Relevancy22: Contemporary Process Christianity: Post-Evangelic Topics and Theology: Process Christianity, the History of Computer Languages, and Quantum Computing

Quotes & Sayings

We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Friday, May 7, 2021

Process Christianity, the History of Computer Languages, and Quantum Computing

Process Christianity, the History of Computer

Languages, and Quantum Computing

by R.E. Slater

Introduction

Would you expect to find a post on Digital and Quantum Computing on a Christian website?! Well, why not? Christians should be interested in everything to help mold our religious worlds. We should be expanding our religious reality at every opportunity. For myself, I wish to allow doubt and uncertainty help lead and inform my religious beliefs. Plus I had a lifetime of service in the technology industry including a major portion of my schooling in mathematics and the sciences. So, I am always interested in learning something new!

I will here digress but you should know that further below will be a load of information that may be explored and learned on your own from early classical computing to quantum coding online in the cloud. But first, let me provide a tie-in from what I describe as "Process Christianity" to Process-based Sciences as they are being affected by Whiteheadian Process Philosophy in the foreseeable future.

Here, at Relevancy22, I try to envisage God and God's World around us. How we might fit in and work with God and with God's creation. And how our every thought might help reconstruct a new point of process-based human progress towards accomplishing healing and restitution between ourselves and the world at large.

Think of the world of computing as a helpful vaccine given to a pandemic world trying to rediscover it's humanity and presence in the world of nature. Computing across all industries, including greentech, will be able to do just that - nanocomputing, biologic and molecular computing, organic computing, AI computing, and so on.

Whatever we touch let us touch it for good, give it to the masses, and use any funds received to alleviate the world's troubles. I suppose this is a naive view but we all know our history how the machinations of man always screws things up. So stay noble, be wise, and invest when and where you can since money talks. And always remember you're first principles. Thus Process Christianity to help remind us that we but a wee part in a very large, and complex, universe.

One last, this is also an apt goal for any future worlds forming themselves into (cosmo)ecological societies and ecoworld civilizations. Don't you LOVE it?!! Computing and cosmological goals! :0

The Progress of Computing Logic

Today I was curious about the progress of computing logic and languages. From its early silicon days to the quantum computing research and applications presently being undertaken. The logic basis of constructing synthetic machine language is dependent upon the medium used.

Whereas in the past a form of linear thinking or sequentially-based (Boolean+, Many-Valued) mathematics might have been applicably related to the silicon world of electromagnetism, in this next world of quantum materials I am guessing a form of "fuzzy logic" (imprecise free association) or, perhaps more properly, a form of "free logic" (unassociated free variables from objects), must be the minimum starting point. In psychological terms we might even consider "free association" (unassociated forms divested of relationships).

In fuzzy mathematics, fuzzy logic is a form of many-valued logic in which the truth value of variables may be any real number between 0 and 1 both inclusive. It is employed to handle the concept of partial truth, where the truth value may range between completely true and completely false. By contrast, in Boolean logic, the truth values of variables may only be the integer values 0 or 1.

The term fuzzy logic was introduced with the 1965 proposal of fuzzy set theory by Lotfi Zadeh. Fuzzy logic had, however, been studied since the 1920s, as infinite-valued logic—notably by Łukasiewicz and Tarski.

Fuzzy logic is based on the observation that people make decisions based on imprecise and non-numerical information. Fuzzy models or sets are mathematical means of representing vagueness and imprecise information (hence the term fuzzy). These models have the capability of recognising, representing, manipulating, interpreting, and utilising data and information that are vague and lack certainty.

vs.

A free logic is a logic with fewer existential presuppositions than classical logic. Free logics may allow for terms that do not denote any object. Free logics may also allow models that have an empty domain. A free logic with the latter property is an inclusive logic.

The point of free logic, though, is to have a formalism that implies no particular ontology, but that merely makes an interpretation of Quine both formally possible and simple. An advantage of this is that formalizing theories of singular existence in free logic brings out their implications for easy analysis. Lambert takes the example of the theory proposed by Wesley C. Salmon and George Nahknikian, which is that to exist is to be self-identical.

vs.

Free association is the expression (as by speaking or writing) of the content of consciousness without censorship as an aid in gaining access to unconscious processes. The technique is used in psychoanalysis (and also in psychodynamic theory) which was originally devised by Sigmund Freud out of the hypnotic method of his mentor and colleague, Josef Breuer.

Freud described it as such: "The importance of free association is that the patients spoke for themselves, rather than repeating the ideas of the analyst; they work through their own material, rather than parroting another's suggestions".

We Live in Relational Worlds

What cannot be escaped is the idea of the relationship of things to things. Yet in this regard to either process mechanics or, process-based quantum physics, those relationships are severed and may freely associate with any other non-dissimilar relationship whether sensical or not.

As example, the picture of a well-ordered businessman or businesswoman in personal psychic crisis deconstructing himself or herself into elemental forms of human reconnection to self and society. Or the chemical bonds found is radical compounds freed from their ionic bonds to recompose into entirely new, non-historical configurations.

Tenet Trailer - Spoiler Alert

In the quantum world we will discover a new way of imagining cause and effect. Perhaps, similar to the TENET movie, by placing effect before cause in non-temporal terms of relational matter to matter freed of temporal bounds... yes, I disabused the movie's premise. Forgive me. I was freely associating :)

But in truth a photon of light has been shown to have virtually travelled its path before actually traveling its historical path, so welcome to the world of the strange found in the quantum world of the paradoxical.

Process Metaphysics

Last thought, as Metaphysicists examine the nature of the reality, or as Philosophers do the same, we must similarly ask ourselves the deep questions of life's material processes, of its organic processes, of even its unseen - some say, spiritual - connections between itself and one another. It is within this complexity we live-and-breathe-and-have-our-being which provides yet another fundamental direction to a purpose-filled world granted (process) theological regard of the Divine in relationship to the inherited immortal.

Inherited in that this world is but an organic process spun off from God's own Self. And immortal in that in process events, as processes live and die, come and go, its overall "manufacture" between ever evolving and freely associating event processes will live on-and-on-and-on even as its Creator-Author does. The very nature of the cosmos is immortal when defined in process terms.

Thus, we should learn to see life from the theological perspective. Let it override the perspective of the metaphysician, the philosopher, and the quantum world of wonder whose threshold we step upon as for the first time. We live in a process world of healing and wellbeing should we allow it. Let's do. And let's together see where it takes us.

Conclusion

Below I have laid out a graphic history of computing languages. A Family Tree of sorts. These iterations have all occurred in my lifetime with more to come. As example, Apache UNIX (2013) is being used by Databricks as an enterprise-wide computing platform in the Cloud. It is replacing all previous enterprise versions of corporate/proprietary UNIX solutions. Thus, IBM and HP had also sought this avenue to stay up with open-source code branded committers.

But what will computing firms do in the future as quantum computing comes on line? Stay to faster iterations of silicon-based computer languages or replace the older logic and language systems altogether with something more pertinent to the medium used? And what kind of quantum logic should be used?

Hence my post today. While thinking specifically, learn to also think universally. See Tim Eastman's discussion in an earlier post a month ago for more discussion here. Especially in his paper and the notes given at the end of the post. It speaks to the developing world of quantum logic and language.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

May 7, 2021

TERMS TO KNOW

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.

The word "metaphysics" comes from two Greek words that, together, literally mean "after or behind or among [the study of] the natural". It has been suggested that the term might have been coined by a first century CE editor who assembled various small selections of Aristotle’s works into the treatise we now know by the name Metaphysics (μετὰ τὰ φυσικά, meta ta physika, lit. 'after the Physics ', another of Aristotle's works).

Metaphysics studies questions related to what it is for something to exist and what types of existence there are. Metaphysics seeks to answer, in an abstract and fully general manner, the questions:
What is there?

What is it like?
Topics of metaphysical investigation include existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility. [Let's also add organic process metaphysics where there are no eternal objects, which are considered existentially phenomenological. - re slater].

Metaphysics is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, logic, and ethics.

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Philosophy (from Greek: φιλοσοφία, philosophia, 'love of wisdom') is the study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about reason, existence, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. The term was probably coined by Pythagoras (c. 570 – c. 495 BCE). Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument, and systematic presentation.

Historically, philosophy encompassed all bodies of knowledge and a practitioner was known as a philosopher. From the time of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to the 19th century, "Natural Philosophy" encompassed astronomy, medicine, and physics. For example, Newton's 1687 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy later became classified as a book of physics.

In the 19th century, the growth of modern research universities led academic philosophy and other disciplines to professionalize and specialize. Since then, various areas of investigation that were traditionally part of philosophy have become separate academic disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, linguistics, and economics.

Today, major subfields of academic philosophy include:

metaphysics, which is concerned with the fundamental nature of existence and reality;

epistemology, which studies the nature of knowledge and belief;

ethics, which is concerned with moral value;

and logic, which studies the rules of inference that allow one to derive conclusions from true premises.

Other notable subfields include philosophy of science, political philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.

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Process Philosophy, also ontology of becoming, or processism, defines processes in the ordinary everyday real world as its only basic or elementary existents. It treats other real existents (examples: enduring physical objects, thoughts) as abstractions from, or ontological dependents on, processes [sic, existential phenomenology as secondary abstractions of recontextualized space. - re slater].

In opposition to the classical view of change as illusory (as argued by Parmenides) or accidental (as argued by Aristotle), process philosophy posits transient occasions of change, or becoming, as the only fundamental things of the ordinary everyday real world. [sic, as exampled by the quantum world of process and event where reality isn't either static or fixed but constructed transitory-and-temporal contextual events. - re slater]

Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, classical ontology has posited ordinary world reality as constituted of enduring substances, to which transient processes are ontologically subordinate, if they are not denied. If Socrates changes, becoming sick, Socrates is still the same (the substance of Socrates being the same), and change (his sickness) only glides over his substance: change is accidental, and devoid of primary reality, whereas the substance is essential.
Philosophers who appeal to process rather than substance include Heraclitus, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Nail, Alfred Korzybski, R. G. Collingwood, Alan Watts, Robert M. Pirsig, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Charles Hartshorne, Arran Gare, Nicholas Rescher, Colin Wilson, Tim Ingold, Bruno Latour, and Gilles Deleuze. In physics, Ilya Prigogine distinguishes between the "physics of being" and the "physics of becoming".

Process philosophy covers not just scientific intuitions and experiences but can be used as a conceptual bridge to facilitate discussions among religion, philosophy, and science.

[Addendum: GWF Hegel was the main precursor to all of the above; Whitehead completed Hegel's thought where it stopped short thus creating a separate branch of philosophy some think of as an Integral Philosophy encasing all previous philosophies; Hartshorne showed process thought's relationship to the natural world. - re slater]
Process philosophy is sometimes classified as closer to Continental philosophy than Analytic philosophy because it is usually only taught in Continental departments. However, other sources state that process philosophy should be placed somewhere in the middle between the poles of analytic versus Continental methods in contemporary philosophy.

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Types of Programming Languages

A History of Computer Languages

(1900s - 2021)

Click to Enlarge - https://i.stack.imgur.com/G2Xri.png

Berkley Software Distribution and the History of UNIX

Languages used at a particular firm (including front end scripts, markup and DSL's)

This one illustates some Languages evolving around BASIC and Fortran

Click to Enlarge - http://rigaux.org/language-study/diagram.png
Also from Wikipedia - Genealogical Tree of Programming Languages
And one other link - UNIX Family Tree

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Language Categories

Procedural Language

A language which states how to compute the result of a given problem. This term encompasses both imperative and functional languages.

Imperative Language

A language which operates by a sequence of commands that change the value of data elements. Imperative languages are typified by assignments and iteration.

Declarative Language

A language which operates by making descriptive statements about data, and relations between data. The algorithm is hidden in the semantics of the language. This category encompasses both applicative and logic languages. Examples of declarative features are set comprehensions and pattern-matching statements.

Applicative Language

A language that operates by application of functions to values, with no side effects. A functional language in the broad sense.

Functional Language

In the narrow sense, a functional language is one that operates by use of higher-order functions, building operators that manipulate functions directly without ever appearing to manipulate data. Example: FP.

Definitional Language

An applicative language containing assignments interpreted as definitions. Example: Lucid.

Single Assignment Language

An applicative language using assignments, with the convention that a variable may appear on the left side of an assignment only once within the portion of the program in which it is active.

Dataflow Language

A language suitable for use on a dataflow architecture. Necessary properties include freedom from side effects, and the equivalence of scheduling constraints with data dependencies. Examples: Val, Id, SISAL, Lucid.

Logic Language

A logic language deals with predicates or relationships p(X,Y). A program consists of a set of Horn clauses which may be:

facts - p(X,Y) is true
rules - p is true if q1 and q2 and ... qn are true
queries - is g1 and g2 and ... gn true? (gi's are the goals.)

Further clauses are inferred using resolution. One clause is selected containing p as an assumption, another containing p as a consequence, and p is eliminated between them. If the two p's have different arguments they must be unified, using the substitution with the fewest constraints that makes them the same. Logic languages try alternative resolutions for each goal in succession, backtracking in a search for a common solution.

OR-parallel logic languages try alternative resolutions in parallel
AND-parallel logic languages try to satisfy several goals in parallel.

Constraint Language

A language in which a problem is specified and solved by a series of constraining relationships.

Object-Oriented Language

A language in which data and the functions which access it are treated as a unit.

Concurrent Language

A concurrent language describes programs that may be executed in parallel. This may be either

Multiprogramming: sharing one processor
Multiprocessing: separate processors sharing one memory
Distributed

Concurrent languages differ in the way that processes are created:

Coroutines - control is explicitly transferred - examples are Simula I, SL5, BLISS and Modula-2.
Fork/join - examples are PL/I and Mesa.
Cobegin/coend - examples are ALGOL 68, CSP, Edison, Argus.
Process declarations - examples are DP, SR, Concurrent Pascal, Modula, PLITS and Ada.

and the ways in which processes interact:

Semaphores - ALGOL 68
Conditional critical regions - Edison, DP, Argus
Monitors - Concurrent Pascal, Modula
Message passing - CSP, PLITS, Gypsy, Actors
Remote procedure calls - DP, *Mod
- Rendezvous - Ada, SR
- Atomic transactions - Argus

Fourth Generation Language (4GL)

A very high-level language. It may use natural English or visual constructs. Algorithms or data structures may be selected by the compiler.

Query Language

An interface to a database.

Specification Language

A formalism for expressing a hardware or software design.

Assembly Language

A symbolic representation of the machine language of a specific computer.

Intermediate Language

A language used as an intermediate stage in compilation. May be either text or binary.

Metalanguage

A language used for the formal description of another language.

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Click to Enlarge - https://ccrma.stanford.edu/courses/250a-fall-2005/docs/ComputerLanguagesChart.png

Alan Turing: Crash Course Computer Science #15

Tomorrow's World: New Banking 09 December 1969 - BBC

BBC4 - Codes That Changed The World - Fortran

A Brief History of Programming Languages:

A Review of “Codes That Changed the World”

Fortran

MON 6 APR 2015

1/5 Aleks Krotoski explores the language that helped put men on the moon and harness the atom.

Cobol

TUE 7 APR 2015

2/5 Deeply unpopular, but 80 per cent of the world's business software was written in it. Why?

Basic

WED 8 APR 2015

3/5 As language of choice for home computing in the 1980s, Basic became iconic.

Java

THU 9 APR 2015

4/5 The language that people probably interact with on a daily basis more than any other.

The Tower of Babel

FRI 10 APR 2015

5/5 Aleks Krotoski explores how today's digital world is a reverse Tower of Babel.

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Click to enlarge -
https://www.vediccomputing.com/images/unifiedfield.png
Source - https://www.vediccomputing.com/about.html

I found it curious that someone acquainted with Indian and Hindu philosophy should give the qauntum computing world a spin much along the lines I had done in my opening introduction here at this post. As Tim Eastman would say, these are our life contexts which either inspire us to greater insights or shut us down in the same. So, to hedge against my Westernized bias of the Cosmos from a Process Theological perspective I thought this little chart may also supply some wisdom. - re slater

The Vedas (/ˈveɪdəz, ˈviː-/; Sanskrit: वेदः vedaḥ, "knowledge") are a large body of religious texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature and the oldest scriptures of Hinduism.

There are four Vedas: the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda and the Atharvaveda. Each Veda has four subdivisions:

the Samhitas (mantras and benedictions),
the Aranyakas (text on rituals, ceremonies, sacrifices and symbolic-sacrifices),
the Brahmanas (commentaries on rituals, ceremonies and sacrifices), and
the Upanishads (texts discussing meditation, philosophy and spiritual knowledge).
Some scholars add a fifth category – the Upasanas (worship). The texts of the Upanishads discuss ideas akin to the heterodox sramana-traditions.

Vedas are śruti ("what is heard"), distinguishing them from other religious texts, which are called smṛti ("what is remembered"). Hindus consider the Vedas to be apauruṣeya, which means "not of a man, superhuman" and "impersonal, authorless," revelations of sacred sounds and texts heard by ancient sages after intense meditation.

The Vedas have been orally transmitted since the 2nd millennium BCE with the help of elaborate mnemonic techniques. The mantras, the oldest part of the Vedas, are recited in the modern age for their phonology rather than the semantics, and are considered to be "primordial rhythms of creation", preceding the forms to which they refer. By reciting them the cosmos is regenerated, "by enlivening and nourishing the forms of creation at their base."

The various Indian philosophies and Hindu denominations have taken differing positions on the Vedas; schools of Indian philosophy which acknowledge the primal authority of the Vedas are classified as "orthodox" (āstika).[note2] Other śramaṇa traditions, such as Lokayata, Carvaka, Ajivika, Buddhism and Jainism, which did not regard the Vedas as authorities, are referred to as "heterodox" or "non-orthodox" (nāstika) schools.

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