We estimate that 208,000 deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices have been implanted to address neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders worldwide. DBS Think Tank presenters pooled data and determined that DBS expanded in its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 providing a space where clinicians, engineers, researchers from industry and academia discuss current and emerging DBS technologies and logistical and ethical issues facing the field. (...) The emphasis is on cutting edge research and collaboration aimed to advance the DBS field. The Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank was held virtually on September 1 and 2, 2020 (Zoom Video Communications) due to restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The meeting focused on advances in: (1) optogenetics as a tool for comprehending neurobiology of diseases and on optogenetically-inspired DBS, (2) cutting edge of emerging DBS technologies, (3) ethical issues affecting DBS research and access to care, (4) neuromodulatory approaches for depression, (5) advancing novel hardware, software and imaging methodologies, (6) use of neurophysiological signals in adaptive neurostimulation, and (7) use of more advanced technologies to improve DBS clinical outcomes. There were 178 attendees who participated in a DBS Think Tank survey, which revealed the expansion of DBS into several indications such as obesity, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction and Alzheimer’s disease. This proceedings summarizes the advances discussed at the Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank. (shrink)
DBS Think Tank IX was held on August 25–27, 2021 in Orlando FL with US based participants largely in person and overseas participants joining by video conferencing technology. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 and provides an open platform where clinicians, engineers and researchers can freely discuss current and emerging deep brain stimulation technologies as well as the logistical and ethical issues facing the field. The consensus among the DBS Think Tank IX speakers was that DBS expanded in (...) its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. After collectively sharing our experiences, it was estimated that globally more than 230,000 DBS devices have been implanted for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. As such, this year’s meeting was focused on advances in the following areas: neuromodulation in Europe, Asia and Australia; cutting-edge technologies, neuroethics, interventional psychiatry, adaptive DBS, neuromodulation for pain, network neuromodulation for epilepsy and neuromodulation for traumatic brain injury. (shrink)
Bruce Janz, Jessica Locke, and Cynthia Willett interact in this exchange with different aspects of Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad’s book Human Being, Bodily Being. Through “constructive inter-cultural thinking”, they seek to engage with Ram-Prasad’s “lower-case p” phenomenology, which exemplifies “how to think otherwise about the nature and role of bodiliness in human experience”. This exchange, which includes Ram-Prasad’s reply to their interventions, pushes the reader to reflect more about different aspects of bodiliness.
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad offers illuminating new perspectives on contemporary phenomenological theories of body and subjectivity, based on studies of diverse classical Indian texts. He argues for a 'phenomenological ecology' of bodily subjectivity in health, gender, contemplation, and lovemaking.
Of the six complaints that Professor Prasad lodges against my article, three are complaints about general remarks I make, two of which are from my unpublished abstract. Of these three, one incorrectly rejects my evaluation of the tone of his article; the second misattributes a claim from the abstract to the beginning of the article, rejects the claim without support, and mistakenly asserts that my claim is unsupported; and the third mistakenly rejects a characterization I make of Strawson's position. (...) Of the three purported claims that Professor Prasad entertains (and rejects) from the main body of my article, only one turns out to be a claim I actually make, and his rejection of it is mistaken. In my article I examine Professor Prasad's original arguments in some detail, asserting that they can be grouped into seven types of argument and that four of them are directly aimed at Strawson's four types of argument in support of optimistic determinism. I then assert that three of Prasad's four types succeed and one fails. Of the three remaining types, one succeeds, and the others fail. None of these assertions draws substantial comment in Professor Prasad's response. (shrink)
P. F. Strawson's influential article "Freedom and Resentment" has been much commented on, and one of the most trenchant commentaries is Rajendra Prasad's, "Reactive Attitudes, Rationality, and Determinism." In his article, Prasad contests the significance of the reactive attitude over a precise theory of determinism, concluding that Strawson's argument is ultimately unconvincing. In this article, I evaluate Prasad's challenges to Strawson by summarizing and categorizing all of the relevant arguments in both Strawson's and Prasad's pieces. -/- (...) Strawson offers four types of arguments to demonstrate that determinism and free agency cannot be incompatible, showing that the reactive attitude is natural and desirable and the objective attitude is not natural, not desirable, not sustainable, and not compatible with the reactive attitude. Prasad targets Strawson's incompatibilist arguments, showing that determinism and free agency are incompatible. Of Prasad's seven types of arguments, four target Strawson's four above. Three of these succeed and one fails. The remaining three target Strawson's support of the reactive attitude, and of these, one succeeds, and the others fail. Although Prasad's arguments miss the mark at times, he does succeed in putting forth a legitimate challenge to Strawson's notion that determinism is no inhibitor of the reactive attitude. (shrink)
Vedānta endeavours to base itself essentially on the facts of experience—in the fullest sense of the term. It recognizes the occurrence of everyday experience and the so-called fact of evil, but it refuses to view them as real. The real, it says, like Hegel, does not exist, and that which exists is not real. Evil is only an “existent"—as all this Samsara is—but not the ultimate Real. But it will be at once objected that if evil is an appearance, a (...) Maya, why should this appearance appear at all? If it has no foundation in reality, how and why does it occur at all? Further, how can anything be known as real unless it should appear ? Reality must appear. (shrink)
This article presents material from my ethnographic study in Śringēri, south India, the site of a powerful 1200yearold Advaitic monastery that has been historically an interpreter of ancient Hindu moral treatises. A vibrant diverse local culture that provides plural sources of moral authority makes Sringeri a rich site for studying moral discourse. Through a study of two conversational narratives, this essay illustrates how the moral self is not an ossified product of written texts and codes, but is dynamic, gen dered, (...) and emergent, endowed with historical and political agency and an aesthetic capacity that mediates many normative sources to articulate "appropriate" conduct. In so doing, the essay shows the value of including oral narrative in ethical inquiry, especially in narrative ethics, which, for most part, has focused on written sources. (shrink)
Based on original translations of passages from the works of three major thinkers of the classical Indian school of Advaita, but addressing issues found in Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein and contemporary analytic philosophers, this book argues for a philosophical position it calls 'non-realism'. This is the view that an independent, external world must be assumed if the features of cognition are to be explained, but that it cannot be proved that there is such a world, independently of an appeal (...) to cognition itself. This position is constructed against idealist denials of externality, realist arguments for an independent world and the sceptical denial of the coherence of cognition. (shrink)
Classical Indian schools of philosophy seek to attain a supreme end to existence--liberation from the cycle of lives. This book looks at four conceptions of liberation and the roles of analytic inquiry and philosophical knowledge in its attainment. The central motivation of Indian philosophy--the quest for the Highest Good--is situated in the analytic philosophical activity of key thinkers.
We present an implementation of a discourse parsing system for alexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar for discourse, specifying the integrationof sentence and discourse level processing. Our system is based on theassumption that the compositional aspects of semantics at thediscourse level parallel those at the sentence level. This coupling isachieved by factoring away inferential semantics and anaphoric features ofdiscourse connectives. Computationally, this parallelism is achievedbecause both the sentence and discourse grammar are LTAG-based and the sameparser works at both levels. The approach to an (...) LTAG for discourse has beendeveloped by Webber and colleagues in some recent papers. Our system takes a discourseas input, parses the sentences individually, extracts the basic discourseconstituent units from the sentence derivations, and reparses the discoursewith reference to the discourse grammar while using the same parser usedat the sentence level. (shrink)
Thus one should define, in a double way, name and form in all phenomena of the three realms. …In this essay, we want to bring together two issues for their mutual illumination: the particular use of that hoary Indian dyad, "nāma-rūpa," literally, "name-and-form," by Buddhaghosa, the influential fifth-century Theravāda writer, to organize the categories of the abhidhamma, the canonical classification of phenomenal factors and their formulaic ordering;1 and an interpretation of phenomenology as a methodology. We argue that Buddhaghosa does not (...) use abhidhamma as a reductive ontological division of the human being into mind and body, but rather as the contemplative structuring of human phenomenology.... (shrink)
Man is endowed with brain and mind for comprehending reality of the world. Brain is material entity and is observable, while mind is a non-physical conceived entity. Scientific investigations enhance our knowledge of the functioning of brain and its constituents. They indicate mind-brain association but do not rule out the possibility, in which mind is a property of brain. The perceived reality of the world has both objective and subjective components. The objective components are attributed to brain either alone or (...) in association with mind. The subjective components are considered to be the creations of mind but they appear to contain grains of reality. Attempts made to separate these grains have succeeded partially. One hopes for complete success only after the incorporation of a few missing ingredients. It is our contention that the missing ingredients are human being as an entangled quantum entity - photon field, quantum entity's capability to read information from photon fields of other humans and from its own field reflected by the environment. The evidence for the first ingredient is provided by the analysis of spontaneously emitted visible range photon signals by human beings. The other two ingredients put usual charge- photon interaction in proper context. The experimental results relevant to mind- brain interface are briefly described. A few minutes' time series of small portion of these signals determines their nine properties, which establish quantum nature of signal, and specify quantum state of the dominant component to be squeezed state. Six properties differ in signals emitted at 12 anatomical sites of the same person. Profile of a property for a person is the set of its values at 12 sites. Profile is very informative and can discriminate persons with differing holistic features. Cluster analysis offers procedures for measuring qualitative holistic features e.g. procedure for measuring ‘meditativeness' of a person. The incorporation of other two ingredients chalks out a route for answering the question who we are? (shrink)
Cognitive architectures, like programming languages, make commitments only at the implementation level and have limited explanatory power. Their universality implies that it is hard, if not impossible, to justify them in detail from finite quantities of data. It is more fruitful to focus on particular tasks such as language understanding and propose testable theories at the computational and algorithmic levels.
Drawing on a rich variety of Indian texts across multiple traditions, including Vedanta, Buddhist, Yoga and Jain, this collection explores how emotional experience is framed, evoked and theorized in order to offer compelling insights into human subjectivity. Rather than approaching emotion through the prism of Western theory, a team of leading Indian philosophers showcase the unique literary texture, philosophical reflections and theoretical paradigms that classical Indian sources provide in their own right. From solitude in the Saundarananda and psychosomatic theories of (...) disease in the Yogavasistha to female lament in Greek, Sinhala Buddhist and Sanskrit epic tales, their chapters reveal the range and diversity of the phenomena encompassing the English term 'emotion'. In doing so, they contribute towards a more cosmopolitan, comparative and pluralistic conception of human experience. Adopting a broad phenomenological methodology, this handbook reframes debates on emotion within classical Indian thought and is an invaluable resource for researchers and students seeking to understand the field beyond the Western tradition. (shrink)
This research examines a series of case studies from the agricultural sector to illustrate how various models of innovation embrace value proposition. A conscious value contestation at the interface of science, policy and civil society requires transformations in the triple-helix model of university-government-industry collaboration, because reiterations in the triple-helix model of innovation, such as quadruple, quintuple and higher helices, do not necessarily address civil society concerns for human values and science ethics. This research develops and tests a matrix model of (...) university-government-industry-civil society collaboration, which involves the co-creation of inclusive and transformational spaces for value proposition. Findings suggest that the matrix model of innovation institutionalises citizen science as it serves as a moral heuristic to make seemingly apolitical science responsive to essentially contested societal values. (shrink)
Bruno Latour equates criticism with an iconoclastic urge that is underpinned by the project of modernity. Latour's attack on iconoclastic criticism is therefore closely linked to his rejection of the modern framework. This paper examines Latour's analysis of modernity and the ways in which he connects criticism to the project of modernity. Through our analysis of Latour's reading of an episode from U.R. Anantha Murthy's novel Bharathipura, we argue that critique is actually an integral part of a truly democratic knowledge-making (...) process as well as politics. (shrink)
The switch from the Command-and-Control to Learning Organisation paradigm in the area of organisational theory is well understood. It is less well appreciated that learning organisations cannot operate effectively if supported by centralised data processing systems. The paper argues that there is a need for synergy between organisational structures and organisational information systems. Learning must be supported by the so-called new information technology. To obtain desired synergy it is necessary to design organisations and organisational information systems concurrently.
