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Item Quantifying Quality of Life(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 1997) Malmgren, HelgeThe concept of quality of life (QoL) which is most relevant to medical and medicopolitical decisions is QoL as goodness of life, e.g., the value of a life for the person who lives it. Mainly because of the interdependence of values, components of an individual human life cannot be ordered in such a way as to permit a complete and context-free ordinal scale. However, local orderings (given a set of fixed conditions) can often be found. Similarly, although local ratio scaling of the desirability of life components using direct ratio estimation seems to be possible, the scales cannot be made complete. Ratio scale values assigned by an individual to the goodness of life components by estimation need not always be even locally additive, since there may not exist any principle of composition. By statistical means, representations of (something like) the value of life components have been derived, which are locally near-additive and which may be useful on a population basis (the QUALY methodology). They are however not useful on an individual basis, nor outside the proven domain of additivity. The question whether the numbers representing the values of different lives can be added is wrongly put. There is no such thing as a composition of a supra-life from individual lives. The real question is whether the numbers should be added - whether the sum is the morally decisive arithmetical quantity to be calculated here. To this, utilitarianism answers Yes, while egalitarianism answers No. The measurement part of QUALY methodology must be kept conceptually apart from utilitarian ethics.Item Without a proper definition, you do not see the phenomenon. The history of a missing diagnosis(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 1997) Malmgren, HelgeItem Perceptual fulfilment and temporal sequence learning(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 1997) Malmgren, HelgeWhat happens when an expectation of a certain perceptible event is fulfilled? Traditional empiricist theories about intentionality, as well as several recent theories about mental imagery, emphasise the concrete similarity between expectations and perceptions. For example, one can almost "hear in one's head" a melody which one is anticipating. This has been the starting point for many theories which postulate some kind of similarity matching between the expectation and its fulfilment. According to such theories, an analogue mental representation of the expected fact is "held up" against the incoming percept, and their similarity or non-similarity determines whether the expectation is or is not fulfilled. If such theories are taken as descriptions of phenomenologically accessible facts, they are difficult to defend. First, analogical expectations - when they do occur - usually do not persist into the fulfilment phase. And how could they be matched for similarity, if they are not available at the same time? Second, many cases of expectation do not involve any imagery at all but only reveal themselves as a feeling of surprise if they are not fulfilled. The philosophical literature abounds with arguments against the thesis that concrete similarity to a certain percept is essential for an expectation to have that percept as its object. But of course these are not arguments against cognitive and/or neural-network theories which entail that simultaneous matchings are performed below the introspectively accessible level; such an assumption is often used in explanations of perceptual learning. I here suggest a simple alternative theory of the nature of matching in such learning. Suppose that thought and perception alternate using the same representational medium, and that the contents of this medium are being continuously fed into the cognitive system which produces thought. Such a common feedback/input mechanism will, in itself, give rise to learning because at each alternation from expectation to perception, the system will perform an implicit matching. If the percept is sufficiently dissimilar to what would have occurred in the common medium without perception, the cognitive system will tend to switch to another region of its state-space, in which other kinds of expectations are produced.Item Controlled Medical Research or Routine Medical Procedure? The Ethics and Politics of Drawing a Line(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 1997) Munthe, ChristianItem Epilepsy, economics and ethics(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 1998) Malmgren, HelgeItem The controlling soul and the automatic body - a critical account of the control-automaticity distinction(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 1998) Radovic, SusannaItem Quality of Life measurement in Children with Epilepsy(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 1998) Chaplin, John E.; Olsson, IngridItem Steriliseringspolitik och fosterdiagnostik. Etiska likheter, skillnader och lärdomar(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 1998) Munthe, ChristianItem Towards a Proper Monism(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 1998) Radovic, FilipMy analysis of the mind-body problem suggests that the mind-body problem is a "problem" because: There are discrepancies in use between scientific notions like "physical" and philosophical notions like "phenomenal character". Phenomenological conceptions of the mind are primarily used as contrast-terms in arguments against metaphysical physicalism. "Qualia" and similar terms - properly analysed - reveal that they do not, as often claimed, have a "folk-psychological" origin. Rather these terms should be described as highly sophisticated technical terms and should not be confused with non-philosophical notions expressing experiential content. Dualists are obliged to offer us a positive, thus substantive, account of what they mean by "subjective experience" and similar idioms. This is, as I shall point out, a very hard task, mainly due to the strong contrast-mode in which these terms are used. When disconnected from the paradigmatic contrast-context these terms appear more or less out of place. But when faced with a hard-core reductionism the appeal to "phenomenal qualities" seems very appropriate. In my analysis, terms like "what it is like" and "experiential character" are concept that, as such, make perfect sense, but only in a limited context. The strong contrast mode in which these terms are used, I think, also explains why it is so hard to give a satisfactory semantic account for these terms.Item Fatigue and fatigability - semantic and etiologic perspectives(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 1998) Radovic, Susanna; Malmgren, HelgeItem Should I Stop Smoking?(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 1999) Munthe, ChristianItem Artificial Neural Networks in Medicine and Biology. A philosophical introduction(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 2000) Malmgren, HelgeItem Gestalt theory. Toward a Scientific Understanding of Consciousness(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 2000) Sundqvist, FredrikItem The "internal/external" metaphor in the philosophy of mind(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 2000) Malmgren, HelgeItem Etiska Principer och Fosterdiagnostik(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 2001) Munthe, ChristianItem Fully automatic segmentation of the hippocampus in MR images(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 2002) Starck, Göran; et alItem Conditions for forced learning of graded responses(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 2002) Malmgren, HelgeItem Time and the Body Schema(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 2003) Malmgren, HelgeItem The Concept of Mental Disorder(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 2003) Brülde, BengtItem Autonomy as a Positive Value – Some Conceptual Prerequisites(University of Gothenburg. Department of Philosophy, 2003) Juth, Niklas