Obscure Existential Narratives: Predetermination and Freedom in Nepalese Horoscopic Knowledge.

Nepali astrological divination can be seen as a form sense-making which, in providing access to the ‘hidden motifs’ attained to determine life events, mitigates the irreducibility of being-in- the-world by providing existential narratives. Conveying hope to act upon what is initially approached as a hopeless fate, astrological knowledge forwards the perception that troubling events, apparently out of control, are also liable to be acted upon. This reveals a permanent tension between ‘fatalism’ and ‘freedom’ that challenges rendering Nepal exclusively in fatalist terms, as argued by the Nepali anthropologist Dor Bahadur Bista. Yet, accounting for these reinterpretations requires a personally-tailored inquiry, usually overlooked by sociocentric approaches that patronizingly disregard people as mere carriers of a worldview, as in the case of the ontological turn

The Transcendental Character of Temporality and the Buddhist Contribution to Time-Consciousness

Enriching the parallel between transcendental phenomenology and enactivism, I briefly discuss the compatibility of the Buddhist perspective with Gallagher\u2019s contribution to time-consciousness. Grounded in his meditative practice and heartfelt engagement with Buddhist philosophy, Varela de-constructed representationalism and its underpinning metaphysical dualism, building up the generative concept of enaction. His approach has been deeply inspired by Madhyamika Buddhism, which describes time-consciousness as that double illusion that frames phenomena as either becoming or permanent

Irreversible Work Reduction by Disorder in Many-Body Quantum Systems

We study the effect of disorder on work exchange associated to quantum Hamiltonian processes by considering an Ising spin chain in which the strength of coupling between spins are randomly drawn from either Normal or Gamma distributions. The chain is subjected to a quench of the external transverse field which induces this exchange of work. In particular, we study the irreversible work incurred by a quench as a function of the initial temperature, field strength and magnitude of the disorder. While presence of weak disorder generally increases the irreversible work generated, disorder of sufficient strength can instead reduce it, giving rise to a disorder induced lubrication effect. This reduction of irreversible work depends on the nature of the distribution considered, and can either arise from acquiring the behavior of an effectively smaller quench for the Normal-distributed spin couplings, or that of effectively single spin dynamics in the case of Gamma distributed couplings.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure