Purpose: This author’s experiences in investigating well over a hundred accident occurrences has led to questioning how such events can be managed while immediately recognising that the idea of managing accidents is an oxymoron, we don’t want to manage them, we don’t want not to manage them, what we desire is not to have to manage not-them, that is, manage matters so they don’t happen and then ...

The new view of reality was by no means easy to accept for physicists at the beginning of the century. Exploration of the atomic and subatomic world brought them in contact with a strange and unexpected reality. In their struggle to grasp this new reality, scientists became painfully aware that their basic concepts, their language, and their whole way of thinking were inadequate to describe ato...

The purpose of this paper is to try to provide an answer to the question whether it is possible to construct a computer simulation of the whole Universe. After presenting some ideas regarding the nature of the human mind and the computational capabilities of the Universe, we conclude that this is not actualy possible.

For the 2011 census, India began a grand experiment wherein every citizen was to be photographed, fingerprinted, and questioned regarding their marital status, education, and occupation. Mind you, such data gathering is not unusual—nations have long conducted censuses—but the scale to which India chose to under take such a vast digitization of information was unprecedented. In earlier times, th...

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the boundaries of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words ‘just ain’t in the head’, and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. ...

At present, more than one-fifth of humanity is unable to read and write. We critically examine experimental evidence and theories of how (il)literacy affects the human mind. In our discussion, we show that literacy has significant cognitive consequences that go beyond the processing of written words and sentences. Thus, cultural inventions such as reading shape general cognitive processing in n...

It was common enough in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to fi nd philosophers holding the position that for something to be ‘in the mind’ and for that mind to be conscious of it are one and the same thing. The thought is that consciousness is a relation between a mind and a mental entity playing the same role as the relation of inherence found between a substance and qualities belongin...

Dualism – The human brain and mind are separate. Known formally as Cartesian Dualism after it’s originator, the 17th century French philosopher René Descartes. Physical matter, including the body and brain, behaves according to the laws of nature, and is thus suitable for scientific investigation. The human mind (soul, self, or spirit), which controls human behavior, lacks physical substance--a...

What does science say about the nature of mind? Are there many minds or just one that manifests itself through the individual’s experience? Do masks used in ritual or secular performance tell us something about the nature of mind? Is the archaic mind close, in some manner, to the sensibility of the postmodern age and where does the Indian evidence stand on it? How might ideas of mind’s powers a...