Seas of unreason

Unreason and the liberal tradition

It is conventionally thought impermissible to force treatment on a patient, even when his life is at stake. Following Kant or Mill, we may defend this convention either by appealing to the inviolability of autonomy, or to the benefits of treating liberty as inviolable, subject only to considerations of harm to others. In both cases, an exception might be made for mental illness. For Kant, auton...

Moral Unreason: The Case of Psychopathy

Psychopaths are renowned for their immoral behavior. They are ideal candidates for testing the empirical plausibility of moral theories. Many think the source of their immorality is their emotional deficits. Psychopaths experience no guilt or remorse, feel no empathy, and appear to be perfectly rational. If this is true, sentimentalism is supported over rationalism. Here, I examine the nature o...

Bounded seas

Imprecise manipulation of source code (semi-parsing) is useful for tasks such as robust parsing, error recovery, lexical analysis, and rapid development of parsers for data extraction. An island grammar precisely defines only a subset of a language syntax (islands), while the rest of the syntax (water) is defined imprecisely. Usually water is defined as the negation of islands. Albeit simple, s...

Harvesting the Seas

Surviving the Cytochrome Seas

were an order of magnitude higher than those required In the molecular drama of apoptotic cell death, perhaps to activate caspases in cell extracts (0.2–0.5 mM). Intact there is no character stranger than cytochrome c. This cells thus seem to have a way to regulate or suppress the familiar heme protein can be transformed, in Jekyll and response to cytosolic cytochrome c. When apoptosis is Hyde ...