... Professor Seipp's Paper transports us to the Middle Ages to discover a society that views crime and tort quite differently from the way we view these categories today. ... In Professor Seipp's world the victim of a wrong had a choice: demand revenge by determining how the wrongdoer would be punished, or demand monetary compensation. ... I believe that the decline of the victim's right to re...

It is “the received wisdom” that any intuitively natural and consistent resolution of a class of semantic paradoxes immediately leads to other paradoxes just as bad as the first. This is often called the “revenge problem”. Some proponents of the received wisdom draw the conclusion that there is no hope of any natural treatment that puts all the paradoxes to rest: we must either live with the ex...

Recent work on ants shows both extraordinary patterns of reproduction and a new type of sexual conflict, leading to the remarkable scenario where females have no father and males have no mother.

Minimizing the costs that others impose upon oneself and upon those in whom one has a fitness stake, such as kin and allies, is a key adaptive problem for many organisms. Our ancestors regularly faced such adaptive problems (including homicide, bodily harm, theft, mate poaching, cuckoldry, reputational damage, sexual aggression, and the infliction of these costs on one’s offspring, mates, coali...

Dante has an increasingly hard time progressing on his journey and in writing poetry about it as he approaches the bottom of the Inferno. Symbolic expression loses its grip before the nullity of absolute evil. Language returns to a pre-semiological state of signifying like a brute thing — especially by virtue of the concrete, literal, root senses of words that are reactivated as their conventio...

We introduce the first deep reinforcement learning agent that learns to beat Atari games with the aid of natural language instructions. The agent uses a multimodal embedding between environment observations and natural language to self-monitor progress through a list of English instructions, granting itself additional reward for completing instructions in addition to increasing the game score. ...