As interpersonal, racial, social, and international conflicts intensify in the world, it is important to safeguard the mental health of individuals affected by them. According to a Buddhist notion “if you want others to be happy, practice compassion; if you want to be happy, practice compassion,” compassion practice is an intervention to cultivate conflict-proof well-being. Here, compassion practice refers to a form of concentrated meditation wherein a practitioner attunes to friend, enemy, and someone in between, thinking, “I’m going to help (...) them.” The compassion meditation is based on Buddhist philosophy that mental suffering is rooted in conceptual thoughts that give rise to generic mental images of self and others and subsequent biases to preserve one’s egoism, blocking the ultimate nature of mind. To contextualize compassion meditation scientifically, we adopted a Bayesian active inference framework to incorporate relevant Buddhist concepts, including mind, compassion, aggregates, suffering, reification, conceptual thoughts, and superimposition. In this framework, a person is considered a Bayesian Engine that actively constructs phenomena based on the aggregates of forms, sensations, discriminations, actions, and consciousness. When the person embodies rigid beliefs about self and others’ identities and the resulting ego-preserving bias, the person’s Bayesian Engine malfunctions, failing to use prediction errors to update prior beliefs. To counter this problem, after recognizing the causes of sufferings, a practitioner of the compassion meditation aims to attune to all others equally, friends and enemies alike, suspend identity-based conceptual thoughts, and eventually let go of any identity-grasping belief and ego-preserving bias that obscure reality. We present a brain model for the Bayesian Engine of three components: Relation-Modeling, Reality-Checking, and Conflict-Alarming, which are subserved by the Default-Mode Network, Frontoparietal Network and Ventral Attention Network, and Salience Network, respectively. Upon perceiving conflicts, the strengthening or weakening of ego-preserving bias will critically depend on whether the SN up-regulates the DMN or FPN/VAN, respectively. We propose that compassion meditation can strengthen brain regions that are conducive for suspending prior beliefs and enhancing the attunements to the counterparts in conflicts. (shrink)

Pain is an important focus for consciousness research because it is an avenue for exploring somatic awareness, emotion, and the genesis of subjectivity. In principle, pain is awareness of tissue trauma, but pain can occur in the absence of identifiable injury, and sometimes substantive tissue injury produces no pain. The purpose of this paper is to help bridge pain research and consciousness studies. It reviews the basic sensory neurophysiology associated with tissue injury, including transduction, transmission, modulation, and central representation. In (...) addition, it highlights the central mechanisms for the emotional aspects of pain, demonstrating the physiological link between tissue trauma and mechanisms of emotional arousal. Finally, we discuss several current issues in the field of pain research that bear on central issues in consciousness studies, such as sickness and sense of self. (shrink)

The measurement of pain depends upon subjective reports, but we know very little about how research subjects or pain patients produce self-reported judgments. Representationalist assumptions dominate the field of pain research and lead to the critical conjecture that the person in pain examines the contents of consciousness before making a report about the sensory or affective magnitude of pain experience as well as about its nature. Most studies to date have investigated what Fechner termed “outer psychophysics”: the relationship between characteristics (...) of an external stimulus and the magnitude and nature of pain experience. In contrast, Fechner originally envisioned that “inner psychophysics” should investigate the relationship between physiological states and subjective experience. Despite the lack of established research tradition, inner psychophysics has a potential utility in elucidating underlying mechanisms for the production of phenomenal self-report. We illustrate this, using causal modeling analyses of the accuracy of self-reported pain ratings from our laboratory. We submit that the results are inconsistent with representationalist assumptions. Converging trends from several domains of consciousness studies seem to suggest that we need to abandon the unquestioned doctrine of representationalism and search for a more viable framework for understanding the generation of subjective self-report. (shrink)

The facial expression of pain is the end product of a complex process that is, in part, emotional. The evolutionary study of facial expression must account for the social nature of human consciousness and should address the questions of why empathy exists, the adaptive importance of empathy, and whether facial expression is a mechanism of empathy and second-person consciousness.

Intersubjectivity refers to one person’s awareness in relation to another person’s awareness. It is key to well-being and human development. From infancy to adulthood, human interactions ceaselessly contribute to the flourishing or impairment of intersubjectivity. In this work, we first describe intersubjectivity as a hallmark of quality dyadic processes. Then, using parent-child relationship as an example, we propose a dyadic active inference model to elucidate an inverse relation between stress and intersubjectivity. We postulate that impaired intersubjectivity is a manifestation of (...) underlying problems of deficient relational benevolence, misattributing another person’s intentions, and neglecting the effects of one’s own actions on the other person. These problems can exacerbate stress due to excessive variational free energy in a person’s active inference engine when that person feels threatened and holds on to his/her invalid beliefs. In support of this dyadic model, we briefly describe relevant neuroimaging literature to elucidate brain networks underlying the effects of an intersubjectivity-oriented parenting intervention on parenting stress. Using the active inference dyadic model, we identified critical interventional strategies necessary to rectify these problems and hereby developed a coding system in reference to these strategies. In a theory-guided quantitative review, we used this coding system to code 35 clinical trials of parenting interventions published between 2016 and 2020, based on PubMed database, to predict their efficacy for reducing parenting stress. The results of this theory-guided analysis corroborated our hypothesis that parenting intervention can effectively reduce parenting stress if the intervention is designed to mitigate the problems of deficient relational benevolence, under-coupling, and over-mentalizing. We integrated our work with several dyadic concepts identified in the literature. Finally, inspired by Arya Nagarjuna’s Buddhist Madhyamaka Philosophy, we described abstract expressions of Dependent Origination as a relational worldview to reflect on the normality, impairment, and rehabilitation of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

中国古代(おもに戦国期~漢代初期)の新出土文献を検討により、古代思想史の空白を埋め、その変遷過程を明らかにする。.

生命科学技術をめぐる倫理的・法的・社会的問題について、社会の意思決定に重要な役割を果たす「生命倫理委員会」。理論と事例をつなぐ立場から、公共政策としての生命倫理を体系的に論じる。.

武內義雄是中國哲學思想研究的重要學者,他以實證論來研究中國思想史的方法,啟發了後來的許多重要學者.武內義雄按古代期(諸子,經學),中古期(三教交涉),近代期(儒教革新)的分類,研究和書寫了中國哲學思想 的源流與演變.既脈絡清晰賅要,又有新的論證角度與獨到見解,讀者可有頗多獲益與啟發.

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.

歴史学をめぐる“方法論的な挑発者”として―自己省察的な小文、時評、書評等を精選して収録。巻末に、編者4人が著作集の意義と魅力を縦横に論じあう座談会の記録と、「安丸良夫著作目録」を付載。.

技術が進歩すればするほど、技術者に対する信頼が必要となる。技術者は専門職として、どんな倫理をもたねばならないのか。それはほかの専門職の倫理とは違うのか?「技術者は公衆の安全・健康・福利を最優先しなけれ ばならない」という理念にもとづいて指針を示したテキストを、原発事故や製造物責任などの最新事例をふまえて改訂!

「通俗道徳」論をはじめ、著者の歴史研究の基軸をなす「民衆思想史」に関する代表的な論考を収める。.

In recent years, scholars in science and technology studies have examined the advice that experts make for the governance of biomedicine. This STS scholarship, however, has not yet explained how the credibility of ethics expertise in public bioethics is produced from particular conditions and extended to different settings. This article describes how a bioethics commission created the ethical principle of justice and examines how the ethics expertise established public credibility on the justice principle. The findings suggest that the principle of (...) justice was first explored as the diverse concepts of “equality” with reference to the review of fetal research, redefined as “fairness” or “desert” from theoretical viewpoints, and then circulated as a standard framework in local settings. The credibility of ethics expertise, based on the coproduction of material and moral orders, was made possible by reaching common ground among different data, principles, and background theories. (shrink)

The aims of this study were twofold, to: examine the behavior displayed by participants who expected to be nominated for donor roles in dictator games wherein initial endowments of players are determined by lottery and investigate the conduct of donors who were confident in their good fortune in relation to their power as they redistributed the rewards they had gained. Results from a dictator game in which a donor is accorded the absolute power to redistribute initial income and a random (...) dictator game in which both a donor and a recipient declare their redistributive preferences and one of them is selected randomly by a computer were compared. Confident donors made more self-serving redistribution decisions than did unconfident donors in both games, but the difference was clearer in the dictator game. In relation to their preferences exhibited before being informed of their roles, confident donors decreased their redistribution amounts after discovering their roles; the decrements in the dictator game were conspicuously larger than those in the random dictator game. In short, confident donors were greedier than unconfident donors; the difference became more pronounced when their redistributive power was unconditional even though their confidence had no rational basis. (shrink)