HOW INDIA GDP CHANGED FROM SECOND AFTER CHINA IN 1780 TO 1.2% IN 1900 AFTER MUSLIM ANS FOLLOWED BY BRITISH'S LOOT
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Saturday, May 3, 2014
DEFALCIFICATION OF INDIAN HISTORY
'Defalsification of Indian history is the first step for our renaissance.' - Dr. Subramanian Swamy
In this falsified history, it is made out that Hindus capitulated to Islamic invaders. But on the contrary,unlike Iran, Iraq and Egypt where within decades the country capitulated to become 100 per cent Muslims. India despite 800 years of brutal Islamic rule, remained 80 per cent Hindu.
The fabrication of our History begins with the falsification of our chronology.
The accepted history of no country can be structured on foreign accounts of it. But Nehru and his Leftist cronies did just that, and thus generations of Indians have been brainwashed by this falsified history of India.
The UPA has succeeded in persuading more state governments to accept the NCERT texts. A report on Monday (January 5, 2009) said 12 more state governments have accepted to teach NCERT texts in their schools.
For the last two weeks the Organiser is carrying a series of articles on the NCERT textbooks prescribed for students at the primary, secondary and higher secondary schools. We have found these books written with a peculiar mindset, to denationalise and deculturise the young Indian. These books fail to make the children aware of their true heritage. These books seem to distort even India's freedom struggle, Mahatma Gandhi's role and try to divide the society into different caste and class segments. Their idea is to convince the children that India as a nation came to exist only after August 15, 1947.
We request the parents, teachers, students and scholars to join this academic exercise to expose the shenanigans behind promotion of these books in Indian schools. ?Editor
The identity of India is Hindustan, i.e., a nation of Hindus and those others who acknowledge with pride that their ancestors were Hindus. Hindustan represents the continuing history of culture of Hindus. One?s religion may change, but culture does not. Thus, on the agenda for a national renaissance should be the dissemination of the correct perception of what we are. This perception has to be derived from a defalsified history. However, the present history taught in our schools and colleges is the British imperialist-sponsored one, with the intent to destroy our identity. India as a State is treated as a British-created entity and of only recent origin. The Indian people are portrayed as a heterogeneous lot who are hopelessly divided against themselves. Such a ?history? has been deliberately created by the British as a policy. Sir George Hamilton, Secretary of State for India, wrote to the Home Office on March 26, 1888 that ?I think the real danger to our rule is not now but say 50 years hence?.. We shall (therefore) break Indians into two sections holding widely different views?.. We should so plan the educational text books that the differences between community and community are further strengthened?.
After achieving Independence, under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru and the implementing authority of the anglicized ICS, revision of our history was never done, in fact the very idea was condemned as ?obscurantist? and Hindu chauvinist by Nehru and his ilk.
The Imperialist History of India
What is the gist of this British imperialist-tailored Indian history? In this history, India is portrayed as the land ?conquered? first by the ?Dravidians?, then by the ?Aryans?, later by Muslims, and finally by the British. Otherwise, everything else is mythical. Our history books today exhibit this obsession with foreign rule. For example, even though the Mughal rule from Akbar to Aurangzeb is about 150 years, which is much shorter than the 350 year rule of the Vijayanagaram empire, the history books of today hardly take notice of the latter. In fact the territory under Krishna Devaraya?s rule was much larger than Akbar?s, and yet it is the latter who is called ?the Great?. Such a version suited the British rules who had sought to create a legitimacy for their presence in India. Furthermore, we were also made to see advantages accruing from British rule, the primary one being that India was united by this colonialism, and that but for the British, India would never have been one country. Thus, the concept of India itself is owed to the plunder of colonialists.
What is the gist of this British imperialist-tailored Indian history? In this history, India is portrayed as the land ?conquered? first by the ?Dravidians?, then by the ?Aryans?, later by Muslims, and finally by the British. Otherwise, everything else is mythical. Our history books today exhibit this obsession with foreign rule. For example, even though the Mughal rule from Akbar to Aurangzeb is about 150 years, which is much shorter than the 350 year rule of the Vijayanagaram empire, the history books of today hardly take notice of the latter. In fact the territory under Krishna Devaraya?s rule was much larger than Akbar?s, and yet it is the latter who is called ?the Great?. Such a version suited the British rules who had sought to create a legitimacy for their presence in India. Furthermore, we were also made to see advantages accruing from British rule, the primary one being that India was united by this colonialism, and that but for the British, India would never have been one country. Thus, the concept of India itself is owed to the plunder of colonialists.
In this falsified history, it is made out that Hindus capitulated to Islamic invaders. But on the contrary, unlike Iran, Iraq and Egypt where within decades the country capitulated to become 100 per cent Muslims. India despite 800 years of brutal Islamic rule, remained 80 per cent Hindu.
These totally false and pernicious ideas have however permeated deep into our educational system. They have poisoned the minds of our younger generations who have not had the benefit of the Freedom Struggle to awaken their pride and nationalism. It has thus to be an essential part of the renaissance agenda that these ideas of British-sponsored history of India, namely, (1) that India as a State was a gift of the British and (2) that there is no such thing as a native Indian, and what we are today is a by-product of the rape of the land by visiting conquerors and their hordes and (3) that India is a land that submitted meekly to invading hordes from Aryan to the English, are discarded.
Falsification of Chronology in India?s History
The fabrication of our History begins with the falsification of our chronology.
Falsification of Chronology in India?s History
The fabrication of our History begins with the falsification of our chronology.
The customary dates quoted for composition of the Rig Veda (circa 1300 B.C.), Mahabharat (600 B.C.), Buddha?s Nirvana (483 B.C.), Maurya Chandragupta?s coronation (324 B.C.), and Asoka (c.268 B.C.) are entirely wrong. Those dates are directly or indirectly based on a selected reading of Megasthenes? account of India. In fact, so much so that eminent historians have called if the ?sheet anchor of Indian chronology?. The account of Megasthenes and the derived chronology of Indian history have also an important bearing on related derivations such as the two-race (Aryan-Dravidian) theory, and on the pre-Vedic character of the so called Indus Valley Civilization.
Megasthenes was the Greek ambassador sent by Seleucus Nicator in c. 302 B.C. to the court of the Indian king whom he and the Greek called ?Sandrocottus?. He was stationed in ?Palimbothra?, the capital city of the kingdom. It is not clear how many years Megasthenes stayed in India, but he did write an account of his stay, titled Indika. The manuscript Indika is lost, and there is no copy of it available. However, during the time it was available, many other Greek writers quoted passages from it in their own works. These quotations were meticulously collected by Dr. Schwanbeck in the nineteenth century, and this compilation is also available to us in English (J.M. McCrindle: Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian).
The founder of the Mauryas, however, is not the only Chandragupta in Indian history, who was a king of Magadh and founder of a dynasty. In particular, there is Gupta Chandragupta, a Magadh king and founder of the Gupta dynasty at Patliputra. Chandragupta Gupta was also not of ?noble? birth and, in fact, came to power by deposing the Andhra king Chandrasri. That is, Megasthenes? Sandrocottus may well be Gupta Chandragupta instead of Maurya Chandgragupta (and Xandremes the same as Chandrasri, and Sandrocryptus as Samudragupta).
In order to determine which Chandragupta it is, we need to look further. It is, of course, a trifle silly to build one?s history on this kind of tongue-gymnastics, but I am afraid we have no choice but to pursue the Megasthenes evidence to its end, since the currently acceptable history is based on it.
In order to determine at which Chandragupta?s court Megasthenes was ambassador, we have to look further into his account of India. We find he was at Pataliputra (i.e. Palimbothra in Megasthenes? account). We know from the Puranas (which are unanimous on this point) that all the Chandravamsa king of Magadh (including the Mauryas) prior to the Guptas, had their capital at Girivraja (or equivalently Rajgrha) and not at Pataliputra. Gupta Chandragupta was the first king to have his capital in Patliputra. This alone should identify Sandrocottos with Gupta Chandragupta. However some 6-11th century A.D. sources call Pataliputra the Maurya capital, e.g., Vishakdatta in Mudrarakshasa, but these are based on secondary sources and not on the Puranas.
Pursuing Megasthenes? account further, we find most of it impossible to believe. He appears to be quite vague about details and is obviously given to the Greek writers? weakness in letting his imagination get out of control. For example, ?Near a mountain which is called Nulo there live men whose fee are turned back-wards and have eight toes on each foot.? (Solinus 52.36-30 XXX.B.) ?Megasthenes says a race of men (exist in India) who neither eat or drink, and in fact have not even mouths, set on fire and burn like incense in order to sustain their existence with odorous fumes?..? (Plutarch, Frag. XXXI). However, Megasthenes appears to have made one precise statement of possible application which was picked up later by Pliny, Solinus, and Arrian. As summarized by Professor K.D. Sethna of Pondicherry, it reads:
?Dionysus was the first who invaded India and was the first of all who triumphed over the vanished Indians. From the days of Dionysus to Alexander the Great, 6451 years reckoned with 3 months additional. From the time of Dionysus to Sandrocottus the Indians reckoned 6452 years, the calculation being made by counting the kings who reigned in the intermediate period to number 153 or 154 years. But among these a republic was thrice established, one extending?..years, another to 300 and another to 120. The Indians also tell us that Dionysus was earlier than Heracles by fifteen generations, and that except for him no one made a hostile invasion of India but that Alexander indeed came and overthrew in war all whom he attacked.?
While there a number of issues raised by this statement including the concoction that Alexander was victorious in battle across the Indus, the exactness with which he states his numbers should lead us to believe that Megasthenes could have received his chronological matters from none else than the Puranic pundits of his time. To be conclusive, we need to determine who are the ?Dionysus? and ?Heracles? of Megasthenes? account.
Traditionally, Dionysus (or Father Bachhus) was a Greek God of wine who was created from Zeus?s thigh. Dionysus was also a great king, and was recognised as the first among all kings, a conqueror and constructive leader. Could there be an Indian equivalent of Dionysus whom Megasthenes quickly equated with his God of wine? Looking through the Puranas, one does indeed find such a person. His name is Prithu.
Prithu was the son of King Vena. The latter was considered a wicked man whom the great sages could not tolerate, especially after he told them that the elixir soma should be offered to him in prayer and not to the gods (Bhagavata Purana IV.14.28). The great sages thereafter performed certain rites and killed Vena. But since this could lead immediately to lawlessness and chaos, the rshis decided to rectify it by coronating a strong and honest person. The rshis therefore churned the right arm (or thigh; descriptions vary) of the dead body (of Vena) to give birth to a fully grown Prithu. It was Prithu, under counsel from rshi Atri (father of Soma), who reconstructed society and brought about economic prosperity. Since he became such a great ruler, the Puranas have called him adi-raja (first king) of the world. So did the Satpatha Brahmana (v.3.5 4.).
In the absence of a cult of soma in India, it is perhaps inevitable that Megasthenes and the other Greeks, in translating Indian experiences for Greek audiences, should pick on adi-raja Prithu who is ?tinged with Soma? in a number of ways and bears such a close resemblance to Dionysus in the circumstances of his birth, and identify him as Dionysus. If we accept identifying Dionysus with Prithu, then indeed by a calculation based on the Puranas (done by DR Mankad, Koti Venkatachelam, KD Sethna, and others), it can be conclusively shown that indeed 6,451 years had elapsed between Prithu and a famous Chandragupta. This calculation exactly identifies Sandrocottus with Gupta Chandragupta and not with Maurya Chandragupta. The calculation also identifies Heracles with Hari Krishna (Srikrishna) of Dwarka.
This calculation must be necessarily long and tedious to counter the uninformed general feeling first sponsored by Western scholars, that the Puranas spin only fair tales and are therefore quite unreliable. However, most of these people do not realise that most Puranas have six parts, and the Vamsanucharita sections (especially of Vishnu, Matsya, and Vagu) are a systematic presentation of Indian history especially of the Chandravansa kings of Magadha.
In order to establish these dates, I would have to discuss in detail the cycle of lunar asterisms, the concept of time according to Aryabhatta, and various other systems, and also the reconciliation of various minor discrepancies that occur in the Puranas. Constraints of space and time however, prevent me from presenting these calculations here.
However, on the basis of these calculations we can say that Gupta Chandragupta was ?Sandrocottus? c.327 B.C. His son, Samudragupta, was the great king who established a unified kingdom all over India, and obtained from the Cholas, Pandyas, and Cheras their recognition of him. He also had defeated Seleucus Nicator, while his father Chandragupta was king. On this calculation we can also place Prithu at 6777 B.C. and Lord Rama before that. Derivation of other dates without discussion may also be briefly mentioned here: Buddha?s Nirvana 1807 BC, Maurya Chandragupta c. 1534 BC, Harsha Vikramaditya (Parmar) c. 82 BC.
The European scholars have thus constructed an enormous edifice of contemporary foreign dates to suit their dating. A number of them are based on misidentification. For instance, the Rock Edict XIII, the famous Kalinga edict, is identified as Asoka?s. It was, however, Samudragupta?s (Samudragupta was a great conqueror and a devout admirer of Asoka. He imitated Asoka in many ways and also took the name Asokaditya. In his later life, he became a sanyasi). Some other facts, which directly contradict their theories, they have rather flippantly cast aside. We state here only a few examples ? such facts as (1) Fa-hsien was in India and at Patliputra c. 410 AD. He mentions a number of kings, but makes not even a fleeting reference to the Gupta, even though according to European scholars he came during the height of their reign. He also dates Buddha at 1100 BC. (2) A number of Tibetan documents place Buddha at 2100 BC. (3) The Ceylonese Pali traditions leave out the Cholas, Pandyas, and Cheras from the list of Asoka?s kingdoms, whereas Rock Edict XIII includes them. In fact, as many scholars have noted, the character of Asoka from Ceylonese and other traditions is precisely (as RK Mukherjee has said) what does not appear in the principal edicts.
The accepted history of no country can be structured on foreign accounts of it. But Nehru and his Leftist cronies did just that, and thus generations of Indians have been brainwashed by this falsified history of India.
The time has come for us to take seriously our Puranic sources and to re-construct a realistic well-founded history of ancient India, a history written by Indians about Indians. Such a history should bring out the amazing continuity of a Hindu nation which asserts its identity again and again. It should focus on the fact that at the centre of our political thought is the concept of the Chakravartian ideal ? to defend the nation from external aggression while giving maximum internal autonomy to the janapadas.
A correct, defalsified history would record that Hindustan was one nation in the art of governance, in the style of royal courts, in the methods of warfare, in the maintenance of its agrarian base, and in the dissemination of information. Sanskrit was the language of national communication and discourse.
An accurate history should not only record the periods of glory but the moments of degeneration, of the missed opportunities, and of the failure to forge national unity at crucial junctures in time. It should draw lessons for the future generations from costly errors in the past.
In particular, it was not Hindu submission as alleged by JNU historians that was responsible for our subjugation but lack of unity and effective military strategy.
Without an accurate history, Hindustan cannot develop on its correct identity. And without a clearly defined identity, Indians will continue to flounder. Defalsification of Indian history is the first step for our renaissance.
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Friday, May 2, 2014
Is There Consciousness Within Science?
Is There Consciousness Within Science?
An Interview with Ravi Gomatam by Thomas Beaudry
The ongoing interface between Western science and Eastern
mysticism is perhaps the strongest statement in modern times as to the relevance
of India's ancient spiritual wisdom. That the Upanishads are influencing the
reigning paradigm of modern science is good reason to look more deeply within
their pages for insight in today's world.
A conference sponsered by the Bhaktivedanta Institute in
San Francisco centered on the study of of consciousness within science. The
Institutes international secretary, Ravi Gomatam, shared with us what he calls
the third wave of the ongoing interface between science and mysticism.
The word Bhaktivedanta itself connotes the synthesis of science and consciousness. Vedanta represents the rational, intellectual side, and bhakti represents the holistic, subjective inner side. The institute promotes studies and discussions on the need for and development of consciousness-based paradigms to outstanding problems in science. The Institute consists of fifteen well-trained professionals, mostly scientists and a few engineers. Our main branch is in Bombay, and we have only recently begun to hold programs in the West.
Our
in-house research is based on specific paradigms for consciousness that are
available within the Bhagavat tradition of Vedanta, or theistic Vedanta. We also
offer research fellowships through which academic people can interact with us,
and we hold broad-based conferences and workshops.
When we do
conferences we recognize that the topic of consciousness is a very difficult one
to deal with. Consciousness has occupied the attention of mankind for thousands
of years. As conscious beings we have wondered about our essential nature, our
place and our relationship to the universe in which we find ourselves, our
rights, and even what are our duties—especially as we see today so many problems
caused directly and indirectly by the application of science. No one can claim
at this point that he has a final answer to these questions. Consequently our
conferences are very broad-based. We bring together a wide variety of thoughts
from different disciplines of science, and we provide a forum for discussion so
that some kind of a scientific consensual understanding of consciousness can
emerge on its own. Although we have our roots in India's spirituality, our work
itself is very contemporary and highly objective.
How do you view the
evolution of the ongoing interface between modern science and Eastern
mysticism?
Capra on
one hand should definitely be credited for putting the subject into the center
of the stage. His work was the first wave. His essential point was that the
scientific tradition and the mystical traditions are two different approaches to
understanding the same reality. He managed to draw some parallels between the
emerging concerns of science and existing world views of Eastern mysticism.
Despite the importance of his work that started this trend, his drawing of
parallels was very superficial. For example, his conjecture that the tracks that
sub-atomic particles leave on a photographic plate are the dance of Shiva is really
pseudo-science. He had a fair understanding of physics and, for those times, a
reasonable introduction to Eastern mysticism. His ideas were commercially
successful, revealing that there was a large audience for this topic, and they
pointed the direction in which further exploration could be made.
The second wave, the work of Ken Wilber and others,
recognized the shortcomings of Capra, Zukav, and the like. They showed that the
issues of spirituality, whether Christian mysticism, Sufism, or the Vedic
tradition, are dealing with a different ontology than that of modern science.
Thus Ken Wilber strongly argued that we should not think that science is going
to lead directly to the same understanding of reality as that afforded by
mysticism. At best science could point towards the need for cultivating
mysticism, for which we would then have to shift gears. This was the second
wave.But the problem with this approach, although true in the ultimate sense, is
that it does not chart specific pathways by which science can come closer to
consciousness. Indeed, it even precludes the possiblity of an expanded science
that can on day legitimately study consciousness directly. In cleaving the two
in this way, in a sense, Wilber reintroduced a kind of Cartesian dualism.
Instead of the mind/body problem, it became the spirituality versus science
problem. This dilemma then formed the motivation for our recent conference—the
third wave.
This third
wave, as I see it, will begin due to the willingness on the part of scientists
themselves to expand the domain of science in very new ways. The motivation for
this is already coming from results in established fields, such as artificial
intelligence, molecular biology, theoretical physics, as well as new emerging
fields like engineering anomolies. Through these fields the causal role of
consciousness in the physical world at deeper levels of matter is becoming
established. What is required is to sustain this investigation so that a logical
framework for discussion of consciousness results naturally within science. In
the process science will doubtless discover a new middle ground between what it
now thinks of as matter and what the mystics describe as consciousness. It will
involve discovering levels of subtle matter presently unknown to science. This
new science will become the empiric evidence for, and system by which we can
better explain the causal role of consciousness. No doubt, this will require new
tools of theory and experiment. Our own contribution is to facilitate this
process of discovery.
That's quite a challenge
for science.
Well if we
survey the history of modern science we will see that major advancements came
when scientists succeeded in integrating seemingly disparate phenomen. Newton,
Maxwell, and Einstein are good examples.
Newton's success was that he integrated stellar motions
with movements of ordinary bodies on Earth. It was a grand synthesis that
launched Newtonian physics. Newtonian physics had an ontology, or mode of
existence of things. In it the fabric of the universe was particles: small
particles that constantly acted, reacted, and collided with one another
according to very precise laws. The first synthesis was that of motions, small
motions and big motions. That was considered a big success. Imagine the euphoria
they experienced when they realized that an object falling from the Leaning
Tower of Pisa followed the same laws that the sun follows! It was soon shown
that these laws of motion could be used to understand not only the behavior of
solids, but also liquids, and then gases. In this way the behavior of the entire
macrocosm and microcosm was thought to be within our grasp. The second major
synthesis came when Maxwell unified the concepts of electromagnetic phenomena
and light.
People may
be surprised to know that toward the end of the 19th century scientists thought
there were no more fundamental laws to be discovered; just do more and more
mathematics and everything would be explained. It was the famous physicist Lord
Kelvin who said that there were only two small clouds on the horizon: "black
body radiation" and "ether drift." But these turned out to be bigger than
scientists thought.
In this
century the two great leaps science has taken concern these two phenomena. One
was Einstein's integration of space and time into one space-time continuum,
which explained the absence of ether drift. The second great leap was quantum
mechanics. It brought us a connection between two seemingly separate
realms—physical measuring devices and human observers. The point I am making is
that science has made great steps when apparently disparate phenomena were
brought together under one roof. Now the time is ripe to bring together yet
another pair—mind and matter. But this too requires a new conceptualization.
This is now what we are attempting—to bring together science and consciousness,
and take another giant step. With the development of quantum mechanics it became
clear that the theory had a fundamental problem. The quantum theory has no
ontology. It does not concern itself with what the world is made up of. It
doesn't start with an assumption about the world's makeup and then build a
theory. Rather, it talks about probabilistic connections between successive
observations not the events themselves.
As Heisenberg
pointed out, "Quantum theory no longer speaks of the state of the universe, but
our knowledge
of the state of the universe." For the first time scientists had a theory that
ultimately had no objective foundation. That this may be because quantum theory
does not satisfactorily account for consciousness has been pointed out by the
founding fathers of quantum theory, Eugen Wigner and John von Neumann, but this
line of reasoning has not been adequately pursued.
There are
also other areas within science besides quantum mechanics where consideration of
consciousness has become central. Artificial intelligence is an example, where
the initial mood was very similar to Newtonian hubris. Newtonian physicists
thought everything in the world could be explained in terms of laws governing
basic motions. Similarly, artificial intelligence researchers thought that all
aspects of human cognition could be explained simply in terms of rules governing
our behavior. But soon AI researchers found that even the simplest aspects of
human cognition could not be reproduced. Now they understand that to suceed in
AI we need a basic understanding of human consciousness. In psychology too,
behaviorism has proven to be insufficient, and what was called introspective
psychology is coming back into fashion.
So our
institute is promoting the examination of overtly consciousness-based approaches
to these problems within science today. Consciousness has been talked about
within science in the past, but always with a view to explain it away rather
than explain it. Accepting that consciousness has a causal role in the world is
a very bitter medicine for scientists to swallow, but they are beginning to do
it. And metaphysicists are also beginning to see that while there is undeniable
reality to the subjective dimension, any system claiming to explain it must bear
relevance to the objective concerns of empiric science. This is the challenge:
to answer the pressing questions arising in science that call for consideration
of consciousness with genuine consciousness-based paradigms.
How did you choose your
speakers for the panel?
The first
thing I did was contact Sir John Eccles. Eccles is very much known for his open
stand that mind is different from the brain. Eccles was described by Libet as
one of the five top neuroscientists of the century. When he says that brain is
different from the mind, in the very least you cannot tell him that he does not
know about the brain. He was the first to accept, which he did immediately. Once
he agreed, everything else fell into place. We had to choose both theorists and
experimenters. Data in this field is very, very rare. We chose two people to
present data that were from opposite camps. Benjamin Libet from UCSF had data
which seems to show that in some cases our apparent actions of free will, such
as when our hand moves spontaneously to set the clock, may well be merely action
triggered by the brain a full half second before we desired to lift our hand.
According to this data, our free will may well be an after thought! There are
other ways to interpret his data, and Libet is the first to admit that his data
deals at best with local intentionalities, not global free will. Robert Jahn and
Brenda Dunn presented data that shows the opposite, that consciousness has
intentionality. These were the experimenters. Although Pribram and Eccles might
consider themselves experimenters as well, they presented no data. The rest of
the panel consisted of theorists of different fields: neuroscience, psychology,
physics, artificial intelligence, mathematics, and philosophy.
You mentioned that there
is not much data in this field to draw from. What about the data in
neurscience?
Yes. This
point was also raised during the panel discussion. It was Pribram who complained
that not enough of the existing data was sufficiently discussed at the
conference. But John Searle came up with the best rejoinder when he said that
the problem of discussing data collected thus far is that all this data was
gathered specifically to demonstrate that consciousness does not exist.
Therefore how can we speak of consciousness and use this data? First we need to
do new research.
The
difficulty is that science always goes by an operational definition. In order to
make any concept scientific, you must have an operational definition, because
then it becomes falsifiable and hence becomes scientific. An operational
definition is in itself an interesting concept. What it really means is that you
can propose any phenomena, like Newton proposed gravitation, but it must be
eventually corelated to some adhoc physical measurements. Consciousness,
however, is by definition the one that measures, the one that does the
observation. So how are you going to give an operational definition of
it?
I think
the answer lies in seeing that the interaction between consciousness and gross
matter involves subtle levels or realms of matter where other kinds of
measurement than the ones that we are presently aware of can be made. The work
of Robert Jahn and others are the kind of experiments in which more precise
operational definitions of phenomena that are closer to consciousness than gross
matter, namely mind, can be talked about. If we learn to see other orders of
existence between consciousness and gross matter, such as mind and intelligence,
then scientists might be better able to conceptualize the ultimate phenomena.
Why have scientists been
so reluctant to discuss consciousness in the past?
Did you
know that before Rutherford split the atom in 1911 scientists considered the
question of what an atom is a religious question?! For them it was enough that
the hypothesis of the atom was useful to explain certain physical processes.
Kekule, who discovered the structure of benzene said, "The question of whether
or not atoms exist has little signifigance from a chemical point of view; its
discussion belongs rather to metaphysics." But today the study of what's inside
the atom is
physics!
Similarly,
scientists in this century have regarded the issue of what consciousness is as a
religious or metaphysical question. After all, Western science started out as a
protest against religion. Since religion went inward, science saw its own task
as going outward. But as science went further and further into the external
world, they ended up inside the atom where to their surprise they saw
consciousness once again staring them in the face!
Even then
scientists thought a hypothesis about consciousness was all that was needed.
However, just as the study of the atom has become what we call physics today,
the study of what consciousness is, I feel, may very soon become
the science.
William James said
"When science comes to eventually understand consciousness it will be an achievement in the face of which every other achievement of science will pale into insignifigance."
Many scientists equate mind and consciousness. Yet in your personal presentation at the conference you described mind as subtle matter, different from consciousness. What is your conception of mind, matter, and consciousness?
In my talk, I approached the issue of consciousness from the perspective of AI. The first step here is to show the need for a new paradigm. That artificial intelligence needs a new paradigm has become apparent from the variety of intractable problems in cognition we face in areas such as perception, natural language processing, knowledge representation, and automatic reasoning. We have no general theory of computation yet that can produce human cognition in machines. A task that comes naturally to a one year old child—recognising the face of his or her mother—is hopelessly beyond the capacity of supercomputers. What's required is not just some new hardware/software schemes, but a fundamentally new technology.
To understand what I mean let's compare electronic computers with mechanical calculators. Both are symbol processing systems. In principle, a mechanical system of gears and levers can be constructed to reproduce the workings of any electronic computer. In practice, however, this will not be possible. A mechanical system equivilent to even the simple desktop computer would be so enormous as to fill the entire planet and consume power that all the coal mines on earth cannot supply! This advantage of speed, power, and size is present in electronic computers because IC chips involve operation of matter at a much subtler level, obeying laws of a different kind from mechanical systems. You cant hope to make smaller and smaller mechanical parts and reach IC technology.
Similarly, AI researchers today think that by making IC chips smaller and smaller we will eventually come to mind. But I argue that you can't do that. You have to go to another level to talk about mind. I am postulating different levels of matter. I am suggesting that we have to think of mind as a subtler level of matter that operates much faster and under different laws than IC chips. You cannot reach that level through nanotechnology.
Professor
Bremmerman at UC Berkeley has shown that there are absolute limits to
infromation processing in physical systems regardless of the details of their
internal construction. For example, given a computer of total mass m, the
maximum information it can ever process is mc2/h bits/second, where h is the
plank's constant. He has gone on to show that even if we consider a computer
that has been in operation for the duration of the entire universe, assuming
that it has been in operation for the duration of the present age of the
universe, its total information capacity will not be enough to solve a
travelling salesman's problem involving no more than 100 cities! The conclusion
is that the human brain, being a physical device, is subject to the same
absolute limitations, irrespective of its internal construction. If the brain
alone was involved in human cognition, we should not be able to carry out the
kind of complicated cognitive operations that we do! Therefore, I have argued
that what is involved in human cognition is information processing involving
levels much faster and hence subtler than the brain.
If you
accept this idea, that there is more to human cognition than the brain function,
then there is already a model of consciousness, intelligence, mind, and brain in
the Vedantic texts that closely follows these requirements. This Vedantic model
describes mind as a level of matter subtler than the brain. According to this
model, thought is to mind what motionis to objects, or beavior is to the body.
That is, thoughts have no intrinsic semantic content. An example of this is when
a driver drives a car. The idea of the journey is not intrinsic to the car's
motion, but a superimposition on the part of the driver. Similarly, meaning is
not intrinsic top thoughts of the material mind, but is a superimposition of
subjective consciousness.
This idea,
that thought is a mechanical output of matter at the subtle level of mind
without intrinsic meaning is a novel idea within Western tradition. If this idea
can be shown to be of practical relevance to AI, then I feel we can go one step
nearer to the paradigm of consciousness, otherwise, to ask current science to
jump directly to consciousness is too much. This is a necessary step in what I
have mentioned about the third wave—finding the middle ground between
consciousness and matter, and thus expanding the domain of current science.
What is the difference
between Cartesian dualism and the Vedantic dualism you are
discussing?
Descartes
said, "I am that, that thinks, the soul, or the reason, or the understanding."
He used all of these terms equivalantly. Thinking, reasoning, and soul were all
the same for him. This is the problem with Cartesian dualism—that it lumped into
one concept called mind all hierarchic cognitive traits. That is why Cartesian
dualism has no relevance for science, whereas the Vedantic pluralism—in terms of
consciousness, mind, and body—seems to give ideas about the presence of various
levels of hierarchy in matter.
If you see
a car moving on the street and you want to know why it's turning left or right,
one might say, "All you need to do is study the mechanics of the car. The car is
a complete system; there is nothing inside." But I come and say no, there is a
driver in there. Now that is correct, but it's not sufficient. Still you have to
accept that there are several levels of mechanisms within the car, and there is
a specific point at which the driver is coming in contact with the car, the
steering wheel and control panel. Descartes was correct in thinking that there
is an irreducible subjective residio that is essentially the self. That is
exactly the same as the Vedic idea tat tvam asi, thou art that. But Descartes was
not able to distinguish that there is a subtle material substance called mind
that is the point at which consciousness meets matter. There is a hand and there
is a glove. The glove is exactly like the hand but it is a cover. So the mind is
very close to consciousness but it is matter.
The Vedanta also has a
monistic interpretation, monistic idealism if you will. In Shankara's view there
is no objective reality to matter. It is all illusion. You hold a very different
viewpoint on Vedanta.
Yes. There
is a very established tradition of Vedantic thought, monism, that is close to
idealism. We are proposing something different,a multidimensional, pluralistic
approach to the whole issue of reality. We are talking about individual
consciousness and a supreme consciousness or God. We are also talking about
matter as an objective reality, the shadow of consciousness, rather than an
illusion or something that really does not exist. This is theistic
Vedanta.
The
question is which Vedantic paradigm can import concepts that can be shown to be
empirically and analytically accountable. I do not think that monism can explain
any of the problems of consciousness in science in a way relevant to science
simply because, according to the monistic viewpoint, in the ultimate analysis
matter doesn't exist. Therefore the highesr realizations of monisim by
definition can not have any bearing on modern science, which studies the domain
of matter.
It seems that in
attempting to bring consciousness into science, rather than keep the two
separate, you are attempting to bring value into a somewhat valueless
technological world view.
I
certainly hope so. Today science is totaly without a framework for values. Any
highschool boy or girl knows how to calculate the force with which a stone he or
she throws will hit someone in the face, but nothing in those equations they use
will tell them whether or not to throw it. Given the fact that science is
perturbing our universe in greater and greater proportions, it is essential that
we address the absence of values within science. We must note that the changes
wrought by science and technology to our environment are always irreversible.
That is to say we cannot go on polluting our environment for years and then one
day suddenly say "Oops, that was a mistake, let's take it back." It is easy to
destroy something, but much more difficult to put it back together
again.
To solve
the problem of values we must know what is valuable. Consciousness is the most
valuable commodity. Without consciousness our own bodies as dear as they are to
us, are suddenly without value. This of course is a philosophical argument, but
nonetheless an pragmatic one. If we accept it, then, to bring values into
science,we need to connect science with what is
valuable—consciousness.
Cairns Smith is well
known for his work in the field of chemical evolution. I was quite surprised to
hear some of his remarks about consciousness. What is the Vedic view on
evolution?
Darwinian
evolution is biological. It talks about the needs of the biological system by
which evolution proceeds. But it is inadequate to explain the appearance of the
first biological system. Therefore we have theories of chemical evolution which
precede biological evolution. Cairns Smith, as a chemical evolutionist, was
pointing out that consciousness is fundamentally different from all other
physical phenomena because it acts back on the system that creates it.
Consciousness has a two-way interplay that Smith called interactionism. His
realization was that this interactionism must be present at the most fundamental
level of matter. It cannot evolve suddenly in matter.
He went to
the extent of assreting that "To say that consciousness evolved from matter is
to say that a TV evolved from a refrigerator. Such things do not happen." He
therefore postulated what he calls protoconscious units, which are not
themselves conscious, but have the potential for consciousness that molecules
and atoms don't have. However, in doing so he himself is dodging the issue. If
protoconscious units are not conscious, then they have the same defect as matter
in that they can't give rise to consciousness. If they are conscious, then why
not call them consciousness rather than protoconsciousness? This is the same
thing that Minsky tried to do in his book Society of Minds. He tried to show that there are
certain things called minds that are not really minds, but when they all get
together, then you get mind. This degenerates ultimately into philosophical
emergence, where something comes out at the top of a structure that is not at
the bottom of the structure. So you can see that even materialists invoke some
fundamental conscious-like units different from known matter in an attempt o
explain consciousness.
We can
congratulate Cairns Smith for boldly recognizing the conceptual limitations of
chemical evolution, but he has not yet taken the next step, which is to
postulate consciousness as a separate ontological category coexisting along with
matter. This is what I feel scientists in every field should do to solve the
problem of consciousness in there respective fields. It won't suffice for
scientists to assume that once we posit something as non-material that we cannot
study it. We simply have to develop new scientific tools.
As far as
the Vedic viewpoint on the different levels of consciousness within different
species, I once explained this to Wigner. According to the Vedas, just as matter
has fundamental particles called atoms, so consciousness is full of fundamental
particles called cit kana. While every material
atom is unconscious and therefore devoid of individuality, every spiritual
particle is conscious, and therefore it has to be individual. Individuality is a
fundamental axiomatic property of consciousness. Material atoms are governed by
the laws of physics, and spiritual atoms are governed by love because they are
units of free will.
I explained to
Wigner that each unit of consciousness interacts with matter, and we see its
capabilities manifest in accordance with whichever material machine or body it
interacts with. If you drive a motorcycle and I drive a bicycle, you may go
faster than me only because of the vehicle. It has nothing to do with you or I
but the vehicles we are using. He asked me if I thought an amoeba had
consciousness. I told him that the Vedas do not say that an amoeba has
consciousness, but rather that consciousness has an amoeba body! Just as in each
vehicle you see on the road there is a different driver, similarly in each body
there is an individual conscious entity. According to the Vedas, all species
exist at all times. Material bodies do not evolve. But each individual conscious
entity evolves, thus acquiring different bodies which correspond with the
individual's particular state of conscious evolution..
This
paradigm is not contra-intuitive, and different Western schools of thought can
be accomodated within it. Take for example reductionism, which claims that our
behavior is essentially controlled by the physical laws operating on our bodies.
The Vedantic viewpoint accepts that even though I am a conscious individual
transcendent to the body, because I am using this particular body, I am
constrained by its operation according to material laws. Thus reductionism can
be accomodated within this framework.
You can
talk also of emergence. The more sophisticated my physical structure is, the
more I can show my skills. Higher order structures will show higher order
properties, not intrinsically but extrinsically because consciousness can
manifest more of its qualities. Dualism is also accommodated because the Vedic
paradigm admits that consciousness and matter are different. Phenomenology,
which says that beingness is an essential aspect of every structure that has
consciousness, can be accommodated.
In short
this Vedic model is the proverbial elephant of which different portions are
being touched by so many blind men. One blind man says that it is rationalistic,
another dualistic, another idealistic monism, another realism, but no one is
seeing the entire elephant of this Vedic paradigm. The elephant is that there
are two ontological categories, consciousness and matter, and the two interact
to form our world.
Can't you also say that
matter is a vitiated form of consciousness, that everything is ultimately
consciousness?
This
involves a higher philosophical discussion. I can see that at some level of God
consciousness we can think of consciouness and matter in these terms—as you put
it, seeing matter as a vitiated form of consciousness. But presently that
vitiated form of consciousness acts differently as matter, and therefore it can
be considered as a separate ontological category.
As the discussion of
the conscious self enters the scientific arena it seems that we are at a
critical juncture. What is the future of science?
I don't
think that I can do better than to quote scientists who are greater than myself,
who at the ends of their careers have given some reflections. I have some
favorite quotes. W. Penfield, one of the top neuroscientists of the century,
said in an article called Science, the Ox, and the Spirit:
"The physical basis of the mind is the brain action in each individual. It accompanies the activity of the spirit, but the spirit is free. It is capable of some degree of initiative. The spirit is the man one knows. He must have continuity through periods of coma and sleep. I assume then that the spirit must live on somehow after death. I cannot doubt that many make contact with God and have guidance from a greater spirit. If he had only a brain and not a mind, this difficult decision would not be his."
The
tendency to see the human mind in terms of the latest technology of the times is
an old one. In earlier times mind was thought of as a steam engine, as a clock,
and before that as a catapult. Today the attempt is to equate mind with the
brain. But here is something from Ludwig Wittgenstein from his Last Writings
on the Philosophy of Psychology: "Nothing seems more possible to
me than that people some day will come to the definite opinion that there is no
copy in the nervous system which corresponds to a particular thought or to a
particular idea of memory."
Szent-Giorgi, the Nobel laureate
biologist, said,
"I went
through my entire scientific career searching for life, but now I see that life
has somehow slipped through my fingers and all I have is electrons, protons, and
particles, which have no life at all. So in my old age I am forced to retrace my
steps."
So I think the great advantage of discussing the notion of the conscious self within our scientific paradigms is that we can actually enlarge our framework. In order to do that we need help, and I don't think that anyone can deny that the Vedic literatures are the single most vast body of literature that seriously deals with this topic. From page one to the end it is conscious all the way.
So I think the great advantage of discussing the notion of the conscious self within our scientific paradigms is that we can actually enlarge our framework. In order to do that we need help, and I don't think that anyone can deny that the Vedic literatures are the single most vast body of literature that seriously deals with this topic. From page one to the end it is conscious all the way.
Science,
as long as it remains bound to emperical reductionism, can say nothing about the
conscious self. Many in the contemporary world have tried to define perception
such that it fits into their existing paradigms, but this has only made our
problems more accute. Time has come to redefine scientific procedures such that
they explain the conscious self. We need as many new ideas as we can get. If we
are so foolhardy as to reject the entire wisdom preceeding us, such as the Vedic
paradigm I have presented, then what assurance do we have that our present-day
knowledge will not similarly be rejected by future generations?
Science is
rooted in observations, and our conscious self is the very tool by which we
observe. Even the strongest giant can not lift the platform on which he stands.
As great as scientific knowledge is, it cannot explain the conscious self within
its present observational framework. To experience it is to observe it.
[Reprinted from Clarion Call
Magazine]
DEBUNKED DARVIN'S THEORY
DARWIN'S THEORY OF EVOLUTION DEBUNKED
Darwin's Theory of Evolution, as presented in his book "Origin of Species" has been widely accepted as fact, although it is based on Darwin's fallible speculations. His critics write, "If the theory of natural selection of Darwin is correct, why can't we see the intermediate forms of species, the connecting links?" Darwin did not have the answer nor the archeological evidence to back it up. Although there is ample evidence for many species, fossil records provide almost no evidence for the intermediate connecting links.
Later, scientists revised Darwin's theory with their "Punctuated Equilibrium" evolutionary theory, supposedly making evolution invisible in the fossil record. Yet this theory is not verifiable in any way and is highly speculative.
An interesting article appeared recently in Pravda, in Russia, which gives an excellent argument against Darwinism. The article follows:
Where Are All the Half-Evolved Dinosaurs?
BY: BABU G. RANGANATHAM
June 7, RUSSIA (PRAVDA) — Millions of people are taught that the fossil record furnishes proof of evolution. But, where are there fossils of half-evolved dinosaurs or other creatures?
The fossil record contains fossils of only complete and fully-formed species. There are no fossils of partially-evolved species to indicate that a gradual process of evolution ever occurred. Even among evolutionists there are diametrically different interpretations and reconstructions of the fossils used to support human evolution from a supposed ape-like ancestry.
Even if evolution takes millions and millions of years, we should still be able to see some stages of its process. But, we simply don't observe any partially-evolved fish, frogs, lizards, birds, dogs, cats among us. Every species of plant and animal is complete and fully-formed.
Another problem is how could partially-evolved plant and animal species survive over millions of years when their basic organs and tissues were still in the process of evolving? How, for example, were animals breathing, eating, and reproducing if there respiratory, digestive, and reproductive organs were still evolving?
In fact, precisely because of this problem more and more modern evolutionists are adopting a new theory known as Punctuated Equilibrium which says that plant and animal species evolved suddenly from one kind to another and that is why we don't see evidence of partially-evolved species in the fossil record. Of course, we have to accept their word on blind faith because there is no way to prove or disprove what they are saying. These evolutionists claim that something like massive bombardment of radiation resulted in mega mutations in species which produced "instantaneous" changes from one life form to another. The nature and issue of mutations will be discussed later and the reader will see why such an argument is not viable.
The fact that animal and plant species are found fully formed and complete in the fossil record is powerful evidence (although not proof) for creation because it is evidence that they came into existence as fully formed and complete which is possible only by creation.
Evolutionists claim that the genetic and biological similarities between species is evidence of common ancestry. However, that is only one interpretation of the evidence. Another possibility is that the comparative similarities are due to a common Designer who designed similar functions for similar purposes in all the various forms of life. Neither position can be scientifically proved.
Although Darwin was partially correct by showing that natural selection occurs in nature, the problem is that natural selection itself is not a creative force. Natural selection can only work with those biological variations that are possible. The evidence from genetics supports only the possibility for horizontal evolution (i.e. varieties of dogs, cats, horses, cows, etc.) but not vertical evolution (i.e. from fish to human). Unless Nature has the ability to perform genetic engineering vertical evolution will not be possible.
The early grooves in the human embryo that appear to look like gills are really the early stages in the formation of the face, throat, and neck regions. The so-called "tailbone" is the early formation of the coccyx and spinal column which, because of the rate of growth being faster than the rest of the body during this stage, appears to look like a tail. The coccyx has already been proven to be useful in providing support for the pelvic muscles.
Modern science has shown that there are genetic limits to evolution or biological change in nature. Again, all biological variations, whether they are beneficial to survival or not, are possible only within the genetic potential and limits of a biological kind such as the varieties among dogs, cats, horses, cows, etc.
Variations across biological kinds such as humans evolving from ape-like creatures and apes, in turn, evolving from dog-like creatures and so on, as Darwinian evolutionary theory teaches, are not possible unless Nature has the capability of performing genetic engineering.
Biological variations are determined by the DNA or genetic code of species. The DNA molecule is actually a molecular string of various nucleic acids which are arranged in a sequence just like the letters in a sentence. It is this sequence in DNA that tells cells in the body how to construct various tissues and organs.
The common belief among evolutionists is that random mutations in the genetic code over time will produce entirely new sequences for new traits and characteristics which natural selection can then act upon resulting in entirely new species. Evolutionists consider mutations to be a form of natural genetic engineering.
However, the very nature of mutations precludes such a possibility. Mutations are accidental changes in the sequential structure of the genetic code caused by various random environmental forces such as radiation and toxic chemicals.
Almost all true mutations are harmful, which is what one would normally expect from accidents. Even if a good mutation occurred for every good one there will be thousands of harmful ones with the net result over time being disastrous for the species.
Most biological variations, however, are the result of new combinations of previously existing genes - not because of mutations.
Furthermore, mutations simply produce new varieties of already existing traits. For example, mutations in the gene for human hair may change the gene so that another type of human hair develops, but the mutations won't change the gene so that feathers or wings develop.
Sometimes mutations may trigger the duplication of already existing traits (i.e. an extra finger, toe, or even an entire head, even in another area of the body!). But mutations have no ability to produce entirely new traits or characteristics.
Young people, and even adults, often wonder how all the varieties and races of people could have descended from Adam and Eve as the Bible teaches. Well, in principle, that's no different than asking how children with different color hair (i.e., blond, brunette, brown, red ) can come from the same parents who both have black hair.
Just as some individuals today carry genes to produce descendants with different color hair and eyes, our first parents, Adam and Eve, possessed genes to produce all the varieties and races of men. You and I today may not carry the genes to produce every variety or race of humans, but Adam and Eve did possess such genes.
All varieties of humans carry the genes for the same basic traits, but not all humans carry every possible variation of those genes. For example, one person may be carrying several variations of the gene for eye color (i.e., brown, green, blue) , but someone else may be carrying only one variation of the gene for eye color (i.e., brown). Thus, both will have different abilities to affect the eye color of their offspring.
Science cannot prove we're here by creation, but neither can science prove we're here by chance or macro-evolution. No one has observed either. They are both accepted on faith. The issue is which faith, Darwinian macro-evolutionary theory or creation, has better scientific support.
What we believe about life's origins does influence our philosophy and value of life as well as our view of ourselves and others. This is no small issue!
Just because the laws of science can explain how life and the universe operate and work doesn't mean there is no Maker. Would it be rational to believe that there's no designer behind airplanes because the laws of science can explain how airplanes operate and work?
Natural laws are adequate to explain how the order in life, the universe, and even a microwave oven operates, but mere undirected natural laws can never fully explain the origin of such order.
The law of entropy in science shows that the universe does not have the ability to have sustained itself from all eternity. In other words, the universe cannot be eternal and requires a beginning.
It is only fair that school students be exposed to the scientific arguments and evidence on both sides of the creation/evolution issue.
REAL KNOWLEDGEWe suggest that a body of knowledge does exist which provides sufficient explanation of the nature and origin of the universe and the living organisms that inhabit it. We refer to the ancient sanskrit Vedic literatures of India, an internally and externally verifiable and consistent presentation of information. Herein we find profuse descriptions of an intelligent creator god and his creation.
Perhaps the most well known of these literatures, The Bhagavad-gita explains the nature of the conscious soul as an indweller in the bodies of various species and it's journey to other bodies after the death of it's present body according to the laws of karma. The living entity has free choice to act properly or improperly and receives the resultant good and bad reactions in terms of success and failure, happiness and distress.
Also encoded within this vast body of literature is a description of the process of bhakti-yoga, a process for obtaining enlightenment and rising beyond the ordinary platform of eating, sleeping, mating and defending. The essence of these teachings may be found in the Bhagavad-gita. Darwin Debunked top
Also available are an article and a video entitled "Scientific Verification of Vedic Knowledge."
FROM vedicsciencenet
Sanskrit & Artificial Intelligence — NASA
Sanskrit & Artificial Intelligence — NASA
Knowledge
Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence
by
Rick Briggs
Roacs, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffet Field, California
Rick Briggs
Roacs, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffet Field, California
Abstract
In the past twenty years, much
time, effort, and money has been expended on designing an unambiguous
representation of natural languages to make them accessible to computer
processing. These efforts have centered around creating schemata designed to
parallel logical relations with relations expressed by the syntax and semantics
of natural languages, which are clearly cumbersome and ambiguous in their
function as vehicles for the transmission of logical data. Understandably, there
is a widespread belief that natural languages are unsuitable for the
transmission of many ideas that artificial languages can render with great
precision and mathematical rigor.
But this dichotomy, which has
served as a premise underlying much work in the areas of linguistics and
artificial intelligence, is a false one. There is at least one language,
Sanskrit, which for the duration of almost 1,000 years was a living spoken
language with a considerable literature of its own. Besides works of literary
value, there was a long philosophical and grammatical tradition that has
continued to exist with undiminished vigor until the present century. Among the
accomplishments of the grammarians can be reckoned a method for paraphrasing
Sanskrit in a manner that is identical not only in essence but in form with
current work in Artificial Intelligence. This article demonstrates that a
natural language can serve as an artificial language also, and that much work in
AI has been reinventing a wheel millenia old.
First, a typical Knowledge Representation Scheme
(using Semantic Nets) will be laid out, followed by an outline of the method
used by the ancient Indian Grammarians to analyze sentences unambiguously.
Finally, the clear parallelism between the two will be demonstrated, and the
theoretical implications of this equivalence will be given.
Semantic Nets
For the sake of comparison, a brief overview of semantic nets will be given, and examples will be included that will be compared to the Indian approach. After early attempts at machine translation (which were based to a large extent on simple dictionary look-up) failed in their effort to teach a computer to understand natural language, work in AI turned to Knowledge Representation.
For the sake of comparison, a brief overview of semantic nets will be given, and examples will be included that will be compared to the Indian approach. After early attempts at machine translation (which were based to a large extent on simple dictionary look-up) failed in their effort to teach a computer to understand natural language, work in AI turned to Knowledge Representation.
Since translation is not simply a map from lexical
item to lexical item, and since ambiguity is inherent in a large number of
utterances, some means is required to encode what the actual meaning of a
sentence is. Clearly, there must be a representation of meaning independent of
words used. Another problem is the interference of syntax. In some sentences
(for example active/passive) syntax is, for all intents and purposes,
independent of meaning. Here one would like to eliminate considerations of
syntax. In other sentences the syntax contributes to the meaning and here one
wishes to extract it.
I will consider a "prototypical" semantic net
system similar to that of Lindsay, Norman, and Rumelhart in the hopes that it is
fairly representative of basic semantic net theory. Taking a simple example
first, one would represent "John gave the ball to Mary" as in Figure 1. Here
five nodes connected by four labeled arcs capture the entire meaning of the
sentence. This information can be stored as a series of
"triples":
give, agent, John
give, object, ball
give, recipient, Mary
give, time, past.
Note that grammatical information has been
transformed into an arc and a node (past tense). A more complicated example will
illustrate embedded sentences and changes of state:
John Mary
book past
Figure 1.
"John told Mary that the train moved out of the
station at 3 o'clock."
As shown in Figure 2, there was a change in state
in which the train moved to some unspecified location from the station. It went
to the former at 3:00 and from the latter at 3:O0. Now one can routinely convert
the net to triples as before.
The verb is given central significance in this
scheme and is considered the focus and distinguishing aspect of the sentence.
However, there are other sentence types which differ fundamentally from the
above examples. Figure 3 illustrates a sentence that is one of "state" rather
than of "event ." Other nets could represent statements of time, location or
more complicated structures.
A verb, say, "give," has been taken as primitive,
but what is the meaning of "give" itself? Is it only definable in terms of the
structure it generates? Clearly two verbs can generate the same structure. One
can take a set-theoretic approach and a particular give as an element of "giving
events" itself a subset of ALL-EVENTS. An example of this approach is given in
Figure 4 ("John, a programmer living at Maple St., gives a book to Mary, who is
a lawyer"). If one were to "read" this semantic net, one would have a very long
text of awkward English: "There is a John" who is an element of the "Persons"
set and who is the person who lives at ADRI, where ADRI is a subset of
ADDRESS-EVENTS, itself a subset of 'ALL EVENTS', and has location '37 Maple
St.', an element of Addresses; and who is a "worker" of 'occupation 1'. .
.etc."
The degree to which a semantic net (or any
unambiguous, nonsyntactic representation) is cumbersome and odd-sounding in a
natural language is the degree to which that language is "natural" and deviates
from the precise or "artificial." As we shall see, there was a language spoken
among an ancient scientific community that has a deviation of
zero.
The
hierarchical structure of the above net and the explicit descriptions of
set-relations are essential to really capture the meaning of the sentence and to
facilitate inference. It is believed by most in the AI and general linguistic
community that natural languages do not make such seemingly trivial hierarchies
explicit. Below is a description of a natural language, Shastric Sanskrit, where
for the past millenia successful attempts have been made to encode such
information.
Shastric Sanskrit
The sentence:
(1) "Caitra goes to the village." (graamam gacchati
caitra)
receives in the analysis given by an
eighteenth-century Sanskrit Grammarian from Maharashtra, India, the following
paraphrase:
(2) "There is an activity which leads to a
connection-activity which has as Agent no one other than Caitra, specified by
singularity, [which] is taking place in the present and which has as Object
something not different from 'village'."
The author, Nagesha, is one of a group of three or
four prominent theoreticians who stand at the end of a long tradition of
investigation. Its beginnings date to the middle of the first millennium B.C.
when the morphology and phonological structure of the language, as well as the
framework for its syntactic description were codified by Panini. His successors
elucidated the brief, algebraic formulations that he had used as grammatical
rules and where possible tried to improve upon them. A great deal of fervent
grammatical research took place between the fourth century B.C and the fourth
century A.D. and culminated in the seminal work, the Vaiakyapadiya by
Bhartrhari. Little was done subsequently to advance the study of syntax, until
the so-called "New Grammarian" school appeared in the early part of the
sixteenth century with the publication of Bhattoji Dikshita's
Vaiyakarana-bhusanasara and its commentary by his relative Kaundabhatta, who
worked from Benares. Nagesha (1730-1810) was responsible for a major work, the
Vaiyakaranasiddhantamanjusa, or Treasury of dejinitive statements of
grammarians, which was condensed later into the earlier described work. These
books have not yet been translated.
The reasoning of these authors is couched in a
style of language that had been developed especially to formulate logical
relations with scientific precision. It is a terse, very condensed form of
Sanskrit, which paradoxically at times becomes so abstruse that a commentary is
necessary to clarify it.
One of the main differences between the Indian
approach to language analysis and that of most of the current linguistic
theories is that the analysis of the sentence was not based on a noun-phrase
model with its attending binary parsing technique but instead on a conception
that viewed the sentence as springing from the semantic message that the speaker
wished to convey. In its origins, sentence description was phrased in terms of a
generative model: From a number of primitive syntactic categories (verbal
action, agents, object, etc.) the structure of the sentence was derived so that
every word of a sentence could be referred back to the syntactic input
categories. Secondarily and at a later period in history, the model was reversed
to establish a method for analytical descriptions. In the analysis of the Indian
grammarians, every sentence expresses an action that is conveyed both by the
verb and by a set of "auxiliaries." The verbal action (Icriyu- "action" or
sadhyu-"that which is to be accomplished,") is represented by the verbal root of
the verb form; the "auxiliary activities" by the nominals (nouns, adjectives,
indeclinables) and their case endings (one of six).
The meaning of the verb is said to be both vyapara
(action, activity, cause), and phulu (fruit, result, effect). Syntactically, its
meaning is invariably linked with the meaning of the verb "to do". Therefore, in
order to discover the meaning of any verb it is sufficient to answer the
question: "What does he do?" The answer would yield a phrase in which the
meaning of the direct object corresponds to the verbal meaning. For example, "he
goes" would yield the paraphrase: "He performs an act of going"; "he drinks":
"he performs an act of drinking," etc. This procedure allows us to rephrase the
sentence in terms of the verb "to do" or one of its synonyms, and an object
formed from the verbal root which expresses the verbal action as an action noun.
It still leaves us with a verb form ("he does," "he performs"), which contains
unanalyzed semantic information This information in Sanskrit is indicated by the
fact that there is an agent who is engaged in an act of going, or drinking, and
that the action is taking place in the present time.
Rather that allow the agent to relate to the syntax
in this complex, unsystematic fashion, the agent is viewed as a one-time
representative, or instantiation of a larger category of "Agency," which is
operative in Sanskrit sentences. In turn, "Agency" is a member of a larger class
of "auxiliary activities," which will be discussed presently. Thus Caitra is
some Caitral or instance of Caitras, and agency is hierarchically related to the
auxiliary activities. The fact that in this specific instance the agent is a
third person-singular is solved as follows: The number category (singular, dual,
or plural) is regarded as a quality of the Agent and the person category (first,
second, or third) as a grammatical category to be retrieved from a search list,
where its place is determined by the singularity of the agent.
The next step in the process of isolating the
verbal meaning is to rephrase the description in such a way that the agent and
number categories appear as qualities of the verbal action. This procedure
leaves us with an accurate, but quite abstract formulation of the scntcnce: (3)
"Caitra is going" (gacchati caitra) - "An act of going is taking place in the
present of which the agent is no one other than Caitra qualified by
singularity." (atraikatvaavacchinnacaitraabinnakartrko vartamaanakaa- liko
gamanaanukuulo vyaapaarah:) (Double vowels indicate length.)
If the sentence contains, besides an agent, a
direct object, an indirect object and/or other nominals that are dependent on
the principal action of the verb, then in the Indian system these nominals are
in turn viewed as representations of actions that contribute to the complete
meaning of the sentence. However, it is not sufficient to state, for instance,
that a word with a dative case represents the "recipient" of the verbal action,
for the relation between the recipient and the verbal action itself requires
more exact specification if we are to center the sentence description around the
notion of the verbal action. To that end, the action described by the sentence
is not regarded as an indivisible unit, but one that allows further
subdivisions. Hence a sentence such as: (4) "John gave the ball to Mary"
involves the verb Yo give," which is viewed as a verbal action composed of a
number of auxiliary activities. Among these would be John's holding the ball in
his hand, the movement of the hand holding the ball from John as a starting
point toward Mary's hand as the goal, the seizing of the ball by Mary's hand,
etc. It is a fundamental notion that actions themselves cannot be perceived, but
the result of the action is observable, viz. the movement of the hand. In this
instance we can infer that at least two actions have taken
place:
(a) An act of movement starting from the direction
of John and taking place in the direction of Mary's hand. Its Agent is "the
ball" and its result is a union with Mary's hand.
(b) An act of receiving, which consists of an act
of grasping whose agent is Mary's hand.
It is obvious that the act of receiving can be
interpreted as an action involving a union with Mary's hand, an enveloping of
the ball by Mary's hand, etc., so that in theory it might be difficult to decide
where to stop this process of splitting meanings, or what the semantic
primitives are. That the Indians were aware of the problem is evident from the
following passage: "The name 'action' cannot be applied to the solitary point
reached by extreme subdivision."
The set of actions described in (a) and (b) can be
viewed as actions that contribute to the meaning of the total sentence, vix. the
fact that the ball is transferred from John to Mary. In this sense they are
"auxiliary actions" (Sanskrit kuruku-literally "that which brings about") that
may be isolated as complete actions in their own right for possible further
subdivision, but in this particular context are subordinate to the total action
of "giving." These "auxiliary activities" when they become thus subordinated to
the main sentence meaning, are represented by case endings affixed to nominals
corresponding to the agents of the original auxiliary activity. The Sanskrit
language has seven case endings (excluding the vocative), and six of these are
definable representations of specific "auxiliary activities." The seventh, the
genitive, represents a set of auxiliary activities that are not defined by the
other six. The auxiliary actions are listed as a group of six: Agent, Object,
Instrument, Recipient, Point of Departure, Locality. They are the semantic
correspondents of the syntactic case endings: nominative, accusative,
instrumental, dative, ablative and locative, but these are not in exact
equivalence since the same syntactic structure can represent different semantic
messages, as will be discussed below. There is a good deal of overlap between
the karakas and the case endings, and a few of them, such as Point of Departure,
also are used for syntactic information, in this case "because of". In many
instances the relation is best characterized as that of the allo-eme
variety.
To illustrate the operation of this model of
description, a sentence involving an act of cooking rice is often quoted: (5)
"Out of friendship, Maitra cooks rice for Devadatta in a pot, over a
fire."
Here the total process of cooking is rendered by
the verb form "cooks" as well as a number of auxiliary
actions:
1. An Agent represented by the person
Maitra
2. An Object by the "rice"
3. An Instrument by the "fire"
4. A Recipient by the person
Devadatta
5. A Point of Departure (which includes the causal
relationship) by the "friendship" (which is between Maitra and
Devadatta)
6. The Locality by the "pot"
So the total meaning of the sentence is not
complete without the intercession of six auxiliary actions. The action itself
can be inferred from a change of the condition of the grains of rice, which
started out being hard and ended up being soft.
Again, it would be possible to atomize the meaning
expressed by the phrase: "to cook rice": It is an operation that is not a
unitary "process", but a combination of processes, such as "to place a pot on
the fire, to add fuel to the fire, to fan", etc. These processes, moreover, are
not taking place in the abstract, but they are tied to, or "resting on" agencies
that are associated with the processes. The word used for "tied to" is a form of
the verbal root a-sri, which means to lie on, have recourse to, be situated on."
Hence it is possible and usually necessary to paraphrase a sentence such as "he
gives" as: "an act of giving residing in him." Hence the paraphrase of sentence
(5) will be: (6) "There is an activity conducive to a softening which is a
change residing in something not different from rice, and which takes place in
the present, and resides in an agent not different from Maitra, who is specified
by singularity and has a Recipient not different from Devadatta, an Instrument
not different from.. .," etc.
It should be pointed out that these Sanskrit
Grammatical Scientists actually wrote and talked this way. The domain for this
type of language was the equivalent of today's technical journals. In their
ancient journals and in verbal communication with each other they used this
specific, unambiguous form of Sanskrit in a remarkably concise
way.
Besides the verbal root, all verbs have certain
suffixes that express the tense and/or mode, the person (s) engaged in the
"action" and the number of persons or items so engaged. For example, the use of
passive voice would necessitate using an Agent with an instrumental suffix,
whereas the nonpassive voice implies that the agent of the sentence, if
represented by a noun or pronoun, will be marked by a nominative singular
suffix.
Word order in Sanskrit has usually no more than
stylistic significance, and the Sanskrit theoreticians paid no more than scant
attention to it. The language is then very suited to an approach that eliminates
syntax and produces basically a list of semantic messages associated with the
karakas.
An example of the operation of this model on an
intransitive sentence is the following:
(7) Because of the wind, a leaf falls from a tree
to the ground."
Here the wind is instrumental in bringing about an
operation that results in a leaf being disunited from a tree and being united
with the ground. By virtue of functioning as instrument of the operation, the
term "wind" qualifies as a representative of the auxiliary activity
"Instrument"; by virtue of functioning as the place from which the operation
commences, the "tree" qualifies to be called "The Point of Departure"; by virtue
of the fact that it is the place where the leaf ends up, the "ground" receives
the designation "Locality". In the example, the word "leaf" serves only to
further specify the agent that is already specified by the nonpassive verb in
the form of a personal suffix. In the language it is rendered as a nominative
case suffix. In passive sentences other statements have to be made. One may
argue that the above phrase does not differ in meaning from "The wind blows a
leaf from the tree," in which the "wind" appears in the Agent slot, the "leaf"
in the Object slot. The truth is that this phrase is transitive, whereas the
earlier one is intransitive. "Transitivity" can be viewed as an additional
feature added to the verb. In Sanskrit this process is often accomplished by a
suffix, the causative suffix, which when added to the verbal root would change
the meaning as follows: "The wind causes the leaf to fall from the tree," and
since English has the word "blows" as the equivalent of "causes to fall" in the
case of an Instrument "wind," the relation is not quite transparent. Therefore,
the analysis of the sentence presented earlier, in spite of its manifest
awkwardness, enabled the Indian theoreticians to introduce a clarity into their
speculations on language that was theretofore un- available. Structures that
appeared radically different at first sight become transparent transforms of a
basic set of elementary semantic categories.
It is by no means the case that these analyses have
been exhausted, or that their potential has been exploited to the full. On the
contrary, it would seem that detailed analyses of sentences and discourse units
had just received a great impetus from Nagesha, when history intervened: The
British conquered India and brought with them new and apparently effective means
for studying and analyzing languages. The subsequent introduction of Western
methods of language analysis, including such areas of research as historical and
structural linguistics, and lately generative linguistics, has for a long time
acted as an impediment to further research along the traditional ways. Lately,
however, serious and responsible research into Indian semantics has been
resumed, especially at the University of Poona, India. The surprising
equivalence of the Indian analysis to the techniques used in applications of
Artificial Intelligence will be discussed in the next section.
Equivalence
A comparison of the theories discussed in the first
section with the Indian theories of sentence analysis in the second section
shows at once a few striking similarities. Both theories take extreme care to
define minute details with which a language describes the relations between
events in the natural world. In both instances, the analysis itself is a map of
the relations between events in the universe described. In the case of the
computer-oriented analysis, this mapping is a necessary prerequisite for making
the speaker's natural language digestible for the artificial processor; in the
case of Sanskrit, the motivation is more elusive and probably has to do with an
age-old Indo-Aryan preoccupation to discover the nature of the reality behind
the the impressions we human beings receive through the operation of our sense
organs. Be it as it may, it is a matter of surprise to discover that the outcome
of both trends of thinking-so removed in time, space, and culture-have arrived
at a representation of linguistic events that is not only theoretically
equivalent but close in form as well. The one superficial difference is that the
Indian tradition was on the whole, unfamiliar with the facility of diagrammatic
representation, and attempted instead to formulate all abstract notions in
grammatical sentences. In the following paragraphs a number of the parallellisms
of the two analyses will be pointed out to illustrate the equivalence of the two
systems.
Consider the sentence: "John is going." The
Sanskrit paraphrase would be
"An Act of going is taking place in which the Agent
is 'John' specified by singularity and masculinity."
If we now turn to the analysis in semantic nets,
the event portrayed by a set of triples is the following:
1. "going events, instance, go (this specific going
event)"
2. "go, agent, John"
3. "go, time, present."
The first equivalence to be observed is that the
basic framework for inference is the same. John must be a semantic primitive, or
it must have a dictionary entry, or it must be further represented (i.e. "John,
number, 1" etc.) if further processing requires more detail (e.g. "HOW many
people are going?"). Similarly, in the Indian analysis, the detail required in
one case is not necessarily required in another case, although it can be
produced on demand (if needed). The point to be made is that in both systems, an
extensive degree of specification is crucial in understanding the real meaning
of the sentence to the extent that it will allow inferences to be made about the
facts not explicitly stated in the sentence
The basic crux of the equivalence can be
illustrated by a careful look at sentence (5) noted in Part
II.
"Out of friendship, Maitra cooks rice for Devadatta
in a pot over a fire "
The semantic net is supplied in Figure 5. The
triples corresponding to the net are:
cause, event, friendship
friendship, objectl, Devadatta
friendship, object2, Maitra
cause, result cook
cook, agent, Maitra
cook, recipient, Devadatta
cook, instrument, fire
cook, object, rice
cook, on-lot, pot.
The sentence in the Indian analysis is rendered as
follows:
The Agent is represented by Maitra, the Object by
"rice," the Instrument by "fire," the Recipient by "Devadatta," the Point of
Departure (or cause) by "friendship" (between Maitra and Devadatta), the
Locality by "pot."
Since all of these syntactic structures represent
actions auxiliary to the action "cook," let us write %ook" uext to each karakn
and its sentence representat(ion:
cook, agent, Maitra
cook, object, rice
cook, instrument, fire
cook, recipient, Devadatta
cook, because-of, friendship
friendship, Maitra, Devadatta
cook, locality, pot.
The comparison of the analyses shows that the
Sanskrit sentence when rendered into triples matches the analysis arrived at
through the application of computer processing. That is surprising, because the
form of the Sanskrit sentence is radically different from that of the English.
For comparison, the Sanskrit sentence is given here: Maitrah: sauhardyat
Devadattaya odanam ghate agnina pacati.
Here the stem forms of the nouns are:
Muitra-sauhardya- "friendship," Devadatta -, odana- "gruel," ghatu- "pot," agni-
"fire' and the verb stem is paca- "cook". The deviations of the stem forms
occuring at the end of each word represent the change dictated by the word's
semantic and syntactic position. It should also be noted that the Indian
analysis calls for the specification of even a greater amount of grammatical and
semantic detail: Maitra, Devadatta, the pot, and fire would all be said to be
qualified by "singularity" and "masculinity" and the act of cooking can
optionally be expanded into a number of successive perceivable activities. Also
note that the phrase "over a fire" on the face of it sounds like a locative of
the same form as "in a pot." However, the context indicates that the
prepositional phrase describes the instrument through which the heating of the
rice takes place and, therefore, is best regarded as an instrument semantically.
cause
Of course, many versions of semantic nets have been
proposed, some of which match the Indian system better than others do in terms
of specific concepts and structure. The important point is that the same ideas
are present in both traditions and that in the case of many proposed semantic
net systems it is the Indian analysis which is more specific.
A third important similarity between the two
treatments of the sentence is its focal point which in both cases is the verb.
The Sanskrit here is more specific by rendering the activity as a "going-event",
rather than "ongoing." This procedure introduces a new necessary level of
abstraction, for in order to keep the analysis properly structured, the focal
point ought to be phrased: "there is an event taking place which is one of
cooking," rather than "there is cooking taking place", in order for the computer
to distinguish between the levels of unspecified "doing" (vyapara) and the
result of the doing (phala).
A further similarity between the two systems is the
striving for unambiguity. Both Indian and AI schools en-code in a very clear,
often apparently redundant way, in order to make the analysis accessible to
inference. Thus, by using the distinction of phala and vyapara, individual
processes are separated into components which in term are decomposable. For
example, "to cook rice" was broken down as "placing a pot on the fire, adding
fuel, fanning, etc." Cooking rice also implies a change of state, realized by
the phala, which is the heated softened rice. Such specifications are necessary
to make logical pathways, which otherwise would remain unclear. For example,
take the following sentence:
"Maitra cooked rice for Devadatta who burned his
mouth while eating it."
The semantic nets used earlier do not give any
information about the logical connection between the two clauses. In order to
fully understand the sentence, one has to be able to make the inference that the
cooking process involves the process of "heating" and the process of "making
palatable." The Sanskrit grammarians bridged the logical gap by the employment
of the phalu/ vyapara distinction. Semantic nets could accomplish the same in a
variety of ways:
1. by mapping "cooking" as a change of state, which
would involve an excessive amount of detail with too much compulsory
inference;
2. by representing the whole statement as a cause
(event-result), or
3. by including dictionary information about
cooking. A further comparison between the Indian system and the theory of
semantic nets points to another similarity: The passive and the active
transforms of the same sentence are given the same analysis in both systems. In
the Indian system the notion of the "intention of the speaker" (tatparya,
vivaksa) is adduced as a cause for distinguishing the two transforms
semantically. The passive construction is said to emphasize the object, the
nonpassive emphasizes the agent. But the explicit triples are not different.
This observation indicates that both systems extract the meaning from the
syntax.
Finally, a point worth noting is the Indian
analysis of the intransitive phrase (7) describing the leaf falling from the
tree. The semantic net analysis resembles the Sanskrit analysis remarkably, but
the latter has an interesting flavor. Instead of a change from one location to
another, as the semantic net analysis prescribes, the Indian system views the
process as a uniting and disuniting of an agent. This process is equivalent to
the concept of addition to and deletion from sets. A leaf falling to the ground
can be viewed as a leaf disuniting from the set of leaves still attached to the
tree followed by a uniting with (addition to) the set of leaves already on the
ground. This theory is very useful and necessary to formulate changes or
statements of state, such as "The hill is in the valley."
In the Indian system, inference is very complete
indeed. There is the notion that in an event of "moving", there is, at each
instant, a disunion with a preceding point (the source, the initial state), and
a union with the following point, toward the destination, the final state. This
calculus-like concept fascillitates inference. If it is stated that a process
occurred, then a language processor could answer queries about the state of the
world at any point during the execution of the process.
As has been shown, the main point in which the two
lines of thought have converged is that the decomposition of each prose sentence
into karalca-representations of action and focal verbal-action, yields the same
set of triples as those which result from the decomposition of a semantic net
into nodes, arcs, and labels. It is interesting to speculate as to why the
Indians found it worthwhile to pursue studies into unambiguous coding of natural
language into semantic elements. It is tempting to think of them as computer
scientists without the hardware, but a possible explanation is that a search for
clear, unambigous understanding is inherent in the human being.
Let us not forget that among the great
accomplishments of the Indian thinkers were the invention of zero, and of the
binary number system a thousand years before the West re-invented them.
Their analysis of language casts doubt on the
humanistic distinction between natural and artificial intelligence, and may
throw light on how research in AI may finally solve the natural language
understanding and machine translation problems.
References
Bhatta, Nagesha (1963) Vaiyakarana-Siddhanta-Laghu-Manjusa, Benares (Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office).
Bhatta, Nagesha (1963) Vaiyakarana-Siddhanta-Laghu-Manjusa, Benares (Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office).
Nilsson, Nils J. Principles of Artificial
Intelligence. Palo Alto: Tioga Publishing Co
Bhatta, Nagesha (1974) Parama-Lalu-Manjusa Edited
by Pandit Alakhadeva Sharma, Benares (Chowkhambha Sanskrit Series
Office).
Rumelhart, D E. & D A. Norman (1973) Active
Semantic Networks as a model of human memory. IJCAI.
Wang, William S-Y (1967) "Final Administrative
Report to the National Science Foundation." Project for Machine Translation.
University of California, Berkeley. (A biblzographical summary of work done in
Berkeley on a program to translate Chinese.)
[THE AI MAGAZINE Spring, 1985
#39]
Labels:
artifician intelligence,
NASA,
Sanskrit .
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