Immunity and security using holism, ambient intelligence, triangulation, and stigmergy: Sensitivity analysis confronts fake news and COVID-19 using open set transduction.

This paper introduces a multi-faceted security methodology based on Holism, Ambient Intelligence, Triangulation, and Stigmergy (HATS) to combat the spread of current pandemics such as fake news and COVID-19. HATS leverages the apparent complementarity and similarity of physical and mental pandemics using adversarial learning and transduction to promote immunity on both using conformal prediction and principled symbiosis. As such, HATS confronts both mental and physical adversity found in misinformation and disinformation. It confers herd immunity using holism and triangulation that call to advantage on sensitivity analysis using open set transduction and meta-reasoning. Ambient intelligence and stigmergy further mediate meta-reasoning and re-identification in building and sharing immunity. As change is constant and everything is fluid, as truth is not always reality and reality is not always truth, and as truth is imponderable and lie can become truth, two things have to happen. First, reconditioning and reconfiguration engage random deficiency to discern familiarity from strangeness and a-typicality. Second, transfer learning using trans-adaptation and transposition, serve adaptation and interoperability. Together, this empowers open set transduction in facing adaptive persistent threats such as deception and denial when it engages moving target defense using modification and de-identification. Immunology and security further come together using to advantage the coupling of active and adversarial learning.

From sanctity to quality of life. Catholic bioethics in the era of Covid-19

Covid-19 is a major challenge for transformation in human species. In particular, health and illness should be revised as far as we need to reshape our categories and strategies for action. The common and widespread use of categories such "catholic and secular Bioethics" or "Ethics of sanctity of life and Ethics of quality of life" are partially inadequate to picture the current debate. New categories are on the plate: biorealism and biodenialism. Biorealism refers to the attitude of those who recognize the actual state of affairs of our planet and put their efforts to find a solution;biodenialism refers to those who reject the idea of an ultimate harm problem and try to defend the status quo of humanity as a whole. The idea that the traditional categories of Catholic Bioethics and Secular Bioethics are no longer available as the major instrument to understanding our reality implies that a new season of dialog is possible. Quality of life becomes a core issue for Catholic Bioethics whose aim is to reassess the interaction between humankind, non-human animals and environment. © 2021 Societa Editrice il Mulino. All rights reserved.

The politics of distress

We are regularly told that mental health problems are becoming more and more prevalent today, a trend exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. This way of conceiving what might rather be called people's—and particularly young people's—distress has several sources. Medical science has made spectacular progress over the last 50 years, encouraging us to look to it for solutions whenever things go wrong for people. A strongly atomistic line of Anglophone political thinking about the relation between individuals and society carries a bias in favour of trying to fix the former rather than the latter. Yet, there are good grounds for thinking that in many cases psychological distress comes from the way that people relate to each other and to the sociopolitical world that we have allowed to come into being. The last part of the paper gives examples of this from the experience of young people during the recent COVID‐19 pandemic.

Redefining nursing solidarity.

The idea of solidarity is in vogue, especially since the eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the term "solidarity," as used in nursing, is imprecise and vague, lacking clear definition and connoting a variety of general meanings. Based on the original meaning of "solidarity" in ancient Roman law, this article captures the archetypical idea of solidarity from a historical and interdisciplinary perspective. This archetypical or primary meaning comes before the development of any other meanings of the word, and it is therefore authentic and genuine because it does not derive from something else. After establishing the archetypical meaning of solidarity, the article translates this meaning into the area of nursing and demonstrates a deep connectivity between healthcare and solidarity. The second part of the article offers and develops a new definition of nursing solidarity as the responsibility for the healthcare of a person (unit) shared as a whole (entirety) by that person and a nurse or a nursing team (plurality). This new definition has some implications for nursing practice and education, since the definition emphasizes the idea that solidarity helps to (a) foster respect and avoid discrimination, (b) promote cohesion in health communities, (c) increase individual responsibility and a spirit of service, (d) stimulate motivation, (e) improve communication, (f) create an engaging workplace, and (g) develop leadership.

Thinking global health from the perspective of anthropology.

COVID-19 has brought about political, economic, cultural, and interspecies problems far from medical areas, which challenges academia to rethink global health. For holism principle, anthropology offers valuable insights into these health issues, including the political economy of inequality, cultural diversity, and cultural adaptations, as well as the study of multispecies ethnography. These perspectives indicate that unequal political and economic systems contribute to health problems when people acknowledge disease and illness mechanisms. Moreover, cultural diversity and cultural adaptation are essential for providing appropriate medical solutions. Lastly, as a research method of studying interspecies relationships, multispecies ethnography promotes one health and planetary health from the ultimate perspective of holism. In conclusion, global health is not only a bio-medical concept but also involves political economy, culture, and multispecies factors, for which anthropology proffers inspiring theories and methods.

Medicine's metaphysical morass: how confusion about dualism threatens public health.

What position on dualism does medicine require? Our understanding of that question has been dictated by holism, as defined by the biopsychosocial model, since the late twentieth century. Unfortunately, holism was characterized at the start with confused definitions of 'dualism' and 'reductionism', and that problem has led to a deep, unrecognized conceptual split in the medical professions. Some insist that holism is a nonreductionist approach that aligns with some form of dualism, while others insist it's a reductionist view that sets out to eradicate dualism. It's important to consider each version. Nonreductive holism is philosophically consistent and clinically unproblematic. Reductive holism, however, is conceptually incoherent-yet it is the basis for the common idea that the boundary between medical and mental health disorders must be vague. When we trace that idea through to its implementation in medical practice, we find evidence that it compromises the safety of patient care in the large portion of cases where clinicians grapple with diagnosis at the boundary between psychiatry and medicine. Having established that medicine must embrace some form of nonreductionism, I argue that Chalmers' naturalistic dualism is a stronger prima facie candidate than the nonreductive alternatives. Regardless of which form of nonreductionism we prefer, some philosophical corrections are needed to give medicine a safe and coherent foundation.