Jos de Mul.  Leben erfaßt hier Leben: Dilthey as a philosopher of (the) life (sciences). In: Eric Nelson (ed.). Interpreting Dilthey. Cambridge University Press, 2019, 41-60. 

Eric Nelson (ed.). Interpreting Dilthey. 

In this wide-ranging and authoritative volume, leading scholars engage with the philosophy and writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, a key figure in nineteenth-century thought. Their chapters cover his innovative philosophical strategies and explore how they can be understood in relation to their historical situation, as well as presenting incisive interpretations of Dilthey's arguments, including their development, their content, and their influence on later thought. A key focus is on how Dilthey's work remains relevant to current debates around art and literature, the biographical and autobiographical self, knowledge, language, science, culture, history, society, and psychology and the embodied mind. The volume will be important for researchers in hermeneutics, aesthetics, practical philosophy, and the history of German philosophy, providing a valuable introduction to Dilthey's work as well as detailed critical analysis of its ongoing significance.

NextNature. Sublime natural and technological landscapes, in: Ritsumeikan Studies in Language and Culture.  Volume 26, no.3 (2014),  5-23.

Abstract
The development of the representation of the landscape in Europe since the 14th century Renaissance can be understood as a mirror of the development of modern and postmodern Western culture as a whole. After sketching the development of landscape representation in modern and postmodern Europe, the article focuses on the theme of sublimity, which, at least since the era of Romanticism, has been inherent to the European experience and representation of the landscape, both in its successive natural and technological manifestation. Against this background, the paper also discusses some striking differences between the European and the Asian landscape.

Keywords : NextNature, Sublimity, Sublime landscapes, European landscape, Asian landscape, natural landscapes, technological landscapes

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Jos de Mul. Participation in panel discussion Human or Robot? The Art in Artificial Intelligence. International Science Festival Nijmegen. Lux, November 10, 14:30.

The documentary Human or Robot? is about android and humanoid robots, from the perspective of photographer Max Aguilera-Hellweg. In his quest to define what it means to be human, Aguilera-Hellweg highlights our increasingly intimate relationship with robots and documents human anatomy and the frontiers of robot technology. What distinguishes man from machine? And what does it mean to be human?

Is there any art in Artificial Intelligence? Is it possible for AI to create art in the same way a human being can? And if so, can this AI then be considered ‘intelligent’? What does that mean for understanding ourselves as human beings? Isn’t creativity the key human condition which seperates us from other beings and systems?

After the documentary Human or Robot? these questions will be discussed by Jos de Mul – professor Philosophy of Man and Culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Cynthia Liem – performing musician and computer science researcher at the TU Delft – and Pablo Núñez and Bram Loogman – creators of Jan Bot: EYE Filmmuseum’s first robot filmmaker, which is exhibited in the library during InScience. The discussion will be moderated by Marc Seijlhouwer from technology magazine De Ingenieur. For the film summary of Human or Robot? 

Klaartje Jaspers. Will artificial intelligence create a shared supermind? Interview with philosophical anthropologist Jos de Mul. Newsroom Erasmus University. June 11, 2018.

Will robots outsmart humans? Erasmus philosophical anthropologist Jos de Mul thinks such beliefs show a gross overestimation of the capacities of robots. Self-replicating robots could take over, he thinks, but they would be inferior to their human counterpart. Instead of robots taking over, De Mul believes humans might develop like bees: sharing their individual psyche to form a shared supermind.

‘Plato was scared of the ability to read and write. He thought script would be a dead memory without the ability to think creatively. In the same way people now are scared of computers. But script and computers are just means, extensions of ourselves, allowing us to do certain things better.’ No, Jos de Mul is not scared of robots and algorithms, but he is urging us to think carefully about how we use them.

Zillions of neurons united

The fear that robots could become autonomous is justified, but they will not be superior in their intellect for a long time to come, De Mul believes. ‘Perhaps they can beat us at chess but they have had trouble learning how to walk up stairs or recognise faces. That’s not so strange, if you realise the human brain has billions of neurons, and so far we haven’t even managed to simulate the complete network of a species with very few neurons, like the Caenorhabditis elegans – a roundworm.’

Imagine what would happen if we could put all our neurons together. We’re already heading towards such a ‘swarm mind’, De Mul emphasises. ‘It’s already happening when you buy a book online and the computer suggests titles that other buyers of that book have bought. Amazon recently got a patent on an algorithm that can predict what book is going to be sold where, so they can send it before you realise you want it. “Anticipatory shipping”, they call it.’

 Floortje Scheepers,  Jos de Mul,  Frits Boer and  Witte Hoogendijk. Psychosis as an evolutionary adaptive mechanism to changing environments. Frontiers of Psychiatry, Volume  9,  June 2018.

Background: From an evolutionary perspective it is remarkable that psychotic disorders, mostly occurring during fertile age and decreasing fecundity, maintain in the human population.

Aim: To argue the hypothesis that psychotic symptoms may not be viewed as an illness but as an adaptation phenomenon, which can become out of control due to different underlying brain vulnerabilities and external stressors, leading to social exclusion.

Methods: A literature study and analysis.

Results: Until now, biomedical research has not unravelld the definitive etiology of psychotic disorders. Findings are inconsistent and show non-specific brain anomalies and genetic variation with small effect sizes. However, compelling evidence was found for a relation between psychosis and stressful environmental factors, particularly those influencing social interaction. Psychotic symptoms may be explained as a natural defense mechanism or protective response to stressful environments. This is in line with the fact that psychotic symptoms most often develop during adolescence. In this phase of life, leaving the familiar, and safe home environment and building new social networks is one of the main tasks. This could cause symptoms of “hyperconsciousness” and calls on the capacity for social adaptation.

Conclusions: Psychotic symptoms may be considered as an evolutionary maintained phenomenon.Research investigating psychotic disorders may benefit from a focus on underlying general brain vulnerabilities or prevention of social exclusion, instead of psychotic symptoms.

Keywords: psychosis, evolution, adaptation, social exclusion, defense mechanism

Jos de Mul & Maria Grever. Transnationalizing the public sphere. Laudatio Honorary Doctorate Prof.dr. Nancy Fraser. Honorary supervisors: prof.dr. Maria Grever and prof.dr. Jos de Mul. Erasmus University Rotterdam, November 7, 2014.

Jos de Mul. Encyclopedias, hive minds and global brains.A cognitive evolutionary account of Wikipedia. In: Alberto Romele and Enrico Terrone (eds.) Towards a Philosophy of Digital Media. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 103-119.

Jos de Mul. Encyclopedias, hive minds and global brains A cognitive evolutionary account of Wikipedia. 立命館言語文化研究29巻3号. Ritsumeikan Studies in Language and Culture. Volume 29, no.3 (2018), 143-153.

Abstract

Wikipedia, the crowd-sourced, hypermedial encyclopedia, available in more  than  290 languages and  consisting  of  no  less  than  40 million  lemmas,  is  often  hailed  as  a  successful  example  of  the ʻwisdom of  the  crowdsʼ.  However,  critics not only  point  at  the  lack  of  accuracy  and  reliability, uneven coverage of topics, and the poor quality of writing, but also at the under-representation of women and non-white ethnicities. Moreover, some critics regard Wikipedia as an example of the development of  a  hive  mind,  as  we  find  it  in  social insects, whose  ʻmindʼ rather than being a property of individuals is a ʻsocial phenomenonʼ, as it has to be located in the colony rather than in the individual bees. In this article an attempt is made to throw some light on this controversy by analyzing Wikipedia  from  the  perspective  of  the  cognitive  evolution  of  mankind.  Connecting  to Origins  of  the  Modern  Mind (1991) of neuropsychologist Merlin Donald, in which three stages in the cognitive evolution -  characterized by a  mimetic, an linguistic, and an external symbolic cognition  respectively  -  are  distinguished,  it  is  argued  that  the  development  of  the  internet,  and crowd-sourced  projects  like  Wikipedia  in  particular,  can be understood as a fourth, computer- mediated form of cognition. If we survey the cognitive evolution of hominids and the role played in this evolution by cultural and technical artefacts like writing, printing press, computers, and internet, we witness a process of increasing integration of individual minds. With outsourcing and virtualization  of  the  products  and  processes  of  thinking  to  external  memories,  and  the  fast development of implanted computer interfaces, we appear to be at the edge of the materialization of the  hive  mind  in a  ʻglobal brainʼ.  The article ends  with  some  speculative  predictions about the future of human cognition.

Keywords: encyclopedias, Wikipedia, wisdom of the crowds, cognitive evolution, hive mind, global brain

Jos de Mul. Foreword: From the Mediatic Turn to Gua-le-ni. In: Stefano Gualeni. Virtual Worlds as Philosophical Tools. How to Philosophize With a Digital Hammer. London: Palgrave Macmillan 2015, x-xiii.

In the last couple of decades a new discipline, called ‘media philosophy’, has entered the philosophical arena. According to Reinhard Margreiter, one of its proponents, this name refers not only, and not even predominantly, to the exploration of yet another ontological domain, but rather designates a fundamental transformation  of  philosophy  itself,  which  is  characterized  by  a  turn towards (the descent and history of) the mediatic foundations of philosophy. In his view, media philosophy might become a contemporary ‘prima philosophia’ (Margreiter 2003, 151). However, Margreiter does not argue for a modernist kind of foundationalist superdiscipline, but rather for a critical discourse that has to accompany every act of knowing.

Though the name ‘media philosophy’ is a recent invention, the phenomenon is not altogether new. Already in Plato’s Phaedrus and Seventh Letter we find fundamental reflections on the impact of writing on philosophy, that is: on the type of oral philosophy that precedes written philosophy and which is still reflected in the dialogical form of Plato’s writings. However, in the tradition of Western philosophy, which is strongly connected with the book, this kind of reflection remains relatively scarce and marginal for a long time. Starting from Parmenides’ identification of being and thinking, a dominant part of the metaphysical tradition was based on the presupposition that thinking and being – nous and phusis – share the same form (eidos, morphé), guaranteeing the identity of what can be thought and what can be (cf. Allen 2004, 218).

Jos de Mul. Athens, or the Fate of Europe. Journal of Philosophical Research. Special supplement: Selected Papers from the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy. 2015: 221–227.

ABSTRACT: In his essay ‘The Idea of Europe’ George Steiner claims that European culture derives from “a primordial duality, the twofold inheritance of Athens and Jerusalem”. For Steiner, the relationship between Greek rationalism and Jewish religion, which is at once conflictual and syncretic, has engaged the entire history of European philosophy, morality, and politics. However, given this definition, at present the United States of America seem to be more European that ‘the old Europe’ itself. Against Steiner, it will be argued that in order to fathom the distinctive characteristic of European culture, we have to take a third European tradition into account, which is inextricably bound up with Athens: the tradition of Greek tragedy. If we may call Europe a tragic continent, it is not only because its history is characterised by an abundance of real political tragedies, but also because it embodies, as an idea and an ideal, a tragic awareness of the fragility of human life. Instead of reducing the ‘idea of Europe’ to a financial and economic issue, Europe should remain faithful to this idea and ideal.

First of all I like to thank the organizers for their invitation to join this symposium on Art and Cultures. As a tribute to the magnificent city of Athens and its inhabitants, I will talk about the relationship between European culture and the art form that is inextricably tied to the city of Athens: Greek tragedy. The thesis I will defend is that European culture distinguishes itself from other world cultures, and in particular from North-American culture, with which it shares both its Christian and its scientific worldview, by its deeply tragic character. This claim, I will argue, is neither a pessimistic nor an optimistic one, because tragedy is beyond this simple dichotomy. If I claim that Europe is a tragic continent, I refer both to its grandeur and pitfalls.

My talk consists of two parts. First, in a critical discussion with George Steiner, I will address the question of the identity of European culture. In the second part I will relate this identity to Greek tragedy.