21,841 research outputs found
Dual-system theory and the role of consciousness in intentional action
According to the standard view in philosophy, intentionality is the mark of genuine action. In psychology, human cognition and agency are now widely explained in terms of the workings of two distinct systems (or types of processes), and intentionality is not a central notion in this dual-system theory. Further, it is often claimed, in psychology, that most human actions are automatic, rather than consciously controlled. This raises pressing questions. Does the dual-system theory preserve the philosophical account of intentional action? How much of our behavior is intentional according to this view? And what is the role of consciousness? I will propose here a revised account of intentional action within the dual-system framework, and we will see that most of our behavior can qualify as intentional, even if most of it is automatic. An important lesson will be that philosophical accounts of intentional action need to pay more attention to the role of consciousness in action
Traditional Compatibilism Reformulated and Defended
Traditional compatibilism about free will is widely considered to be untenable. In particular, the conditional analysis of the ability to do otherwise appears to be subject to clear counterexamples. I will propose a new version of traditional compatibilism that provides a conditional account of both the ability to do otherwise and the ability to choose to do otherwise, and I will argue that this view withstands the standard objections to traditional compatibilism. For this, I will assume with incompatibilists that the mere possession of a general ability to do otherwise is not sufficient for having the ability that is required for free will. This concession distinguishes the view from the traditional conditional analysis and from recent dispositional accounts of the ability to do otherwise, and we will see that this concession enables a straightforward response to the counterexamples. This, in turn, will play a crucial role in my response to the strongest version of the consequence argument for incompatibilism
Role of coherence in resistance quantization
The quantization of resistances in the quantum Hall effect and ballistic
transport through quantum point contacts is compared with the quantization of
the charge relaxation resistance of a coherent mesoscopic capacitor. While the
former two require the existence of a perfectly transmitting channel, the
charge relaxation resistance remains quantized for arbitrary backscattering.
The quantum Hall effect and the quantum point contact require only local phase
coherence. In contrast quantization of the charge relaxation resistance
requires global phase coherence.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure
Beyond two-stage models for lung carcinogenesis in the Mayak workers: Implications for Plutonium risk
Mechanistic multi-stage models are used to analyze lung-cancer mortality
after Plutonium exposure in the Mayak-workers cohort, with follow-up until
2008. Besides the established two-stage model with clonal expansion, models
with three mutation stages as well as a model with two distinct pathways to
cancer are studied. The results suggest that three-stage models offer an
improved description of the data. The best-fitting models point to a mechanism
where radiation increases the rate of clonal expansion. This is interpreted in
terms of changes in cell-cycle control mediated by bystander signaling or
repopulation following cell killing. No statistical evidence for a two-pathway
model is found. To elucidate the implications of the different models for
radiation risk, several exposure scenarios are studied. Models with a radiation
effect at an early stage show a delayed response and a pronounced drop-off with
older ages at exposure. Moreover, the dose-response relationship is strongly
nonlinear for all three-stage models, revealing a marked increase above a
critical dose
Mesoscopic Charge Relaxation
We consider charge relaxation in the mesoscopic equivalent of an RC circuit.
For a single-channel, spin-polarized contact, self-consistent scattering theory
predicts a universal charge relaxation resistance equal to half a resistance
quantum independent of the transmission properties of the contact. This
prediction is in good agreement with recent experimental results. We use a
tunneling Hamiltonian formalism and show in Hartree-Fock approximation, that at
zero temperature the charge relaxation resistance is universal even in the
presence of Coulomb blockade effects. We explore departures from universality
as a function of temperature and magnetic field.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Analysis of Quickselect under Yaroslavskiy's Dual-Pivoting Algorithm
There is excitement within the algorithms community about a new partitioning
method introduced by Yaroslavskiy. This algorithm renders Quicksort slightly
faster than the case when it runs under classic partitioning methods. We show
that this improved performance in Quicksort is not sustained in Quickselect; a
variant of Quicksort for finding order statistics. We investigate the number of
comparisons made by Quickselect to find a key with a randomly selected rank
under Yaroslavskiy's algorithm. This grand averaging is a smoothing operator
over all individual distributions for specific fixed order statistics. We give
the exact grand average. The grand distribution of the number of comparison
(when suitably scaled) is given as the fixed-point solution of a distributional
equation of a contraction in the Zolotarev metric space. Our investigation
shows that Quickselect under older partitioning methods slightly outperforms
Quickselect under Yaroslavskiy's algorithm, for an order statistic of a random
rank. Similar results are obtained for extremal order statistics, where again
we find the exact average, and the distribution for the number of comparisons
(when suitably scaled). Both limiting distributions are of perpetuities (a sum
of products of independent mixed continuous random variables).Comment: full version with appendices; otherwise identical to Algorithmica
versio
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