ABSTRACT This essay examines Satyajit Ray’s children’s film Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne to interrogate the ways it signals the utopian. Contending that its utopian desire manifests through the trope of wish-fulfillment, it illuminates the trope’s centrality in the film’s imagination and articulation of freedom. Moreover, the essay suggests that the film’s utopianism is also anchored in its irrealist aesthetics. Engaging with the film’s figuration of ghosts and its violation of the narrative structure of the real, the essay illuminates how these (...) formal features inform, and are informed by, a utopian desire. Furthermore, the essay notes that despite its inherent utopianism, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne fails to resolve some of the more obdurate social contradictions in its diegetic world, especially around questions of class, gender, and caste. Arguing that these “failures” are in keeping with its utopian spirit, I suggest they draw our attention to the imperfections of our real conditions of existence and flag the limits of textual utopianism. In so doing, they refer negatively to the social field beyond pointing to the abiding importance of class struggle as the ultimate agent of transformative social change. (shrink)

Background: Risks to healthcare workers have escalated during the pandemic and they are likely to experience a greater level of stress. This cross-sectional study investigated mental distress among healthcare workers during the early phase of Coronavirus disease-2019 outbreak in India.Method: 140 healthcare workers of a tertiary care hospital in India were assessed for perceived stress and insomnia. A factor analysis with principal component method reduced these questions to four components which were categorized as insomnia, stress-related anxiety, stress-related irritability, and stress-related (...) hopelessness. Further statistical analyses were done on these factor scores to identify the predictors and investigate the differences between the different categories of healthcare workers.Result: Doctors had the highest level of anxiety among the healthcare workers. Both doctors and nurses perceived a greater level of irritability than the other HCWs. Compared to doctors and nurses, other HCWs were more likely to experience insomnia. Lower age, higher education, female gender, and urban habitat were associated with greater perception of anxiety. Older age, being quarantined, and single marital status were the significant predictors of irritability. Female gender, single marital-status, and higher number of medical ailments contributed to perceived hopelessness. Quarantine significantly predicted insomnia.Conclusion: Different categories of healthcare workers are experiencing varied mental health problems owing to their heterogeneous socio-demographic backgrounds. Tailored and personalized care, as well as policies, might help in alleviating their problems. Further research is warranted to explore the psychological distress and remedies among these frontline workers during and after the ongoing pandemic crisis. (shrink)

Objective: To explore the relationship between the presentation of suffering and support for euthanasia in the British news media.Method: Data was retrieved by searching the British newspaper database LexisNexis from 1996 to 2000. Twenty-nine articles covering three cases of family assisted suicide were found. Presentations of suffering were analysed employing Heidegger’s distinction between technological ordering and poetic revealing.Findings: With few exceptions, the press constructed the complex terrain of FAS as an orderly or orderable performance. This was enabled by containing the (...) contradictions of FAS through a number of journalistic strategies: treating degenerative dying as an aberrant condition, smoothing over botched attempts, locating the object of ethical evaluation in persons, not contexts, abbreviating the decision making process, constructing community consensus and marginalising opposing views.Conclusion: The findings of this study support the view that news reporting of FAS is not neutral or inconsequential. In particular, those reports presenting FAS as an orderly, rational performance were biased in favor of technical solutions by way of the legalisation of euthanasia and/or the involvement of medical professionals. In contrast, while news reports sensitive to contradiction did not necessarily oppose euthanasia, they were less inclined to overtly support technical solutions, recognising the importance of a trial to address the complexity of FAS. (shrink)

Anthology of articles on the integral philosophy of Sri Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950, modern Indian philosopher.

Generic sentences (e.g., bare plural sentences such as “dogs have four legs” and “mosquitoes carry malaria”) are used to talk about kinds of things. Three experiments investigated the conceptual foundations of generics as well as claims within the formal semantic approaches to generics concerning the roles of prevalence, cue validity and normalcy in licensing generics. Two classes of generic sentences that pose challenges to both the conceptually based and formal semantic approaches to generics were investigated. Striking property generics (e.g. “sharks (...) bite swimmers”) are true even though only a tiny minority of instances have the property and thus pose obvious problems for quantificational approaches, and they also do not seem to characterize kinds in terms of the principled or statistical connections investigated in previous research ( Prasada and Dillingham, 2006 ; Prasada and Dillingham, 2009). The second class — minority characteristic generics (e.g. “ducks lay eggs”) — also poses serious problems for quantificational accounts, and appears to involve principled connections even though fewer than half of its instances have the relevant property. The experiments revealed three principal discoveries: first, striking generics involve neither principled nor statistical connections. Instead, they involve a causal connection between a kind and a property. Second, minority characteristic generics exhibit the characteristics of principled connections, which suggests that principled connections license the expectation that most instances will have the property, but do not require it. Finally, the experiments also provided evidence that prevalence and the acceptability of generics may be dissociated and provided data that are problematic for normalcy approaches to generics, and for the idea that cue validity licenses low prevalence generics. As such, the studies provided evidence in favor of a conceptually based approach to the semantics of generics ( Leslie, 2007 ; Leslie, 2008; see also Carlson, 2009). (shrink)

This paper identifies the different normative ethical arguments stated and suggested by Arjuna and Krishna in the Gītā , analyzes those arguments, examines the interrelations between those arguments, and demonstrates that, contrary to a common view, both Arjuna and Krishna advance ethical theories of a broad consequentialist nature. It is shown that Krishna’s ethical theory, in particular, is a distinctive kind of rule-consequentialism that takes as intrinsically valuable the twin consequences of mokṣa and lokasaṃgraha . It is also argued that (...) Krishna’s teachings in the Gītā gain in depth, coherence, and critical relevance what they lose in simplicity when the ethical theory underlying those teachings is understood as a consequentialism of this kind rather than as a deontology. (shrink)

Nominal concepts represent things as tokens of types. Recent research suggests that we represent principled connections between the type of thing something is (e.g., DOG) and some of its properties (k‐properties; e.g., having four legs for dogs) but not other properties (t‐properties; e.g., being brown for dogs). Principled connections differ from logical, statistical, and causal connections. Principled connections license (i) the expectation that tokens of the type will generally possess their k‐properties, (ii) formal explanations (i.e., explanation of the presence of (...) k‐properties in tokens of a type by reference to the type of thing it is), and (iii) normative expectations concerning the presence of k‐properties in tokens of the type. The present paper investigates the hypothesis that representing principled connections requires representing properties as aspects of being the relevant kind of thing (Aspect Hypothesis). Experiment 1 provides a direct test of the Aspect Hypothesis. Experiments 2 and 3 provide indirect tests of the Aspect Hypothesis. All three experiments provide support for the Aspect Hypothesis. Experiment 4 investigates a prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis concerning the manner in which formal explanations are licensed by principled connections. Finally, Experiment 5 investigates a prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis concerning the nature of the normative expectations licensed by principled connections. Together these results provide strong evidence for the idea that representing principled connections involves representing a property as being an aspect of being a given kind of thing. The results also help clarify the manner in which formal explanation differs from other modes of explanation. Finally, the results of the experiments are used to motivate a proposal concerning the formal structure of the conceptual representations implicated by principled connections. This structure provides a domain‐general way of structuring our concepts and embodies the perspective we take when we think and talk of things as being instances of a kind. (shrink)

Biometrics is essentially a pattern recognition system that recognizes an individual using their unique anatomical or behavioral patterns such as face, fingerprint, iris, signature etc. Recent researches have shown that many biometric traits are vulnerable to spoof attacks. Moreover, recent works showed that, contrary to a common belief, multimodal biometric systems in parallel fusion mode can be intruded even if only one trait is spoofed. However, most of the results were obtained using simulated spoof attacks, under the assumption that the (...) spoofed and genuine samples are indistinguishable, which may not be true for all biometric traits. In addition, so far vulnerability of multimodal biometric systems in serial fusion mode against spoof attacks has not been investigated. These issues raise a demand to investigate the robustness of multimodal systems under realistic spoof attacks. In this paper, we empirically investigate the performance of serial and parallel biometric fusion modes under realistic spoof attacks. Preliminary empirical results on real biometric systems made up of face, fingerprint and iris confirm that multimodal biometric systems in both fusion modes are not intrinsically robust against spoof attacks as believed so far. In particular, multimodal biometric systems in serial fusion mode can be even less robust than systems in parallel mode. We also experimentally found that incorporating the biometric sample quality in biometric fusion increases the robustness of the multimodal systems against spoof attacks. In the end, we study the trade-off between performance and robustness of the biometric systems under spoof attacks. (shrink)

IntroductionAlthough the topic of consciousness is both mysterious and controversial, psychedelic drugs are popularly believed to provide unique insights into the nature of consciousness despite a lack of empirical evidence.MethodsThis study addresses the question of whether psychedelics change the attribution of consciousness to a range of living and non-living entities. A survey was conducted in 1,606 respondents who endorsed a belief changing psychedelic experience.ResultsParticipants rated their attributions of consciousness to a range of living and non-living entities before and after their (...) psychedelic experience. Superstitious beliefs and belief in freewill were also assessed. From before the experience to after, there were large increases in attribution of consciousness to various entities including non-human primates, quadrupeds, insects, fungi, plants, inanimate natural objects, and inanimate manmade objects. Higher ratings of mystical experience were associated with greater increases in the attribution of consciousness. Moreover, the increased attributions of consciousness did not decrease in those who completed the survey years after the psychedelic experience. In contrast to attributions of consciousness, beliefs in freewill and superstitions did not change. Notably, all findings were similar when restricted to individuals reporting on their first psychedelic experience.DiscussionThis study demonstrates that, among people who reported belief-changing psychedelic experiences, attribution of consciousness to various entities increases. Future prospective psychedelic drug administration studies that control for expectancies are needed. (shrink)

Kautilya (4th Century B.C.) is a legendary figure in India for not only writing Arthashastra, a treatise that deals extensively with the strategies for building and running a nation based on strong fundamentals of economics and the wisdom of the leader, but also for making Chandragupta Maurya the king of Magadha whose empire later on became the largest empire ever seen in the Indian history. This paper is an attempt to identify the dimensions of wise leadership to subsequently arrive at (...) a wise leadership development model for contemporary times based on the philosophy of Kautilya. (shrink)

Since the late 1900s the business world has been under increasing pressure to demonstrate responsible social behaviour and the pressure continues to grow. Today, the role of business in society is on the Boardroom agenda and at stake are corporate reputation, innovation, competitiveness and growth. It is a clarion call, that either, the CEO and the Board manage it or someone else will manage it for them. As we know that we cannot solve our problems with the same level of (...) thinking that created them; therefore it is imperative that we look beyond the 20th century’s scientism and materialism dominated worldly ways for solutions. In view of the above, I believe that the ‘Indian Philosophy of Consciousness’ which focuses on practicing “better-worldliness” rather than “worldliness” and has developed over the past 4000 years has the potential to help business. Better worldliness is ‘a disposition towards life that is based on a Dharmic (righteous) way of conduct; a conduct with compassion and forbearance for fellow man, no matter what the nationality, or the colour of the skin, religion or caste.’ Society expects similar compassion and forbearance from business. (shrink)

Through a philosophical engagement with “Arju” (communal dormitories for children/adolescents among the Ao tribe, India), we develop a distinct conceptualization of it as “caring space, in-between”. In its various ontological, epistemological, and ethical dimensions, Arju becomes a space for mothering of Ao children and of caring for the tribe at large. It provides a basis for developing a notion of “caring space” within a philosophy of care. Finally, while theorizing its “in-between” character, we argue that Arju resists mapping onto dominant (...) Western spatial binaries such as private/public, home/world, etc. This essay is not only an articulation of a non-dominant group’s philosophy of “mothering” and “care”, but also aims to create an alternative theoretical space from which to engage with the dominantly Western feminist philosophies of care. (shrink)

would suspect him of murdering them and would not spare him. So he too killed himself. Gods were very much disturbed by this sad incident and realized the ...

Focuses on the interplay between algorithm design and the underlying computational models.

Rough Sets were introduced by Z. Pawlak in the year 1982 with the intention to address knowledge representation and data processing from the angle of computation and decision making. The main idea...

This book delves deep into the Social Construction of Theory, comparative epistemology and intellectual history to stress the interrelationship between diverse cultures during the colonial period and bring forth convincing evidence of how the 19th century was shaped. It approaches an interesting relation between the linguistic studies of 19th century’s scientific world and subsequent widespread acceptance of the empirically weak theory of the Aryan invasion. To show entangled history in a globalized world, the book draws on the Aryan Invasion Theory (...) to highlight how different socio-religious parties commonly shape a new theory. It also explores how research is affected by the so-called social construction of theory and comparative epistemology, and deals with scholarly advancement and its relation with contemporary socio-political demands. The most significant conclusion of the book is that academic studies are prone to comparative epistemology, even under the strict scrutiny of the so-called scientific methods. (shrink)

Since certain temporal aspects of the relation between duties, rights, and the interests that rights protect have not been fully theorized, a puzzle arises when we come to consider whether and how entities such as members of future generations, fetuses, deceased persons, and unconscious persons are able to possess rights. This paper evolves a unified structure for attributing the ability to possess rights to such entities. It demonstrates that while, under any cogent theory of rights-attributions, rights and duties must be (...) strictly contemporaneous, the interests that rights protect need not temporally coincide with those rights. (shrink)

We investigate the hypothesis that our conceptual systems provide two formally distinct ways of representing categories by investigating the manner in which lexical nominals (e.g., tree, picnic table) and phrasal nominals (e.g., black bird, birds that like rice) are interpreted. Four experiments found that lexical nominals may be mapped onto kind representations, whereas phrasal nominals map onto class representations but not kind representations. Experiment 1 found that phrasal nominals, unlike lexical nominals, are mapped onto categories whose members need not be (...) of a single kind. Experiments 2 and 3 found that categories named by lexical nominals enter into both class inclusion and kind hierarchies and thus support both class inclusion (is a) and kind specification (kind of) relations, whereas phrasal nominals map onto class representations which support only class inclusion relations. Experiment 4 showed that the two types of nominals represent hierarchical relations in different ways. Phrasal nominals (e.g., white bear) are mapped onto classes that have criteria of membership in addition to those specified by the class picked out by the head noun of the phrase (e.g., bear). In contrast, lexical nominals (e.g., polar bear) specify one way to meet the criteria specified by the more general kind concept (e.g., bear). Implications for the language–conceptual system interface, representation of hierarchical relations, lexicalization, and theories of conceptual combination are discussed. (shrink)

We simultaneously live in two worlds—our internal world of thoughts, values, desires, and experiences; and our external world in which we are born, and perform actions. Modernity, despite successfully developing our external world, has failed to develop our internal world. This has resulted in our lower nature being unleashed and a crisis of morals and values taking over society. This paper, drawing from the “science of consciousness” as detailed in the Indian tradition, looks at the nature of modernity and how (...) we can address the challenges being posed by it, by training our consciousness to higher levels. (shrink)

Acquiring expertise in a task is often thought of as an automatic process that follows inevitably with practice according to the log‐log law (aka: power law) of learning. However, as Ericsson, Chase, and Faloon (1980) showed, this is not true for digit‐span experts and, as we show, it is certainly not true for Tetris players at any level of expertise. Although some people may simply “twitch” faster than others, the limit to Tetris expertise is not raw keypress time but the (...) techniques acquired by players that allow them to use the tools provided by the hardware and software to compensate for the game's relentlessly increasing drop speed. Unfortunately, these increases in drop speed between Tetris levels make performance plateaus very short and quickly followed by game death. Hence, a player's success at discovering, exploring, and practicing new techniques for the tasks of board preparation, board maintenance, optimal placement discovery, zoid rotation, lateral movement of zoids, and other tasks important to expertise in Tetris is limited. In this paper, we analyze data collected from 492 Tetris players to reveal the challenges they confronted while constructing expertise via the discovery of new techniques for gameplay at increasingly difficult levels of Tetris. (shrink)

Five experiments provide evidence for a class of ‘dual character concepts.’ Dual character concepts characterize their members in terms of both (a) a set of concrete features and (b) the abstract values that these features serve to realize. As such, these concepts provide two bases for evaluating category members and two different criteria for category membership. Experiment 1 provides support for the notion that dual character concepts have two bases for evaluation. Experiments 2-4 explore the claim that dual character concepts (...) have two different criteria for category membership. The results show that when an object possesses the appropriate concrete features, but does not fulfill the appropriate abstract value, it is judged to be a category member in one sense but not in another. Finally, Experiment 5 uses the theory developed here to construct artificial dual character concepts and examines whether participants react to these artificial concepts in the same way as naturally occurring dual character concepts. The present studies serve to define the nature of dual character concepts and distinguish them from other types of concepts (e.g., natural kind concepts), which share some, but not all of the properties of dual character concepts. More broadly, these phenomena suggest a normative dimension in everyday conceptual representation. (shrink)

A hypertext learner navigates with a instinctive feeling for a knowledge. The learner does not know her queries, although she has a feeling for them. A learner’s navigation appears as complete upon the emergence of an aesthetic pleasure, called rasa. The order of arrival or the associational logic and even the temporal order are not relevant to this emergence. The completeness of aesthetics is important. The learner does not look for the intention of the writer, neither does she look for (...) significance. Lexia has a suggestive power and she is suggested in the arrival of aesthetics. Hypertext learning does not depend on communication. The learner in her pleasure transgresses the bounds of space-time to be in communion with several writers/learners. Hypertext learning does not appear to be fundamentally different from the analog learning; however, in performance, as in navigation, the learner assumes a mental state that helps her in her emergence into aesthetic bliss, of an arrival to the completed lexial navigation. This completeness is owing to aesthetics and is not owing to either the semantics or the query-fulfilling qualities. (shrink)

Contemporary democracy has given primacy to thought. Building up institutions on thought and reasoned discourse excludes out human actions derived not from thought that one thinks. Ordinary life is visited by emotion and passion. Such actions of unknown origin are captured best in the drama. Indian theory and practice of drama and the poetics offer communion between the performer and the viewer. Blissful relish of the actions and the dialogues lift up the banal actions from the ordinary to a state (...) beyond simple event. Relishing thus resides in cognition. Drama in theory and in its practice thus offers foundation to institutions that could embrace independent actions as well. In relish there is cognition and reasoning alone cannot lay claim. Folk life and folk actions thus could be emancipatory. (shrink)

This paper addresses questions of women’s autonomy in India and analyses its location within the legal discourse. The women’s movement has primarily tried to analyse questions of women’s autonomy through exploring women’s position in law. Among other indicators, women’s position in society is often analysed through marriage, divorce and property acts. This paper analyses the evolution of these acts and critiques whether they have led to women’s autonomy or merely subsumed questions of autonomy resulting in further marginalization of women in (...) the polity. The paper begins with the assumption that locations matter and that laws affect different women differently, particularly in the context of India where civil law is constantly pitted against personal and customary law. To understand the situation of women in India, therefore, an understanding of the evolution of laws seems necessary, because laws are considered to be primary markers of autonomy. (shrink)

Despite increasing pressure to deal with climate change, firms have been slow to respond with effective action. This article presents a multi-level framework for a better understanding of why many firms are failing to reduce their absolute greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to climate change. The concepts of short-termism and uncertainty avoidance from research in psychology, sociology, and organization theory can explain the phenomenon of organizational inaction on climate change. Antecedents related to short-termism and uncertainty avoidance reinforce one another at (...) three levels—individual, organizational, and institutional—and result in organizational inaction on climate change. The article also discusses the implications of this multi-level framework for research on corporate sustainability. (shrink)

In this article I provide a critical perspective on governing the global corporation. While the papers in the 2009 special issue of Business Ethics Quarterly explore the political role of corporations I argue that they lack a sophisticated analysis of power acrossinstitutional and actor networks. The argument that corporate engagement with deliberative democracy can enhance the legitimacy of corporations does not take into account the effects of institutional, material and discursive forms of power that determine legitimacycriteria. As a result corporate (...) versions of citizenship mediate versions of social responsibility and morality, which are reflected in the institutional and political economic norms that are produced by this power/knowledge. In order to overcome the limits of corporate social responsibility there is a need to develop more democratic forms of global governance of corporations. A radical revisioning of democratic governance would also need to overcome the limits posed by sovereignty and would require new forms of multi-actor and multi-level translocal governance arrangements in an attempt to create forms of power that are more compatible with the principles of economic democracy. (shrink)

India is the world’s largest democracy. It is also a peculiarly violent one, frustrating liberals who expect democracies to be well-behaved – a horse still unbridled to rule of law. Its riders have...

Previous research with adults suggests that a catalog of minimally counterintuitive concepts, which underlies supernatural or religious concepts, may constitute a cognitive optimum and is therefore cognitively encoded and culturally transmitted more successfully than either entirely intuitive concepts or maximally counterintuitive concepts. This study examines whether children's concept recall similarly is sensitive to the degree of conceptual counterintuitiveness (operationalized as a concept's number of ontological domain violations) for items presented in the context of a fictional narrative. Seven- to nine-year-old children (...) who listened to a story including both intuitive and counterintuitive concepts recalled the counterintuitive concepts containing one (Experiment 1) or two (Experiment 2), but not three (Experiment 3), violations of intuitive ontological expectations significantly more and in greater detail than the intuitive concepts, both immediately after hearing the story and 1 week later. We conclude that one or two violations of expectation may be a cognitive optimum for children: They are more inferentially rich and therefore more memorable, whereas three or more violations diminish memorability for target concepts. These results suggest that the cognitive bias for minimally counterintuitive ideas is present and active early in human development, near the start of formal religious instruction. This finding supports a growing literature suggesting that diverse, early-emerging, evolved psychological biases predispose humans to hold and perform religious beliefs and practices whose primary form and content is not derived from arbitrary custom or the social environment alone. (shrink)

Research on moral psychology has frequently appealed to three, apparently consistent patterns: Males are more likely to engage in transgressions involving harm than females; educated people are likely to be more thorough in their moral deliberations because they have better resources for rationally navigating and evaluating complex information; political affiliations and religious ideologies are an important source of our moral principles. Here, we provide a test of how four factors ‐ gender, education, politics and religion ‐ affect intuitive moral judgments (...) in unfamiliar situations. Using a large-scale sample of participants who voluntarily logged on to the internet-based Moral Sense Test, we analyzed responses to 145 unique moral and conventional scenarios that varied widely in content. Although each demographic or cultural factor sometimes yielded a statistically significant difference in the predicted direction, these differences were consistently associated with extremely small effect sizes. We conclude that gender, education, politics and religion are likely to be relatively insignificant for moral judgments of unfamiliar scenarios. We discuss these results in light of current debates concerning the mechanisms underlying our moral judgments and, especially, the idea that we share a universal moral sense that constrains the range of cross-cultural variation. (shrink)

Acquiring expertise in a task is often thought of as an automatic process that follows inevitably with practice according to the log‐log law (aka: power law) of learning. However, as Ericsson, Chase, and Faloon (1980) showed, this is not true for digit‐span experts and, as we show, it is certainly not true for Tetris players at any level of expertise. Although some people may simply “twitch” faster than others, the limit to Tetris expertise is not raw keypress time but the (...) techniques acquired by players that allow them to use the tools provided by the hardware and software to compensate for the game's relentlessly increasing drop speed. Unfortunately, these increases in drop speed between Tetris levels make performance plateaus very short and quickly followed by game death. Hence, a player's success at discovering, exploring, and practicing new techniques for the tasks of board preparation, board maintenance, optimal placement discovery, zoid rotation, lateral movement of zoids, and other tasks important to expertise in Tetris is limited. In this paper, we analyze data collected from 492 Tetris players to reveal the challenges they confronted while constructing expertise via the discovery of new techniques for gameplay at increasingly difficult levels of Tetris. (shrink)

AbstractIn this paper I provide a decolonial critique of received knowledge about deliberative democracy. Legacies of colonialism have generally been overlooked in theories of democracy. These omissions challenge several key assumptions of deliberative democracy. I argue that deliberative democracy does not travel well outside Western sites and its key assumptions begin to unravel in the ‘developing’ regions of the world. The context for a decolonial critique of deliberative democracy is the ongoing violent conflicts over resource extraction in the former colonies (...) of Africa, Asia and Latin America. I argue that deliberative democracy cannot take into account the needs of marginalized stakeholders who are defending their lands and livelihoods. The paper contributes to the literature by (1) offering a critique of hegemonic models of democracy that cannot address issues of inequality and colonial difference and (2) offering possibilities to imagine counterhegemonic alternatives for a democratization of democracy from below. (shrink)

The collapse of the wavefunction is arguably the least understood process in quantum mechanics. A plethora of ideas—macro-micro divide, many worlds and even consciousness—have been put forth to resolve the issue. Contrary to the standard Copenhagen interpretation, objective collapse models modify the Schrödinger equation with nonlinear and stochastic terms in order to explain the collapse of the wavefunction. In this paper we propose a collapse model in which a particle’s wavefunction has a possibility of collapsing when it interacts with macroscopic (...) objects, without the intervention of a conscious observer. We propose four possible conditions of collapse of the wavefunction and make testable predictions which differ from standard quantum mechanics. (shrink)