&ldquo;IIT Jodhpur is committed to impart quality education to facilitate the creation of qualified, competent and responsible human resources to meet the emerging technological challenges of the world. It is working towards creating an equitable learning platform that is positive, accessible and effective in the face of the modern societal and scientific advancements.

Flexibility in curriculum, in all its academic programs, encompassing elements of teaching, research, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship is the most unique feature of IIT Jodhpur. The Department of Science and Technology (DST), under the National Mission on Cyber Physical Systems, has identified IIT Jodhpur as a Technology &amp; Innovation Hub in the area of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. The institute has also been nominated as the coordinator for the Jodhpur City and Knowledge Cluster by the Office of Principal Scientific Adviser, Government of India.

The sprawling 852-acre IIT Jodhpur campus is a majestic tribute to the deep-rooted diverse cultural heritage of the region. The campus is an architectural masterpiece, which is slated to become an international exemplar of sustainability with net-zero energy, and advanced water and waste management strategies.&rdquo;

IIT Jodhpur

This paper seeks to argue that advances in the study of freewill and responsibility are directly relevant to jurisprudence. Following Daniel Dennett attempts to discredit the existence of freewill with the help of experiments can be checked by arguing that freedom should be understood as something that has evolved over time rather than being a pre-existent feature of our species. The major function served by freedom is to ensure responsibility for actions. This understanding of freedom as something that evolved to enhance responsibility suggests that freedom can be developed further. This can be understood as enhancing the ability to follow social norms by overcoming factors that limit responsibility. Jurisprudence has to take into account the ability to follow norms as a variable, even within the category of adults, and treat violations accordingly. Further, efforts to enhance the capacity to be free from habitual reactions need to be made part of education, and the state has to focus on this aspect without which the task of ensuring adherence to law of citizens will remain incomplete. © 2018 Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

School of Liberal Arts (SoLA)

Balkan Journal of Philosophy

Freedom, responsibility, and jurisprudence

Purpose: The paper seeks to explore the interrelation among the phenomena of wandering mind, free-floating self and intuitive dualism. Further, the paper aims at looking at the possibility of revising the self-conception by changing the wandering nature of mind. Method: The paper proceeds by demonstrating the existence of the wandering mind and the presence of a particular kind of reflexive self-conception and then contends that reflexive self-conception, characterised in terms of free-floating nature of the self, can be understood to be the result of intuitive dualism along with the wandering mind. Result and Discussion: The relationship between wandering mind and reflexive self-conception brings out the possibility of revising the reflexive self-conception through practices such as mindfulness because it opens ways to reflexively realise embodiment and reduces the wandering nature of mind. This can possibly give rise to a different kind of self-conception that is more holistic in outlook and is less separative or free-floating. © 2016, ICPR.

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research

Voice in the Head: The Road Ahead

A major stumbling block in understanding the full significance of embodiment is the reflexive self-conception characterised by free-floating nature. The paper, in the initial sections, looks into the sensory motor approach to phenomenal consciousness and the approach to the study of vision where the world is treated as an external memory. Subsequently, the paper argues that the difficulty in exploring the sensory motor approach to phenomenal consciousness stems from the free-floating self-conception humans is endowed with. The assumption that experiences are internal can make us closed to the role external factors play in constituting experience. Accordingly, a revision in the self-conception carries the possibility of conceptualising experience in a different manner. © 2014, Springer-Verlag London.

AI and Society

Revisiting the self: a sine qua non for understanding embodiment

Embodied approach to cognition has taken roots in cognitive studies with developments in diverse fields such as robotics, artificial life and cognitive linguistics. Taking cue from the metaphor of a Watt governor, this approach stresses on the coupling between the organism and the environment and the continuous nature of the cognitive processes. This results in questioning the viability of computational–representational understanding of mind as a comprehensive theory of cognition. The paper, after giving an overview of embodied approach based on some examples from conceptual metaphor theory, looks into a special case of Orwell’s problem in cognitive science. The problem is that there is so much evidence for embodiment to be true, yet there is little understanding of the same. I shall try to solve this problem by pointing out that it is our inveterate habits of perceiving ourselves that makes the embodied approach appear implausible. Studies on free will as well as the importance of the unconscious in overall cognitive processing raise challenging questions on our self-conception. A revision in the self-conception in the light of these findings will pave the way for a better appreciation of the embodied approach to cognition. © 2013, Springer-Verlag London.

Embodied cognition and the Orwell’s problem in cognitive science

The idea of the self plays a pivotal role in human life. The most common way of conceptualizing the self may be called the free-floating or separative self. This amounts to treating the self as something away from the web of life and as something in need of protection and aggrandizement. Another major characteristic of the free-floating self is the belief in free will. There have been many studies questioning the empirical validity of free will, and this takes cudgels against the free-floating self-conception also. Even though some traits associated with this kind of self-conception might have had evolutionary advantages, it is not difficult to see that the moorings of many human problems can be traced to the separative self-conception. Therefore, efforts need to be made to develop an alternate way of understanding the self. It is contended in this chapter that the conception of the free-floating self is primarily a case of gut feeling of certainty and our present environment is conducive to overcome this inveterate way of understanding ourselves. © Springer India 2014.