In Defence of the Real: The ‘Pathology’ of Violence in Buddhist Folk Rituals and Statecraft of Sri Lanka: A Psychoanalytic Review

According to Slavoj Zizek, ‘Real’ is the world before it is carved up by the Symbolic. The Symbolic is the big Other that distorts/represses the Real. Fantasy is the mask that covers up this distortion and makes people of necessity live with repressed or sublimated forms of pleasure in different versions of the Symbolic. The discontent that issues from this inhibition constitutes psychic trauma and manifests in clash of denominational and racist fantasies. In this article, I attempt a Lacanaian-Zizekian analysis of the traumatic that inflects the subject positions in violent Buddhist state politics of Sri Lanka and seek to trace its continuity in the (anti)-ethics of Sinhala Buddhist folk rituals practised in the southern (low) part of the country. The psychodynamics of violence that engender the political engagement of the state, the JVP and the LTTE in the 1980s are not dissimilar from that of the sacrificial violence of Buddhist exorcism rituals in vogue in parts of Sri Lanka today. This is a fresh attempt to understand why violence becomes ‘unavoidable’ even in denominational identities that otherwise preach ahimsa (non-violence), and in statecraft that professes to be governed by such principles.     

Acceptibility, Evidence, and Severity

The notion of a severe test has played an important methodological role in the history of science. But it has not until recently been analyzed in any detail. We develop a generally Bayesian analysis of the notion, compare it with Deborah Mayo’s error-statistical approach by way of sample diagnostic tests in the medical sciences, and consider various objections to both. At the core of our analysis is a distinction between evidence and confirmation or belief. These notions must be kept separate if mistakes are to be avoided; combined in the right way, they provide an adequate understanding of severity. Those who think that the weight of the evidence always enables you to choose between hypotheses “ignore one of the factors (the prior probability) altogether, and treat the other (the likelihood) as though it ...meant something other than it actually does. This is the same mistake as is made by someone who has scruples about measuring the arms of a balance (having only a tape measure at his disposal ...), but is willing to assert that the heavier load will always tilt the balance (thereby implicitly assuming, although without admitting it, that the arms are of equal length!). (Bruno de Finetti, Theory of Probability)²     

Non-Bayesian Accounts of Evidence: Howson’s Counterexample Countered

There is a debate in Bayesian confirmation theory between subjective and non-subjective accounts of evidence. Colin Howson has provided a counterexample to our non-subjective account of evidence: the counterexample refers to a case in which there is strong evidence for a hypothesis, but the hypothesis is highly implausible. In this article, we contend that, by supposing that strong evidence for a hypothesis makes the hypothesis more believable, Howson conflates the distinction between confirmation and evidence. We demonstrate that Howson’s counterexample fails for a different pair of hypotheses.     

An EEG-based neuro-recommendation system for improving consumer purchase experience

The aperture between the marketing domain and the electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain–computer interface (BCI) has been achieved with the inception of neuromarketing. This domain helps access the hidden information of the preferences and tastes of the consumers who intend to purchase. Research scholars have experimented with this emerging area in multiple aspects like designing pricing, promotions, predicting purchase-related activities, new product development, and so on. In this study, we have proposed an innovative use of neuromarketing to build a recommendation system. This recommendation system can potentially suggest suitable products to the consumer based on the past purchase behavior. This proposal carries huge potential in converting visitors to shoppers, increasing average order value, increasing the number of items per order, designing personalized promotions, and so on. The commonality of activated brain signals has been used to build this recommendation system. This neuromarketing-based recommendation system carries the advantage over the traditional recommendation system as this system suggests products based on the actual real-time state of the brain during the purchase. This system successfully initiated the starting point of building a neuromarketing-based recommendation system.