Medical ethics in the Indian context is closely related to indigenous classical and folk traditions. This article traces the history of Indian conceptions of ethics and medicine, with an emphasis on the Hindu tradition. Classical Ayurvedic texts including Carakasamhita and Susrutasamhita provide foundational assumptions about the body, the self, and gunas, which provide the underpinnings for the ethical system. Karma, the notion that every action has consequences, provides a foundation for medical morality. Conception, prolongation of one's blood-line is an important (...) ethical aim of life. Thus a wide range of practices to further conception are acceptable. Abortion is a more complex matter ethically. At the end of life death is viewed in the context of passage to another life. Death is a relief from suffering to be coped with by the thought of an eternal atman or rebirth. Keywords: India, Hindu, karma, conception, death CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Modern Indian nationalist thought has dealt with political ideas such as freedom, equality, liberty, democracy, so on and so forth. The idea of freedom received enough attention on the part of most of the modern Indian political thinkers. However, the idea of freedom as envisaged by the nationalist thinkers did not receive positive response from the other stream of modern Indian thought. Dalit-Bahujan political thinkers questioned the narration of freedom as propagated by the nationalist thinkers. Nationalist thinkers aspired for universal (...) values and at the same time reaffirmed ancient religious principles. Such effort was questioned and doubted by the other thinkers of modern India. Thus, one can find different narrations of freedom, such as social, economic and political. The social categories such as caste, class and gender became bases for their narration on the idea of freedom. The ideas and arguments of B. G. Tilak, M. K. Gandhi, Pandita Ramabai, Jyotiba Phule, B. R. Ambedkar E. M. S. Namboodripad and others would help in larger understanding of the idea of freedom. (shrink)

The Lingayat movement led by Basava, Allama, Mahadevi and many others in Karnataka in the twelfth century stands as one of the important movements that challenged, protested and, to a major extent,...

This book examines linguistic expressions of emotion in intensional contexts and offers a formally elegant account of the relationship between language and emotion. The author presents a compelling case for the view that there exist, contrary to popular belief, logical universals at the intersection of language and emotive content. This book shows that emotive structures in the mind that are widely assumed to be not only subjectively or socio-culturally variable but also irrelevant to a general theory of cognition offer an (...) unusually suitable ground for a formal theory of emotive representations, allowing for surprising logical and cognitive consequences for a theory of cognition. Challenging mainstream assumptions in cognitive science and in linguistics, this book will appeal to linguists, philosophers of the mind, linguistic anthropologists, psychologists and cognitive scientists of all persuasions. Prakash Mondal is Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. He is the author of Language, Mind and Computation (2014), Natural Language and Possible Minds (2016) and Language, Biology and Cognition (completed). (shrink)

ABSTRACT The emergence of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has wide-ranging implications for the field of professional psychology. As clinical practice has rapidly adapted to ensure continuity of care, doctoral students have encountered unique opportunities for ethics-related competency development across practicum training settings. This article discusses the relevant American Psychological Association Ethics Code standards and additional ethical considerations facing trainees as they navigate their foundational clinical experiences and develop as professional psychologists in light of a pandemic.

_Natural Language and Possible Minds: How Language Uncovers the Cognitive Landscape of Nature_ examines the intrinsic connection between natural language and the nature of mentality, offering to show how language can shed light on the forms of other types of mentality in non-humans.

Does natural selection favor veridical percepts—those that accurately depict objective reality? Perceptual and cognitive scientists standardly claim that it does. Here we formalize this claim using the tools of evolutionary game theory and Bayesian decision theory. We state and prove the “Fitness-Beats-Truth Theorem” which shows that the claim is false: If one starts with the assumption that perception involves inference to states of the objective world, then the FBT Theorem shows that a strategy that simply seeks to maximize expected-fitness payoff, (...) with no attempt to estimate the “true” world state, does consistently better. More precisely, the FBT Theorem provides a quantitative measure of the extent to which the fitness-only strategy dominates the truth strategy, and of how this dominance increases with the size of the perceptual space. The FBT Theorem supports the Interface Theory of Perception, which proposes that our perceptual systems have evolved to provide a species-specific interface to guide adaptive behavior, and not to provide a veridical representation of objective reality. (shrink)

On classic Hindu Yoga philosophy; a study.

This book concerns clinical psychology, but it is most concerned with the world outside the clinic. That world—where culture, history, and economy are found—radically impacts the public’s mental health. However these worldly considerations often do not feature centrally in the science and practice of clinical psychology, a subfield of psychology seemingly dedicated to mental health. Desai offers a corrective by travelling out of the clinic and into the world, exploring ideas, movements, and thinkers that help broaden our approach to (...) well-being, by situating it within its cultural, historical, and sociopolitical contexts. The book aims to be an intercultural journey itself—encountering Buddhism, phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, Mahatma Gandhi, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. along the way. Featuring a Foreword by Jeffrey Sachs, the book positions pressing matters such as social justice, racial justice, and environmental justice as integral components of good mental health work. The book will be of interest to readers interested in cultural and community approaches to psychological science and practice. (shrink)

The Interface Theory of Perception, as stated by D. Hoffman, says that perceptual experiences do not to approximate properties of an “objective” world; instead, they have evolved to provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to the world. Conscious Realism states that the objective world consists of ‘conscious agents’ and their experiences. Under these two theses, consciousness creates all objects and properties of the physical world: the problem of explaining this process reverses the mind-body problem. In support of the interface theory (...) I propose that our perceptions have evolved, not to report the truth, but to guide adaptive behaviors. Using evolutionary game theory, I state a theorem asserting that perceptual strategies that see the truth will, under natural selection, be driven to extinction by perceptual strategies of equal complexity but tuned instead to fitness. I then give a minimal mathematical definition of the essential elements of a “conscious agent.” Under the conscious realism thesis, this leads to a non-dualistic, dynamical theory of conscious process in which both observer and observed have the same mathematical structure. The dynamics raises the possibility of emergence of combinations of conscious agents, in whose experiences those of the component agents are entangled. In support of conscious realism, I discuss two more theorems showing that a conscious agent can consistently see geometric and probabilistic structures of space that are not necessarily in the world per se but are properties of the conscious agent itself. The world simply has to be amenable to such a construction on the part of the agent; and different agents may construct different structures as seeming to belong to the world. This again supports the idea that any true structure of the world is likely quite different from what we see. I conclude by observing that these theorems suggest the need for a new theory which resolves the reverse mind-body problem, a good candidate for which is conscious agent theory. (shrink)

Natural language meaning has properties of both (embodied) cognitive representations and formal/mathematical structures. But it is not clear how they actually relate to one another. This article argues that how properties of cognitive representations and formal/mathematical structures of natural language meaning can be united remains one of the puzzles in cognitive science. That is primarily because formal/mathematical structures of natural language meaning are abstract, logical, and truth‐conditional properties, whereas cognitive/conceptual representations are embodied and grounded in sensory‐motor systems. After reviewing the (...) current progress, this work offers, in outline, the general formulations that show how these two different kinds of representations for semantic structures can (potentially) be unified and also proposes three desiderata for testing, in brain dynamics, the mathematical equivalence between formal symbolic representations (and their transitions), and neuronal population codes (and their transitions). (shrink)

Résumé En Afrique du Sud, de nouveaux mouvements communautaires, où dominent les femmes, les jeunes, les pauvres, où tout le monde participe, sont apparus depuis la fin de l’apartheid. Ils luttent contre l’ANC, refusent de payer les services publics pour compenser les diminutions d’allocations, essaient d’inventer de nouveaux services. Les anciens militants de la libération nationale sont forcés de revoir leurs alliances et de se fondre dans ce mouvement horizontal. L’histoire est réécrite, hors des compromis que les luttes pour l’indépendance (...) avaient faits avec le colonisateur. Il s’agit de lutter contre les politiques imposées par la Banque mondiale et le Fonds monétaire international et, concrètement, contre les expulsions de logement et contre la privatisation des services et des espaces urbains. La communauté a cessé de croire en l’État, dans la figure du père. Alors les gens remplissent les logements vides comme ils l’entendent, avec qui ils veulent, brouillent la frontière entre légal et illégal. Ils s’inspirent de la lutte des piqueteros en Argentine et de ce qu’ils ont entendu de Seattle. (shrink)

Compilation of lectures delivered on the works of Yaśovijaya, 1624-1688, Jaina philosopher.

Mitochondrial ATP synthesis, calcium buffering, and trafficking affect neuronal function and survival. Several genes implicated in mitochondrial functions map within the genomic region associated with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11DS), which is a key genetic cause of neuropsychiatric diseases. Although neuropsychiatric diseases impose a serious health and economic burden, their etiology and pathogenesis remain largely unknown because of the dearth of valid animal models and the challenges in investigating the pathophysiology in neuronal circuits. Mouse models of 22q11DS are becoming valid tools (...) for studying human psychiatric diseases, because they have hemizygous deletions of the genes that are deleted in patients and exhibit neuronal and behavioral abnormalities consistent with neuropsychiatric disease. The deletion of some 22q11DS genes implicated in mitochondrial function leads to abnormal neuronal and synaptic function. Herein, we summarize recent findings on mitochondrial dysfunction in 22q11DS and extend those findings to the larger context of schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric diseases. (shrink)

This book explores the cognitive constraints and principles of variation in structures of linguistic meaning across languages. It unifies cognitive-semantic representations with formal-semantic representations to make a unique contribution to the study of typological generalizations and universals in natural language semantics. This unified approach not only helps reveal why semantic structures have the observed variation they have, but also sheds light on the compelling cognitive and formal regularities and patterns in the variation of linguistic semantics. The book also advances the (...) general principles of a cognitively-oriented semantic typology. Lucid and topical, the book will be an indispensable resource for students and researchers of language typology, linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and semantics. It will also be of interest to theoretical linguists of both cognitivist and formalist schools. (shrink)

Using Durkheim as an exemplary figure, this article takes up the problem of the entanglement of Orientalism with the social sciences. Durkheim is one of the classic theorists of the sociology of religion whose work remains relevant today. He drew on data relating to non-Western cultures, including India to a certain extent, in working out his theories of the division of labour and of religion. Durkheim's work is placed against the pioneering research programme of S. N. Balagangadhara on the comparative (...) science of cultures. In doing so, the article takes up the common points of focus in their work: theory of religion; India; its religion, Hinduism; its religious law; and its caste system. Durkheim, it is argued, exemplifies the tying of Orientalism into the social sciences such that their facts and theories become problematic. Balagangadhara's research programme provides a means of understanding how this happens, and why it is a problem, and offers an alternative framework. (shrink)

This paper revisits the conception of intelligence and understanding as embodied in the Turing Test. It argues that a simple system of meaning relations drawn from words/lexical items in a natural language and framed in terms of syntax-free relations in linguistic texts can help ground linguistic inferences in a manner that can be taken to be 'understanding' in a mechanized system. Understanding in this case is a matter of running through the relevant inferences meaning relations allow for, and some of (...) these inferences are plain deductions and some can serve to act as abductions. Understanding in terms of meaning relations also supervenes on linguistic syntax because such understanding cannot be simply reduced to syntactic relations. The current approach to meaning and understanding thus shows that this is one way, if not the only way, of framing Alan Turing's original insight into the nature of thinking in computing systems. (shrink)

Yoga American Style Turn your hand so your palm is facing towards you. Now spread your fingers wide. See the distance ...

This paper is an attempt at exploring the possibility of reconciling the two interpretations of biolinguistics which have been recently projected by Koster(Biolinguistics 3(1):61–92, 2009). The two interpretations—trivial and nontrivial—can be roughly construed as non-internalist and internalist conceptions of biolinguistics respectively. The internalist approach boils down to a conception of language where language as a mental grammar in the form of I-language grows and functions like a biological organ. On the other hand, under such a construal consistent with Koster’s (Biolinguistics (...) 3(1):61-92, 2009), the non-internalist version does not necessarily have to be externalist in nature; rather it is a matter of mutual reinforcement of biology and culture under the rubric of a co-evolutionary dynamics. Here it will be argued that the apparent dichotomy between these two conceptions of biolinguistics can perhaps be resolved if we have a richer synthesis that accounts for both internalism and non-internalism. (shrink)

Meditation hasrecently emerged as a topic of interest for the medicinal scientists as well as for the neuropsychological scientists for different reasons. The methods used by both of these approaches have been mostly objective. This quest of objectification has led to vigorous use of tools like EEG and ERP, which has definitely led to revealing of marvellous aspects of meditation. However, the subjective states of meditation have been much less explored, especially when seen in contrast to the objective states. The (...) need of the hour is to use the qualitative methods for exploration of these states because these methods better depict the unique experiences of meditation. In this context, we conducted a qualitative study in the form of Interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore the subjective experiences associated with the inner-light perception of a group of meditators practising the meditation technique of Vihangam Yoga. It is an ancient meditation technique of India, initiated by HH Sadguru Sadafal Deoji Maharaj in the year 1924 and now being propogated by HH Sadguru Swatantra Deoji Maharaj. When asked in detail, the practitioners often report of many mystique experiences. This particular Yoga group was chosen because in a survey of among four groups, the maximum number of confident mediators reporting of perceiving some sort of luminance during meditation was found in this group. For this study, the inner-light perception experience of this meditation was chosen because of the divine value attached to this experience across all the cultures and religions. This experience was also chosen because of the great impact on their lives that Vihangam Yogis attributed to this experience. As the results of the study, four major themes were obtained which were: Uniqueness of the nature of light Experiences during light perception Explanations of the source of light Change in outlook towards world and associated changes in thinking. (shrink)