Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB): Open Journal Systems
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Two levels of confusion between imagination and memory
Get PDFIs it possible to confuse one’s own memories with imaginings? And what about confusing one’s own imaginings with memories? The extensive literature in psychology on memory errors and confabulation suggests positive answers to these questions. However, things are more complicated, and the notion of confusion deserves a more detailed analysis. In this paper, we will do so and provide several scenarios showing that these two types of confusion can occur on two different levels: reflective (the level of self-ascription) and phenomenological (the level of what it is like to be in a certain mental state). To strengthen our case, we will relate at least some of our hypothetical scenarios to known conditions affecting memory or imagination. The genuine possibility of these conditions opens the door to a systematic exploration of the implications of the falsity of the impossibility claims for the adequate account of the relationship between memory and imagination
Hedonic valence at the core of consciousness: A review of "A philosophy for the science of animal consciousness" by Walter Veit
Get PDFA book review of “A philosophy for the science of animal consciousness” by Walter Veit Routledge, 2023, 162 pages, ISBN 9781032343617
Das iberische Werk von Otto Denk, Historiker der mittelalterlichen katalanischen Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert
Get PDFThe author of the first German-language history of Catalan literature, Otto Denk (pseud. Otto von Schaching, 1845–1918), has remained an unknown figure in German Catalan studies despite his pioneering historiographical work. The Iberian Peninsula is only one of the many aspects of the Bavarian polygraph’s large oeuvre. His literary and historiographical texts relating to Spain and Catalonia are briefly reviewed in this miscellany on the history of Catalan studies and the main features of his 1893 history of Catalan literature are presented.The author of the first German-language history of Catalan literature, Otto Denk (pseud. Otto von Schaching, 1845–1918), has remained an unknown figure in German Catalan studies despite his pioneering historiographical work. The Iberian Peninsula is only one of the many aspects of the Bavarian polygraph’s large oeuvre. His literary and historiographical texts relating to Spain and Catalonia are briefly reviewed in this miscellany on the history of Catalan studies and the main features of his 1893 history of Catalan literature are presented.The author of the first German-language history of Catalan literature, Otto Denk (pseud. Otto von Schaching, 1845–1918), has remained an unknown figure in German Catalan studies despite his pioneering historiographical work. The Iberian Peninsula is only one of the many aspects of the Bavarian polygraph’s large oeuvre. His literary and historiographical texts relating to Spain and Catalonia are briefly reviewed in this miscellany on the history of Catalan studies and the main features of his 1893 history of Catalan literature are presented
Hettiger, Andreas: Language Policy at German Higher Education Institutions. : Foundations and Perpectives
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Andreas Hettiger (2018): Sprachenpolitik an deutschen Hochschulen. Grundlagen und Perspektiven. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren.Review of Andreas Hettiger: Language policy at German Higher Education Institutions
Delusional beliefs and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy
Get PDFIn this paper I argue that in her new book, Why Delusions Matter, Lisa Bortolotti offers us a new way to dispel a major objection to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, the Comforting Delusions Objection
Is it me or my delusion? Harnessing authenticity for an agential view of delusionality
Get PDFIn the revisionist part of the book, Bortolotti aims at defending a non-pathologising view of delusions, according to which they not only compromise but support our agency. By construing delusions as meaningful protective responses, the author attempts to decouple delusionality from pathology. Nevertheless, it is not clear how, according to her approach, delusions could foster agency. Even when seen as a “way of life” and not as psychiatric symptoms, the defensive nature of delusions undermines the person’s sense of agency, for the symptom or defence mechanism never stems from the person themselves. Notwithstanding the benefits delusions might bring along, they seem to display their own intentionality to the detriment of the agent. Here, I suggest that insights from the authenticity debate in psychiatry could support Bortolotti’s revisionist aim and benefit her discussion on identity beliefs. For this purpose, I introduce the concept of self-illness ambiguity (Sadler, 2007) and compare de Haan’s notion of existential stance (2020) and Stanghellini’s concept of position-taking (Stanghellini et al., 2023) to argue that the person’s agency resides in their ability to take a stance on their (psychiatric) condition, especially when struggling with questions of authenticity. Finally, I explore why one cannot just get rid of a delusion and why, when one attempts to, it feels urgent to replace it
Call Rewinding: Efficient Backward Edge Protection
No full textThe prevalence of memory-unsafe software prompts significant efforts by the research community to mitigate memory corruption bugs. This endeavor is crucial for safeguarding critical systems against security threats. Specifically, there is a focus to protect against code-reuse attacks through enforcing control-flow integrity (CFI). This paper introduces call rewinding, a novel microarchitecture-level mechanism for protection of return addresses. It is based on a property of the calling convention that is common to major architectures such as x86, ARM and RISC-V, which states that all return instructions transfer control to a valid call site. Call rewinding consists of jumping to the instruction preceding the return target for each return instruction and checking if the instruction at this address is a call or not. On systems equipped with return address prediction, a commonly employed optimization, the security check is performed only on mispredicted return addresses. The proposed protection mechanism demonstrates negligible impact on both area and performance. We implement call rewinding on the CV64A6, a RISC-V CPU with consequent branch prediction support. Our evaluation validates the effectiveness of call rewinding, both in bare-metal and in a Linux operating system (OS) environment. It triggers no false positives in bare-metal and is functional with the OS extended with a custom exception handler. Furthermore, our findings indicate that call rewinding successfully detects unauthorized return addresses, highlighting its potential as a reliable and efficient security mechanism
Dash: Accelerating Distributed Private Convolutional Neural Network Inference with Arithmetic Garbled Circuits
No full textThe adoption of machine learning solutions is rapidly increasing across all parts of society. As the models grow larger, both training and inference of machine learning models is increasingly outsourced, e.g. to cloud service providers. This means that potentially sensitive data is processed on untrusted platforms, which bears inherent data security and privacy risks. In this work, we investigate how to protect distributed machine learning systems, focusing on deep convolutional neural networks. The most common and best-performing mixed MPC approaches are based on HE, secret sharing, and garbled circuits. They commonly suffer from large performance overheads, big accuracy losses, and communication overheads that grow linearly in the depth of the neural network. To improve on these problems, we present Dash, a fast and distributed private convolutional neural network inference scheme secure against malicious attackers. Building on arithmetic garbling gadgets [BMR16] and fancy-garbling [BCM+19], Dash is based purely on arithmetic garbled circuits. We introduce LabelTensors that allow us to leverage the massive parallelity of modern GPUs. Combined with state-of-the-art garbling optimizations, Dash outperforms previous garbling approaches up to a factor of about 100. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient scaling operation over the residues of the Chinese remainder theorem representation to arithmetic garbled circuits, which allows us to garble larger networks and achieve much higher accuracy than previous approaches. Finally, Dash requires only a single communication round per inference step, regardless of the depth of the neural network, and a very small constant online communication volume
“O God of Newton and Clarke, have mercy on me!”: Nicholas Saunderson, Denis Diderot and the only possible answer to Molyneux’s question
No full textThis essay deals with the early discussion of Molyneux’s question - which may hopefully cast some light on the contemporary debate – and is written from an historical point of view. I will claim that, in the eighteenth century history of Molyneux’s question, there is a leading figure: Denis Diderot; the most original and fruitful answer is given in his Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient (1749). From the historical background of Diderot’s analysis, both the merits and limitations of the negative and positive answers, along with the inadequacy of the standard classification between “empiricists” and “rationalists”, will also emerge. Diderot’s “relativistic” solution is a turning point in the whole philosophical discussion of Molyneux’s question, in that it has been confirmed by clinical reports of surgical operations of blind people, starting from Cheselden’s case
Memory, Religion, and Authoritarianism in Post (1994)-Genocide Rwanda
Get PDFThis article attempts to theorise governmental efforts of the Kagame regime to construct a common national identity that precariously hinges on the adoption of an official revisionist history. Guided by Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory and Maurice Halbwachs’ collective memory, it may be argued the government’s official narrative of Rwanda’s idyllic history is a strategy for securing Rwanda’s future by linking it to an ancestral past. This narrative is largely supported by museums and the frozen memories of Tutsi returnees — to the exclusion of competing narratives — as materialised and publicly disseminated through traditional dances and tandemly pursued through private spaces through infiltration and closure of churches and mosques. However, per Rebekah Phillips DeZalia, a new version of history must successfully replace the former in the personal narratives of the people and not simply control public discourse through a top-down approach. Hence, the Kagame regime is also utilising a bottom-up strategy of infiltrating day-to-day, intimate spaces — one of which is religious spaces by both exploiting and curbing religious influence, appropriating religious language, and referencing the divine right of kings — all which are designed to sustain public confidence in the possibility of post-1994 genocide reconciliation and to realise Kagame’s vision of a unified and prosperous Rwanda. The regime’s strategy involves inverting the overall passage of personal memory to collective memory to history as well as repressing memory in official memorials by excluding narratives that contradict or do not legitimise the Kagame regime’s agenda. This tandem manipulation and suppression of memory is aided by the aggressive campaign of church and mosque infiltrations as well as closures, respectively, which may be functionally understood using Thomas Luckmann’s notions of invisible religion (Rwandan government) as competing with visible religions (Christianity and Islam). These government strategies are detrimental to the trauma-coping potential of visible religions and undermines reconciliation — highlighting the fragile architecture of Kagame’s authoritarian vision for peace