The Explainability Of Experience

This book reconstructs Spinoza's theory of the human mind against the backdrop of the twofold notion that subjective experience is explainable and that its successful explanation is of ethical relevance, because it makes us wiser, freer, and happier. Doing so, the book defends a realist rationalist interpretation of Spinoza's approach which does not entail commitment to an ontological reduction of subjective experience to mere intelligibility. In contrast to a long-standing tradition of Hegelian reading of Spinoza's Ethics, it thus defends the notion that the experience of finite subjects is fully real.

This book reconstructs Spinoza's theory of the human mind against the backdrop of the twofold notion that subjective experience is explainable and that its successful explanation is of ethical relevance, because it makes us wiser, freer, and happier. Doing so, the book defends a realist rationalist interpretation of Spinoza's approach which does not entail commitment to an ontological reduction of subjective experience to mere intelligibility. In contrast to a long-standing tradition of Hegelian reading of Spinoza's Ethics, it thus defends the notion that the experience of finite subjects is fully real.

Master's Thesis from the year 2023 in the subject Computer Science - SEO, Search Engine Optimization, grade: 1,0, University of Regensburg (Professur für Wirtschaftsinformatik, insb. Internet Business & Digitale Soziale Medien), language: English, abstract: This thesis presents a toolkit of 17 user experience (UX) principles, which are categorized according to their relevance towards Explainable AI (XAI). The goal of Explainable AI has been widely associated in literature with dimensions of comprehensibility, usefulness, trust, and acceptance. Moreover, authors in academia postulate that research should rather focus on the development of holistic explanation interfaces instead of single visual explanations. Consequently, the focus of XAI research should be more on potential users and their needs, rather than purely technical aspects of XAI methods. Considering these three impediments, the author of this thesis derives the assumption to bring valuable insights from the research area of User Interface (UI) and User Experience design into XAI research. Basically, UX is concerned with the design and evaluation of pragmatic and hedonic aspects of a user’s interaction with a system in some context. These principles are taken into account in the subsequent prototyping of a custom XAI system called Brain Tumor Assistant (BTA). Here, a pre-trained EfficientNetB0 is used as a Convolutional Neural Network that can divide x-ray images of a human brain into four classes with an overall accuracy of 98%. To generate factual explanations, Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations are subsequently applied as an XAI method. The following evaluation of the BTA is based on the so-called User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) according to Laugwitz et al. (2008), whereby single items of the questionnaire are adapted to the specific context of XAI. Quantitative data from a study with 50 participants in each control and treatment group is used to present a standardized way of quantifying the dimensions of Usability and UX specifically for XAI systems. Furthermore, through an A/B test, evidence is presented that visual explanations have a significant (α=0.05) positive effect on the dimensions of attractiveness, usefulness, controllability, and trustworthiness. In summary, this thesis proves that explanations in computer vision not only have a significantly positive effect on trustworthiness, but also on other dimensions.

This two-volume set LNCS 13315 and 13316 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Social Computing and Social Media, SCSM 2022, held as part of the 24rd International Conference, HCI International 2022, which took place in June-July 2022. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held virtually. The total of 1276 papers and 275 posters included in the 40 HCII 2022 proceedings volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 5583 submissions. The papers of SCSM 2022, Part I, are organized in topical sections named: design and user experience in social media and social live streaming; text analysis and AI in social media; social media impact on society and business.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Sciences, RCIS 2020, held in Limassol, Cyprus, during September 23-25, 2020. The conference was originally scheduled for May 2020, but the organizing committee was forced to postpone the conference due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The scope of RCIS 2020 is summarized by the thematic areas of information systems and their engineering; user-oriented approaches; data and information management; business process management; domain-specific information systems engineering; data science; information infrastructures, and reflective research and practice. The 26 full papers and 3 work in progress papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 106 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: Data Analytics and Business Intelligence; Digital Enterprise and Technologies; Human Factors in Information Systems; Information Systems Development and Testing; Machine Learning and Text Processing; and Security and Privacy. The volume also contains 12 poster and demo-papers, and 4 Doctoral Consortium papers.

One century after Gustav Landauer’s death, in a time marked by a deep doubt concerning modern politics, the volume proposes a fascinating overview of the articulation between skepsis and antipolitics in his multifaceted unconventional anarchism.

This volume investigates what it means to be human. Is there something that makes us distinct from computers, other great apes, Martians, and gods? And what are the ethical and political consequences of how we answer this question? How have our views on this changed from the times of the ancient Greek and Chinese philosophers? What do contemporary evolutionary biologists and advocates of uploading human consciousness onto computers think about it? This volume collects new essays from leading scholars in philosophy, history, and other disciplines to explore these and numerous other questions.

A bold reevaluation of Spinoza that reveals his powerful, inclusive vision of religion for the modern age Spinoza is widely regarded as either a God-forsaking atheist or a God-intoxicated pantheist, but Clare Carlisle says that he was neither. In Spinoza’s Religion, she sets out a bold interpretation of Spinoza through a lucid new reading of his masterpiece, the Ethics. Putting the question of religion centre-stage but refusing to convert Spinozism to Christianity, Carlisle reveals that “being in God” unites Spinoza’s metaphysics and ethics. Spinoza’s Religion unfolds a powerful, inclusive philosophical vision for the modern age—one that is grounded in a profound questioning of how to live a joyful, fully human life. Like Spinoza himself, the Ethics doesn’t fit into any ready-made religious category. But Carlisle shows how it wrestles with the question of religion in strikingly original ways, responding both critically and constructively to the diverse, broadly Christian context in which Spinoza lived and worked. Philosophy itself, as Spinoza practiced it, became a spiritual endeavor that expressed his devotion to a truthful, virtuous way of life. Offering startling new insights into Spinoza’s famously enigmatic ideas about eternal life and the intellectual love of God, Carlisle uncovers a Spinozist religion that integrates self-knowledge, desire, practice, and embodied ethical life to reach toward our “highest happiness”—to rest in God. Seen through Carlisle’s eyes, the Ethics prompts us to rethink not only Spinoza but also religion itself.