The epistemics of ayahuasca visions

In this paper, I discuss substance-induced visions and consider their epistemic status, meaning, and modes of proper interpretation. I focus on the visions induced by ayahuasca, a powerful psychoactive plant-made brew that has had a central status and role in the indigenous tribal cultures of the upper Amazonian region. The brew is especially famous for the visions seen with it. These are often coupled with personal psychological insights, mentations concerning topics of special significance to one, intellectual (notably, philosophical and metaphysical) ideations, as well as powerful religious and spiritual sentiments. Thus, under the intoxication, people often feel that they gain significant knowledge and understanding. The present discussion takes a cognitive-phenomenological perspective coupled with a philosophical analysis of the various epistemological questions at hand.     

The visions of Luciano Perez,contemporary native American Shaman

This paper presents an interview on the visions of the contemporary Native American shaman Luciano Perez. Born of southern Mexican Indian (P'urepecha) ancestry in Laredo, Texas, on 31 December 1950, he was trained in shamanic practice by the Lakota Sioux spiritual leader Leonard Crow Dog. He begins the interview with general comments on visions, how he experiences them and how they have matured him as a visionary providing him with spirit contact, revelation and power. He then remembers visions in childhood of the ‘little people’ and of hearing voices calling him. His first adult experience was a revelatory vision at the beginning of his spiritual quest (1973). Finally, he reports a healing vision from 1989 in a chiropractor's office where he sought medical help for severe back pain.     

The politics of time: Deleuze,duration and alter-globalisation

Alex Callinicos, in An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto, criticises Gilles Deleuze's work for its ostensible apolitical aestheticism, and for its correlative undermining of the concept of authenticity so important to political activism. He accordingly valorises the November 1999 mass protests in Seattle against the WTO and economic globalisation as expressing reinvigorated neo-Marxist social critique and rejuvenated belief in authenticity. Both of these, he maintains, are underpinned by insight into the problematic politico-economic excesses of neoliberalism and recognition of the philosophical limitations of post-structural thought, particularly that of Deleuze. Against the backdrop of such criticism, this article considers the value of Deleuze's (and Félix Guattari's) politicisation of time and memory, as a heuristic device that renders conspicuous the durational concerns currently animating the alter-globalisation struggle. Durational concerns which, since the Second World War, have been successively marginalised through developmental time and neoliberal time, and which now face displacement, yet again, through attempts (such as those of Callinicos) to subsume them within the time of dialectical materialism. Arguably, this move threatens to curb the diverse temporalities currently being produced by alter-globalisation supporters, using the internet and related digital media, as part of a tactical effort to resist neoliberal hegemony.     

Public and private communication are different: results on relative expressivity

Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) is the study of how to reason about knowledge, belief, and communication. This paper studies the relative expressivity of certain fragments of the DEL language for public and private communication. It is shown that the language of public communication with common knowledge and the language of private communication with common knowledge are expressively incomparable for the class of all pointed Kripke models, which provides a formal proof that public and private communication are fundamentally different in the presence of common knowledge. It is also shown that single-recipient private communication does not add expressive power to the language of modal logic with common knowledge for any class of transitive pointed Kripke models. The latter result provides a sense in which positive introspection—believing our own beliefs—induces a kind of self-dialog.     

The Second Vatican Council 50th anniversary: visions and re-visions

On 21 November 2014, the 50th anniversary of the solemn promulgation of Lumen Gentium and Unitatis Redintegratio was celebrated. Between ‘aggiornamento’ and ‘ressourcement’ the Catholic Church had been striving to understand itself and its Tradition more precisely, in order to be newly relevant, lastingly true and authoritative in the future ? an indispensible task, if the gospel were to be proclaimed to the contemporary world, but not an easy one. It is little wonder that this completion of the Council's endeavours was preceded by its so-called ‘black week’. Questions remain as to the outcome of it all, and the articles assembled in this issue assess the reception of these two conciliar texts after 50 years. Where do the achievements lie? Where are the shortcomings? Where do questions need to be asked today that reach beyond the horizon of Vatican II?     

Public and private self-awareness: When personal attitudes conflict with societal expectations

Different methods of inducing self-awareness have generally been assumed to be interchangeable. The present paper argues that the two most widely used manipulations of self-awareness—audiences and mirrors—differ in an important way: specifically, audiences increase focus on the public aspects of the self, whereas mirrors focus attention on the private aspects of the self. It is further argued that the standards that are used to regulate behavior depend upon which of these self-aspects is taken as the object of attention. Attention to the private self may result in behavior that reflects personal attitudes; attention to the public self may cause behavior to become more consistent with societal expectations. This reasoning was tested in two studies in which subjects served as “teachers” in an aggression paradigm. Each subject in Experiment 1 opposed the use of punishment in learing, but felt that other people favored it. Compared to the control condition, the presence of a mirror led to decreased levels of shock, and the presence of an evaluative audience led to increased levels of shock. Experiment 2 made use of subjects who favored the use of punishment but felt that others were against its use. Compared to the control group, the presence of a mirror led to increased levels of shock whereas the presence of an evaluative audience led to decreased levels of shock. Taken together, these findings indicate that self-awareness manipulations need to be chosen according to the aspect of self that is to be the object of self-attention. Discussion centers on the implications of the public-private distinction.     

Black Athena: The politics of scholarship

Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol. II: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence, by Martin Bernal, London: Free Association Books, 1991, 736 pages, hb £39.95, pb £19.95     

The Self, the symbolic and synchronicity: virtual realities and the emergence of the psyche

Jung's theory of synchronicity is seen as a step in the development of a complete theory of the symbol. In so doing, a number of proposals are made for modelling the symbolic process along lines already in use for modelling a variety of other phenomena, ranging from language to the behaviour of earthquakes. These modelling techniques involve processes of self-organization, and raise issues of scaling in systems including symbolic systems. The proposal is made that symbolic systems obey the same rules of scaling that these other systems obey, and that symbolic systems can therefore be understood as exhibiting the characteristics of a power law distribution-a concept that is explained and developed in the paper. It is finally proposed that synchronicity is an aspect of the symbolic that can be characterized as exhibiting a high degree of 'symbolic density'.     

HIV and AIDS in Africa: social,political, and economic realities

Sub-Saharan Africa bears the brunt of the HIV epidemic, which is fueled by the many ethical, social, and political complexities that make up Africa. In turn, the pandemic has also caused many ethical, social, and political complexities that Africa now grapples with. Being infected with HIV is highly complex and challenging. Regrettably, gender inequality is still pervasive in Africa. The response by African leaders to the pandemic has been, on the whole, shamefully lethargic. For Africa to win its war against HIV/AIDS, a paradigm shift is required from the perspective of its socio-political context. What is called for is positive political will that will address all aspects of the social determinants of AIDS. What is also required is that Ubuntu is embraced meaningfully.