality is the result of an interplay of microphysical interactions. It denies the causality of constraints; only their explanatory value is recognized. In so doing, HLCE commits itself to superdeterminism, the theory for which some unknown non-local hidden variables and the laws of nature utterly determine the outcomes of all events, including those of quantum physics. Superdeterminism considers all higher-order relationships as nothing but statistically salient effects of global microphysical field interactions. By undermining the dependence of mathematical selection on ontological processes, superdeterminism leads to an arbitrary selection of initial conditions for the universe. Yet we will argue that this arbitrariness undermines itself and the hopes of HLCE.

Notarized documents serve as certified records of acts and contracts overseen by notaries, conferring unchallengeable legal authority. These documents significantly reduce transaction costs in goods and services markets, with millions produced and utilized annually by stakeholders, including banks, insurance companies, and government agencies. Extracting information from these unstructured documents is essential for automating business processes reliant on their content. However, this task is challenging due to the distinct characteristics of these legal documents and the limited availability of datasets and language models in Spanish. This paper addresses the issue of Information Extraction from Spanish notarized documents. We propose a framework that relies solely on end-to-end data usage, enabling the extraction of legal elements without labeled datasets. Our framework is effective in legal domains, particularly with notarized documents, where text extraction from scanned documents is common and often affected by optical character recognition noise. We created a new dataset from a corpus of notarized documents and fine-tuned several pretrained multilingual language models, including mT5, mBART, and the large language model BLOOMZ. Additionally, we developed a model from scratch based on the T5 architecture, utilizing a corpus of Spanish notarized documents. The promising results, with an F1 score of 96.13, validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework compared to existing methods in legal document information extraction.

If it is possible to think that human life is temporal as a whole, and we can make sense of Wittgenstein’s claim that the psychological phenomena called ‘dispositions’ do not have genuine temporal duration on the basis of a distinction between dispositions and other mental processes, we need a compelling account of how time applies to these dispositions. I undertake this here by examining the concept of expectation, a disposition with a clear nexus to time by the temporal point at which the expectation is satisfied. However, it seems that we cannot always identify the beginning of an expectation, and in a few cases, its end. If so, the reduction of expectations to neural events or accompanying feelings which spread over time in the usual way seems a hard enterprise, because these processes, much as other physical processes, have a definite and largely measurable time span. Only at a higher level, that is, as part of human life, expectation can be said to be temporal.

After going through the essentials of the most relevant philosophical positions on happiness offered by the history of thought, the author emphatically defends Miguel de Unamuno’s position. It is shown indeed how a Unamunian version of Platonism approaches truth very successfully, just in relevant points where conflicting theories fail in various senses. The critical descriptions are devoted mainly to Aristotelianism and Stoicism, while Epicureanism is valued in an unusual way. Post-Shoah thought obliges, as it is shown later, to deepen the understanding of hope that had been glimpsed in existential philosophy, especially in Kierkegaard and in Unamuno.

Este artículo expone el resultado de la puesta en práctica de una metodología docente novedosa a través de la que se busca superar las dificultades que el proceso de enseñanza/aprendizaje encuentra en las asignaturas jurídicas que forman parte de los grados universitarios no jurídicos. Comienza destacando el papel que tienen las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación en dicho proceso y, significativamente, el campus virtual. Seguidamente, desgrana cada uno de los elementos de la metodología docente aplicaba, entre los que encuentra la gamificación. Concluye con la determinación de las consecuencias de la experiencia desarrollada.

En el presente trabajo, pretendo explorar la historia de una búsqueda de la filosofía medieval, que trasciende incluso su propia época, ya que condujo a la ciencia de lo material, dejó sentadas las bases para el futuro desarrollo de las ciencias y de la propia filosofía occidentales, ya en los tiempos modernos; y donde creo percibir la presencia de una constante: la búsqueda de lo individual, de lo singular, dentro de los conceptos filosóficos que el pensamiento medieval fue formando. Es lo que llamo la Adversus Pluralitas de la filosofía escolástica occidental. Esta exploración la realizo tanto desde el punto de vista del análisis doctrinal como del contexto histórico, mediante el estudio de fragmentos de las obras de los más importantes representantes de la filosofía de la época medieval, así como de textos más recientes a ellos referidos. In the present work I intend to explore the history of a quest of medieval philosophy that transcends even its own era, since it led to the science of material things, laid the foundations for the future development of Western sciences and of philosophy itself, already in the modern age; and in which I believe I perceive the presence of a constant: the search for the individual, for the singular, within the philosophical concepts that medieval thought was forming. This is what I call the adversus pluralitas of Western scholastic philosophy. This research is carried out both from the point of view of doctrinal analysis and historical context, through the study of fragments of the works of the most important representatives of the philosophy of the Medieval time, as well as more recent texts referring to them.

Externalist theories of teleology are views that explain the actions and ends of living beings in terms of nonnormative phenomena. “Field theory” (FT) adds to them that teleology arises from external guidance. Embracing an artifact model, it considers all systems as functional by-products of their field relationships, whether these are internal or external to an organization. The key categories to understand how they do this are persistence (the tendency of an entity to return to the same trajectory after being perturbed) and plasticity (the tendency of an entity to find a particular trajectory from varying starting points). While FT offers a nuanced analysis of field relationships, it describes too many physical processes as teleological. Emblematic of it is that it pays no attention to the difference between two types of asymmetric change: the linear processes governed by global thermodynamic tendencies, which I call “terminal” because their end is increasing entropy, and the processes that utilize these same tendencies to stay away from equilibrium by creating local deviations of the second law, which I call “targeted”. Living systems use terminal field effects to prevent thermodynamic degradation and promote their own forms of organization. They generate their sources of guidance and are not just targeted with respect to external fields but also to themselves. Since the artifactual model of FT does not seem able to account for targeted tendencies, adopting the distinction between terminal and targeted processes could help FT overcome some of the perceived limits of its deflationary stance.