Kagaku tetsugaku
Online ISSN : 1883-6461
Print ISSN : 0289-3428
ISSN-L : 0289-3428
Current issue
Special Topic: Ethics and the Science of Consciousness
Displaying 1-15 of 15 articles from this issue
Special Invited Papers
  • [in Japanese]
    2024 Volume 57 Issue 2 Pages 1-
    Published: March 31, 2025
    Released on J-STAGE: March 31, 2025
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
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  • An Overview of Recent Philosophical Discussions
    Kodai Sato, Koji Ota
    2024 Volume 57 Issue 2 Pages 3-12
    Published: March 31, 2025
    Released on J-STAGE: March 31, 2025
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

        Mind-uploading is a futuristic technology that transfers consciousness into a machine. There have been philosophical discussions about the rationality of choosing to undergo mind-uploading. In this essay, first, we review a debate related to the probability of death due to mind-uploading and its normative implications. Second, we focus on a more recent work, which highlights the transformative character of mind-uploading. We briefly argue that it is still open to make a rational decision in choosing mind-uploading even if it inevitably involves transformative experience.

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  • The Missed Nobel Prize of Shun’ichi Amari and Future Challenges
    Masataka Watanabe
    2024 Volume 57 Issue 2 Pages 13-20
    Published: March 31, 2025
    Released on J-STAGE: March 31, 2025
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

        The Hard Problem of consciousness highlights the explanatory gap between subjective experience and objective neuroscience. Some philosophers argue that it is unsolvable, but since all science sits upon natural laws, such laws of consciousness can be used to bridge the gap. To test such natural laws, I argue that development of artificial consciousness is crucial, where it's consciousness is tested by connecting it to our own brain and “seeing for ourselves”. Finally, creating such machines with consciousness involves reconstruction of neural wiring of the postmortem human brain via invasive connectome methods and treating it as initial state for training to reproduce neural dynamics that likely resides consciousness.

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  • A Case Study of Brain-Computer Interfaces
    Eisuke Nakazawa
    2024 Volume 57 Issue 2 Pages 21-35
    Published: March 31, 2025
    Released on J-STAGE: March 31, 2025
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

        Brain pioneers are heroes who venture into the frontier of neuroscience research. This paper focuses on the research and development of invasive brain-computer interfaces, examining the ethical dimensions of participation by three distinct types of brain pioneers: patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, healthy volunteers, and researchers themselves. A phenomenon of moral entanglement is identified as a common thread across these three types, which acts to distort authentic informed consent. To address biases in risk perception, third-party research ethics committees should serve as appropriate gatekeepers, ensuring adequate protection of research participants through continuous monitoring.

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Research Report Articles
  • Takayuki Amamoto
    2024 Volume 57 Issue 2 Pages 37-55
    Published: March 31, 2025
    Released on J-STAGE: March 31, 2025
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

        This paper re-examines non-sentential utterances (NSUs) ―expressions lacking sentence form but conveying propositional content―through the lens of dynamic semantics, which treats sentence meaning as context updating. The paper first provides an overview of NSUs and the current state of research. Then, it explores the dynamic aspects of NSU interpretation, proposing a dynamic semantics centered on updates to the interpreter’s information state, including an analysis of epistemic NSUs. Finally, the paper briefly discusses the implications of viewing NSUs dynamically, focusing on their impact on meaning, propositions, and the static-dynamic distinction in semantics.

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  • Ryouhei Takaya
    2024 Volume 57 Issue 2 Pages 57-76
    Published: March 31, 2025
    Released on J-STAGE: March 31, 2025
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

        There has been extensive debate about the principle of compositionality among philosophers of language and formal semanticists, according to which the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and the way these parts are combined. Questions about this principle can be broadly divided into three categories: why we want compositionality, what the proper definition of compositionality should be, and how various semantic phenomena can be analyzed compositionally. In this paper, I will focus on the first question. After briefly surveying well-known arguments for compositionality, I will present two methodological arguments and examine their validity.

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Book Reviews
Ishimoto Prize 2024
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