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commitment, conscientiousness, costly signaling theory, equilibrium selection, emotion, empathy, ethics, evolutionary psychology, fitness indicators, genetic correlations, good genes, good parents, good partners, human courtship, kin selection, kindness, individual differences, intelligence, mate choice, mental health, moral virtues, mutation load, mutual choice, person perception, personality, reciprocal altruism, sexual fidelity, sexual selection, social cognition, virtue ethics “Human good turns out to be the activity of the soul exhibiting excellence.” Aristotle (350 BC) Moral evolution theories have emphasized kinship, reciprocity, group selection, and equilibrium selection. Yet, moral virtues are also sexually attractive. Darwin suggested that sexual attractiveness may explain many aspects of human morality. This paper updates his argument by integrating recent research on mate choice, person perception, individual differences, costly signaling, and virtue ethics. Many human virtues may have evolved in both sexes through mutual mate choice to advertise good genetic quality, parenting abilities, and/or partner traits. Such virtues may include kindness, fidelity, magnanimity, and heroism, as well as quasi-moral traits like conscientiousness, agreeableness, mental health, and intelligence. This theory leads to many testable predictions about the phenotypic features, genetic bases, and social-cognitive responses to human moral virtues. A

Are minds really dynamical or are they really symbolic? Because minds are bundles of computations, and because computation is always a matter of interpretation of one system by another, minds are necessarily symbolic. Because minds, along with everything else in the universe, are physical, and insofar as the laws of physics are dynamical, minds are necessarily dynamical systems. Thus, the short answer to the opening question is “yes.” It makes sense to ask further whether some of the computations that constitute a human mind are constrained by functional, algorithmic, or implementational factors to be essentially of the discrete symbolic variety (even if they supervene on an apparently continuous dynamical substrate). I suggest that here too the answer is “yes” and discuss the need for such discrete, symbolic cognitive computations in communication-related tasks.

Abstract. This paper contributes to the analysis of the question how altruistic behaviour can be in an agent’s own interest. The question is addressed by involving a temporal dimension in which altruist behaviour at one point in time can be in the agent’s interest at a future point in time, depending on the environment. The claim is that to be able to make reasonable decisions, an agent needs a cognitive system for intertemporal decision making, in relation to a model of the environment. To address this, a society of agents has been modelled, simulated and analyzed. Some of the agents have a cognitive system including a model of the environment based on a dynamic model for trust in other agents. This environment model is combined with a model for intertemporal decision making. Agents with this cognitive system show more altruistic behaviour, they get a larger social network, and become in the end more healthy than agents without such a cognitive system. 1

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Our brains make up a series of signs and are engaged in making, manifesting or reacting to a series of signs: through this semiotic activity they are at the same time engaged in “being minds” and so in thinking intelligently. An important effect of this semiotic activity of brains is a continuous process of “externalization of the mind” that exhibits a new cognitive perspective on the mechanisms underling the semiotic emergence of abductive processes of meaning formation. In this perspective we can see that at the root of thinking abilities there is a process of externalization/disembodiment of mind that presents a new cognitive perspective on the role of external models and representations. To illustrate this process I will take advantage of Turing’s comparison between unorganized brains and logical and practical machines and of the analysis of some aspects of the cognitive interplay between internal and external representations. I consider this interplay critical in analyzing the

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In a quantum-Bayesian take on quantum mechanics, the Born Rule cannot be interpreted as a rule for setting measurement-outcome probabilities from an objective quantum state. But if not, what is the role of the rule? In this paper, we argue that it should be seen as an empirical addition to Bayesian reasoning itself. Particularly, we show how to view the Born Rule as a normative rule in addition to usual Dutch-book coherence. It is a rule that takes into account how one should assign probabilities to the consequences of various intended measurements on a physical system, but explicitly in terms of prior probabilities for and conditional probabilities consequent upon the imagined outcomes of a special counterfactual reference measurement. This interpretation is seen particularly clearly by representing quantum states in terms of probabilities for the outcomes of a fixed, fiducial symmetric informationally complete (SIC) measurement. We further explore the extent to which the general form of the new normative rule implies the

In this paper we expand the notion of embodied literary experience (Sumara, 2003) in order to represent human consciousness as a bio-cultural symbiosis that both participates in the acts of reading, viewing and response, and at the same time, is potentially transformed by those acts. Yet within education, certain uninterrogated assumptions continue to underlie a common (folk psychological) understanding of consciousness – what it is, what it does, what it feels like. These assumptions, in turn, shape the way collective experiences with literature are structured in the classroom in predominantly implicit ways. A theory of embodied literary experience aligned with recent studies in consciousness allows us to identify the kinds of reading practices that are necessary for navigating the multimodal “communicational landscape ” (Kress, 2003) characteristic of contemporary popular culture. We suggest that lingering assumptions concerning human consciousness may be limiting the transformative possibilities inherent in various literary experiences within the classroom. The Hype about Harry Despite an assumedly mind-numbing multimedia overload, the summer of 2005 saw readers young and old rush to buy the latest installment in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the

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