Humans can make hasty, but generally robust judgements about what a text fragment is, or is not, about. Such judgements are termed information inference. By drawing on theories from non-classical logic and applied cognition, an information inference mechanism is proposed which makes inferences via computations of information flow through a high dimensional conceptual space. Within a conceptual space information is represented geometrically. In this article, an approximation of a conceptual space is employed whereby geometric representations of words are realized as vectors in a high dimensional semantic space, which is automatically constructed from a text corpus. Two approaches were presented for priming vector representations according to context. The first approach uses a concept combination heuristic to adjust the vector representation of a concept in the light of the representation of another concept. The second approach computes a prototypical concept on the basis of exemplar trace texts and moves it in the dimensional space according to the context. Information inference is evaluated by measuring the effectiveness of query models derived by information flow computations. Results show that information flow contributes significantly to query model effectiveness, particularly with respect to precision. Moreover, retrieval effectiveness compares favourably with two probabilistic query models, and another based on semantic association. More generally, this article can be seen as a contribution towards realizing operational systems which mimic human text-based reasoning.

Recent developments in cognitive neuroscience radically changed the perspective on understanding human nature. For the first time in history many philosophical questions can be placed on scientific, rather than on philosophical grounds. These questions include understanding of the mind, self, free will, religious and cultural beliefs, morality, politics and social organization. Scientific consensus based on these discoveries is slowly being developed and will have far reaching consequences. Evolutionary perspective explains how homo sapiens has evolved, why do we have specific structures of the body, brain, sensory abilities, and how the mind emerges from embodiment and social interactions. Social neuroscience shows that there is emergent causality: biology determines affective and cognitive abilities, preferences and beliefs, personality, but it is itself influenced by the environment that changes our brains and bodies. All these mechanisms are deeply hidden from ordinary introspection, creating a wrong perception of human nature. Traditional views on human nature are briefly summarized and radical reductionist interpretations of neurobiologists presented, comparing humans to a bag of chemicals. Scientific discoveries cannot be ignored, but their interpretation is not

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Describing anything as ‘Buddhist’, including in this case a distinctively Buddhist bioethics, is fundamentally problematic from both a historic and Buddhist point of view. Historically, the Buddhist tradition has evolved in dozens of countries for 2500 years, with no one tradition having clear doctrinal authority over the others. Internally, even if a common Buddhist ethics was implicit in the practices of the dozens of Buddhist cultures or the exegetics of their traditions, the core philosophical insight of Buddhism is that all things are empty of essential, authentic being, including the Buddhist tradition. So, starting from the understanding that there is no authentic Buddhist bioethics to explicate, and only a constellation of practices and ideas related to medicine and the body among Buddhists throughout history, which may or may not be tied to core ideas of the