Free Will: Real or Illusion - A Debate

Debate on free will with Christian List, Gregg Caruso, and Cory Clark. The exchange is focused on Christian List's book Why Free Will Is Real

Evaluating Net-Zero Energy Houses from the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2011

The Solar Decathlon is a two year, international project where university students compete to design, build, and test energy-efficient, net-zero homes. By definition, net-zero energy houses annually produce as much electricity as they consume. The 2011 Solar Decathlon, held in Washington D.C., had 19 university teams from around the world. Unfortunately, many past Solar Decathlon houses have traditionally been very costly. However, the 2011 Solar Decathlon was the first competition to have an affordability contest. The affordability contest required each home to be valued under an estimated builder’s cost of $250,000, forcing the teams to select economically feasible solutions for creating net zero energy houses, finding super-efficient, solar- powered, and affordable houses can be done by evaluating the contests associated with the Solar Decathlon 2011. The main cost-effective and energy saving components were discovered by researching final competition scoring of each specific contest. Heat pump water heaters, properly sized photovoltaic arrays, and HVAC systems with proper dehumidification were the main findings of this research, fortunately, all of these findings can immediately be implemented into the design of net-zero energy housing with off-the-shelf products

On the Necessity of Consciousness for Sophisticated Human Action

In this essay, we aim to counter and qualify the epiphenomenalist challenge proposed in this special issue on the grounds of empirical and theoretical arguments. The current body of scientific knowledge strongly indicates that conscious thought is a necessary condition for many human behaviors, and therefore, consciousness qualifies as a cause of those behaviors. We review illustrative experimental evidence for the causal power of conscious thought while also acknowledging its natural limitations. We argue that it is implausible that the metabolic costs inherent to conscious processes would have evolved in humans without any adaptive benefits. Moreover, we discuss the relevance of conscious thought to the issue of freedom. Many accounts hold conscious thought as necessary and conducive to naturalistic conceptions of personal freedom. Apart from these theories, we show that the conscious perception of freedom and the belief in free will provide sources of interesting findings, beneficial behavioral effects, and new avenues for research. We close by proposing our own challenge via outlining the gaps that have yet to be filled to establish hard evidence of an epiphenomenal model of consciousness. To be sure, we appreciate the epiphenomenalist challenge as it promotes critical thinking and inspires rigorous research. However, we see no merit in downplaying the causal significance of consciousness a priori. Instead, we believe it more worthwhile to focus on the complex interplay between conscious and other causal processes

Ageism And The Baby Boomers: Issues, Challenges And The TEAM Approach

This paper considers the issues and challenges associated with ageism relating to the Baby Boomer generation in Corporate America.  Stereotypes about older workers are examined along with types of discrimination facing Boomers.  The TEAM approach is proposed to combat ageism in the workplace.  The strategy includes using intergenerational teams, education and training, awareness, accountability, and accommodation and mentoring as key components

Declines in Religiosity Predict Increases in Violent Crime—but Not Among Countries With Relatively High Average IQ

Many scholars have argued that religion reduces violent behavior within human social groups. Here, we tested whether intelligence moderates this relationship. We hypothesized that religion would have greater utility for regulating violent behavior among societies with relatively lower average IQs than among societies with relatively more cognitively gifted citizens. Two studies supported this hypothesis. Study 1, a longitudinal analysis from 1945 to 2010 (with up to 176 countries and 1,046 observations), demonstrated that declines in religiosity were associated with increases in homicide rates—but only in countries with relatively low average IQs. Study 2, a multiverse analysis (171 models) using modern data (97–195 countries) and various controls, consistently confirmed that lower rates of religiosity were more strongly associated with higher homicide rates in countries with lower average IQ. These findings raise questions about how secularization might differentially affect groups of different mean cognitive ability

Forget the Folk: Moral Responsibility Preservation Motives and Other Conditions for Compatibilism

For years, experimental philosophers have attempted to discern whether laypeople find free will compatible with a scientifically deterministic understanding of the universe, yet no consensus has emerged. The present work provides one potential explanation for these discrepant findings: People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and moral responsibility, and thus do not have stable, logically rigorous notions of free will. Seven studies support this hypothesis by demonstrating that a variety of logically irrelevant (but motivationally relevant) features influence compatibilist judgments. In Study 1, participants who were asked to consider the possibility that our universe is deterministic were more compatibilist than those not asked to consider this possibility, suggesting that determinism poses a threat to moral responsibility, which increases compatibilist responding (thus reducing the threat). In Study 2, participants who considered concrete instances of moral behavior found compatibilist free will more sufficient for moral responsibility than participants who were asked about moral responsibility more generally. In Study 3a, the order in which participants read free will and determinism descriptions influenced their compatibilist judgments–and only when the descriptions had moral significance: Participants were more likely to report that determinism was compatible with free will than that free will was compatible with determinism. In Study 3b, participants who read the free will description first (the more compatibilist group) were particularly likely to confess that their beliefs in free will and moral responsibility and their disbelief in determinism influenced their conclusion. In Study 4, participants reduced their compatibilist beliefs after reading a passage that argued that moral responsibility could be preserved even in the absence of free will. Participants also reported that immaterial souls were compatible with scientific determinism, most strongly among immaterial soul believers (Study 5), and evaluated information about the capacities of primates in a biased manner favoring the existence of human free will (Study 6). These results suggest that people do not have one intuition about whether free will is compatible with determinism. Instead, people report that free will is compatible with determinism when desiring to uphold moral responsibility. Recommendations for future work are discussed

Prospectus, May 10, 1990

https://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_1990/1014/thumbnail.jp

NMR Techniques for Quantum Control and Computation

Fifty years of developments in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) have resulted in an unrivaled degree of control of the dynamics of coupled two-level quantum systems. This coherent control of nuclear spin dynamics has recently been taken to a new level, motivated by the interest in quantum information processing. NMR has been the workhorse for the experimental implementation of quantum protocols, allowing exquisite control of systems up to seven qubits in size. Here, we survey and summarize a broad variety of pulse control and tomographic techniques which have been developed for and used in NMR quantum computation. Many of these will be useful in other quantum systems now being considered for implementation of quantum information processing tasks.Comment: 33 pages, accepted for publication in Rev. Mod. Phys., added subsection on T_{1,\rho} (V.A.6) and on time-optimal pulse sequences (III.A.6), redid some figures, made many small changes, expanded reference