scholarly journals Contemplative Science and Secular Ethics

Religions ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (8) ◽  
pp. 98
Author(s):  
Brendan Ozawa-de Silva
Keyword(s):  
Contemplative Science ◽  
Secular Ethics

From many to one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruben Laukkonen ◽  
Heleen A Slagter
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Enhancement ◽  
The Self ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Conceptual Processing ◽  
Current State ◽  
Contemplative Science ◽  
Open Monitoring ◽  
Living Organisms ◽  
The Brain

How profoundly can humans change their own minds? In this paper we offer a unifying account of meditation under the predictive processing view of living organisms. We start from relatively simple axioms. First, the brain is an organ that serves to predict based on past experience, both phylogenetic and ontogenetic. Second, meditation serves to bring one closer to the here and now by disengaging from anticipatory processes. We propose that practicing meditation therefore gradually reduces predictive processing, in particular counterfactual cognition—the tendency to construct abstract and temporally deep representations—until all conceptual processing falls away. Our Many- to-One account also places three main styles of meditation (focused attention, open monitoring, and non-dual meditation) on a single continuum, where each technique progressively relinquishes increasingly engrained habits of prediction, including the self. This deconstruction can also make the above processes available to introspection, permitting certain insights into one’s mind. Our review suggests that our framework is consistent with the current state of empirical and (neuro)phenomenological evidence in contemplative science, and is ultimately illuminating about the plasticity of the predictive mind. It also serves to highlight that contemplative science can fruitfully go beyond cognitive enhancement, attention, and emotion regulation, to its more traditional goal of removing past conditioning and creating conditions for potentially profound insights. Experimental rigor, neurophenomenology, and no-report paradigms combined with neuroimaging are needed to further our understanding of how different styles of meditation affect predictive processing and the self, and the plasticity of the predictive mind more generally.

Leadership, morality and ethics: Developing a practical model for moral decision-making

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred W. Kaszniak ◽  
Cynda H. Rushton ◽  
Joan Halifax
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Applied Ethics ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Moral Decision Making ◽  
Contemplative Science ◽  
Practical Model

The present paper is the product of collaboration between a neuroscientist, an ethicist, and a contemplative exploring issues around leadership, morality, and ethics. It is an exploration on how people in roles of responsibility can better understand how to engage in discernment processes with more awareness and a deeper sense of responsibility for others and themselves. It draws upon recent research and scholarship in neuroscience, contemplative science, and applied ethics to develop a practical understanding of how moral decision-making works and is essential in this time when there can seem to be an increasing moral vacuum in leadership.

scholarly journals The Place of Religion in the System of General Humanitarian Education of the Republic of Bashkortostan

2019 ◽  
pp. 89-99
Author(s):  
Timur M. Nadyrshin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Rhetorical Analysis ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Republic Of Bashkortostan ◽  
Secular Ethics ◽  
Ethics Course ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Cultures ◽  
Confessional Identity ◽  
The Republic

The article discusses the place of religion in the system of school humanitarian education of the Republic of Bashkortostan. At the regional level, one can clearly see what place religion occupies in the picture of the world of subjects of education on two subjects that essentially determine the worldview of schoolchildren. These include “Fundamentals of Religious Cultures and Secular Ethics” and the History of Russia. The study focuses on the following aspects of the topic: the place of religion in textbooks on “Fundamentals of the Religious Cultures and Secular Ethics” and the History of Russia, the form of discourse in the lessons of “Fundamentals of the Religious Cultures and Secular Ethics”, the factors of choosing religious modules of the “Fundamentals of the Religious Cultures and Secular Ethics” course, students 'interest in the history of religion, students' knowledge of Russian religious leaders. The work is based on the analysis of statistical sources, observation, sociological survey of schoolchildren, parents, students, as well as rhetorical analysis of textbooks. As the results of the research show, in Bashkortostan, a low choice of confessional modules guarantees a weak religious socialization of students in the classrooms of the “Fundamentals of the Religious Cultures and Secular Ethics”, since the module reflects the subject's discourse. Schoolchildren of Bashkortostan demonstrate a rather low interest in the history of religion and the biographies of religious figures. The data obtained indicate a low level of confessional identity of schoolchildren in the region.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Omnia El Shakry
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Thought ◽  
Secular Ethics ◽  
Human Difference ◽  
Psychoanalytic Thought ◽  
Social Scientific

This introductory chapter briefly explores the topography of modern selfhood and its ethical and epistemological contours in postwar Egypt. More specifically, it asks what it means to think through psychoanalysis and Islam together, not as a “problem” but as a creative encounter of ethical engagement. In so doing, the chapter considers the points of intersection, articulation, and commensurability between Islamic discourses and modern social scientific thought, and between religious and secular ethics. This hybridization of psychoanalytic thought with pre-psychoanalytic Islamic discursive formations illustrates that the Arabic Freud emerged not as something developed in Europe only to be diffused at its point of application elsewhere, but rather as something elaborated, like psychoanalysis itself, across the space of human difference.

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