Matter of principle

Species Inegalitarianism as a Matter of Principle

Most critics of species egalitarianism point to its counter-intuitive implications in particular cases. But this argumentative strategy is vulnerable to the response that our intuitions should give way in the face of arguments showing that species egalitarianism is required by our deepest, most fundamental moral principles. In this article, I develop an argument against deontological versions o...

Object Vision: A Matter of Principle

A new study shows that sparse coding - a principle which elegantly explains neural selectivity in the early visual system - may also explain selectivity in V4, an intermediate visual area implicated in object vision.

Dark Matter and The Anthropic Principle

We evaluate the problem of galaxy formation in the landscape approach to phenomenology of the axion sector. With other parameters of standard ΛCDM cosmology held fixed, the density of cold dark matter is bounded below relative to the density of baryonic matter by the requirement that structure should form before the era of cosmological constant domination of the universe. Galaxies comparable to...

Generalized Uncertainty Principle and Dark Matter

There have been proposals that primordial black hole remnants (BHRs) are the dark matter, but the idea is somewhat vague. Recently we argued that the generalized uncertainty principle (GUP) may prevent black holes from evaporating completely, in a similar way that the standard uncertainty principle prevents the hydrogen atom from collapsing. We further noted that the hybrid inflation model prov...

Dark-Matter-Induced Weak Equivalence Principle Violation