Safety and Reverence: How Roman Catholic Liturgy Can Respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The current COVID-19 pandemic is a major challenge for many religious denominations. The Roman Catholic Church strongly depends on physical communal worship and sacraments. Disagreements grow concerning the best balance between safety and piety. To address this issue, I review the major transmission risks for the SARS-CoV-2 virus and list certain measures to enhance the safety of the Roman Catholic Liturgy without compromising its intrinsic beauty and reverent spiritual attitude. This can be achieved through assimilation of several traditional elements into the modern liturgy. I emphasize that religious leadership and decision-making should be transparent and based on inclusiveness, pluralism, best scientific evidence and voluntary cooperation.

Computational animal welfare: towards cognitive architecture models of animal sentience, emotion and wellbeing.

To understand animal wellbeing, we need to consider subjective phenomena and sentience. This is challenging, since these properties are private and cannot be observed directly. Certain motivations, emotions and related internal states can be inferred in animals through experiments that involve choice, learning, generalization and decision-making. Yet, even though there is significant progress in elucidating the neurobiology of human consciousness, animal consciousness is still a mystery. We propose that computational animal welfare science emerges at the intersection of animal behaviour, welfare and computational cognition. By using ideas from cognitive science, we develop a functional and generic definition of subjective phenomena as any process or state of the organism that exists from the first-person perspective and cannot be isolated from the animal subject. We then outline a general cognitive architecture to model simple forms of subjective processes and sentience. This includes evolutionary adaptation which contains top-down attention modulation, predictive processing and subjective simulation by re-entrant (recursive) computations. Thereafter, we show how this approach uses major characteristics of the subjective experience: elementary self-awareness, global workspace and qualia with unity and continuity. This provides a formal framework for process-based modelling of animal needs, subjective states, sentience and wellbeing.

Patterns of early embryonic light exposure determine behavioural asymmetries in zebrafish: a habenular hypothesis.

Releasers of innate responses are more effective in many vertebrates when seen by the left eye. In zebrafish Brachydanio rerio, this asymmetry is linked with neuroanatomical asymmetry of the habenular complex (enlarged left lateral and right medial habenular nuclei): if habenular asymmetry is reversed, reader response to releasers shifts to the right eye. Light exposure (schedule: 14/10h,L/D) during the first few days of development post fertilisation (pf) controls the patterning of this asymmetry. We show here, using response to a model predator on day 7 pf, that absence of light on day 1 pf alone causes high responsiveness to shift from left to right eye and to intensify. Absence on day 2 pf or day 3 pf produces lesser shifts, whereas absence for all 3 days reduces responsiveness without any shift. Action on day 1 pf is likely to be due to modulation of gene expression. A known disturbance of gene (nrp1a) expression causes rerouting of the outflow of the left lateral habenula to the way station of the right medial habenula, providing a possible explanation of shifts. Variation in exposure of eggs to light is likely to produce inter-individual variation in the field.