Both before and after the publication of Isaac Newton’s particulate theory of light, numerous wave theories of light were advanced by both philosophers and scientists (e.g., René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Robert Hooke, Francesco Grimaldi, and Christiaan Huygens). What is peculiar about this list, as frequently found in the scholarly literature on light, is that it refers to individuals who do not extend much further back than the seventeenth century. A close examination of Aristotle’s account of color and light in comparison (...) to Christiann Huygens’ theory of color and light, however, reveals that Aristotle deserves to be recognized as one who antedates and foreshadows these modern wave theorists. Indeed, we shall argue that Aristotle offered the first wave theory of color and light. On Aristotle’s theory, light is the actualization of a transparent medium such as air or water that makes possible the dissemination of color through the medium in a manner analogous to the dissemination of sound through air or water. (shrink)

The primary question this article deals with is one of ontology. In a dystopian world populated with genetically engineered windups and hybrids, what constitutes ‘the human’? This article looks at how the posthuman body in a dystopian novel like The Windup Girl, set in a world where geographical, political, social, economic and religious norms and boundaries are erased and reconfigured, can in no way simply remain a mere body, but transmutes into a highly complex political and social site from whence (...) multiple relations of power originate, travel and culminate in. The titular character in the novel, Emiko, is a genetically engineered windup created in a laboratory, with obedience and the need to please etched right into her DNA. This makes her a prized possession for a brothel owner in Bangkok, once her Japanese master abandons her. She is both desirable and revolting to her customers at the same time – her perfect body is too perfect, her genetic urge to please at any cost draws them in, but her involuntary shaking and robot-like jerking disgusts them. The windup can thus be seen as both the Lacanian object cause of desire and Kristeva’s abject body. (shrink)

Superman’s legendary powers include super‐strength, super‐speed, flight, invulnerability, x‐ray vision, heat vision, and super‐hearing. One would think those powers would be enough, but occasionally writers add new ones. This chapter considers one of his less common powers‐the ability to read minds‐and use some basic philosophical thinking about minds to ask why it never caught on as one of Supes's main powers. The chapter explains why, despite mind‐reading’s occasional usefulness, it would be philosophically prudent to eliminate it from Superman’s set of (...) powers. Given that Superman was born on Krypton and raised on Earth, there is no reason to think that he should be confident in guessing the mental states of other beings. (shrink)

Biography of U.G. Krishnamurti, Indian philosopher.

A new construct, termed music receptivity, is introduced and discussed in this work. Music receptivity can be defined as a measure of the extent of internalization that an individual has, to a given piece of music, as measured at the point of listening. Through three studies, we demonstrate the psychometric properties of the construct—the Music Receptivity Scale. Exploratory factor analysis on a sample of 313 revealed good psychometric validity, with a four-factor solution, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.89, and a (...) two-factor solution, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.87. The tool also had a good test–retest reliability. Overall, the tool had 20 items in the long form and 12 items in the short version. The MRS could distinguish musicians and non-musicians supporting its discriminant validity. We have also discussed the implication of the MRS in the field of music psychology. (shrink)

This book brings together ancient spiritual wisdom and modern science and philosophy to address age-old questions regarding our existence, free will and the nature of conscious awareness. Stuart Hameroff MD Professor, Anesthesiology and Psychology, and Director, Center for Consciousness Studies The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona This book presents a rich, broad-ranging overview of contemporary research and scholarship into consciousness and the self.... It is... to their credit that the editors have assembled a highly stimulating set of scholars whose expertise (...) cover all the relevant areas. I strongly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in understanding the directions in which contemporary thinking about the nature of consciousness is headed. B. Les Lancaster Emeritus Professor of Transpersonal Psychology Liverpool John Moores University, UK This volume is a collection of 17 essays that contribute to the emerging discipline of consciousness studies with particular focus on the concept of the self. The essays together argue that to understand consciousness is to understand the self that beholds consciousness. Two broad issues are addressed in the volume: the place of the self in the lives of humans and nonhuman primates; and the interrelations between the self and consciousness, which contribute to the understanding of cognitive functions, awareness, free will, nature of reality, and the complex experiential and behavioural attributes of consciousness. The book presents cutting-edge and original work from well-known authors and scholars of philosophy, psychiatry, behavioural sciences and physics. This is a pioneering attempt to present to the reader multiple ways of conceptualizing and thus understanding the relation between consciousness and self in a nuanced manner. (shrink)

This book discusses consciousness from the perspectives of neuroscience, neuropsychiatry and philosophy. The author argues that the central issue in brain studies is to explain the unity, continuity, and adherence of experience, whether it is sensory or mental awareness, phenomenal- or self-consciousness. The fascinating discussion that this book presents is: How do the brain and the self create the conspiracy of experience where the physicality of the brain is lost in the subjectivity of the self?

Previous accounts of how people develop expertise have focused on how deliberate practice transforms the cognitive and perceptual representations and processes that give rise to expertise. However, the likelihood of developing expertise with a particular tool may also depend on the degree to which that tool fits pre‐existing perceptual and cognitive abilities. The present studies explored whether the abacus—a descendent of the first human computing devices—may have evolved to exploit general biases in human visual attention, or whether developing expertise with (...) the abacus requires learning special strategies for allocating visual attention to the abacus. To address this question, we administered a series of visual search tasks to abacus experts and subjects who had little to no abacus experience, in which search targets and distractors were overlaid atop abacus “beads.” Across three studies, we found that both experts and naïve subjects were faster to detect targets in semantically relevant components of the abacus, suggesting that abacus training is not required to exhibit attentional biases toward these components of the abacus. This finding suggests that the attentional biases that scaffold numerical processing of the abacus may emerge from general properties of visual attention that are exploited by the design of the abacus itself. (shrink)

In responding to this debate, Ananth both surveys the existing literature, with special focus on the work of Christopher Boorse, and argues that a naturalistic ...

U.G. Krishnamurti famously described enlightenment as a neurobiological state of being with no religious, psychological or mystical implications. He did not lecture, did not set up organizations, held no gatherings and professed to have no message for mankind. Known as the 'anti-guru', the 'raging sage' and the 'thinker who shuns thought', U.G. spent his life destroying accepted beliefs in science, god, mind, soul, religion, love and relationships-all the props man uses to live life. Having taken away all support systems from (...) those who came to him, he refused to replace them with those of his own, always insisting that each must find his own truth. And when U.G. knew that it was time for him to go, he refused all attempts to prolong life with medical help. He let nature, and his body, take its course. On the afternoon of 22 March 2007, U.G. Krishnamurti passed away in Vallecrosia, Italy. A bare, intensely personal account of a bedside vigil with the dying, A Taste of Life records the final days that well-known film-maker Mahesh Bhatt spent with U.G. Krishnamurti. It narrates how, in death, U.G. shows the author and us a way to live life. Book jacket. (shrink)

U.G. Krishnamurti famously described enlightenment as a neurobiological state of being with no religious, psychological or mystical implications. He did not lecture, did not set up organizations, held no gatherings and professed to have no message for mankind. Known as the 'anti-guru', the 'raging sage' and the 'thinker who shuns thought', U.G. spent his life destroying accepted beliefs in science, god, mind, soul, religion, love and relationships-all the props man uses to live life. Having taken away all support systems from (...) those who came to him, he refused to replace them with those of his own, always insisting that each must find his own truth. And when U.G. knew that it was time for him to go, he refused all attempts to prolong life with medical help. He let nature, and his body, take its course. On the afternoon of 22 March 2007, U.G. Krishnamurti passed away in Vallecrosia, Italy. A bare, intensely personal account of a bedside vigil with the dying, A Taste of Life records the final days that well-known film-maker Mahesh Bhatt spent with U.G. Krishnamurti. It narrates how, in death, U.G. shows the author and us a way to live life. Book jacket. (shrink)

This edited volume presents perspectives from computer science, information theory, neuroscience and brain imaging, aesthetics, social sciences, psychiatry, and philosophy to answer frontier questions related to artificial intelligence and human experience. Can a machine think, believe, aspire and be purposeful as a human? What is the place in the machine world for hope, meaning and transformative enlightenment that inspires human existence? How, or are, the minds of machines different from that of humans and other species? These questions are responded to (...) along with questions in the intersection of health, intelligence and the brain. It highlights the place of consciousness by attempting to respond to questions with the help of fundamental reflections on human existence, its life-purposes and machine intelligence. The volume is a must-read for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary researchers in humanities and social sciences and philosophy of science who wish to understand the future of AI and society. (shrink)

Sex chromosomes are advantageous to mammals, allowing them to adopt a genetic rather than environmental sex determination system. However, sex chromosome evolution also carries a burden, because it results in an imbalance in gene dosage between females (XX) and males (XY). This imbalance is resolved by X dosage compensation, which comprises both X chromosome inactivation and X chromosome upregulation. X dosage compensation has been well characterized in the soma, but not in the germ line. Germ cells face a special challenge, (...) because genome wide reprogramming erases epigenetic marks responsible for maintaining the X dosage compensated state. Here we explain how evolution has influenced the gene content and germ line specialization of the mammalian sex chromosomes. We discuss new research uncovering unusual X dosage compensation states in germ cells, which we postulate influence sexual dimorphisms in germ line development and cause infertility in individuals with sex chromosome aneuploidy. (shrink)

All activities which are taking place in the Cosmos also exist in a human body in subtle micro-scale. Plexuses centers in a human body are the most mysterious kinds of energies. The six-center plexus system is the path of the Kundalini shakti, the primordial cosmic energy of a person. Each plexus has its own propensities (vibrating words/dimensions/vritti) and an acoustic root. These plexuses control some cluster of words of sounds and corresponding physical organs in human body. The 50 main propensities (...) of the human’s unit mind are expressed through the vibration-expression of these plexuses. These vibrations cause hormones to secrete from the corresponding glands of the human’s body. These plexuses can play very important roles in curing the diseases. According to the Theory of Nikola Tesla’s 369, there are all together 1 to 9 digital root numbers exist. All other higher or lower numbers are the combination of those digital root numbers. This statement seems quite true when we compare it with Theory of Absolutivity. If 3, 6, 9 numbers are arranged together it makes a letter Ohm (AUM) which represents actually a Sagun Bramh/Nikola Tesla’s 369 triangle which is a part of NirgunBramh having higher dimensions. Number zero is the NirgunBramh (having all the qualities but in dormant form) which does not possess any quality in action. Number 3, 6, 9 forming as an equilateral triangle of static, mutative and sentient forces representing the Black-hole which is a part of Sagun Bramh projecting Himself as a Visible World through Big-bang along with forming five basic elements such as Ethereal, Areal, Fire, Liquid and Solid. According to the biological science, life emerged in this planet from matter about four billion years ago in the form of DNA that carried the software for the development of billion of species on the way to its final destination in humans. These facts also fully support the above hypothesis of universe formations. (shrink)

The Cosmos we live in consists of Invisible Prakriti and Visible World. In Visible World, we do live. All the galaxies, Milky Ways, nebulas and planets, stars, and physical bodies belong to this world are governed by the physical and mathematical laws of nature. Prakriti which is invisible spiritually governed and wave-formed existed even before the Big-Bang. Purush holds the Visible World and Prakriti around makes entire Cosmos in existence. Purush which is an absolutely positively charged and quality less with (...) no traces of negative portions always existed, neither being created nor destroyed. A fraction of a Purush known as Omega Point appears into the portion of Prakriti due to some causal effect for further expansion of the Visible World. Purush is situated in the middle of the cylindrical universe surrounded by the Prakriti and Visible World. Theories proposed by different scientists and philosophers to verify the Purush seem to be incomplete trial and error of the zigzag puzzle show. Today, our scientists, cosmologists, and mathematicians are trying to explain the function of the universe through only four physical dimensions of science, which seems to be incomplete without explaining the transcendental factors while dealing with the living bodies. (shrink)

Fifty-five documents in a western-Himalayan language dealing with land, pilgrimage, legality and temple-economy are presented. They explicate how ‘lesser states’ patronized numerous shrines and the role of Nath-Siddha-ascetics in creating consent-to-rule, and constructing hybridity between the Hindu and Tibetan-Buddhist traditions.

Robustness arguments hold that hypotheses are more likely to be true when they are confirmed by diverse kinds of evidence. Robustness arguments require the confirming evidence to be independent. We identify two kinds of independence appealed to in robustness arguments: ontic independence —when the multiple lines of evidence depend on different materials, assumptions, or theories—and probabilistic independence. Many assume that OI is sufficient for a robustness argument to be warranted. However, we argue that, as typically construed, OI is not a (...) sufficient independence condition for warranting robustness arguments. We show that OI evidence can collectively confirm a hypothesis to a lower degree than individual lines of evidence, contrary to the standard assumption undergirding usual robustness arguments. We employ Bayesian networks to represent the ideal empirical scenario for a robustness argument and a variety of ways in which empirical scenarios can fall short of this ideal. (shrink)

Metaphors and other tropes are commonly thought to reflect asymmetries in concreteness, with concrete sources being used to talk about relatively more abstract targets. Similarly, originating sense...

The value-free ideal for science holds that values should not influence the core features of scientific reasoning. We defend the difference-to-inference model of value-permeation, which holds that value-permeation in science is problematic when values make a difference to the inferences made about a hypothesis. This view of value-permeation is superior to existing views, and it suggests a corresponding maxim—namely, that scientists should strive to eliminate differences to inference. This maxim is the basis of a novel value-free ideal for science. -/- (...) . (shrink)

For Knox, ‘spacetime’ is to be defined functionally, as that which picks out a structure of local inertial frames. Assuming that Knox is motivated to construct this functional definition of spacetime on the grounds that it appears to identify that structure which plays theoperationalrole of spacetime—i.e., that structure which is actually surveyed by physical rods and clocks built from matter fields—we identify in this paper important limitations of her approach: these limitations are based upon the fact that there is a (...) gap between inertial frame structure and that which is operationally significant in the above sense. We present five concrete cases in which these two notions come apart, before considering various ways in which Knox’s spacetime functionalism might be amended in light of these issues. (shrink)

_Bringing Biology to Life _is a guided tour of the philosophy of biology, canvassing three broad areas: the early history of biology, from Aristotle to Darwin; traditional debates regarding species, function, and units of selection; and recent efforts to better understand the human condition in light of evolutionary biology. Topics are addressed using no more technical jargon than necessary, and without presupposing any advanced knowledge of biology or the philosophy of science on the part of the reader. Discussion questions are (...) also provided to encourage reader reflection. (shrink)