Is the state we experienced meditating a religious, philosophical, mystical experience? Or is it just a change in brain physiology? Is it possible to achieve a state "beyond the mind" (meditative state) through a technique that uses the mind (meditative technique)? This article explores these aspects by the perspective of neurobiology.

Um dos papéis mais importantes da Universidade, juntamente com o ensino e a produção de conhecimento, é sua inserção efetiva na comunidade mais ampla, especialmente, em sua comunidade de acolhida. A proposta da Universidade Luterana do Brasil - ULBRA, através do Curso de Psicologia é, justamente, de..

Although advance care planning can lead to more patient-centered care, the communication around it can be challenging in acute care hospitals, where saving a life or shortening hospitalization is important priorities. Our qualitative study in an acute care hospital in Japan revealed when specifically physicians and nurses start communication to facilitate ACP. Seven physicians and 19 nurses responded to an interview request, explaining when ACP communication was initiated with 32 patients aged 65 or older. Our qualitative approach employed descriptive analysis (...) to identify major themes, which included “initiation by patients” and “initiation by healthcare professionals.” In the latter case, seven specific triggers were identified: when the patients’ medical condition changed in terms of symptom relief, when the patients’ medical condition changed in terms of prognostic prediction, when serious events occurred, when a choice of treatment was presented, when the location for end-of-life care was chosen, when the patients’ cognitive function deteriorated, and when serious events settled down. Within this group of healthcare professionals, physicians were more focused on changes in their patients’ medical condition, whereas nurses focused more on their patients’ desire for a long-term perspective. Nurses encouraged patients to consider ACP themselves, which developed into an approach to respect patients’ autonomy. In acute care hospitals, it appeared to be desirable to have an early discussion where patients could understand the significance ACP, which would matter even after their discharge from the hospital. (shrink)

A leader in the modern commentary on ethics and philosophy, Mary Warnock casts a critical eye over her life and times.

This selection consists of extracts from writings of women concerned solely with the pursuit of abstract ideas, historically contextualized. The texts, for the most part, reflect issues widely debated in their contemporary societies. Extracts from lesser-known writers are also included, providing a diversity of arguments spanning four centuries and including some notable contemporary philosophers.

How is hope to be found amid the ethical and political dilemmas of modern life? Writer and philosopher Mary Zournazi brought her questions to some of the most thoughtful intellectuals at work today. She discusses "joyful revolt" with Julia Kristeva, the idea of "the rest of the world" with Gayatri Spivak, the "art of living" with Michel Serres, the "carnival of the senses" with Michael Taussig, the relation of hope to passion and to politics with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto (...) Laclau. A dozen stimulating minds weigh in with their visions of a better social and political order. The result is a collaboration - of writing, of thinking, and of politics - that demonstrates more clearly than any single-authored project could how ideas encountering one another can produce the vision needed for social change. (shrink)

Nature and Mortality is a challenging look at some of the major public issues of our time through the eyes of one of our most influential and probing liberal humanists. It is a frank account on where we stand today on such controversial matters as human embryology, genetic engineering, euthanasia and abortion. Warnock's views may seem like a red rag to a bull to some, but her contribution to the debate is always stimulating. Enlivened by autobiographical anecdote and some delicious (...) side-swipes, Nature and Mortality is Mary Warnock at her most perceptive, wise and entertaining. (shrink)

The works of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) ranged from the early _Thoughts on the Education of Daughters_ to _The Female Reader_, a selection of texts for girls, and included two novels. But her reputation is founded on _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ of 1792. This treatise is the first great document of feminism—and is now accepted as a core text in western tradition. It is not widely known that the germ of Wollstonecraft’s great work came out of an (...) earlier and much shorter vindication—A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), written in the context of the issues raised by the French Revolution. This edition, which follows the model of other Broadview Editions in including a range of materials that help the reader to see the work in the context of its era out of which it emerged, is arranged chronologically, opening with Wollstonecraft’s “other vindication.” It also includes a wide range of other documents in appendices, as well as a comprehensive and authoritative introduction, chronology, and full index. (shrink)

This chapter first distinguishes between originality and creativity. True originality is rare, whether in art, science, or LEGO, because to be truly original means to have done something that no one has ever done before, and that no one could have anticipated. Most LEGO creations will not meet that condition, for with the exception of serious hobbyists who undertake massive builds, most players who make original creations are making creations that are commonplace. Painting or remolding or placing stickers on the (...) bricks counts against the spirit of LEGO creation. The chapter then discusses The LEGO Movie embodies the paradox that presents three conflicting models of creative LEGO play, illustrated by the Master Builders, Finn's father, and Emmet. The movie's creators were deliberately playing around with conflicting popular conceptions of creativity: creativity as madness, creativity as thinking outside the box, and creativity as vision. (shrink)

All religion and much philosophy has been concerned with the contrast between the ephemeral and the eternal. Human beings have always sought ways to overcome time, and to prove that death is not the end. This book consists then in an exploration of certain closely related ideas: personal identity, time, history and our commitment to the future, and the role of imagination in life.

Fundamental principles : the nature of the dispute -- Types of euthanasia -- Psychiatric assisted suicide -- Neonates -- Incompetent adults -- Human life is sacred -- The slippery slope -- Medical views -- Four methods of easing death and their effect on doctors -- Looking further ahead.

In addition to the many easily observable differences between people, there are also differences in people's subjective experiences that are harder to observe, and which, as a consequence, remain hidden. For example, people vary widely in how much visual imagery they experience. But those who cannot see in their mind's eye, tend to assume everyone is like them. Those who can, assume everyone else can as well. We argue that a study of such hidden phenomenal differences has much to teach (...) cognitive science. Uncovering and describing this variation (a search for unknown unknowns) may help predict otherwise puzzling differences in human behavior. The very existence of certain differences can also act as a stress test for some cognitive theories. Finally, studying hidden phenomenal differences is the first step toward understanding what kinds of environments may mask or unmask links between phenomenal experience and observable behavior. (shrink)

Behavioral genetics and cultural evolution have both revolutionized our understanding of human behavior – largely independent of each other. Here, we reconcile these two fields under a dual inheritance framework, offering a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between genes and culture. Going beyond typical analyses of gene–environment interactions, we describe the cultural dynamics that shape these interactions by shaping the environment and population structure. A cultural evolutionary approach can explain, for example, how factors such as rates of innovation and (...) diffusion, density of cultural subgroups, and tolerance for behavioral diversity impact heritability estimates, thus yielding predictions for different social contexts. Moreover, when cumulative culture functionally overlaps with genes, genetic effects become masked, unmasked, or even reversed, and the causal effects of an identified gene become confounded with features of the cultural environment. The manner of confounding is specific to a particular society at a particular time, but a WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) sampling problem obscures this boundedness. Cultural evolutionary dynamics are typically missing from models of gene-to-phenotype causality, hindering generalizability of genetic effects across societies and across time. We lay out a reconciled framework and use it to predict the ways in which heritability should differ between societies, between socioeconomic levels, and other groupings within some societies but not others, and over the life course. An integrated cultural evolutionary behavioral genetic approach cuts through the nature–nurture debate and helps resolve controversies in topics such as IQ. (shrink)

We propose an efficient algorithm for deciding the reachability between any nodes on XML data represented by connected directed graphs. We develop a technique to reduce the size of the reference table for the reachability test. Using the small table and the standard range labeling method for rooted ordered trees, we show that our algorithm answers almost queries in a constant time preserving the space efficiency and a reasonable preprocessing time.

The unity of aesthetic and teleological judgment, the third and earlier Critiques, is based on Kant′s discovery of a “heuristic method” for applying judgments regarding sense phenomena to abstract thought, a “second attention” which enables an “idea of the whole”. Synthetic judgment, basis for cognition and human action, depends on efficacy of non-empirical insights: the transcendental standpoint, “regulative” ideas, consciousness of “ought” and the reality of freedom, universality of natural mechanism, the principle of “fortuitous” purposiveness. The activity of reflective judgment (...) in the encounter with the beautiful, sublime, living, and two paradigmatic types of explanation, inspired by Spinoza′s distinction of extensio and cogitatio, permit Kant to bridge the gap between freedom and necessity, theoretical knowledge and morality. (shrink)

The essay is a written version of a talk Nakamura Yūjirō gave at the College international de philosophie in Paris in 1983. In the talk Nakamura connects the issue of common sense in his own work to that of place in Nishida Kitarō and the creative imagination in Miki Kiyoshi. He presents this connection between the notions of common sense, imagination, and place as constituting one important thread in contemporary Japanese philosophy. He begins by discussing the significance of (...) place (basho) that is being rediscovered today in response to the shortcomings of the modern Western paradigm, and discusses it in its various senses, such as ontological ground or substratum, the body, symbolic space, and linguistic or discursive topos in ancient rhetoric. He then relates this issue to the philosophy of place Nishida developed in the late 1920s, and after providing an explication of Nishida’s theory, discusses it further in light of some linguistic and psychological theories. Nakamura goes on to discuss his own interest in the notion of common sense traceable to Aristotle and its connection to the rhetorical concept of topos, and Miki’s development of the notion of the imagination in the 1930s in response to Nishida’s theory. And in doing so he ties all three—common sense, place, and imagination—together as suggestive of an alternative to the modern Cartesian standpoint of the rational subject that has constituted the traditional paradigm of the modern West. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the use of effortless attention in performing daily activities and tasks. It details a study developed by The University of Chicago and Claremont Graduate University, and named the Experience Sampling Method to collect data from subjects of the study investigating the use of effortless attention in daily life. The findings are based on an ESM study of subjects consisting of middle and high school students from around the United States and the Sloan Study of Youth and (...) Social Development. The Sloan study focuses on investigating both effortful and effortless attention experiences of the subjects. A large number of students reveal how effortless attention has helped them to focus better on several tasks without much effort. (shrink)

Free will in intentional consciousness is exposed to skeptics since it was found that subconscious neural activities, what is called readiness potential, precedes the intention to an action. The question of whether free will is an authentic illusion has been argued not only in psychology but physics and philosophy. Most of scientists, however, think that the intentional consciousness who believes to have his/her own free will, is determined by readiness potential in advance, and that free will cannot coexist with determinism. (...) We here point out that knowing to be determined in advance cannot be verified till local event at a local site can be known from a different local site without disturbing the event. That is the assumption of locality. We here show that determinism, free will and locality are three essential elements in consciousness, and show that they constitute trilemma. The fact that one of three elements must be abandoned can lead to three types of consciousness. Absence of free will can constitute type I consciousness which is consistent with symptoms in autism spectrum disorder such as weakened theory of mind. Absence of determinism can constitute type II consciousness which is consistent with symptoms in schizophrenia such as thought insertion, self-other integration. Absence of locality can constitute type III consciousness which is consistent with typical people. We can find the entanglement of intentional consciousness with unconsciousness including readiness potential only in type III consciousness. Finally, we show that sense of agency and free will cannot be established until consciousness as an entanglement is implemented. (shrink)

The industries of Japan have developed by learning from Western industries, especially the USA, and by implementing many of their concepts and technologies. However, Japanese industries have often implemented these concepts and technologies in a very different way from the USA. For example, while the USA uses information systems in retail industries as a tool by which data are collected and analysed to ‘control the market’, in Japan this same technology is considered rather as a learning device to ‘interpret the (...) market’. While in the USA the market is seen as a natural phenomenon capable of being controlled, the Japanese see it as an ambiguous phenomenon that is ever changing and is not capable of being controlled. Rather it is important to feel the change in the market itself. (shrink)

The 29 commentaries amplified our key arguments; offered extensions, implications, and applications of the framework; and pushed back and clarified. To help forge the path forward for cultural evolutionary behavioral genetics, we (1) focus on conceptual disagreements and misconceptions about the concepts of heritability and culture; (2) further discuss points raised about the intertwined relationship between culture and genes; and (3) address extensions to the proposed framework, particularly as it relates to cultural clusters, development, and power. These commentaries, and the (...) deep engagement they represent, reinforce the importance of integrating cultural evolution and behavioral genetics. (shrink)

Measuring processes of a single spin-1/2 object and of a pair of spin-1/2 objects in the EPR-Bohm state are modeled by systems of differential equations. The latter model is a local model with hidden variables of the EPR-Bohm gedanken experiment. Although there is no dynamical interaction between the pair of spin-1/2 objects, the model reproduces approximately the quantum-mechanical correlations by coincidence counting. Hence the Bell inequality is violated. This result supports the idea that the coincidence counting is the source of (...) the apparent nonlocality in the EPR-Bohm gedanken experiment. (shrink)