C’est la CEPT (a.k.a. “Emptiness within Emptiness”) as open-ended, performance-based cinematic project grounded in ambient architectural and scenographic utility, utilizes a semi-abandoned building (badminton court) in Ahmedabad, India, origin of the School of Architecture (c.1962), later CEPT University, for a polemical and tragi-comic investigation of the vagaries of institutional memory, inclusive of intentional repressions. The pseudo-psychoanalytical prospects of the project question whether “emptiness” is a concept relative to subjective versus objective states. By hypothetically placing one form of emptiness within another (...) – i.e., via submission of the theatrical-cinematic work to a design competition for an installation at the EMST, a never-opened museum in Athens, Greece – an empty “ancient” building in India (the East) is conjoined with an empty new (i.e., never-opened) building in Greece (the West), the conflation becoming a means for doubling the subjective states under investigation and inducing hoped-for catharsis on all accounts. (shrink)

Although Indic perspectives toward nature are now well documented, climate engineering discussions seem to still lack the views from Indic or other non‐Western sources. In this article, I will apply some of the Hindu and Jain concepts such as karma, nonviolence (Ahiṃsā ), humility (Vinaya ), and renunciation (Saṃnyāsa ) to analyze the two primary climate geoengineering strategies of solar radiation management (SRM) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). I suggest that Indic philosophical and religious traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, (...) and Jainism offer ethical concepts to call for humility in all acts of climate engineering leading to a favoring of CDR over SRM and a favoring of lifestyle changes (particularly vegetarianism) over both. I demonstrate these concepts by introducing the five great elements from the Hindu philosophy, two Hindu legends from Hindu mythology, the Indic ethical ideas of karma, renunciation, and humility, and the moral authority of Gandhi. (shrink)

On the life and philosophy of Kundakunda, 2nd century exponent of Jainism.

America now is home to approximately three million Hindus and Jains. Their contribution to the economic and intellectual growth of the country is unquestionable. Dharma in America aims to explore the role of Hindu and Jain Americans in diverse fields such as: education and civic engagements medicine and healthcare music. Providing a concise history of Hindus and Jains in the Americas over the last two centuries, Dharma in America also gives some insights into the ongoing issues and challenges these (...) important ethnic and religious groups face in the America today. (shrink)

This Is A Concise Narrative Of The Beginnings, History, Schisms, Social Organization And Cosmology Of The Living Jain Tradition. The Study Is Covered In 7 Chapters - Atheistic Jainism? - Textual Sources And Ethnographic Literature - The Grand Transition In Jainism: Digambar And Shvetambar As Continuity And Change - The Shvetambar `Church` - The Digambar Case Reconsidered: Contemporary Period - The Digambar Jains Of North India: Society And Religion In Baraut, Uttar Pradesh - The Kanji Swami Panth: Contestation, Cosmology (...) And Confrontation. Condition Good. (shrink)

Modernist literature of the early to mid-twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic is replete with examples of a particular kind of relationship with objects, namely, the touching, collecting, and grasping of small, often highly personal, and ostensibly quotidian objects. From John’s glass collection in Woolf’s “Solid Objects,” Peter Walsh’s stroking of his pocket-knife in Mrs. Dalloway, Miriam’s frenzied absorption with flowers in Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, to Laura’s fiddling of her glass menagerie in Tennessee Williams’s eponymous play, fidgeting (...) in modernist literature and drama reveals a particular tendency of not just characters’ possession of things but also their possession by things. This phenomenon, I argue, allows characters to practice care as they withdraw from oppressive narratives of normalcy and (economic and biological) productivity, challenging their exclusionary and othering configurations. My paper looks at fidgeting in The Glass Menagerie as a part of this larger ideological and haptic orientation in modernist literature. The care invested by Laura in her intimate relationship with these “playthings” allows her to intercept not only male narrativizing forces and articulation of herself but also the rhetoric of productivity that circulates both within the play and in the larger economic backdrop of post-depression America. My paper attempts to foreground these objects of care in our readings of the play and modernist texts in general and, in so doing, highlight their importance as lenses of analysis that render visible alternate forms of agency and resistance. Lastly, it attempts to reframe fidgeting as an act of embodied refusal, evoking the radical potential of refusal within feminist and disability studies. (shrink)

On the life and works of ancient Jaina philosophers.

As natural language processing tools powered by big data become increasingly ubiquitous, questions of how to design, develop, and manage these tools and their impacts on diverse populations are pressing. We propose utilizing the concept of linguistic justice—the realization of equitable access to social and political life regardless of language—to provide a framework for examining natural language processing tools that learn from and use human language data. To support linguistic justice, we argue that natural language processing tools must be examined (...) not only from the perspective of a privileged, majority language user, but also from the perspectives of minoritized language users. Considering such perspectives can help to surface areas in which the data used within natural language processing tools may be working against linguistic justice by failing to provide access to information, services, or opportunities in users’ language of choice, underperforming for certain linguistic groups, or advancing harmful stereotypes that can lead to negative life outcomes for members of marginalized groups. At the same time, this framework can help to illuminate ways that these shortcomings can be addressed and allow us to use inclusive language data and approaches to leverage natural language processing technologies that advance linguistic justice. (shrink)

As modern deep networks become more complex, and get closer to human‐like capabilities in certain domains, the question arises as to how the representations and decision rules they learn compare to the ones in humans. In this work, we study representations of sentences in one such artificial system for natural language processing. We first present a diagnostic test dataset to examine the degree of abstract composable structure represented. Analyzing performance on these diagnostic tests indicates a lack of systematicity in representations (...) and decision rules, and reveals a set of heuristic strategies. We then investigate the effect of training distribution on learning these heuristic strategies, and we study changes in these representations with various augmentations to the training set. Our results reveal parallels to the analogous representations in people. We find that these systems can learn abstract rules and generalize them to new contexts under certain circumstances—similar to human zero‐shot reasoning. However, we also note some shortcomings in this generalization behavior—similar to human judgment errors like belief bias. Studying these parallels suggests new ways to understand psychological phenomena in humans as well as informs best strategies for building artificial intelligence with human‐like language understanding. (shrink)

"This book... is the English translation of the Hindi book Tattvārthasūtra with Upādhyāya (now Ailācārya) Srutasāgarji, as the principal commentator and edited by Dr Sudeep Jain in Hindi"--P. 3.

Lochlann Jain's debut non-fiction graphic novel, Things That Art, playfully interrogates the order of things. Toying with the relationship between words and images, Jain's whimsical compositions may seem straightforward. Upon closer inspection, however, the drawings reveal profound and startling paradoxes at the heart of how we make sense of the world. Commentaries by architect and theorist Maria McVarish, poet and naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield, musician and English Professor Drew Daniel, and the author offer further insight into the drawings in (...) this collection. A captivating look at the fundamental absurdities of everyday communication, Things that Art jolts us toward new forms of collation and collaboration. (shrink)

Annotation Does nature worship inspire Hindus to act in an environmentally conscious way? This book explores the above question with three communities, the Swadhyaya movement, the Bishnoi, and the Bhil communities.

Manju Jain's innovative study of T. S. Eliot's Harvard years traces the genesis of his major literary, religious and intellectual preoccupations in his early work as a student of philosophy, and explores its influence on his poetic and critical practice. His concerns were located within the mainstream of Harvard philosophical debates, especially in relation to the controversy of science versus religion. These questions (and Eliot's work as he grappled with them) point forward to important debates in contemporary philosophy and (...) hermeneutics. Drawing extensively on unpublished sources, Manju Jain offers answers to the questions of why Eliot failed to find satisfaction in an academic career devoted to philosophy, and why he abandoned the speculations of metaphysics for the dogmas of theology. (shrink)

Contributed articles presented at a seminar.

Psychologists and neuroscientists extensively rely on computational models for studying and analyzing the human mind. Traditionally, such computational models have been hand-designed by expert researchers. Two prominent examples are cognitive architectures and Bayesian models of cognition. Although the former requires the specification of a fixed set of computational structures and a definition of how these structures interact with each other, the latter necessitates the commitment to a particular prior and a likelihood function that – in combination with Bayes' rule – (...) determine the model's behavior. In recent years, a new framework has established itself as a promising tool for building models of human cognition: the framework of meta-learning. In contrast to the previously mentioned model classes, meta-learned models acquire their inductive biases from experience, that is, by repeatedly interacting with an environment. However, a coherent research program around meta-learned models of cognition is still missing to date. The purpose of this article is to synthesize previous work in this field and establish such a research program. We accomplish this by pointing out that meta-learning can be used to construct Bayes-optimal learning algorithms, allowing us to draw strong connections to the rational analysis of cognition. We then discuss several advantages of the meta-learning framework over traditional methods and reexamine prior work in the context of these new insights. (shrink)

This article critically examines the ways in which the trope of prosthesis has been used in recent theory to understand human-technology relationships. Analyzing the trope from a number of angles, including disability, factory labor practices, mass production, and marketing, the author scrutinizes ways in which technologies are simultaneously wounding and enabling in ways for which the prosthesis trope cannot account.

In “What Are Humans Doing in the Loop? Co-Reasoning and Practical Judgment When Using Machine Learning-Driven Decision Aids,” Salloch and Eriksen (2024) address the tension between algorithm explai...

Human perception has long been a critical subject of design thinking. While various studies have stressed the link between thinking and acting, particularly in spatial experience, the term “design thinking” seems to disconnect conceptual thinking from physical expression or process. Spatial perception is multimodal and fundamentally bound to the body that is not a mere receptor of sensory stimuli but an active agent engaged with the perceivable environment. The body apprehends the experience in which one’s kinesthetic engagement and knowledge play (...) an essential role. Although design disciplines have integrated the abstract, metaphoric, and visual aspects of the body and its movement into conceptual thinking, studies have pointed out that design disciplines have emphasized visuality above the other sensory domains and heavily engaged with the perception of visual configurations, relying on the Gestalt principles. Gestalt psychology must be valued for its attention to a whole. However, the theories of design elements and principles over-empathizing such visuality posit the aesthetics of design mainly as visual value and understate other sensorial and perceptual aspects. Although the visual approach may provide a practical means to represent and communicate ideas, a design process heavily driven by visuality can exhibit weaknesses undermining certain aspects of spatial experience despite the complexity. Grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s notion of multisensory perception, this article discusses the relationship between body awareness and spatial perception and its implication for design disciplines concerning built environments. Special attention is given to the concepts of kinesthetic and synesthetic phenomena known as multisensory and cross-sensory, respectively. This discussion integrates the corporeal and spatiotemporal realms of human experience into the discourse of kinesthetic and synesthetic perceptions. Based on the conceptual, theoretical, and precedent analyses, this article proposes three models for design thinking: Synesthetic Translation, Kinesthetic Resonance, and Kinesthetic Engagement. To discuss the concepts rooted in action-based perception and embodied cognition, this study borrows the neurological interpretation of haptic perception, interoception, and proprioception of space. This article suggests how consideration of the kinesthetic or synesthetic body can deepen and challenge the existing models of the perceptual aspects of environmental psychology adopted in design disciplines. (shrink)

This essay is conceived as a contribution to the academic debate on the ethical status of mystical traditions with regard to Jain asceticism in particular and—through comparison of Jain with Advaita Vedanta asceticism—to ideologies of radical quietism more generally. For both Jain and Advaita Vedantic ascetic traditions, the material world, and particularly the body, are the primary obstacles to spiritual development. We deal with the social, physical, and environmental implications of such a worldview, rather than with the (...) practice or the phenomenology or the doctrine of mysticism, which we grant to be an accurate reflection of a particular kind of cosmic experience. We address ethical issues, not metaphysical ones. In our discussion of Jain asceticism, we demonstrate that the basic problem (and promise) of quietism, in almost any cultural form, is the shocking realization it can occasion that the Real has absolutely nothing to do with the social or with any sort of ethical action. We argue that Jain asceticism cannot function as an adequate resource for contemporary ethics. Our normative concerns lie exclusively with the adequacy of Jain quietism in supporting a stable global community and a sustainable natural environment. One can be mystical without being ethical, and ethical without being a mystic. We conclude that the truths of quietism are both very profound and profoundly nonethical. (shrink)

Contributed papers on Jainism doctrines, philosophy and Prakrit language.

This book provides a unique insider’s look at the world’s largest film industry, now globally known as ‘Bollywood’ and challenges existing notions about Indian films. -/- Indian films have been a worldwide phenomenon for decades. Chapters in this edited volume take a fresh view of various hidden gems by maestros such as Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy, V Shantaram, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Shakti Samant, Rishikesh Mukherjee, and others. Other chapters provide a pioneering review and analysis of the portrayal (...) of Indian religious communities such as Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Parsis. The themes covered include unique Indian feminism and male chauvinism, environment and climate issues, international locations and diaspora tourism, religious harmony and conflict, the India-Pakistan relationship, asceticism, and renunciation in Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Unlike many recent studies of Indian films, these chapters do not distinguish between popular and serious cinema. Many chapters focus on Hindi films, but others bring insights from films made in other parts of India and its neighbouring countries. (shrink)

In this modern world, a massive amount of data is processed and broadcasted daily. This includes the use of high energy, massive use of memory space, and increased power use. In a few applications, for example, image processing, signal processing, and possession of data signals, etc., the signals included can be viewed as light in a few spaces. The compressive sensing theory could be an appropriate contender to manage these limitations. “Compressive Sensing theory” preserves extremely helpful while signals are sparse (...) or compressible. It very well may be utilized to recoup light or compressive signals with less estimation than customary strategies. Two issues must be addressed by CS: plan of the estimation framework and advancement of a proficient sparse recovery calculation. The essential intention of this work expects to audit a few ideas and utilizations of compressive sensing and to give an overview of the most significant sparse recovery calculations from every class. The exhibition of acquisition and reconstruction strategies is examined regarding the Compression Ratio, Reconstruction Accuracy, Mean Square Error, and so on. (shrink)

Social development organizations increasingly employ artificial intelligence -enabled tools to help team members collaborate effectively and efficiently. These tools are used in various team management tasks and activities. Based on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology, this study explores various factors influencing employees’ use of AI-enabled tools. The study extends the model in two ways: a) by evaluating the impact of these tools on the employees’ collaboration and b) by exploring the moderating role of AI aversion. Data (...) were collected through an online survey of employees working with AI-enabled tools. The analysis of the research model was conducted using partial least squares, with a two-step model – measurement and structural models of assessment. The results revealed that the antecedent variables, such as effort expectancy, performance expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions, are positively associated with using AI-enabled tools, which have a positive relationship with collaboration. It also concluded a significant effect of AI aversion in the relationship between performance expectancy and use of technology. These findings imply that organizations should focus on building an environment to adopt AI-enabled tools while also addressing employees’ concerns about AI. (shrink)

According to Arti Dhand, it can be argued that all Indian ethics have been primarily virtue ethics. Many have indeed jumped on the virtue bandwagon, providing prima facie interpretations of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist canons in virtue terms. Others have expressed firm skepticism, claiming that virtues are not proven to be grounded in the nature of things and that, ultimately, the appeal to virtue might just well be a mere façon de parler. In this paper, we aim to advance (...) the discussion of Indian virtue ethics. Our intent is not to provide a catch-all interpretation of the different Indian schools. Our goal is, more modestly, to offer a theory of virtues in Indian philosophies, as a framework for theorists and interpreters who see these diverse traditions as amenable to systematic virtue analysis. Our theory grounds virtues in the reality of genuine moral dispositions and in a system of beliefs where morality is understood as transformative in nature. (shrink)

We are encouraged by the many positive commentaries on our target article. In this response, we recapitulate some of the points raised and identify synergies between them. We have arranged our response based on the tension between data and architecture that arises in the meta-learning framework. We additionally provide a short discussion that touches upon connections to foundation models.

On the fundamentals of Jaina philosophy.