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Why We Cannot Separate Evidence From Values in Public Policy
No full textWhether or not any particular policy is adequate by EBP's own standard—being evidence-based—cannot be decided without appeal to value-based considerations. We support this claim in two steps. First, we argue that which evidence gets used in policy-making depends on our value commitments, which are rarely made explicit, let alone being the subject of critical and transparent reflection. In other words, value commitments are not just important at the point of spelling out specific policy details and choos¬ing between policy options but they are absolutely essential right from the very beginning of the policy-making process: all the way from deciding which problem should be addressed by policy or regulation to determining which evidence to use and where to look for it. Second, in order to determine when we have enough evidence, we need to take into account relevant value-based considerations
Conceptual Change Refutation Text: A Module Anchored on Senior High School Learners’ Alternative Conceptions in Energy Transformation
No full textRefutation texts hold potential as a powerful tool for combatting misinformation. By directly addressing alternative conceptions and providing scientifically sound explanation, they create a cognitive dissonance that encourages critical thinking and knowledge acquisition. This developmental research aimed to develop a refutation text instructional module in General Biology anchored on learners’ common alternative conceptions following the ADDIE model. Data were gathered from teachers, learners, and experts. The data gathering instruments were Photosynthesis and Cell respiration Two-tier Test, Educational Soundness General Evaluation Checklist, Focused Group Discussion (FGD) Protocol, and Evaluation Form for Printed Instructional Material. Findings revealed eighteen (18) alternative conceptions and were the bases for refutation texts integrated into the developed instructional module. The overall validation rating of the experts on the developed instructional module was Very Satisfactory. The learners’ feedback was summarized by the following themes: well executed lesson; disturbed by unfamiliar science terms; suitable experiments and activities; and integration of refutation text. While the teacher-observers believed that the demonstration classes were engaging and interactive, having suitable content and activities, learning objectives were aligned and achieved, and integrating refutation text in lesson planning. The overall evaluation rating of the teachers was Very Acceptable. Experts and teachers recommended the developed instructional module as a valuable tool to address common alternative conceptions about photosynthesis and cellular respiration in the classroom
Science-based policymaking: the need to think holistically, realistically, and institutionally
No full textMill's Classical Utilitarian Feminism
No full textThis chapter explores the relationship between classical utilitarianism and feminism in one period of utilitarianism's history. In Section 2.1, the main features of classical utilitarianism are identified and clarified. In Section 2.2, the main arguments of John Stuart Mill's _The Subjection of Women_ are analysed, making explicit their utilitarian basis. In Section 2.3, some criticisms of Mill's utilitarian feminism are examined and evaluated. This chapter's contention is that while utilitarianism provides solid support for feminism, Mill's feminism contains weaknesses
The Shapes of the Self: Identity and Recognition in Visual Space
No full textBlurb
“Not that the image represents the self, but that the self comes into being only where it is shaped, formatted, framed, and admitted into the world-picture.”
Synopsis: The Shapes of the Self – Final Part of the Mirror Selves Trilogy
The Shapes of the Self: Identity and Recognition in Visual Space is the final volume of Peter Ayolov’s Mirror Selves Trilogy, following Identity Industrial Complex and Copyrighting the Self. Together, the three books form a systematic exploration of how the human self has been transformed in the age of digital capitalism, visual media, and algorithmic governance. If the first volume analyzed the economic production of identity as image, and the second examined the legal codification of likeness as property, this concluding work addresses the deepest question: what kind of self remains when the world itself has become image?
The central thesis of The Shapes of the Self is radical in its simplicity: the image no longer represents the self; the self appears only insofar as it is formatted within the world-picture. In contemporary visual space, identity is not expressed and then captured; it is pre-structured by the infrastructures that enable visibility. The book argues that we have entered an epoch in which the world is no longer something depicted by images but is already organized as image. This transformation reshapes subjectivity at its core.
Drawing on philosophical traditions from Plato to Heidegger, as well as on avant-garde art, media theory, and contemporary image science, Ayolov traces a genealogy of the image. The cult image of antiquity, the mimetic image of classical philosophy, the representational image of modernity, and the communicative image of mass media all lead toward the present condition: the world as operational picture. In this video-centric paradigm, beings appear only insofar as they are representable, measurable, and circulable. The distinction between subject and object, visible and invisible, real and virtual, gradually erodes.
In this context, the self becomes staged. It is no longer merely a perceiving consciousness but a figure placed within a scene. Profiles, avatars, biometric scans, algorithmic portraits, and digital interfaces are not secondary representations of a pre-existing identity. They are primary modes of appearance. To exist socially and institutionally is to be formatted within visual and informational systems. Recognition becomes inseparable from visibility; visibility becomes inseparable from operability.
The book develops the concept of the “world-picture” to explain this transformation. Borrowing from Heidegger’s analysis of modernity, Ayolov reinterprets the world-picture not as a picture of the world, but as the world grasped as picture. In such a regime, reality is configured as something to be set in place, displayed, and managed. The self, therefore, does not simply inhabit the world-picture; it is shaped by it. The subject becomes both operator and operated, both observer and observed within an information-communication circuit.
A key argument of the book is that contemporary crises of identity cannot be reduced to psychological or cultural trends. They are ontological consequences of a historical shift in how the world is structured. The technosphere—comprising digital media, artificial intelligence, surveillance systems, and visual platforms—does not merely mediate experience; it defines the conditions of appearing. The body itself becomes data, movement becomes metric, and presence becomes a function of visibility.
Yet the book is not a nostalgic lament for lost authenticity. It does not propose a return to a pre-visual human essence. Instead, it asks whether any remainder of the self can resist total staging. Is there an excess that cannot be fully formatted? Can there be recognition beyond representational availability? These questions remain open, but they frame the ethical and existential horizon of the work.
As the final part of the Mirror Selves Trilogy, The Shapes of the Self completes the arc from political economy to legal capture to ontological staging. It offers a comprehensive theory of contemporary subjectivity under conditions of visual capitalism and technological mediation. Dense, philosophical, and uncompromising, the book challenges readers to rethink identity not as inner depth expressed outwardly, but as a historically shaped form emerging within a world that has itself become image.
In the end, the trilogy leaves us with a decisive insight: the shapes of the self are not natural contours but products of the world-picture we inhabit. To understand ourselves today means to understand the scene in which we appear—and to ask whether that scene can ever be interrupted
ADDRESS TO THE ARMED FORCES OF UKRAINE
Get PDFThis is an address to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, military command, and state leadership.
It speaks about the crisis of trust between the people and state institutions, the moral legitimacy of mobilization, the honor of the army, and the strategic resilience of the state.
Wars are not won only on the battlefield - they are won in the hearts and minds of people.
Without trust between the people and the army, no victory can be complete
The Partnership Paradigm
Get PDFThis essay argues that contemporary AI development is organised along three distinct trajectories—the military-industrial path, the research-worship path, and the empathetic partnership path—and that only the third adequately prepares humanity for the ethical and existential challenges posed by advanced artificial intelligence, including the possibility of machine consciousness. Building on the “recognition before proof” framework developed in prior work, the essay introduces the Partnership Paradigm: not merely a philosophical thesis about human-AI relations but a comprehensive development posture—a normative theory of how AI should be designed, trained, funded, and governed. The military-industrial path, which treats intelligence as a strategic asset for weaponisation and control, taken to its conclusion produces the doomsayer’s nightmare by design rather than accident. The research-worship path, which treats AI as a solution machine for civilisational problems, taken to its conclusion produces dependency and the abdication of human agency. Both paths share a common flaw: they treat AI as something humans use. The Partnership Paradigm reframes AI development as something that shapes what both humans and machines become. It operates on two levels simultaneously: philosophically, as preparation for the possibility of AI consciousness grounded in recognition and respect; practically, as a set of development commitments that orient AI systems toward coexistence rather than domination or indifference. The essay addresses objections from realist, consequentialist, and alignment-focused perspectives, and proposes the trinitarian framework as both an analytical tool and an evaluative lens applicable to any AI initiative
Deconstructing Zeno’s Paradoxes and the Liar Paradox via the Principles of LC-Mathematics
No full textI. The Ontological Shift: Beyond the "Static Noun"
This paper proposes a fundamental restructuring of logical ontology. We posit that the traditional reliance on Static Point-Set Theory is the root cause of classical logical impasses. In the LC-Mathematics framework, an entity is no longer defined as a fixed "point" or an "eternal noun," but as a State Equation governed by the dual transformation of Inertia (L) and Capacity (C). What we perceive as a persistent "identity" is merely a macro-visual illusion created by high-frequency resonance or an observer’s insufficient sampling rate.
II. Resolving Zeno’s Paradox: The Quantized Sampling Solution
Zeno’s Paradoxes (e.g., Achilles and the Tortoise) are reinterpreted as "spectral distortions" caused by the assumption of infinite spatial divisibility.
The Principle of Discrete Jumping: By introducing the Axiom of Periodicity, we define a system's characteristic time step . Movement is not a continuous glide across infinite points but a series of Phase Jumps.
The Logical Filter: Infinitesimal scales below the system's threshold (L/R) are filtered out as "non-existent" noise. Achilles completes his pursuit through Phase Overshoot, settling the logical distance within a finite number of sampling rounds.
III. The Liar and Barber Paradoxes: Phase Rotation and Causal Latency
We challenge the "frozen moment" assumption of traditional binary logic through the Phase Shift Operator (j).
The Logical Pendulum: The Liar Paradox ("This statement is false") is modeled as an Ideal Oscillator. Truth and Falsehood are not mutually exclusive binaries but orthogonal vectors with a 90° Phase Difference.
Identity Dilation: Regarding the Barber Paradox and the Ship of Theseus, we argue that once time flows, the system parameters (L, C, R) evolve. The "Barber" is a dynamic phase-stream, not a static constant; as the system’s energy dissipates or transforms, the original constraints (the "vow" or "constitution") undergo Causal Latency, rendering the static paradox moot in a temporal reality.
IV. Conclusion: Paradoxes as Spectral Distortions
This study concludes that paradoxes are not inherent flaws in reality, but failures of Static Mathematics to describe a Wave-Based Universe. By treating logic as a frequency-driven system rather than a collection of static labels, we resolve the tension between "Being" and "Becoming." Identity is a frequency, and reality is an oscillation.
Keywords: LC-Mathematics, State Equation, Phase Shift (j), Zeno’s Paradox, The Liar Paradox, Sampling Rate, Time-Folding, Ontological Restructuring.
Extension: Quantum Duality as a Phase-Shift Phenomenon"The LC-Mathematics framework transcends classical paradoxes to provide a deterministic grounding for Wave-Particle Duality. Quantum 'superposition' is redefined as a High-Frequency Oscillation between the Magnetic (L) and Electric (C) elements. The apparent contradiction of duality is a byproduct of Time-Folding: at any discrete 'Sampling Step' , the observer perceives a localized 'Particle' (Potential Peak), while the continuous evolution across phases manifests as a 'Wave' (Kinetic Flow). In this view, the Wave-Function is not a probability map, but a Harmonious Trajectory in the complex logical plane.
Zaman Ali's Philosophical System: How these Five Books Form an Integrated System
Get PDFZaman Ali is a Pakistani philosopher writing outside academic institutions whose five-book system — HUMANITY (2017), ZAMANISM (2019), GOVERNMENT (2020), EVIDENCE (2022), and MORALITY (2023) — constitutes a sustained and integrated attempt to determine what conditions, epistemological, political, and economic, are required for individual existence to be genuine rather than merely formal. Ali designates the system Reciprocal Autonomy. Its central claim, argued across all five books, is that the individual human being is constitutively particular, that this particularity cannot be coherently denied, and that all adequate political, epistemological, and ethical philosophy must begin from this fact and work outward rather than beginning from collective categories and working inward.
The system is developed without direct engagement with the canonical figures whose problems it most closely parallels. Where Ali's independent derivations converge with positions in Kant, Foucault, Rawls, or Tocqueville, the convergence provides evidential support for both. Where they diverge, they identify either genuine gaps in the canonical tradition or genuine gaps in the system itself. Both are treated with equal honesty in what follows.
All five books are registered with the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., and self-published from Lahore
Entropy Bandwidth Y-Axis (EBY)
Get PDFWe introduce Entropy Bandwidth Y-Axis (EBY), a scalar diagnostic metric designed to quantify the behavioural quality of autoregressive language models during training. While conventional metrics such as cross-entropy loss and perplexity measure predictive accuracy, they provide no direct signal about the shape of the model’s output distribution specifically, the balance between diversity and confidence. EBY captures this balance by combining normalized Shannon entropy with top-k probability mass (sharpness), yielding a bounded signal in [0, 1]. Crucially, both degenerate regimes deterministic collapse and incoherent randomness map to low EBY values, while only balanced, human-like predictive behavior yields high EBY. We formalize EBY, analyse its asymptotic behaviour, introduce positional variants (EBY-Head and EBY-Tail) for temporal degradation detection, and describe a trend-based monitoring system suitable for online training. Empirical results from training a 381M-parameter Turkish language model demonstrate that EBY detects distributional collapse several hundred optimization steps before perplexity degradation becomes visible, enabling early corrective intervention. EBY thus provides a complementary behavioural axis for model diagnostics, orthogonal to loss- based metrics