Hasil untuk "Religion (General)"

João Francisco Pereira

Jarmo Mäkelä

Beginning from the standard Arnowitt-Deser-Misner (ADM) formulation of general relativity we construct a tentative model of quantum gravity from the point of view of an observer with constant proper acceleration, just outside of a horizon of spacetime. In addition of producing the standard results of black-hole thermodynamics, our model makes an entirely new prediction that there is a certain upper bound for the energies of massive particles. For protons, for instance, this upper bound is around $1.1\times 10^{21}eV$. The result is interesting, because this energy is roughly of the same order of magnitude as are the highest energies ever measured for protons in cosmic rays.

Bruno Mölder

Teesid: Kas meie igapäevane raamistik vaimunähtuste tähistamiseks ehk rahvapsühholoogia rakendub ajaliste piiranguteta? Või ei rakendu rahvapsühholoogia mikroskaalal (millisekunditest kuni sadade millisekunditeni). Käesolev artikkel vaeb seda küsimust ja uurib, et mis järeldub sellest vaimsete nähtuste olemuse kohta, kui rahvapsühholoogia mikroskaalal ei rakendu. Vaatluse alla tuleb eeldus, mille kohaselt vaimseid seisundeid individueeritakse rahvapsühholoogia kaudu. Toon välja mitmesuguseid võimalusi käsitada rahvapsühholoogia, mikroskaala ja mentaalse omavahelist seost.   It has been claimed that familiar psychological categories do not apply at a very short time scale. The conceptual framework that collects our everyday psychological notions is called ‘folk psychology’. This paper explores the following question: is there a limited time scale in which folk psychology is applicable, and if that is the case, then what does this tell us about the nature of mental phenomena? In particular, the question concerns the applicability of folk psychology at the microscale (ranging from milliseconds up to hundreds of milliseconds). I outline several options concerning the relationship between folk psychology, the microscale and the mental. Why does this matter? First, this is important since if folk psychology applies only within certain temporal limits, this is an obstacle to developing models of micro-scale time consciousness in folk-psychological terms. Second, ‘folk psychology’ can be understood as just another name for a set of mental terms. This is not an innocent assumption. If this assumption holds, then the folk conception tacitly settles which properties are mental. We can call this assumption the ‘Principle of Folk Individuation’ (FIP): mental states are individuated only through folk psychology. If folk psychology is limited to a macroscale, and the FIP holds, then processes happening outside this scale at the millisecond range are not mental. This presumes that the mental is recognition-dependent: a property is mental only if it has a specification in mental (folk) terms; if it lacks it, there is no reason to classify it as mental. On the other hand, if folk psychology is limited to the macroscale, but there are good reasons to think that the mind is not, then this tells against the Folk Individuation Principle. Some reasons for considering certain events at the microscale as mental, albeit not part of folk psychology, could be found in research in psychology, where scientists have ascertained certain modality-dependent thresholds for distinguishing stimuli. The lowest threshold is for auditory stimuli (only a two-ms interval between stimuli suffices to detect them as separate). The ordering of stimuli requires intervals between stimuli of at least 20 ms. Are these discriminations mental? Prima facie, they must be, for these are conscious events. Therefore, they provide a counterexample to the FIP. This would lead to the position that the microscale processes are mental. At this point, someone who would like to keep the FIP might argue that considerations based on temporal thresholds do not show that the microscale events are mental but not folk-psychological. First, one could hold that these short-lived conscious experiences are neural states and that the brain has better temporal resolution than the mind/folk psychology. However, this reply might cause difficulties in giving a full picture of how neural consciousness relates to mental events. If microscale conscious events are merely neural, one is faced with the task of explaining at what point a conscious event becomes properly mental. The second option is to point out that ‘conscious experience’ is a folk-psychological term, too. Hence, considerations from temporal thresholds do not tell against the FIP. However, one may ask if the term ‘experience’ applies without problems to these discriminatory states. For instance, how can we tell that these states are perceptual experiences, not recent memories? There is another option. There is no need to construe folk psychology narrowly as a theory of beliefs, desires, memories and thoughts. In principle, folk psychology can be extended and developed: it could also include reference to events that take place at the microscale. We would need a new vocabulary to characterise those states, but this new vocabulary could still be part of an extended folk psychology—folk psychology 2.0. In this way, we could keep the FIP by updating it to state that mental states are individuated only through folk psychology 2.0 (which includes folk psychology and more). Then, one could say that although folk psychology, as traditionally conceived, applies only at the macroscale, folk psychology 2.0 also spans the microscale.

Zikri Yavuz

The existence of evil in our world seems to pose a serious challenge to belief in the existence of a perfect God. If God were all-knowing, it seems that God would know about all of the horrible things that happen in our world. If God were all-powerful, God would be able to do something about all of the evil. Moreover, if God were morally perfect, then surely God would want to do something about it. These facts about evil seem to conflict with the Islamic theist claim that there exists a perfectly good God. Several solutions to this problem have been proposed in Islamic thought. Ibn al-Arabi’s thought on evil goes as far as to say that what is seen as evil is actually illusory and has no reality. According to Ibn al-Arabi, existence is all good. Evil has no existence and belongs only to non-existence. The thoughts of Abu al-Hasan al-Ash‘ari can also be said to have caused a kind of moral conventionalism. Ash‘arism, unlike Mu‘tazilite thought, claims that the task of revelation is not only to explain moral statements but to impose and determine them. We encounter Neoplatonist point of view in Islamic thought. Avicenna says that evil has no positive existence or reality of its own. Evil is the incomplete realization of a good or existence. As maintained by him, evil arises when something does not show the full characteristics of its nature or type. There is no pure evil in the absolute sense. Solutions to the problem of evil do not always resort to the idea that evil is an illusion or an accidental element. According to Mu‘tazila and Maturidism, evil actually exists in this world; for conceptions of evil as an illusion or an accidental element do not adequately meet the conditions of being a free agent. According to this understanding, in order for an agent to have free will, it must not have been caused by external factors, e.g. God or the laws of nature.

Ludger O. Suarez-Burgoa

This note presents the definition of a proposed generalization of the conchoid at the plane. Known conchoids, such as the Nicomedes and the Limaçon of Pascal are part of this set. Following the definition, one can generate other conchoids. Examples are generated using of a computer code that is available openly for download. In addition, two step-by-step examples are described by detail, the first one which presents the results in calculation tables.

Yoon IJ, Lee SJ

In Ju Yoon,1 Su Jung Lee2 1Graduate School of Nursing Science, Hallym University, Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital, Anyang, South Korea; 2School of Nursing, Research Institute of Nursing Science, Hallym University, Chuncheon, South KoreaCorrespondence: Su Jung Lee, Tel +82-33-248-2722, Fax +82-33-248-2734, Email sujunglee.95@gmail.comBackground and Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic can cause psychological distress, and hemodialysis patients with chronic kidney disease may be particularly vulnerable. The aim of this study is to investigate anxiety levels among patients undergoing hemodialysis during the COVID-19 pandemic and to explore the relationship between health literacy and anxiety.Methods: This study recruited 149 hemodialysis patients from two hospitals between July 16th and July 31st, 2021. Patient data were collected using questionnaires on general characteristics, health literacy, generalized anxiety, and coronavirus disease-related anxiety. We used the Coronavirus Anxiety Scale (CAS) and the Korean version of the Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) scale to evaluate the anxiety symptoms of the patients. Statistical analyses were performed using descriptive statistics, t-test, Mann–Whitney U-test, one-way ANOVA, Kruskal-Walli’s test and Spearman’s rank correlation.Results: The results showed that health literacy increased with decreasing age and increasing educational level among patients who source health information from the internet and among patients without comorbidities. Patients with comorbidities showed high levels of general anxiety. Patients who search for health information for ≥ 1 hour had high levels of coronavirus disease-related anxiety. Both CAS and GAD showed a significant negative correlation with the sub-domains of health literacy, except for critical health literacy.Conclusion: The results of this study highlight the need for a follow-up study on whether health literacy programs will reduce the anxiety levels of patients undergoing hemodialysis during infectious disease outbreaks. In addition, provision of social support for patients with comorbidity is essential for reducing their anxiety levels during disease outbreaks.Keywords: end-stage kidney disease, anxiety, health literacy, coronavirus disease-19, pandemics

Crispin Sartwell

Preview: /Commentary: Richard Shusterman, Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 436 pages./ Richard Shusterman’s work is remarkable, among other things, for extending the range and power of the discipline of aesthetics, conceived by him as fundamental to many dimensions of human experience. Indeed, he has driven aesthetics into entirely new ranges of phenomena and strategies for research, and also perhaps returned to an ancient sense of the centrality of aesthetic concepts such as beauty to virtually every human endeavor. In many ways, I think, Shusterman is fulfilling John Dewey’s vision as expressed in Art as Experience, as well as spelling out in detail the implications of his own early book Pragmatist Aesthetics, exploring the aesthetic dimensions of all sorts of human activities. Schusterman’s somaesthetics, however, takes what we might call the aesthetics, or ordinary experience, and centers it on the body in a way that Dewey could not have foreseen. The book might have been titled The Aesthetics of Sex, and as soon as he broaches the topic it strikes one that this subject has been remarkably neglected within philosophical aesthetics, or even in Western philosophy as a whole. Considered as dimensions or arenas of human experience, the aesthetic and the erotic, as Shusterman shows in replete multi-cultural detail, are bound up entirely and from the origins in many or even all cultures.

Luiz Bernardo Leite Araujo, Rennan Guerra Pinheiro

Em Uma teoria da justiça, John Rawls desenvolve os principais conceitos de sua concepção de justiça conhecida como “justiça como equidade”. Nosso foco é o aspecto distributivo desta concepção. O presente artigo procura mostrar características definidoras de uma sociedade organizada conforme as demandas de justiça dos dois princípios de justiça rawlsianos. Para tanto, exploramos os principais aspectos de uma democracia dos cidadãos-proprietários e do socialismo liberal, que são os exemplos de modelos de organização socioeconômica citados por Rawls como compatíveis com sua concepção de justiça.

Felipe Matti

S. M. Bilenky

We present a basics of the Einstein General Theory of Relativity. In the first part of this review we derive relations of Riemann geometry which are used in the General Relativity. In the second part we discuss Einstein Equations and some of its consequences (The Schwarzschild solution, gravitational waves, Friedman Equations etc). In the Appendix we briefly discuss a history of the discovery of the Einstein Equations.

Sinya Aoki, Tetsuya Onogi, Shuichi Yokoyama

We present a precise definition of a conserved quantity from an arbitrary covariantly conserved current available in a general curved spacetime with Killing vectors. This definition enables us to define energy and momentum for matter by the volume integral. As a result we can compute charges of Schwarzschild and BTZ black holes by the volume integration of a delta function singularity. Employing the definition we also compute the total energy of a static compact star. It contains both the gravitational mass known as the Misner-Sharp mass in the Oppenheimer-Volkoff equation and the gravitational binding energy. We show that the gravitational binding energy has the negative contribution at maximum by 68% of the gravitational mass in the case of a constant density. We finally comment on a definition of generators associated with a vector field on a general curved manifold.

Maximiliano Isi, Katerina Chatziioannou, Will M. Farr

We propose a hierarchical approach to testing general relativity with multiple gravitational wave detections. Unlike existing strategies, our method does not assume that parameters quantifying deviations from general relativity are either common or completely unrelated across all sources. We instead assume that these parameters follow some underlying distribution, which we parametrize and constrain. This can be then compared to the distribution expected from general relativity, i.e. no deviation in any of the events. We demonstrate that our method is robust to measurement uncertainties and can be applied to theories of gravity where the parameters beyond general relativity are related to each other, as generally expected. Our method contains the two extremes of common and unrelated parameters as limiting cases. We apply the hierarchical model to the population of 10 binary black hole systems so far detected by LIGO and Virgo. We do this for a parametrized test of gravitational wave generation, by modeling the population distribution of beyond-general-relativity parameters with a Gaussian distribution. We compute the mean and the variance of the population and show that both are consistent with general relativity for all parameters we consider. In the best case, we find that the population properties of the existing binary signals are consistent with general relativity at the ~1% level. This hierarchical approach subsumes and extends existing methodologies, and is more robust at revealing potential subtle deviations from general relativity with increasing number of detections.

Francisco José Vázquez Manzano

A partir de las reflexiones de Michel Foucault en torno al poder, la noción de biopolítica ha sido un topos común en el debate filosófico contemporáneo. Sin embargo, como ya advirtiese Giorgio Agamben, no es posible una comprensión de lo biopolítico sin un enriquecimiento de la noción de “vida” manejada por Foucault. A esta tarea se encomienda principalmente este trabajo, a través de un análisis de la noción de vida propuesta por Gilbert Simondon que permita arrojar luz sobre la naturaleza de lo biopolítico.

José Ricardo Bernal Lugo

En el presente artículo retomamos la noción de “fobia al Estado” utilizada por Foucault para analizar la manera en la que se logró problematizar la acción estatal como una amenaza al desarrollo económico y a la libertad individual en el ámbito de la sociedad civil. A través del estudio de la obra de Tocqueville, mostramos cómo algunos elementos de esta forma de problematización ya se encontraban articulados en los discursos del siglo xix; sin embargo, en el siglo xx los autores neoliberales radicalizarán la crítica al Estado, el cual opondrán al mercado como la única instancia capaz de procurar las exigencias de la democracia moderna. En ese viraje, los trabajos de Hayek en la obra Caminos de servidumbre adquieren una importancia vital.

María E. Urrea-Solano, María J. Hernández-Amorós, Lucía Granados Alós et al.

Making citizens more respectful of and sensitive to diversity means recognizing the sexist, stereotypical beliefs that still exist in our society today. With this in mind, the present paper aims to identify the presence of gender stereotypes among students on vocational training courses. It will also look for the existence of possible differences according to sex and the level of training course studied (general or higher degree). The instrument used for this purpose is the Gender Role Attitudes Scale, with a sample of 135 students on training courses at a public integrated vocational training centre in the province of Alicante. A Student’s t-test confirmed the existence of significant differences according to sex and training level studied. As far as sex is concerned, female students had significantly higher average scores when arguing for gender equality in a family setting and for joint responsibility in carrying out household tasks. Male students, however, had significantly higher average scores as regards sexism within the family, believing in a different way of bringing up children under the responsibility of the mother. Meanwhile it was students on higher training courses that had higher averages as regards the equitable distribution of household tasks. These results lead one to believe that gender equality awareness-raising measures should be introduced in the area of vocational training as a successful strategy for attending to diversity.

Henrique Gomes, Vasudev Shyam

We give the most general conditions to date which lead to uniqueness of the general relativistic Hamiltonian. Namely, we show that all spatially covariant generalizations of the scalar constraint which extend the standard one while remaining quadratic in the momenta are second class. Unlike previous investigations along these lines, we do not require a specific Poisson bracket algebra, and the quadratic dependence on the momenta is completely general, with an arbitrary local operator as the kinetic term.

Samer Assaf

The distance on a set is a comparative function. The smaller the distance between two elements of that set, the closer, or more similar, those elements are. Fréchet axiomatized the distance into what is today known as a metric. In this thesis we study the generalization of Fréchet's axioms in various ways including a partial metric, strong partial metric, partial $n-\mathfrak{M}$etric and strong partial $n-\mathfrak{M}$etric. Those generalizations allow for negative distances, non-zero distances between a point and itself and even the comparison of $n-$tuples. We then present the scoring of a DNA sequence, a comparative function that is not a metric but can be modeled as a strong partial metric. Using the generalized metrics mentioned above we create topological spaces and investigate convergence, limits and continuity in them. As an application, we discuss contractiveness in the language of our generalized metrics and present Banach-like fixed, common fixed and coincidence point theorems.

Emil T. Akhmedov

These are lectures on General Theory of Relativity that were given to students of the Mathematical Faculty of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

Oleg Klenin

In the article was analyzed term "consulting" using different scientific approaches and was presented authorial view to its maintenance. It was proved that modern changes of enterprises functioning needed to be laid by strategy as control system of development. It was found out that development of enterprises was possible in conditions of effective innovations usage, rates of increasing were connected with the level of strategic management. Was formed authorial position concerning term "strategic consulting" as professional activity in the system of strategic enterprise management. It was set that strategic consulting was powerful source of informative and intellectual resources for increasing level of competitiveness and innovative development. From the point of view scientific approaches it is suggested to present full term of "strategic consulting" as combination system and processing approaches with features of innovativeness that in future will to assist realization of strategic aims and targets of enterprise-customer. 

A. M. Yaroschuk

The article analyzes the design and operation of the portcullis blocking the corridor in the Bent Pyramid. It proves that the drawing of an activated portcullis demonstrated by D. Perring in 1939 is wrong. Egyptologists have been making references to the drawing for many years. The author concludes that a new type of portcullis was activated in the attempt of the robbers to enter the pyramid.