Jyotiranjan Beuria

Empirical research in cognitive science has documented systematic departures from classical probability theory in human judgment, including conjunction fallacies and order effects. Because classical probability is defined over a Boolean algebra of events, such findings have motivated non-Boolean modeling frameworks, including quantum probabilistic approaches to cognition. This paper examines the implications of these developments for Nyāya epistemology. Drawing on the Nyāya Sūtra and its classical and Navya-Nyāya commentaries, we reconstruct the theory of vyāpti (pervasion) as grounding inference (anumāna) in invariant relations between properties rather than in numerical coherence among belief states. We argue that empirical violations of classical probability concern the structure of cognitive representation, whereas Nyāya’s account of inference operates at the level of ontological relations and categorical epistemic warrant. Although both Nyāya and contemporary non-classical cognitive models acknowledge the role of contextual constraints, they theorize contextuality differently: quantum approaches embed it within representational algebra, whereas Nyāya treats it as an epistemic limitation to be resolved through domain refinement. The comparison clarifies the distinct explanatory strata involved and contributes to broader debates concerning rationality, contextuality, and the normative status of probability.

Much of the ethical debate about artificial intelligence turns on a single question: do AI systems behave in line with human preferences, norms, or regulation? This question has primarily been the focus in AI ethics. This paper offers a conceptual and philosophical contribution. Here we give an alternative basis for AI ethics by evaluating the role technology plays in building and stabilising worlds of meaning. Experience is modelled as passing through nested representational layers: the world W, the screen of perceived reality W′ on which agents encounter and interpret the world, and the artificial screens W′′ built by digital platforms, recommender systems, and immersive environments. Meaning is formed, held, and acted on within a minimal cycle of perception, integration, and action. On that basis, many familiar ethical problems around AI show up less as simple failures of behaviour or compliance and more as breakdowns in semantic coherence i.e. in the preservation of meaning along the chain W → W′ → W′′. Fairness, transparency, accountability, privacy, and safety are recast as aspects of these deeper coherence conditions, not as free-standing technical or policy goals. We derive a four-level hierarchy of ethical depth (L0 - L3) and sketch governance aimed at the integrity of constructed worlds, with consequences for how risk, responsibility, and regulation are conceived when technological mediation is everywhere.

We propose a consciousness-first framework to coherently explain the contextual diversity of local experiences and the global unity of the phenomenal field. Utilizing category theory, we model experience as a coherent structure arising from the integration of context-dependent content. We introduce a category of Raw states (representing pre-semantic relational data) and a category of Sem states (representing meaningful experiential content). A faithful translation between these domains is established via an integrator functor, which maps raw relational structures to stable semantic categories. These local semantic states are organized into a diagram indexed by a category of contexts, capturing the relationships and overlaps between distinct perspectives. We demonstrate that phenomenal unity can be rigorously defined as the colimit of this semantic diagram. Furthermore, a universal construction glues local contents together along their shared relational constraints, yielding a unified global structure that preserves perspectival differentiation without collapsing into a flat, undifferentiated whole. Ontologically, this formalism results in the following: rather than assuming a pre-existing physical spacetime reality that generates experience, it is possible to model the objective world as the invariant semantic core emerging from the coherence relations between plural phenomenal worlds.