Richard Swinburne (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780197264898
- eISBN:
- 9780191754074
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197264898.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
Do humans have a free choice of which actions to perform? Three recent developments of modern science can help us to answer this question. First, new investigative tools have enabled us to study the ...
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Do humans have a free choice of which actions to perform? Three recent developments of modern science can help us to answer this question. First, new investigative tools have enabled us to study the processes in our brains which accompanying our decisions. The pioneer work of Benjamin Libet has led many neuroscientists to hold the view that our conscious intentions do not cause our bodily movements but merely accompany them. Then, Quantum Theory suggests that not all physical events are fully determined by their causes, and so opens the possibility that not all brain events may be fully determined by their causes, and so maybe — if neuroscience does not rule this out — there is a role for intentions after all. Finally, a theorem of mathematics, Gödel's theory, has been interpreted to suggest that the initial conditions and laws of development of a mathematician's brain could not fully determine which mathematical conjectures he sees to be true. The extent to which human behaviour is determined by brain events may well depend on whether conscious events, such as intentions, are themselves merely brain events, or whether they are separate events which interact with brain events (perhaps in the radical form that intentions are events in our soul, and not in our body). This book considers what kind of free will we need in order to be morally responsible for our actions or be held guilty in a court of law. Is it sufficient merely that our actions are uncaused by brain events?Less
Do humans have a free choice of which actions to perform? Three recent developments of modern science can help us to answer this question. First, new investigative tools have enabled us to study the processes in our brains which accompanying our decisions. The pioneer work of Benjamin Libet has led many neuroscientists to hold the view that our conscious intentions do not cause our bodily movements but merely accompany them. Then, Quantum Theory suggests that not all physical events are fully determined by their causes, and so opens the possibility that not all brain events may be fully determined by their causes, and so maybe — if neuroscience does not rule this out — there is a role for intentions after all. Finally, a theorem of mathematics, Gödel's theory, has been interpreted to suggest that the initial conditions and laws of development of a mathematician's brain could not fully determine which mathematical conjectures he sees to be true. The extent to which human behaviour is determined by brain events may well depend on whether conscious events, such as intentions, are themselves merely brain events, or whether they are separate events which interact with brain events (perhaps in the radical form that intentions are events in our soul, and not in our body). This book considers what kind of free will we need in order to be morally responsible for our actions or be held guilty in a court of law. Is it sufficient merely that our actions are uncaused by brain events?
Laurent Lellouch, Rainer Sommer, Benjamin Svetitsky, Anastassios Vladikas, and Leticia F. Cugliandolo (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199691609
- eISBN:
- 9780191731792
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199691609.001.0001
- Subject:
- Physics, Theoretical, Computational, and Statistical Physics
The book is based on the lectures delivered at the XCIII Session of the ´Ecole de Physique des Houches, held in August, 2009. The aim of the event was to familiarize the new generation of Ph.D. ...
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The book is based on the lectures delivered at the XCIII Session of the ´Ecole de Physique des Houches, held in August, 2009. The aim of the event was to familiarize the new generation of Ph.D. students and postdoctoral Fellows with the principles and methods of modern lattice field theory, which Is set to resolve fundamental, non-perturbative questions about QCD without uncontrolled approximations. The emphasis of the book is on the theoretical developments that have shaped the field in the last two decades and that have turned lattice gauge theory into a robust approach to the determination of low energy hadronic quantities and of fundamental parameters of the Standard Model. By way of introduction, the courses of the school began by covering lattice theory basics (P. Hernández), lattice renormalization and improvement (P. Weisz and A. Vladikas) and the many faces of chirality (D.B. Kaplan). A later course introduced QCD at finite temperature and density (O. Philipsen). A broad view of lattice computation from the basics to recent developments was offered in the corresponding course (M. Lüscher). The students learned the basics of lattice computation in a hands-on tutorial (S. Schaefer)---a first at Les Houches, Extrapolations to physical quark masses and a framework for the parameterization of the low-energy physics by means of effective coupling constants has been covered in the course on chiral perturbation theory (M. Golterman). A course in heavy-quark effective theories (R. Sommer), an essential tool for performing the relevant lattice calculations, covered HQET from its basics to recent advances. A number of shorter courses rounded out the school and broadened its purview. These included recent applications to flavour physics (L. Lellouch) the nucleon--nucleon interation (S. Aoki) and a course on physics beyond the Standard Model (T. Appelquist and E.T. Neil).Less
The book is based on the lectures delivered at the XCIII Session of the ´Ecole de Physique des Houches, held in August, 2009. The aim of the event was to familiarize the new generation of Ph.D. students and postdoctoral Fellows with the principles and methods of modern lattice field theory, which Is set to resolve fundamental, non-perturbative questions about QCD without uncontrolled approximations. The emphasis of the book is on the theoretical developments that have shaped the field in the last two decades and that have turned lattice gauge theory into a robust approach to the determination of low energy hadronic quantities and of fundamental parameters of the Standard Model. By way of introduction, the courses of the school began by covering lattice theory basics (P. Hernández), lattice renormalization and improvement (P. Weisz and A. Vladikas) and the many faces of chirality (D.B. Kaplan). A later course introduced QCD at finite temperature and density (O. Philipsen). A broad view of lattice computation from the basics to recent developments was offered in the corresponding course (M. Lüscher). The students learned the basics of lattice computation in a hands-on tutorial (S. Schaefer)---a first at Les Houches, Extrapolations to physical quark masses and a framework for the parameterization of the low-energy physics by means of effective coupling constants has been covered in the course on chiral perturbation theory (M. Golterman). A course in heavy-quark effective theories (R. Sommer), an essential tool for performing the relevant lattice calculations, covered HQET from its basics to recent advances. A number of shorter courses rounded out the school and broadened its purview. These included recent applications to flavour physics (L. Lellouch) the nucleon--nucleon interation (S. Aoki) and a course on physics beyond the Standard Model (T. Appelquist and E.T. Neil).
M. Pilar HernÁndez
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199691609
- eISBN:
- 9780191731792
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199691609.003.0001
- Subject:
- Physics, Theoretical, Computational, and Statistical Physics
This chapter reviews the basic building blocks of the regularization of Quantum Field Theories (QFT) on a space-time lattice. It assumes some familiarity with QFT in the continuum. In an introductory ...
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This chapter reviews the basic building blocks of the regularization of Quantum Field Theories (QFT) on a space-time lattice. It assumes some familiarity with QFT in the continuum. In an introductory section, the path integral formulation is reviewed, focusing on important aspects such as the transfer matrix, the relation of correlation functions and physical observables, the perturbative expansion, and the key issue of renormalization and the Wilsonian renormalization group. It then considers in detail the lattice formulation of scalar, fermion and gauge field theories, paying careful attention to their physical interpretation, and the continuum limit. The difficulty of discretizing chiral fermions is discussed in detail, and various fermion discretizations are described. The strong coupling expansion is introduced in the context of lattice Yang-Mills theory and the criteria for confinement and for the presence of a mass gap are presented. It concludes with a description of Wilson's formulation of lattice QCD and a brief overview of its applications.Less
This chapter reviews the basic building blocks of the regularization of Quantum Field Theories (QFT) on a space-time lattice. It assumes some familiarity with QFT in the continuum. In an introductory section, the path integral formulation is reviewed, focusing on important aspects such as the transfer matrix, the relation of correlation functions and physical observables, the perturbative expansion, and the key issue of renormalization and the Wilsonian renormalization group. It then considers in detail the lattice formulation of scalar, fermion and gauge field theories, paying careful attention to their physical interpretation, and the continuum limit. The difficulty of discretizing chiral fermions is discussed in detail, and various fermion discretizations are described. The strong coupling expansion is introduced in the context of lattice Yang-Mills theory and the criteria for confinement and for the presence of a mass gap are presented. It concludes with a description of Wilson's formulation of lattice QCD and a brief overview of its applications.
Richard Swinburne
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780198236986
- eISBN:
- 9780191598593
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0198236980.003.0013
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
A substantial balance of evidence favours the view that human souls have (limited) libertarian free will, that is the freedom to choose between alternative actions, despite all causal influences ...
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A substantial balance of evidence favours the view that human souls have (limited) libertarian free will, that is the freedom to choose between alternative actions, despite all causal influences acting on them. Free will thus entails soul indeterminism, which entails brain indeterminism. There is no reason to suppose that the same laws govern the behaviour of the brain as govern any other physical system, since the brain is different from any other physical system in being in causal interaction with a soul. In any case, its indeterminism may be ensured by Quantum indeterminism. The main evidence for soul indeterminism is, however, the fact that human counter‐suggestibility would be compatible with determinism only on the assumption of an a priori very unlikely mechanism for the production of beliefs. New Appendices E, F, and G discuss the relevance to this topic of different interpretations of Quantum Theory, of Gödel's Theorem and of Libet's experiments.Less
A substantial balance of evidence favours the view that human souls have (limited) libertarian free will, that is the freedom to choose between alternative actions, despite all causal influences acting on them. Free will thus entails soul indeterminism, which entails brain indeterminism. There is no reason to suppose that the same laws govern the behaviour of the brain as govern any other physical system, since the brain is different from any other physical system in being in causal interaction with a soul. In any case, its indeterminism may be ensured by Quantum indeterminism. The main evidence for soul indeterminism is, however, the fact that human counter‐suggestibility would be compatible with determinism only on the assumption of an a priori very unlikely mechanism for the production of beliefs. New Appendices E, F, and G discuss the relevance to this topic of different interpretations of Quantum Theory, of Gödel's Theorem and of Libet's experiments.
Karen Barad
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823279500
- eISBN:
- 9780823281558
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823279500.003.0010
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
This chapter examines the epistemological-ontological-ethical implications of temporal dis/junction by reading insights from Quantum Field Theory and Kyoko Hayashi’s account of the destruction ...
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This chapter examines the epistemological-ontological-ethical implications of temporal dis/junction by reading insights from Quantum Field Theory and Kyoko Hayashi’s account of the destruction wrought by the Nagasaki bombing through one another. The diffraction of time at the core of quantum field theory troubles the scalar distinction between the world of subatomic particles and that of colonialism, war, nuclear physics research, and environmental destruction; all of which entangle the effects of nuclear warfare throughout the present time, troubling the binaries between micro and macro, nature and culture, nonhuman and human. The chapter thus attempts to think through what possibilities remain open for an embodied re-membering of the past which, against the colonialist practices of erasure and avoidance and the related desire to set time aright, calls for thinking a certain undoing of time; a work of mourning more accountable to, and doing justice to, the victims of ecological destruction and of racist, colonialist, and nationalist violence, human and otherwise—those victims who are no longer there, and those yet to come.Less
This chapter examines the epistemological-ontological-ethical implications of temporal dis/junction by reading insights from Quantum Field Theory and Kyoko Hayashi’s account of the destruction wrought by the Nagasaki bombing through one another. The diffraction of time at the core of quantum field theory troubles the scalar distinction between the world of subatomic particles and that of colonialism, war, nuclear physics research, and environmental destruction; all of which entangle the effects of nuclear warfare throughout the present time, troubling the binaries between micro and macro, nature and culture, nonhuman and human. The chapter thus attempts to think through what possibilities remain open for an embodied re-membering of the past which, against the colonialist practices of erasure and avoidance and the related desire to set time aright, calls for thinking a certain undoing of time; a work of mourning more accountable to, and doing justice to, the victims of ecological destruction and of racist, colonialist, and nationalist violence, human and otherwise—those victims who are no longer there, and those yet to come.
