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Vesna A. Wallace This colloquium has been conceived out of the need for creating a shared discursive arena for scientists and Buddhist studies scholars, who are not so much under the sway of assumptions and terminologies of their individual disciplines that they cannot engage in a meaningful, interdisciplinary dialogue. The participants of this colloquium have already demonstrated in their works their receptivity to intellectual exchanges and the awareness of the great potential of collaborative and cross-disciplinary thinking. Some among them have already offered new paradigms and explanatory models that transcend the boundaries of individual disciplines and challenge the old, stilted preconceptions that have dominated their disciplinary areas; and some have undertaken collaborative initiatives in their research and practice within the fields of physics, biology, and cognitive and medical sciences.  Download complete article
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P. M. S. Hacker (St John’s College, Oxford) The following are remarks that might be used to clarify and shed light upon some of the issues that were discussed yesterday. They are purely philosophical, i.e. conceptual, observations. Whether they can contribute anything to the understanding of Buddhism, I do not know. But I believe that they may contribute something to the understanding of some of the subjects that were discussed yesterday, and that they may curb our powerful inclination to transgress the bounds of sense. Download complete paper |
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Michel Bitbol Download ppt |
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J. Mark G. Williams The author reviews the articles in the Special Section on Mindfulness, starting from the assumption that emotions evolved as signaling systems that need to be sensitive to environmental contingencies. Failure to switch off emotion is due to the activation of mental representations of present, past, and future that are created independently of external contingencies. Mindfulness training can be seen as one way to teach people to discriminate such “simulations” from objects and contingencies as they actually are. The articles in this Special Section show how even brief laboratory training can have effects on processing affective stimuli; that long-term meditation practitioners show distinct reactions to pain; that longer meditation training is associated with differences in brain structure; that 8 weeks’ mindfulness practice brings about changes in the way emotion is processed showing that participants can learn to uncouple the sensory, directly experienced self from the “narrative” self; that mindfulness training can affect working memory capacity, and enhance the ability of participants to talk about past crises in a way that enables them to remain specific and yet not be overwhelmed. The implications of these findings for understanding emotion and for further research is discussed. Download paper as PDF |
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J. Mark G. Williams The author introduces the special section on mindfulness: four articles that between them explore the correlates of mindfulness in both crosssectional and treatment studies. Results from these studies, taken together, suggest a close association between higher levels of mindfulness, either as a trait or as cultivated during treatment, and lower levels of rumination, avoidance, perfectionism and maladaptive self-guides. These four characteristics can be seen as different aspects of the same ‘mode of mind’, which prioritizes the resolution of discrepancies between ideas of current and desired states using a test-operate-test-exit sequence. Mindfulness training allows people to recognize when this mode of mind is operating, to disengage from it if they choose, and to enter an alternative mode of mind characterized by prioritizing intentional and direct perception of moment-by-moment experience, in which thoughts are seen as mental events, and judgemental striving for goals is seen, accepted and ‘let go’. Download paper as PDF |
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Mark Williams Download ppt |
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Denis Noble Systems Biology is the study of the interactions between the elements (genes, proteins and other molecules) of living systems. Genes do not act in isolation either from each other or from the environment, and so I replace the metaphor of the selfish gene with metaphors that emphasise the processes involved rather than the molecular biological components. This may seem a simple shift of viewpoint. In fact it is revolutionary. Nothing remains the same. There is no 'book of life', nor are there 'genetic programs'. The consequences for the study of the brain and the nature of the self are profound. They lead naturally to the concept of anātman, no-self, and to a better understanding of the relation between the microscopic and macroscopic views of the world. Download paper as PDF |
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Laurent Nottale La notion de "particules d'espace", que l'on trouve dans les textes boudddhiques les plus anciens [1], et tout particulièrement dans le tantra de Kalachakra [2], renvoit à deux des quêtes les plus fondamentales de la physique, celle de l'élémentarité et celle de la compréhension de la nature de l'espace (et du temps). Dans la physique moderne, la première a culminé avec la théorie quantique des particules élémentaires, et la seconde avec la théorie de la relativité générale d'Einstein, qui décrit la gravitation comme manifestation de la géométrie d'un espace-temps courbe [3]. Aujourd'hui une théorie nouvelle, la relativité d'échelle, permet de donner corps à cette intuition étonnante, en identifiant les particules élémentaires et leurs propriétés quantiques aux manifestations purement géométriques d'un espace-temps encore plus général (non-différentiable et fractal). Download paper as PDF |
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Roland Cash, Jean Chaline, Laurent Nottale, Pierre Grou We suggest applying the log-periodic law formerly used to describe various crisis phenomena, in biology (evolutionary leaps), inorganic systems (earthquakes), societies and economy (economic crisis, market crashes) to the various steps of human ontogeny. We find a statistically significant agreement between this model and the data. Download paper as PDF |
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