Hasil untuk "Religions of the world"

Jingxuan Wei, Siyuan Li, Yuhang Xu et al.

The construction of World Models capable of learning, simulating, and reasoning about objective physical laws constitutes a foundational challenge in the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence. Recent advancements represented by video generation models like Sora have demonstrated the potential of data-driven scaling laws to approximate physical dynamics, while the emerging Unified Multimodal Model (UMM) offers a promising architectural paradigm for integrating perception, language, and reasoning. Despite these advances, the field still lacks a principled theoretical framework that defines the essential properties requisite for a General World Model. In this paper, we propose that a World Model must be grounded in the Trinity of Consistency: Modal Consistency as the semantic interface, Spatial Consistency as the geometric basis, and Temporal Consistency as the causal engine. Through this tripartite lens, we systematically review the evolution of multimodal learning, revealing a trajectory from loosely coupled specialized modules toward unified architectures that enable the synergistic emergence of internal world simulators. To complement this conceptual framework, we introduce CoW-Bench, a benchmark centered on multi-frame reasoning and generation scenarios. CoW-Bench evaluates both video generation models and UMMs under a unified evaluation protocol. Our work establishes a principled pathway toward general world models, clarifying both the limitations of current systems and the architectural requirements for future progress.

Delong Chen, Willy Chung, Yejin Bang et al.

Humans are known to have an internal "world model" that enables us to carry out action planning based on world states. AI agents need to have such a world model for action planning as well. It is not clear how current AI models, especially generative models, are able to learn such world models and carry out procedural planning in diverse environments. We introduce WorldPrediction, a video-based benchmark for evaluating world modeling and procedural planning capabilities of different AI models. In contrast to prior benchmarks that focus primarily on low-level world modeling and robotic motion planning, WorldPrediction is the first benchmark that emphasizes actions with temporal and semantic abstraction. Given initial and final world states, the task is to distinguish the proper action (WorldPrediction-WM) or the properly ordered sequence of actions (WorldPrediction-PP) from a set of counterfactual distractors. This discriminative task setup enable us to evaluate different types of world models and planners and realize a thorough comparison across different hypothesis. The benchmark represents states and actions using visual observations. In order to prevent models from exploiting low-level continuity cues in background scenes, we provide "action equivalents" - identical actions observed in different contexts - as candidates for selection. This benchmark is grounded in a formal framework of partially observable semi-MDP, ensuring better reliability and robustness of the evaluation. We conduct extensive human filtering and validation on our benchmark and show that current frontier models barely achieve 57% accuracy on WorldPrediction-WM and 38% on WorldPrediction-PP whereas humans are able to solve both tasks perfectly.

Maria Krinner, Elie Aljalbout, Angel Romero et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach for robot learning. However, model-free RL (MFRL) requires a large number of environment interactions to learn successful control policies. This is due to the noisy RL training updates and the complexity of robotic systems, which typically involve highly non-linear dynamics and noisy sensor signals. In contrast, model-based RL (MBRL) not only trains a policy but simultaneously learns a world model that captures the environment's dynamics and rewards. The world model can either be used for planning, for data collection, or to provide first-order policy gradients for training. Leveraging a world model significantly improves sample efficiency compared to model-free RL. However, training a world model alongside the policy increases the computational complexity, leading to longer training times that are often intractable for complex real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose a new method for accelerating model-based RL using state-space world models. Our approach leverages state-space models (SSMs) to parallelize the training of the dynamics model, which is typically the main computational bottleneck. Additionally, we propose an architecture that provides privileged information to the world model during training, which is particularly relevant for partially observable environments. We evaluate our method in several real-world agile quadrotor flight tasks, involving complex dynamics, for both fully and partially observable environments. We demonstrate a significant speedup, reducing the world model training time by up to 10 times, and the overall MBRL training time by up to 4 times. This benefit comes without compromising performance, as our method achieves similar sample efficiency and task rewards to state-of-the-art MBRL methods.

Rahmatika Luthfiana Sholikhah, Nazil Mumtaz al-Mujtahid , All Rizky Ramadhan

Though ethics in animal slaughter are still not by the standards, animal slaughter is an essential component of human existence. This study aims to develop the principles of Islamic doctrine in honor of animals that will be slain. Qualitative methodology with a literature study orientation is used in this study. The book of Hadith and the verses of the Quran are used in the study data. By matching Hadith and Qur'anic verses, the data will be examined. The findings demonstrated that the Qur'an and Hadith support respect for animals to be killed. The slaughtered animal has to express thanks by invoking the name of Allah. Then, Islam has rules for humane care of animals. According to ethical principles and animal welfare, Islam develops slaughter policies. Classifications include requirements for animal killing and tool provisions. Through several treatments suggested by Islam, evidence of morality in animal killing is shown so that slaughtered animals are not anxious. Five or more phases in the ritual of animal slaughter are Intentionality as a spiritual component, acknowledgment of Allah's name (Bismillah), Qibla orientation, velocity and precision in killing, and animal welfare.

Sudarman, Faisal Adnan Reza, Dian Nur Anna et al.

Being a nun is a noble calling, but to achieve self-actualization so that one is able to find the meaning of life is a very long and arduous process. This study aims to reveal how a nun can achieve the meaning of life and what aspects underlie this search. The approach used in the study was qualitative one using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and NVIVO12 pro techniques to organize the data. The results of the study found that the achievement of the meaning of life of nuns has five superordinate themes, namely spiritual values, religious behaviour, sacred promises, work and surrender. The aspects that underlie the process of the meaning of life of nuns are five superordinate themes that emerge, namely inner motivation, family functioning, peer support, stress coping and emotional regulation. All of these themes that emerge are things that make a nun able to achieve the meaning of her life from the experiences that occur in her everyday life experience. So it can be concluded that the achievement of a meaningful life is felt as something that is evaluative because it is produced through a process of reflection felt by nuns, which is obtained through their daily lives and the achievement of a meaningful life that is felt to be based on certain aspects that underlie changes in the meaningfulness of a nun's life.

Nicola Denzey Lewis

Arzu Yıldız Aydın

The Indian subcontinent, the homeland of Hinduism, the third most practiced religion in the world today, and home to the vast majority of its believers, also has a large Muslim population. It is also a fact that there have been intense interactions between Muslims and Hindus since the first Muslim presence in the Indian subcontinent, and that these interactions have resulted in the members of the two religions adopting certain elements of each other’s beliefs, culture and lifestyle. Sometimes these interactions have been positive and moderate, while at other times they have led to mutual tension and conflicts. It has been observed that various methods have been tried by the rulers in almost every era to eliminate this social tension and polarization. They have attempted to bring the adherents of these two faiths, which appear to be at different religious and cultural extremes, closer together. Phool Walon ki Sair, the Florists’ Procession Festival, is a perfect example of this. First celebrated during the reign of the ruler Akbar Shah II (1760-1837), it was later reintroduced by Jawaharlal Nehru to promote unity and solidarity between the Muslim and Hindu communities. This festival has a cultural rather than religious value and has been celebrated and internalized by both Hindus and Muslims. This festival, a rare example of state officials’ efforts to unite a community of diverse cultures and beliefs and eliminate division and hatred, is noteworthy in many respects. It has become important and necessary to examine this festival, which began to be celebrated during a period when the British imperialist rule was dominant in the region, and which served the purpose of rejoicing and celebrating together rather than uniting the Hindu and Muslim faiths, from the perspective of the History of Religions. In this study, how Hindus and Muslims have celebrated this festival from past to present will be discussed with a historical, comparative and descriptive method and some current analyses will be attempted. We believe that this study will be a noteworthy work that will contribute to the studies conducted in Türkiye and internationally on the ongoing tense Hindu-Muslim relations in the Indian subcontinent.

McGlory Speckman

This article seeks to make a case for the use of the mgodoyi label to refer to perpetrators of corruption in South Africa by examining the jibes used by Jesus against his opponents in the first century. It argues that while Jesus discouraged random name-calling, he strategically used various jibes in the process of proclaiming his gospel, to stir up the ‘consciences’ of his opponents and dislodge them from their philosophical positions, with the view to causing them to change their ways. Linguistically and anthropologically, words and labels communicate a message, and they give shape to the object they are communicating about, albeit some may be regarded as insults. The article argues that the term mgodoyi is used in the same manner in the discourse against perpetrators of corruption, eliciting, in the process, complaints about its harshness. This is indicative of the effectiveness of the message that is being communicated. The article then concludes that the insults are used purposefully with the view to dislodging the objects from their ways and to make them receptive to the good news.

Elena Muñiz Grijalvo, Fernando Lozano Gómez

El objeto de análisis de este trabajo son las “procesiones imperiales”, es decir, los desfiles rituales en los que paseaban, entre otras cosas, imágenes del emperador reinante y de otros miembros de la casa imperial, tanto vivos como muertos. Nuestro propósito es contribuir a aclarar qué aportaba la procesión, y más en concreto el movimiento de las estatuas de los emperadores, a la construcción ideológica del poder del gobernante. En este artículo se analizará en particular la intervención de los “porteadores del emperador” (sebastophoroi), un nuevo cargo que se rastrea en algunas ciudades del Imperio, en la percepción del poder imperial. El desplazamiento de las estatuas o retratos de los emperadores contribuyó a cimentar la sacralidad del gobernante pero también, al mismo tiempo, la cercanía y la intervención activa del emperador en el gobierno de las ciudades del imperio. En nuestra opinión, la figura del sebastophoros fue decisiva en este proceso.

Vlas Zyrianov, Henry Che, Zhijian Liu et al.

We present LidarDM, a novel LiDAR generative model capable of producing realistic, layout-aware, physically plausible, and temporally coherent LiDAR videos. LidarDM stands out with two unprecedented capabilities in LiDAR generative modeling: (i) LiDAR generation guided by driving scenarios, offering significant potential for autonomous driving simulations, and (ii) 4D LiDAR point cloud generation, enabling the creation of realistic and temporally coherent sequences. At the heart of our model is a novel integrated 4D world generation framework. Specifically, we employ latent diffusion models to generate the 3D scene, combine it with dynamic actors to form the underlying 4D world, and subsequently produce realistic sensory observations within this virtual environment. Our experiments indicate that our approach outperforms competing algorithms in realism, temporal coherency, and layout consistency. We additionally show that LidarDM can be used as a generative world model simulator for training and testing perception models.

Michel Ma, Tianwei Ni, Clement Gehring et al.

A natural approach for reinforcement learning is to predict future rewards by unrolling a neural network world model, and to backpropagate through the resulting computational graph to learn a policy. However, this method often becomes impractical for long horizons since typical world models induce hard-to-optimize loss landscapes. Transformers are known to efficiently propagate gradients over long horizons: could they be the solution to this problem? Surprisingly, we show that commonly-used transformer world models produce circuitous gradient paths, which can be detrimental to long-range policy gradients. To tackle this challenge, we propose a class of world models called Actions World Models (AWMs), designed to provide more direct routes for gradient propagation. We integrate such AWMs into a policy gradient framework that underscores the relationship between network architectures and the policy gradient updates they inherently represent. We demonstrate that AWMs can generate optimization landscapes that are easier to navigate even when compared to those from the simulator itself. This property allows transformer AWMs to produce better policies than competitive baselines in realistic long-horizon tasks.

Zhenjiang Mao, Siqi Dai, Yuang Geng et al.

A world model creates a surrogate world to train a controller and predict safety violations by learning the internal dynamic model of systems. However, the existing world models rely solely on statistical learning of how observations change in response to actions, lacking precise quantification of how accurate the surrogate dynamics are, which poses a significant challenge in safety-critical systems. To address this challenge, we propose foundation world models that embed observations into meaningful and causally latent representations. This enables the surrogate dynamics to directly predict causal future states by leveraging a training-free large language model. In two common benchmarks, this novel model outperforms standard world models in the safety prediction task and has a performance comparable to supervised learning despite not using any data. We evaluate its performance with a more specialized and system-relevant metric by comparing estimated states instead of aggregating observation-wide error.

Huatao Xu, Liying Han, Qirui Yang et al.

Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their remarkable capabilities across a range of tasks. Questions, however, persist about the nature of LLMs and their potential to integrate common-sense human knowledge when performing tasks involving information about the real physical world. This paper delves into these questions by exploring how LLMs can be extended to interact with and reason about the physical world through IoT sensors and actuators, a concept that we term "Penetrative AI". The paper explores such an extension at two levels of LLMs' ability to penetrate into the physical world via the processing of sensory signals. Our preliminary findings indicate that LLMs, with ChatGPT being the representative example in our exploration, have considerable and unique proficiency in employing the embedded world knowledge for interpreting IoT sensor data and reasoning over them about tasks in the physical realm. Not only this opens up new applications for LLMs beyond traditional text-based tasks, but also enables new ways of incorporating human knowledge in cyber-physical systems.

Muhammad Mahdi Koohkan, Majid Ghorbanali Doolabi

Islam, as the last and most comprehensive religion, undoubtedly includes social and governmental dimensions in addition to individual dimensions, and has provided specific frameworks for the economic and political systems of managing the social life of humans. In order for the foreign policy of the Islamic government to achieve the desired goals in the prosperity and perfection of society, it is necessary to regulate the actions of the foreign policy of the Islamic government in the light of the principles and fundamental rules derived from Islamic law. Before the victory of the Islamic revolution in Iran and the establishment of a government based on the Islamic Sharia, although centuries had passed since the formation of jurisprudence and researching in various Islamic sciences, among the followers of the Ahl al-Bayt, the governmental aspects of Shiism, due to not being practical, were given less importance. Considering this reason, after the establishment of the government of the Islamic Republic, and especially in the current situation, when more than 40 years have passed since the establishment of this holy system, which is based on the rules of pure Islam and the teachings of the Ahl al-Bayt, the need for research in these areas is even more necessary. One of the most effective issues in achieving the goals of Islamic society and Islamic government, is relations with other governments and countries, which are regulated based on foreign policy. In foreign policy, having the right prioritization, which forms the basis of the country's numerous and important foreign policy choices, is essential to having a consistent and appropriate foreign policy. the main question in this matter is, what is that prioritization based on the principles and rules of jurisprudence? and what factors are effective in arranging the jurisprudential principles and rules related to foreign policy Something that seems to have been somewhat neglected so far. Considering that foreign policy is a concept that has taken a different form after the formation of modern governments, in the old jurisprudence and narrative texts, there is no specific discussion under the title of foreign policy prioritization; Although the discussion of relations with other nations is one of the topics that the Holy Qur'an and hadiths have dealt with, and the scholars have also discussed it and raised it among other jurisprudential issues since the beginning of the establishment of the Islamic State. In addition, with the conducted surveys, there is no research work that has paid independently to Prioritization of foreign policy actions in Islam. But there are some researches that are somehow related to the issue of foreign policy and Islamic international relations. The main purpose of this research is to examine the priorities of foreign policy action from the perspective of Islamic jurisprudence. In addition, the position of expediency in the foreign policy of the Islamic State from a jurisprudential point of viewand the role of the ability to achieve goals in prioritizing foreign policy from a jurisprudential perspective is also examined.The present study reinforces the idea that by using conflict resolution methods in the science of principles of jurisprudence and rational principle, the most important preference, as well as the realities of the contemporary world, the problems of the Islamic world in the present age and the role of foreign policy in providing It has the interests of countries, according to the circumstances, it is possible to make an arrangement for prioritization of the most important principles and rules of foreign policy from the perspective of Islamic jurisprudence and consequently, the necessary actions to implement them. It can be said that in prioritizing foreign policy from the point of view of the jurisprudence of Islamic religions, principles and rules such as peaceful coexistence, the Mustache negation rule, the principle of the necessity of contracts, the principle of reciprocity, the principle of invitation, the concepts of power and public interest; are decisive principles and rules. Also, this general principle that the existence of a task in the implementation of each of the prioritized principles depends on its ability to do so, and also in case of conflict between any of the principles of foreign policy with the principle of expediency, expediency, especially expediency of maintaining the of Islamic system takes precedence over everything, it is deduced.

Akiko Walley

The set of eighth-century objects known as the “Tōdaiji Golden Hall Platform Pacifying Objects” (Tōdaiji Kondō chindangu 東大寺金堂鎮壇具; “Tōdaiji objects”) is among the earliest concrete evidence of ritual practice in the Nara period. This study reveals how the Tōdaiji objects transformed the space inside the temple’s colossal central statue of the Vairocana Buddha into a symbolic heavenly realm where the deceased would traverse to arrive at Vairocana’s Pure Land. Close analysis of the Tōdaiji objects within Sovereigns Shōmu’s and Kōken’s religiopolitical applications of the Kegon teaching strengthens Okumura Hideo’s argument that Kōken orchestrated the emplacement of these objects in the year 757 as part of commemorating the one-year anniversary of Shōmu’s death. I argue that the Tōdaiji objects encapsulated Kōken’s filial piety towards her father, Shōmu, by praying for his swift ascension to Vairocana’s Pure Land. The objects furthermore served as a reenactment of Buddhist repentance that not only ensured Shōmu’s salvation, but also the prosperity of Kōken’s new reign.

Komal Fatima

With the increased availability of streaming services and access to international content a feature of today’s media consumption, can social media be used to explore the potential of global cinema to inform audiences about religion and society? As a media form, movies play a role in educating as well as entertaining society at large; narrative arcs from Bollywood, Hollywood, and beyond inform audiences about contemporary religious concepts. This research makes use of a practice-based journalistic methodology to explore the educative role movies can play in informing audiences about religious and societal concepts; the researcher produces a creative artefact appropriate for the discipline of journalism (in this instance, a social-media-based curated collection of movie reviews), with a contribution to the wider knowledge that is contextualised by this study. Using a deductive approach, the researcher narrows down an initial list of films, from a global selection of cinematic output, that covers religious and societal themes through a range of lenses (such as characters’ well-being, trauma, religious practice, and cultural values). The concepts and ideologies explored through this study and the construction of a social-media-based movie database suggest that cinema can play an active role in informing audiences about religion and society, instead of merely entertaining across cultures. The concepts and ideologies explored in this paper, through the construction of a social-media-based movie database, show that religious and societal issues in movies can be an important aspect of the lives of millions in the cinema-going audience.

Alexandra Creola

Swami Medhananda

This article proposes to examine in detail Aurobindo’s searching—and often quite original—criticisms of Advaita Vedānta, which have not yet received the sustained scholarly attention they deserve. After discussing his early spiritual experiences and the formative influence of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda on his thought, I outline Aurobindo’s philosophy of “realistic Adwaita”. According to Aurobindo, the sole reality is the Divine Saccidānanda, which is not only the static impersonal Brahman but also the personal, dynamic Cit-Śakti (Consciousness-Force), which manifests as everything in this universe. At various points in his corpus, Aurobindo criticizes Advaita Vedānta on three fronts. From the standpoint of spiritual experience, Aurobindo argues that Śaṅkara’s philosophy is based on a genuine, but partial, experience of the Infinite Divine Reality: namely, the experience of the impersonal nondual Absolute and the corresponding conviction of the unreality of everything else. Aurobindo claims, on the basis of his own spiritual experiences, that there is a further stage of spiritual experience, when one realizes that the impersonal-personal Divine Reality manifests as everything in the universe. From a philosophical standpoint, Aurobindo questions the logical tenability of key Advaitic doctrines, including māyā, the exclusively impersonal nature of Brahman, and the metaphysics of an illusory bondage and liberation. Finally, from a scriptural standpoint, Aurobindo argues that the ancient Vedic hymns, the Upaniṣads, and the Bhagavad-Gītā, propound an all-encompassing Advaita philosophy rather than the world-denying Advaita philosophy Śaṅkara claims to find in them. This article focuses on Aurobindo’s experiential and philosophical critiques of Advaita Vedānta, as I have already discussed his new interpretations of the Vedāntic scriptures in detail elsewhere. The article’s final section explores the implications of Aurobindo’s life-affirming Advaitic philosophy for our current ecological crisis.

Minne Li, Mengyue Yang, Furui Liu et al.

The capability of imagining internally with a mental model of the world is vitally important for human cognition. If a machine intelligent agent can learn a world model to create a "dream" environment, it can then internally ask what-if questions -- simulate the alternative futures that haven't been experienced in the past yet -- and make optimal decisions accordingly. Existing world models are established typically by learning spatio-temporal regularities embedded from the past sensory signal without taking into account confounding factors that influence state transition dynamics. As such, they fail to answer the critical counterfactual questions about "what would have happened" if a certain action policy was taken. In this paper, we propose Causal World Models (CWMs) that allow unsupervised modeling of relationships between the intervened observations and the alternative futures by learning an estimator of the latent confounding factors. We empirically evaluate our method and demonstrate its effectiveness in a variety of physical reasoning environments. Specifically, we show reductions in sample complexity for reinforcement learning tasks and improvements in counterfactual physical reasoning.

Norman Chivasa

When societies are faced with socio-economic and political challenges, religion plays a crucial role in shaping citizens’ perceptions and attitudes pertaining to interactions between political dynamics and supernatural beings. Anthropomorphism, a distinct religio-political phenomenon that emerged in Zimbabwe as a result of the 2018 general election, has received limited academic attention. It has been treated as a marginal phenomenon without due consideration to its impact on citizens’ aspirations. This treatment of anthropomorphism has obscured its significance, as it is situational. Drawing from three political prophesies that circulated on the WhatsApp platform and YouTube in the run-up to and the aftermath of the 2018 elections, this study posited that anthropomorphism can lead to people being disinclined to take responsibility for their own well-being, even amidst political systems perceived as unjust. It shapes individual perceptions, preferences and patterns of participation, encouraging or discouraging collective action for political change. The study concluded that in 2018 anthropomorphism in Zimbabwe had a dual role; first it ascertained what is going on in the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans and their aspirations and second, it relinquished the responsibility to God to act in favor of the poor and the powerless.