An energy condition, in the context of a wide class of spacetime theories, is, crudely speaking, a relation one demands the stress-energy tensor of matter satisfy in order to try to capture the idea that "energy should be positive". The remarkable fact I will discuss in this paper is that such simple, general, almost trivial seeming propositions have profound and far-reaching import for our understanding of the structure of relativistic spacetimes. It is therefore especially surprising when one (...) also learns that we have no clear understanding of the nature of these conditions, what theoretical status they have with respect to fundamental physics, what epistemic status they may have, when we should and should not expect them to be satisfied, and even in many cases how they and their consequences should be interpreted physically. Or so I shall argue, by a detailed analysis of the technical and conceptual character of all the standard conditions used in physics today, including examination of their consequences and the circumstances in which they are believed to be violated. (shrink)

The status of the geodesic principle in General Relativity has been a topic of some interest in the recent literature on the foundations of spacetime theories. Part of this discussion has focused on the role that a certain energy condition plays in the proof of a theorem due to Bob Geroch and Pong-Soo Jang [“Motion of a Body in General Relativity.” Journal of Mathematical Physics16(1) (1975)] that can be taken to make precise the claim that the geodesic principle is (...) a theorem, rather than a postulate, of General Relativity. In this brief note, I show, by explicit counterexample, that not only is a weaker energy condition than the one Geroch and Jang state insufficient to prove the theorem, but in fact a condition still stronger than the one that they assume is necessary. (shrink)

The paper reviews methods, and their difficulties, in the measurement of the daily energy expenditure of rural women under field conditions in developing countries. Since all methods need to be validated against a reference method which is usually based on indirect calorimetry, examples of the use of this technique are given. The energy costs of most agricultural and daily tasks of rural women in developing countries have been measured. Large intra- and inter-individual variations in the cost of (...) a single activity occur, so repeated measurements are needed to obtain a valid mean energy cost for a specific activity for a homogeneous group of individuals.Much work remains to be done on the assessment of the duration and the intensity of the physical activity of the rural adolescent and adult female population. Studies indicate that the workload of most rural women in developing countries is excessive and frequently associated with acute poverty. (shrink)

According to the free energy principle all living systems aim to minimise free energy in their sensory exchanges with the environment. Processes of free energy minimisation are thus ubiquitous in the biological world. Indeed it has been argued that even plants engage in free energy minimisation. Not all living things however feel alive. How then did the feeling of being alive get started? In line with the arguments of the phenomenologists, I will claim that every feeling (...) must be felt by someone. It must have mineness built into it if it is to feel a particular way. The question I take up in this paper asks how mineness might have arisen out of processes of free energy minimisation, given that many systems that keep themselves alive lack mineness. The hypothesis I develop in this paper is that the life of an organism can be seen as an inferential process. Every living system embodies a probability distribution conditioned on a model of the sensory, physiological, and morphological states that are highly probably given the life it leads and the niche it inhabits. I argue for an ecological and enactive interpretation of free energy. I show how once the life of an organism reaches a certain level of complexity mineness emerges as an intrinsic part of the process of life itself. (shrink)

The energy-limited time-varying formation control problem of second-order multiagent systems is addressed for both leaderless and leader-following communication topologies in this paper. Different from the previous results, the joint consideration of energy limitation and formation design is more challenging and practical. First, an ETVF control protocol is presented, and the total energy supply is pregiven and limited, which is more common in practical applications. Then, by an orthogonal transformation, the formation control problem is converted into the consensus (...) stabilization problem for second-order leaderless MAS, where sufficient conditions for the ETVF are derived by joint design of control gains and the total energy. At the same time, the explicit formula that forms the formation center function is obtained to depict the macroscopic movement of the multiagent system as a whole. Moreover, the proposed method is also extended to the leader-following communication structure. Finally, two examples are given to verify the effectiveness of our theoretical results. (shrink)

It is shown that the time operatorQ 0 appearing in the realization of the RCCR's [Qμ,Pv]=−jhgμv, on Minkowski quantum spacetime is a self adjoint operator on Hilbert space of square integrable functions over Σ m =σ×v m , where σ is a timelike hyperplane. This result leads to time-energy uncertainty relations that match their space-momentum counterparts. The operators Qμ appearing in Born's metric operator in quantum spacetime emerge as internal spacetime operators for exciton states, and the condition that the (...) metric operator should possess a ground exciton state assumes the significance of achieving minimal spacetime4-momentum uncertainty in fundamental standards for spacetime measurements. (shrink)

Conflicts can arise between energy policies pursued in the interests of present people and the needs of future people for environmental and social conditions conducive to human well-being. This paper is addressed primarily to those who believe that we have moral obligations toward people of the distant future, and who consider these obligations to affect the range of energy policies which we are morally entitled to pursue. l examine utilitarian, contractarian, and formalist ethical theories to determine which (...) provide adequate ethical bases for this moral conviction. I argue that utilitarian theories lead to bizarre prescriptions concerning energy policies that affect people of the distant future. Contractarian theories, on one interpretation, fail to support any moral concern at all for such people and, on another, exclude some relevant dimensions of moral concern, i.e., beneficence, and provide policy planners with inadequate guidance in the face of moral dilemmas. Only formalism, for example, that of W. D. Ross, supports a moral concern for people of the distant future, and yields reasonable prescriptions concerning energy policies that affect such people. (shrink)

Conflicts can arise between energy policies pursued in the interests of present people and the needs of future people for environmental and social conditions conducive to human well-being. This paper is addressed primarily to those who believe that we have moral obligations toward people of the distant future, and who consider these obligations to affect the range of energy policies which we are morally entitled to pursue. l examine utilitarian, contractarian, and formalist ethical theories to determine which (...) provide adequate ethical bases for this moral conviction. I argue that utilitarian theories lead to bizarre prescriptions concerning energy policies that affect people of the distant future. Contractarian theories, on one interpretation, fail to support any moral concern at all for such people and, on another, exclude some relevant dimensions of moral concern, i.e., beneficence, and provide policy planners with inadequate guidance in the face of moral dilemmas. Only formalism, for example, that of W. D. Ross, supports a moral concern for people of the distant future, and yields reasonable prescriptions concerning energy policies that affect such people. (shrink)

Reproduction places severe demands on the energy metabolism in human females. When physical work entails higher energy expenditure, not enough energy will be left for the support of the reproductive processes and temporal suppression of the reproductive function is expected. While energy needed for reproduction may be obtained by increases in energy intake, utilization of fat reserves, or reallocation of energy from basal metabolism, several environmental or physiological constraints render such solutions unlikely. For human (...) ancestors increases in energy intake were limited by availability of food, by labor of food preparation and by metabolic ceilings to energy assimilation. Energy stored as fat may support only a fraction of the requirements for reproduction (especially lactation). Effects of intense physical activity on basal metabolism may also interfere with fat accumulation during pregnancy. Finally, the female physiology may experience demands on increasing the basal metabolism as a consequence of physical activity and, at the same time, on decreasing the basal metabolism, when energy to support the ongoing pregnancy or lactation is inadequate. The resulting metabolic dilemmas could constitute a plausible cause for the occurrence of reproductive suppression in response to physical activity. It is, therefore, likely that allocating enough energy to the reproductive processes during periods when energy expenditure rises may be difficult due to physiological and bioenergetic constraints. Females attempting pregnancy in such conditions may compromise their lifetime reproductive output. A reproductive suppression occurring in low energy availability situations may thus represent an adaptive rather then a pathological response. (shrink)

Abstract:Designers whose projects are inspired by a community’s unique sense of spatial identity often focus on a site’s observable context, i.e. historic forms and surface aesthetics. Focus on typological components, however, overlooks generative relationships between the phenomenology of place and human energy investment. Recognizing Kubler’s dictum that material history is an observable continuum then, at its most fundamental level, the history of spatial production is the history of energy use. For most of human history, place was a unique (...) socio-cultural expression because it fused energy expenditure with site-specific conditions, including climate, topography and materials. This paper introduces the concept of burden distance, the distance needed to travel to material sources and bring them back from origin points to their place of use. This proposed concept parallels Walter Christaller’s Central Place Theory idea of “range,” but applied in terms phenomenological implications of energy investment and placemaking. Understanding burden distance and its role in placemaking, is an important step in identifying why built environments have a spatial specificity that contributes to mitigate spatial alienation and instead root people to their built environment. (shrink)

In Newtonian gravity it is a moot question whether energy should be localized in the field or inside matter. An argument from relativity suggests a compromise in which the contribution from the field in vacuum is positive definite. We show that the same compromise is implied by Noether’s theorem applied to a variational principle for perfect fluids, if we assume Dirichlet boundary conditions on the potential. We then analyse a thought experiment due to Bondi and McCrea that gives (...) a clean example of inductive energy transfer by gravity. Some history of the problem is included. (shrink)

Philosophical writings on the free energy principle in the life sciences often give the impression that minimising free energy is sufficient for life. But minimising free energy is not a sufficient condition for life. In fact, one can perfectly well conceive of a system that actively minimises its free energy, and for this very reason moves inexorably towards death. So, where does the assumption of this entailment relation come from? There is indeed an entailment relation, but (...) it goes the other way around: life entails minimising free energy. Put another way, if you exist, now, under the right conditions, it is because you’ve done something like minimising your free energy. However, the question of whether you will exist tomorrow cannot be settled purely by resorting to the fact that you will minimise your free energy to get there. The simple point I make in this paper is that the free energy principle is not concerned with the sufficient conditions of existence, but rather with what must have been the case, given that you exist. It’s not about figuring out what it takes to be alive; it’s about figuring out what took you there. (shrink)

ObjectiveBulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder are eating disorders characterized by recurrent binge eating episodes. Overlap exists between ED diagnostic groups, with BE episodes presenting one clinical feature that occurs transdiagnostically. Neuroimaging of the responses of those with BN and BED to disorder-specific stimuli, such as food, is not extensively investigated. Furthermore, to our knowledge, there have been no previous published studies examining the neural response of individuals currently experiencing binge eating, to low energy foods. Our objective was to (...) examine the neural responses to both low energy and high energy food images in three emotive categories in BN and BED participants.MethodsNineteen females with BN or BED, comprising the binge eating group, and 19 age-matched healthy control ’s completed thorough clinical assessment prior to functional MRI. Neural response to low energy and high energy foods and non-food images was compared between groups using whole-brain exploratory analyses, from which six regions of interest were then selected: frontal, occipital, temporal, and parietal lobes; insula and cingulate.ResultsIn response to low energy food images, the BEG demonstrated differential neural responses to all three low energy foods categories compared to HCs. Correlational analyses found a significant association between frequency of binge episodes and diminished temporal lobe and greater occipital lobe response. In response to high energy food images, compared to HC’s, the BEG demonstrated significantly decreased neural activity in response to all high energy food images. The HC’s had significantly greater neural activity in the limbic system, occipital lobe, temporal lobe, frontal lobe, and limbic system in response to high energy food images.ConclusionResults in the low energy food condition indicate that binge frequency may be related to increased aberrant neural responding. Furthermore, differences were found between groups in all ROI’s except the insula. The neural response seen in the BEG to disgust food images may indicate disengagement with this particular stimuli. In the high energy food condition, results demonstrate that neural activity in BN and BED patients may decrease in response to high energy foods, suggesting disengagement with foods that may be more consistent with those consumed during a binge eating episode. (shrink)

This volume collects academic as well as artistic explorations highlighting historical and contemporary approaches to the energetic in its aesthetic and political potential. Energetic processes straddle dance, performance art, and installations. They transform the body, evoke specific states, and push towards intensities. In contemporary dance and performance art, energetic processes are no longer mere conditions of form but appear as distinct aesthetic interventions. The contributions in this volume submit these to thorough investigation, elucidating maneuvers of mobilization, activation, initiation, regulation, (...) navigation, and containment of forces as well as different potentials and associated with the energetic. (shrink)

The explicit history of the “hidden variables” problem is well-known and established. The main events of its chronology are traced. An implicit context of that history is suggested. It links the problem with the “conservation of energy conservation” in quantum mechanics. Bohr, Kramers, and Slaters (1924) admitted its violation being due to the “fourth Heisenberg uncertainty”, that of energy in relation to time. Wolfgang Pauli rejected the conjecture and even forecast the existence of a new and unknown then (...) elementary particle, neutrino, on the ground of energy conservation in quantum mechanics, afterwards confirmed experimentally. Bohr recognized his defeat and Pauli’s truth: the paradigm of elementary particles (furthermore underlying the Standard model) dominates nowadays. However, the reason of energy conservation in quantum mechanics is quite different from that in classical mechanics (the Lie group of all translations in time). Even more, if the reason was the latter, Bohr, Cramers, and Slatters’s argument would be valid. The link between the “conservation of energy conservation” and the problem of hidden variables is the following: the former is equivalent to their absence. The same can be verified historically by the unification of Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics and Schrödinger’s wave mechanics in the contemporary quantum mechanics by means of the separable complex Hilbert space. The Heisenberg version relies on the vector interpretation of Hilbert space, and the Schrödinger one, on the wave-function interpretation. However the both are equivalent to each other only under the additional condition that a certain well-ordering is equivalent to the corresponding ordinal number (as in Neumann’s definition of “ordinal number”). The same condition interpreted in the proper terms of quantum mechanics means its “unitarity”, therefore the “conservation of energy conservation”. In other words, the “conservation of energy conservation” is postulated in the foundations of quantum mechanics by means of the concept of the separable complex Hilbert space, which furthermore is equivalent to postulating the absence of hidden variables in quantum mechanics (directly deducible from the properties of that Hilbert space). Further, the lesson of that unification (of Heisenberg’s approach and Schrödinger’s version) can be directly interpreted in terms of the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics in the cherished “quantum gravity” as well as a “manual” of how one can do this considering them as isomorphic to each other in a new mathematical structure corresponding to quantum information. Even more, the condition of the unification is analogical to that in the historical precedent of the unifying mathematical structure (namely the separable complex Hilbert space of quantum mechanics) and consists in the class of equivalence of any smooth deformations of the pseudo-Riemannian space of general relativity: each element of that class is a wave function and vice versa as well. Thus, quantum mechanics can be considered as a “thermodynamic version” of general relativity, after which the universe is observed as if “outside” (similarly to a phenomenological thermodynamic system observable only “outside” as a whole). The statistical approach to that “phenomenological thermodynamics” of quantum mechanics implies Gibbs classes of equivalence of all states of the universe, furthermore re-presentable in Boltzmann’s manner implying general relativity properly … The meta-lesson is that the historical lesson can serve for future discoveries. (shrink)

The energy-momentum tensor for a particular matter component summarises its local energy-momentum distribution in terms of densities and current densities. We re-investigate under what conditions these local distributions can be integrated to meaningful global quantities. This leads us directly to a classic theorem by Max von Laue concerning integrals of components of the energy-momentum tensor, whose statement and proof we recall. In the first half of this paper we do this within the realm of Special Relativity (...) and in the traditional mathematical language using components with respect to affine charts, thereby focusing on the intended physical content and interpretation. In the second half we show how to do all this in a proper differential-geometric fashion and on arbitrary space-time manifolds, this time focusing on the group-theoretic and geometric hypotheses underlying these results. Based on this we give a proper geometric statement and proof of Laue's theorem, which is shown to generalise from Minkowski space to space-times with significantly less symmetries. This result, which seems to be new, not only generalises but also clarifies the geometric content and hypotheses of Laue's theorem. A series of three appendices lists our conventions and notation and summarises some of the conceptual and mathematical background needed in the main text. (shrink)

This book integrates Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit and contemporary conversations about energy. By interpreting actuality as energy in the Hegelian corpus, the author provides a new lens for understanding the dialectical project and the energy⁰́₁starved condition of our contemporaneity.

Despite the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, a growing number of countries are interested in expanding or introducing nuclear energy. However, nuclear energy production and nuclear waste disposal give rise to pressing ethical questions that society needs to face. This book takes up this challenge with essays by an international team of scholars focusing on the key issues of risk, justice, and democracy. The essays consider a range of ethical issues, including radiological protection, the (...) influence of gender in the acceptability of nuclear risk, and environmental, international, and intergenerational justice in the context of nuclear energy. They also address the question of when, and under which conditions, nuclear energy should play a role in the world's future supply of electricity, looking at both developing and industrialized countries. The book will interest readers in ethics and political philosophy, social and political sciences, nuclear engineering, and policy studies. (shrink)

Wenqi 文氣 (literary pneuma) is a foundational idea in Chinese aesthetics. It has remained elusive since its initial formulation, however. This is so largely because previous scholars did not examine its ontological and epistemological conditions in analytic terms, still less explore its implications in a conceptual framework of artistic creation. Here, it is proposed to explore its general as well as specific implications against the larger background of Chinese intellectual thought and in relation to contemporary theories of literature and (...) aesthetics. Through a philosophical inquiry, wenqi is here reconceived as an integration of the primal energy of the universe, the creative energy of human beings, and the totalizing force that animates an artistic work. Wenqi is viewed not as a substance or a product but as a creative and shaping force that flows from the writer into his writing, gives it a distinct shape, and makes it different from any other writing. The theory of wenqi is a system of aesthetic principles that govern the creative and shaping force operating in the space of three intertwined entities: the macrocosm of the universe including human society, the microcosm of the writer, and the microcosm of his writing. (shrink)

A new hypothesis for energy localization in general relativity is introduced which is based upon the fact that the energy-momentum conservation laws are devoid of content in vacuum. The vanishing of pseudotensor components forms the basis of coordinate conditions consistent with the above. The implication is that energy is localized where the energy-momentum tensor is nonvanishing. As a consequence, gravitational waves are not carriers of energy in vacuum. A detailed analysis of a Feynman detector (...) interacting with a plane gravitational wave is consistent with the hypothesis. The fact that there has never been a confirmed direct energy transfer to a detector via gravitational radiation is also consistent with the hypothesis. (shrink)

_In this article we justify why justice ought to be considered in scenarios of energy transitions, stipulate what dimensions should reasonably be considered, and investigate whether such considerations are taken in Swedish parliamentary debates on energy policies. Through interviews we investigated how Swedish parliamentary politicians think through justice in energy transitions, providing a practical perspective. We conclude that while there is some overlap between minimal conditions for energy justice and the issues brought forward by Swedish (...) politicians, several issues are omitted. Examples include procedural justice and recognizing Sámi interests. On the other hand, principles of energy justice omit economic issues, which are however often brought up by respondents. It can be argued that justice issues, and not only the technical and economic issues that currently dominate the political debate, should be considered in energy transitions. It is therefore unfortunate that questions about justice are not adequately recognized by Swedish members of parliament, as outlined here by interview results. Stronger conclusions would require more empirical work, but the article points out several discrepancies between the topics discussed in the research literature on energy policies, and the topics discussed by elected parliamentarians having a specific focus on energy policies. _ _Keywords_: energy justice; energy transitions; Swedish energy policies; climate justice. (shrink)

Over and above the probable peaking of worldwide oil production as a current reality, the arrival of hard limits on all energy resources is very much nearer in the future than many people realize. The public discourse on Peak Oil and the associated arrival of hard limitson energy availability has attracted more than its share of brilliant and creative minds. In addition to scientific and technical analysts, thisgroup includes a fair number of generalists who have engaged in broader (...) forms of reflection upon the likely economic, social, political, and cultural effects of Peak Oil and other hard energy limits on the structure of current world civilization. In this paper, I select for examination three such generalists who are both especially talented and widely read by those having an interest in this topic: James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer, and Dmitri Orlov. My intention is to survey their central ideas in turn, with a view to forming a reasonably well-developed and concrete notion as to how the impending arrival of hard limits on energy consumption will affect the structure of built space in coming decades. I focus both on the macro-infrastructural level and on what one might term the micro-infrastructural level of the built space within which the denizens of contemporary industrial civilization live their daily lives. Theprincipal focus of the discussion will be on the situation in the United States, though many of the lines of argument presented may be applied much more broadly if suitably adjusted in light of locally prevailing conditions elsewhere. (shrink)

In the general relativity theory gravitational energy-momentum density is usually described by a pseudo-tensor with strange transformation properties so that one does not have localization of gravitational energy. It is proposed to set up a gravitational energy-momentum density tensor having a unique form in a given coordinate system by making use of a bimetric formalism. Two versions are considered: (1) a bimetric theory with a flat-space background metric which retains the physics of the general relativity theory and (...) (2) one with a background corresponding to a space of constant curvature which introduces modifications into general relativity under certain conditions. The gravitational energy density in the case of the Schwarzschild solution is obtained. (shrink)

This paper considers combinations of frictionless mechanical amplifiers arranged in a cycle so that the amplified signal passes around through an endless chain of such systems the output of the last system being fed into the first. It appears that while each amplifier may be reversible in the absence of friction, the effect of the combination is such that the signal would be unable to pass around the cycle indefinitely, using the same energy over and over again. It is (...) felt that the assumptions upon which this cycle is based are related to some of the conditions met with in consideration of open thermodynamic systems such as heat engines and living organisms when in finite environments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Climate Justice: Ethics, Energy, and Public PolicyWillis JenkinsClimate Justice: Ethics, Energy, and Public Policy James Martin-Schramm Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010. 232 pp. $20.00Religious ethicists are sometimes tempted to interpret climate change as symptomatic of a civilizational corruption so deep that practical responsibility seems nearly impossible. In its considered treatment of energy options and policy responses, [End Page 198] Climate Justice works to make applied Christian (...) ethics competent to address climate change. By interpreting political possibilities with Christian commitments to justice, the book makes a distinctively practical contribution to the literature on Christianity and climate; it lifts an important theological voice in the growing subfield of climate ethics.The book begins by elaborating the general notion of ecological justice into workable criteria. Martin-Schramm describes four basic norms of ecojustice (sustainability, sufficiency, participation, and solidarity), from which he develops twelve energy policy guidelines (e.g., equity, adequacy). He then specifies those guidelines into fourteen criteria by which to assess the justice of climate action (e.g., historical responsibility, emissions verifiability).Subsequent chapters use those criteria to evaluate policy options. A chief difficulty in applying them lies in the tension between intergenerational and intragenerational claims. Global climate negotiations founder on disagreements about these undeveloped, plural dimensions of justice. Martin-Schramm therefore deploys criteria with a balancing objective: to develop obligations to the future while recognizing claims of the present poor and vulnerable, and while keeping the result within the bounds of North American political viability.For example, Martin-Schramm recognizes that the criterion of historical responsibility indicates that the United States should bear about one-third of the costs of climate transition. But he finds that the resulting figure ($331 billion) so outstrips realistic acceptance that he rejects financial transfer in favor of a “national obligation wedge” in which the nation compensates by pledging to reduce future emissions. Since those emission reductions are unlikely apart from a price on carbon, Martin-Schramm argues that justice mandates a fossil fuel tax. With an eye to political viability, he proposes beginning with a modest $5/ton (for comparison, the Stern Report estimates the social costs of carbon at $85/ton).Controversy in the details matters to the whole project because the point of Martin-Schramm’s approach is that a meaningful climate ethic should guide contextual action. Yet other accounts of climate justice will find a scandal of modesty on those contextual points. Martin-Schramm’s climate justice entails less economic transformation than the “Northern structural adjustment” demanded by the Latin American Council of Churches. It is also less ecocentric than accounts from indigenous theologians arguing that justice warrants rights for species at risk of extinction, and perhaps for Earth itself.While Climate Justice is a self-consciously North American account, the criteria it develops would be different and work more critically were the underlying account of justice dialogically constructed across economic, political, and theological borders. Were it pragmatic, in the sense of arising from projects from across those borders, rather than applied deductively, a Christian climate ethic would likely produce an account of justice with more critical demands on industrial infrastructure and on ecological consciousness. [End Page 199]In its self-limitation, however, lies the book’s practical promise. Martin-Schramm wants justice to illuminate effective ways toward real responsibility. His criteria for justice imply that advocating for impossible goals, or for objectives that would imperil other conditions of social justice, would amount to injustice. Making ethics matter for climate change, he shows, requires understanding what justice can do in context.The open question for this book’s project is how a self-limited ethic of applied justice relates to the deeper processes of social transformation obviously needed for adequate response. Martin-Schramm closes with an account of his work reforming the energy economy of Luther College, which should inspire every reader with a sense of what persistent, informed, and contextual action can accomplish.Willis JenkinsYale Divinity SchoolCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Global climate change is one of the biggest threats humankind faces today. Changing climatic conditions are expected to lead to rising sea levels, a higher frequency of natural hazards, extended phases of drought, and a greater risk of many other sudden and slow-onset events. These threats will impact not only economic development but also the livelihood and cultures of many communities and regions of the world. Governing climate change to minimize these risks not only concerns understanding its science but (...) also analyzing policy options with methods from social sciences and economics. This in turn means making evaluative judgments about what policy measures can be considered just and fair. These kinds of judgments are normative; they concern ethics. The aim of this article is to lay out some of the most important aspects of justice and responsibility in governing transitions to renewable energy as a means of reducing global emissions. (shrink)

This research examines the effect of an individual difference variable that reflects the extent to which one desires positive evaluations from others—that is, face consciousness on consumer energy-saving behavior—as well as the mechanism through which the effect occurs and conditions under which it varies. Drawing upon the means-end theory of lifestyles, we propose that face consciousness increases a status-seeking lifestyle and thus decreases energy-saving behavior. Moreover, the negative relationship between status-seeking lifestyle and energy-saving behavior is contingent (...) upon a perceived seriousness of environmental problems and perceived environmental responsibility, such that the indirect and negative effect of such face consciousness is stronger for consumers who perceive less serious environmental problems and less environmental responsibility. Results from an experimental study and a field study using samples of Chinese consumers provide consistent evidence for the hypothesized model. Theoretical and practical implications for energy-saving behavior are also discussed. (shrink)

Recent events have put the acceptability of the risks of nuclear energy production technologies under the spotlight. A focus on risks, however, could lead to the neglect of other aspects of NEPT, such as their irreversibility. I argue that awareness of the socio-historical development of NEPT is helpful for understanding their irreversibility. To this end, I conceptualize NEPT development as a process of structuration in which material, institutional and discursive elements are produced and/or reproduced by purposive social actors. This (...) conceptualization is used to structure an analysis of how irreversibility arose in the first decades of NEPT development in India, France and the USA, and how some NEPT have been reversed or partially reversed. Lastly, two general conditions for reversible NEPT are formulated based on this analysis. (shrink)

Arguments for a just transition are integral to debates about climate change and the drive to create a carbon-neutral economy. There are currently two broad approaches rooted in ethics and justice for framing just energy transitions. The first can be described as internal to the transition and emphasizes the anticipation, assessment, and redressing of harms created by the transition itself and the inclusion in transition governance of groups or communities potentially harmed by its disruptions. In this article, we propose (...) a second approach to ethics and justice in an energy transition, which we describe as systemic or societal in scope. This approach complements attention to the proximate dynamics and impacts of the transition process with a focus on the distant societal and economic outcomes the transition brings into being and how they compare to conditions prior to the transition. It poses the question: do the transformative social, economic, and technological changes wrought by energy systems create more just societies and economies, or do they instead reinforce or recreate long-standing injustices and inequalities? We illustrate this approach with an assessment of one of the most significant existing forms of energy injustice: the energy-poverty nexus. We argue that the energy-poverty nexus reflects configurations of socio-energy systems that create complex, extractive feedbacks between energy insecurity and economic insecurity and, over time, reinforce or exacerbate poverty. We further argue that just energy transitions should work to disentangle these configurations and re-design them so as to create generative rather than extractive feedbacks, thus ending the energy-poverty nexus and creating long-term outcomes that are more just, equitable, and fair. (shrink)

Phytomass cultivation for energy use is increasingly popular in Europe for high profits guaranteed by subsidy. Although public interest in ecology is on an increasing level, direct combustion is still preferred even though scholars have been warning about formations of hazardous compounds for a long-time. However, the reduction of subsidies would negatively affect an already bad situation in Czech agriculture, since most farmers became fully dependent on subsidies due to quotas, restrictions, and other unequal business conditions in European (...) Union. It was proved in a commercial scale that an alternative phytomass energy utilizing technology consisting of steam explosion and subsequent anaerobic fermentation may be run solely on the waste heat without any further addition of chemicals. Behavior analysis of present and future agriculture decision-makers showed that none of the farmers who visited the facility cared about ecological consequences. On the other hand, ost students from the Faculty of Agriculture and the Faculty of the Economy answered the questionnaire with higher environmental responsibility. We assume this is caused by high average age of farmers in Czech Republic who are more aware of the ongoing economical difficulties and perceive differently the risk of higher acquisition costs. (shrink)

A way to make people save energy is by informing them that “comparable others” save more. We investigated whether one can further improve this nudge by manipulating Who the “comparable others” are. We asked participants to imagine receiving feedback stating that their energy consumption exceeded that of “comparable others” by 10%. We varied Who the “comparable others” were in a 2 × 2 design: they were a household that was located either in the same neighborhood as themselves or (...) in a different neighborhood, and its members were either identified (by names and a photograph) or unidentified. We also included two control conditions: one where no feedback was provided, and one where only statistical feedback was provided (feedback about an average household). We found that it matters Who the “comparable others” are. The most effective feedback was when the referent household was from the same neighborhood as the individual’s and its members were not identified. (shrink)

Alternative non‐B‐DNA conformations formed under physiological conditions by sequences called flipons include left‐handed Z‐DNA, three‐stranded triplexes, and four‐stranded i‐motifs and quadruplexes. These conformations accumulate and release energy to enable the local assembly of cellular machines in a context specific manner. In these transactions, nucleosomes store power, serving like rechargeable batteries, while flipons smooth energy flows from source to sink by acting as capacitors or resistors. Here, I review the known biological roles for flipons. I present recent and (...) unequivocal findings showing how innate immune responses are regulated by Z‐flipons that identify endogenous RNAs as self. Evidence is also presented supporting important roles for other flipon classes. In these examples, the dynamic exchange of energy between flipons and nucleosomes enables rapid switching of genetic programs without altering flipon sequence. The increased phenotypic diversity enabled by flipons drives their natural selection, with adaptations evolving faster than is possible by codon mutation alone. (shrink)

A class of states obtained by extremizing the energy of a system under certain conditions is introduced and their properties are compared with those of the coherent states. Conditions under which these states move without change of shape and follow the classical path are investigated.

Fire is a force that links everyday human activities to some of the most powerful energetic movements of the Earth. Drawing together the energy-centred social theory of Georges Bataille, the fire-centred environmental history of Stephen Pyne, and the work of a number of ‘pyrotechnology’ scholars, the paper proposes that the generalized study of combustion is a key to contextualizing human energetic practices within a broader ‘economy’ of terrestrial and cosmic energy flows. We examine the relatively recent turn towards (...) fossil-fuelled ‘internal combustion’ in the light of a much longer human history of ‘broadcast’ burning of vegetation and of artisanal pyrotechnologies – the use of heat to transform diverse materials. A combustion-centred analysis, it is argued, brings human collective life into closer contact with the geochemical and geologic conditions of earthly existence, while also pointing to the significance of explorative, experimental and even playful dispositions towards energy and matter. (shrink)

The principle of energy conservation is widely taken to be a se- rious difficulty for interactionist dualism (whether property or sub- stance). Interactionists often have therefore tried to make it satisfy energy conservation. This paper examines several such attempts, especially including E. J. Lowe’s varying constants proposal, show- ing how they all miss their goal due to lack of engagement with the physico-mathematical roots of energy conservation physics: the first Noether theorem (that symmetries imply conservation laws), its (...) converse (that conservation laws imply symmetries), and the locality of continuum/field physics. Thus the “conditionality re- sponse”, which sees conservation as (bi)conditional upon symme- tries and simply accepts energy non-conservation as an aspect of interactionist dualism, is seen to be, perhaps surprisingly, the one most in accord with contemporary physics (apart from quantum mechanics) by not conflicting with mathematical theorems basic to physics. A decent objection to interactionism should be a posteri- ori, based on empirically studying the brain. (shrink)

Constructing energy scenarios is traditionally an endeavour driven by experts. I suggest that an outcome of relying solely on expertise is incompleteness. Moreover, expertise, while being a necessary condition, is not a sufficient condition for epistemic quality and normative legitimacy of energy scenarios given the scope of transitions that energy scenarios entail, which includes substantial societal repercussions. Four reasons will be provided for wide participation when constructing energy scenarios. First, there are several forecasting shortcomings of top-down (...) approaches. Second, to rely solely on expertise provides incomplete conceptualizations of energy and central concepts such as ‘smartness’, in addition to neglecting normative views. Third, increased epistemic quality is an outcome of wide participation. A fourth reason is derived from the argument of inductive risks, stating that thresholds of evidence should reflect the potential outcomes if erroneously corroborating or rejecting a hypothesis. As energy scenarios provide input to decision-making having potentially large societal impact, they ought to be both normatively legitimate as well as of sufficient epistemic quality, components provided by wide participation. -/- . (shrink)

We consider several subtle aspects of the theory of neutrino oscillations which have been under discussion recently. We show that the S-matrix formalism of quantum field theory can adequately describe neutrino oscillations if correct physics conditions are imposed. This includes space-time localization of the neutrino production and detection processes. Space-time diagrams are introduced, which characterize this localization and illustrate the coherence issues of neutrino oscillations. We discuss two approaches to calculations of the transition amplitudes, which allow different physics interpretations: (...) (i) using configuration-space wave packets for the involved particles, which leads to approximate conservation laws for their mean energies and momenta; (ii) calculating first a plane-wave amplitude of the process, which exhibits exact energy-momentum conservation, and then convoluting it with the momentum-space wave packets of the involved particles. We show that these two approaches are equivalent. Kinematic entanglement (which is invoked to ensure exact energy-momentum conservation in neutrino oscillations) and subsequent disentanglement of the neutrinos and recoiling states are in fact irrelevant when the wave packets are considered. We demonstrate that the contribution of the recoil particle to the oscillation phase is negligible provided that the coherence conditions for neutrino production and detection are satisfied. Unlike in the previous situation, the phases of both neutrinos from Z 0 decay are important, leading to a realization of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. (shrink)

Energy services have a particularly significant impact on the daily life and welfare of consumers. The importance of such services is high, and their regulation is also changing both at the EU and Member States level, especially after the adoption of the Third Energy Package1, which is focused on improving the operation of retail markets to yield real benefits for both electricity and gas consumers. In order to implement the main or the most relevant goal of the EU, (...) such as high level of consumer rights protection, resulting in consumer trust in business sector, proper and effective functioning of the EU internal market etc., it is essential to ensure clear and sufficient legal regulation, establish responsibility of the services providers, consumer rights and duties as well as promote more effective, faster and cheaper ways of solving consumer and business disputes. The authors of this article feel the lack of scientific analysis on this issue. Despite its importance, discussions take place at political or practical level, but no recent analyses exist as to why energy services sector is so fragmented and how it affects different conditions or rights of consumers in various Member States. This article also clearly supports the idea that the above-mentioned goals can be achieved by close and more fruitful cooperation between the EU and national competent authorities, participation in various ad hoc expert working groups and committees, such as the Vulnerable Consumers Working Group. This article reflects general ideas about the problems arising in the energy consumer services sector, the activity of the EU and national institutions, seeking to ensure fair and transparent provision of such services to consumers, it also contains an analysis of alternative dispute resolution (hereinafter – the ADR) methods and good practice of their application in the EU Member States. This article highly supports the application of alternative procedures in the field of energy services and sees them as a possibility to minimise increasing consumer problems, e.g. a new phenomenon – consumer energy poverty in the EU, which is defined as the situation where a household is unable to access a socially and materially necessitated level of energy services at home and pay for the provided services. (shrink)

Past research suggests that spiritual leadership plays a pivotal role in enhancing employee job performance, yet we have little understanding of how and when spiritual leadership enhances employee job performance. The present study explores how and when spiritual leadership promotes job performance by examining relational energy as a mediator and leader integrity and relational energy differentiation as boundary conditions. We tested the theoretical model with data gathered across three phases over 12 months from 497 employees and their (...) supervisors in 108 groups. Results showed that the positive relationship between spiritual leadership and job performance was mediated by relational energy. Moreover, we found that leader integrity amplified the mediated relationship between spiritual leadership and employee job performance via relational energy. In contrast, relational energy differentiation weakened this mediated relationship. (shrink)

Two striking claims are advanced on behalf of the free energy principle in cognitive science and philosophy: that it identifies a condition of the possibility of existence for self-organising systems; and that it has important implications for our understanding of how the brain works, defining a set of process theories—roughly, theories of the structure and functions of neural mechanisms—consistent with the free energy minimising imperative that it derives as a necessary feature of all self-organising systems. I argue that (...) the conjunction of claims and rests on a fallacy of equivocation. The FEP can be interpreted in two ways: as a claim about how it is possible to redescribe the existence of self-organising systems, and as a claim about how such systems maintain their existence. Although the Descriptive FEP plausibly does identify a condition of the possibility of existence for self-organising systems, it has no important implications for our understanding of how the brain works. Although the Explanatory FEP would have such implications if it were true, it does not identify a condition of the possibility of existence for self-organising systems. I consider various ways of responding to this conclusion, and I explore its implications for the role and importance of the FEP in cognitive science and philosophy. (shrink)

Biological agents can act in ways that express a sensitivity to context-dependent relevance. So far it has proven difficult to engineer this capacity for context-dependent sensitivity to relevance in artificial agents. We give this problem the label the “problem of meaning”. The problem of meaning could be circumvented if artificial intelligence researchers were to design agents based on the assumption of the continuity of life and mind. In this paper, we focus on the proposal made by enactive cognitive scientists to (...) design artificial agents that possess sensorimotor autonomy—stable, self-sustaining patterns of sensorimotor interaction that can ground values, norms and goals necessary for encountering a meaningful environment. More specifically, we consider whether the Free Energy Principle (FEP) can provide formal tools for modeling sensorimotor autonomy. There is currently no consensus on how to understand the relationship between enactive cognitive science and the FEP. However, a number of recent papers have argued that the two frameworks are fundamentally incompatible. Some argue that biological systems exhibit historical path-dependent learning that is absent from systems that minimize free energy. Others have argued that a free energy minimizing system would fail to satisfy a key condition for sensorimotor agency referred to as “interactional asymmetry”. These critics question the claim we defend in this paper that the FEP can be used to formally model autonomy and adaptivity. We will argue it is too soon to conclude that the two frameworks are incompatible. There are undeniable conceptual differences between the two frameworks but in our view each has something important and necessary to offer. The FEP needs enactive cognitive science for the solution it provides to the problem of meaning. Enactive cognitive science needs the FEP to formally model the properties it argues to be constitutive of agency. Our conclusion will be that active inference models based on the FEP provides a way by which scientists can think about how to address the problems of engineering autonomy and adaptivity in artificial agents in formal terms. In the end engaging more closely with this formalism and its further developments will benefit those working within the enactive framework. -/- . (shrink)

Businesses and governments in postcolonial countries frame investments in wind energy as efforts to address climate change and sustainable development. However, when wind energy projects encroach on indigenous peoples’ lives and land, there is often a lack of recognition and participation of these peoples and an unequal distribution of cost and benefits of such projects toward them, which leads to opposition against wind energy projects and often triggers conflicts for justice. Worryingly, such conditions have repeatedly resulted (...) in the assassination of human rights defenders, which further inflames the conflict. Herein, I discuss these concepts based on a longitudinal study centered on a wind energy project in Oaxaca, Mexico, with the aim of exploring and understanding the conditions under which wind energy investments fail to respect current laws and norms, as well as the consequences of such negligence. My in-depth analysis of the actions of the government, businesses, and indigenous peoples revealed a phenomenon that is less discussed in environmental justice research: the gradual and continuous transformation of indigenous peoples’ norms and behaviors away from their traditional economic and cultural livelihoods. This phenomenon helps to extend the conceptual understanding of environmental justice with regard to social turbulence, which is defined as the unpredictable behavior of political and social systems in contexts in which existing laws, regulations, and norms regarding environmental justice are not observed. The concept of social turbulence of environmental justice helps to explain how indigenous peoples sacrifice their territories, norms, and traditions to a technical solution to climate change and sustainable development. (shrink)

All sciences have epistemic assumptions, a language for expressing their theories or models, and symbols that reference observables that can be measured. In most sciences the language in which their models are expressed are not the focus of their attention, although the choice of language is often crucial for the model. On the contrary, biosemiotics, by definition, cannot escape focusing on the symbol–matter relationship. Symbol systems first controlled material construction at the origin of life. At this molecular level it is (...) only in the context of open-ended evolvability that symbol–matter systems and their functions can be objectively defined. Symbols are energy-degenerate structures not determined by laws that act locally as special boundary conditions or constraints on law-based energy-dependent matter in living systems. While this partial description holds for all symbol systems, cultural languages are much too complex to be adequately described only at the molecular level. Genetic language and cultural languages have common basic requirements, but there are many significant differences in their structures and functions. (shrink)

The questions of what represents space-time in GR, the status of gravitational energy, the substantivalist-relationalist issue, and the exceptional status of gravity are interrelated. If space-time has energy-momentum, then space-time is substantival. Two extant ways to avoid the substantivalist conclusion deny that the energy-bearing metric is part of space-time or deny that gravitational energy exists. Feynman linked doubts about gravitational energy to GR-exceptionalism, as do Curiel and Duerr; particle physics egalitarianism encourages realism about gravitational (...) class='Hi'>energy. In that spirit, this essay proposes a third possible view about space-time, one involving a particle physics-inspired non-perturbative split that characterizes space-time with a constant background _matrix_, a sort of vacuum value, thus avoiding the inference from gravitational _energy to substantivalism. On this proposal, space-time is, where eta=diag is a spatio-temporally constant numerical signature matrix, a matrix already used in GR with spinors. The gravitational potential, to which any gravitational energy can be ascribed, is g_{\mu\nu}- eta, an _affine_ geometric object with a tensorial Lie derivative and a vanishing covariant derivative. This non-perturbative split permits strong fields, arbitrary coordinates, and arbitrary topology, and hence is pure GR by almost any standard. This razor-thin background, unlike more familiar backgrounds, involves no extra gauge freedom and so lacks their obscurities and carpet lump-moving. After a discussion of Curiel's GR exceptionalist denial of the localizability of gravitational energy and his rejection of energy conservation, the two traditional objections to pseudotensors, coordinate dependence and nonuniqueness, are explored. Both objections are inconclusive and getting weaker. A literal interpretation involving infinitely many energies corresponding by Noether's first theorem to the infinite symmetries of the _action_ largely answers Schroedinger's false-negative coordinate dependence problem. Bauer's false-positive objection has multiple answers. Non-uniqueness might be handled by Nester et al.'s finding physical meaning in multiplicity in relation to boundary conditions, by an optimal candidate, or by Bergmann's identifying the non-uniqueness and coordinate dependence ambiguities as one. (shrink)

Much of the literature on the free energy principle has focused on how organisms maintain homeostasis amidst a constantly changing environment. A fundamental feature of the FEP is that biological entities are “hard-wired” towards self-preservation.However, contrary to this notion, there do exist organisms that appear to seek out rather than avoid conditions that pose an elevated risk of serious injury or death, thereby jeopardizing their physiological integrity. Borrowing a term used in 1990s popular culture to refer to stunt (...) performers like Evel Knievel, these organisms that exhibit such behavioural characteristics can be referred to as daredevils.This paper presents the case of daredevils as a challenge to the FEP’s homeostasis- and optimization-based construal of biological systems. It also introduces three possible explanatory strategies by which the FEP can account for daredevils. The broader objective of the paper is to enhance the FEP’s ability to account for a diverse range of complex behaviour. (shrink)

The question of the existence of gravitational stress-energy in general relativity has exercised investigators in the field since the inception of the theory. Folklore has it that no adequate definition of a localized gravitational stress-energetic quantity can be given. Most arguments to that effect invoke one version or another of the Principle of Equivalence. I argue that not only are such arguments of necessity vague and hand-waving but, worse, are beside the point and do not address the heart of (...) the issue. Based on a novel analysis of what it may mean for one tensor to depend in the proper way on another, which, en passant, provides a precise characterization of the idea of a "geometric object", I prove that, under certain natural conditions, there can be no tensor whose interpretation could be that it represents gravitational stress-energy in general relativity. It follows that gravitational energy, such as it is in general relativity, is necessarily non-local. Along the way, I prove a result of some interest in own right about the structure of the associated jet bundles of the bundle of Lorentz metrics over spacetime. I conclude by showing that my results also imply that, under a few natural conditions, the Einstein field equation is the unique equation relating gravitational phenomena to spatiotemporal structure, and discuss how this relates to the non-localizability of gravitational stress-energy. (shrink)

Located at the intersection of philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy of biology, this thesis aims to provide a novel approach to understanding the strong continuity between life and mind. This thesis applies the Free Energy Framework, predictive processing and the conceptual apparatus from ecological psychology to reveal different manners in which the organizational processes and principles underlying life have been enriched so as to result in cognitive processes. By using these anticipatory cognitive frameworks this thesis unveils different forms (...) of cognition at work in surprising places and considers how such expressions of cognition are ultimately driven by various forms of environmental complexity. Importing the concepts of affordances, environmental information and perceptual medium from ecological psychology into predictive processing and the Free Energy Framework, an empirically grounded account of cognition as an anticipatory process that allows living systems to adapt to various degrees of uncertainty in their environments at distinct and yet overlapping timescales is argued for. In doing so, this thesis attempts to identify both the explanatory limits of ecological coupling accounts of perception and action, and the possible environmental conditions under which the predictive brain evolved from its decentralized non-neural predecessors as a solution to uncertainty. In contributing to a novel approach to constraining the mind, the various concepts deployed in both philosophy and cognitive science are sharpened, furthering the current debate on what cognition is and how it is related to life. (shrink)