Ekolingwistyka w dobie antropocenu: w stronę integracji i konsiliencji

Celem artykułu jest ukazanie głównych wyzwań antropocenu dla językoznawstwa oraz wynikający z nich kierunek rozwoju ekolingwistyki w stronę konsiliencji, rozumianej jako idea systematycznego poszukiwania zależności przyczynowych między zjawiskami z różnych dziedzin wiedzy. Integracyjny model ekolingwistyki, który jest budowany od niespełna dekady, zostanie przedstawiony w powiązaniu z najtrudniejszymi problemami poznawczymi „epoki człowieka”, do których zalicza się przełamywanie antropocentryzmu oraz problematyzowanie pojęcia natury. Odpowiedzią ekolingwistów jest sformułowanie zasady nielokalności języka oraz jego znaturalizowany ogląd w hipotezie rozszerzonej ekologii. Z tymi nowymi ideami wiążą się nadzieje na to, że ekolingwistyka nie będzie traktowana jako tematyczny dział językoznawstwa, a stanie się awangardą w takim myśleniu o języku, które dotrzyma kroku trudnym wyzwaniom antropocenu. Ecolinguistics in the Anthropocene Era: Towards Integration and Consilience Summary: The aim of the paper is to present the main challenges that the Anthropocene presents to linguistics, and discuss the subsequent development of ecolinguistics towards consilience, understood as the idea of a systematic search for causal relationships between phenomena from various fields of science. The integrative model of ecolinguistics, which has been built for less than a decade, will be presented in relation to the most difficult cognitive problems of the Human Era, such as the overcoming of anthropocentrism and the addressing of the concept of nature. The solution proposed by ecolinguists is the principle of the non-locality of language and the nature-oriented view of language that follows the Extended Ecology Hypothesis. These new ideas will, hopefully, lead to considering ecolinguistics not so much as a thematic branch of linguistics, but as the avant-garde in such thinking about language that will keep pace with the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Branching Space-Times

This book develops a rigorous theory of indeterminism as a local and modal concept. Its crucial insight is that our world contains events or processes with alternative, really possible outcomes. The theory aims at clarifying what this assumption involves, and it does it in two ways. First, it provides a mathematically rigorous framework for local and modal indeterminism. Second, we support that theory by spelling out the philosophically relevant consequences of this formulation and by showing its fruitful applications in metaphysics. To this end, we offer a formal analysis of modal correlations and of causation, which is applicable in indeterministic and non-local contexts as well. We also propose a rigorous theory of objective single-case probabilities, intended to represent degrees of possibility. In a third step, we link our theory to current physics, investigating how local and modal indeterminism relates to issues in the foundations of physics, in particular, quantum non-locality and spatio-temporal relativity. The book also ventures into the philosophy of time, showing how the theory’s resources can be used to explicate the dynamic concept of the past, present, and future based on local indeterminism.

Contextual Inferences, Nonlocality, and the Incompleteness of Quantum Mechanics

It is known that “quantum non locality”, leading to the violation of Bell’s inequality and more generally of classical local realism, can be attributed to the conjunction of two properties, which we call here elementary locality and predictive completeness. Taking this point of view, we show again that quantum mechanics violates predictive completeness, allowing the making of contextual inferences, which can, in turn, explain why quantum non locality does not contradict relativistic causality. An important question remains: if the usual quantum state ψ is predictively incomplete, how do we complete it? We give here a set of new arguments to show that ψ should be completed indeed, not by looking for any “hidden variables”, but rather by specifying the measurement context, which is required to define actual probabilities over a set of mutually exclusive physical events.

Non-locality and geometric potential provide the phenomenology of the double-hole single massive particle interference

In spite of its accurate prediction of the experimental outcomes of double-hole single particle interference, quantum mechanics does not provide a phenomenological description of the individual realizations of the experiment. By defining a non-locality function and considering the non-paraxial solution of the time-independent Schrödinger equation by the Green’s theorem, we introduce a geometrical potential which leads to an outstanding result. The geometric potential allows the description of spatially structured Lorentzian wells in the volume between the double-hole mask and the detector. The buildup of the interference patterns results from the confined propagation of single particles through these Lorentzian wells. The phenomenological implications of this description are discussed and illustrated by numerical examples, and its compatibility with quantum mechanical predictions is also shown. A further, non-trivial advantage of this model over the conventional formalism, is that the present quantum probability density can be exactly calculated both in the near and far field conditions.

A simple holographic universe

In the context of an evolution occurring in thick present instants, we investigate the possible emergence of a spacelike foliation through a toy model based on the information of entanglement among quanta of space. We elaborate the hypotheses of the model for on a physically implementable solution and identify the need for finite and discrete information, relativity in respect to universal scales of reference and logical consistency of the global information potential. We conjecture the possible emergence of an imaginary spacetime as a holographic boundary between 2 symmetric bulk regions extending in the thick present and evolving synched on a discrete cycle (identified as an elementary quantum of action and connected to a spacetime sampling-rate). We then investigate how the information of a single particle could be described in the model through an analysis of scale of the information of non-locality in the spacelike foliation. Finally, we propose how the information potential could be intended and efficiently encoded through a wavelet analysis (log-perspective) and elaborate on the “features” (such as spin or anti-matter) derived from the symmetries in the model

The accelerated Gisin state: its non-locality, quantum correlations and efficiency to perform quantum masking

The local and non local behavior of the accelerated Gisin state are investigated either before or after filtering process. It is shown that, the possibility of predicting the non-local behavior is forseen at large values of the weight of the Gisin and acceleration parameters. Due to the filtering process, the non-locality behavior of the Gisin state is predicted at small values of the weight parameter. The amount of non classical correlations are quantified by means of the local quantum uncertainty (LQU)and the concurrence, where the LQU is more sensitive to the non-locality than the concurrence. The phenomenon of the sudden changes is displayed for both quantifiers. Our results show that, the accelerated Gisin state could be used to mask information, where all the possible partitions of the masked state satisfy the masking criteria. Moreover, there is a set of states, which satisfy the masking condition, that is generated between each qubit and its masker qubit. For this set, the amount of the non-classical correlations increases as the acceleration parameter increases . Further, the filtering process improves these correlations, where their maximum bounds are much larger than those depicted for non-filtered states.

Completing the D7-brane local gaugino action

Within the ongoing debate about de Sitter (dS) vacua in string theory, different aspects of explicit dS proposals have come under intense scrutiny. One key ingredient is D7-brane gaugino condensation, which is usually treated using effective 4d supergravity. However, it is clearly more desirable to derive the relevant scalar potential directly from a local 10d Lagrangian. Such a local 10d description captures the interactions among the various localized sources and the background fields which are smeared in the 4d Lagrangian. While progress in this endeavour has recently been made, some form of non-locality related to the 4-gaugino term has remained hidden in the available proposals. We spell out the local counterterm removing the divergence that arises when integrating out the 3-form flux and which, upon dimensional reduction, serves to reproduce the relevant part of the 4d supergravity action. This is both a step towards a more complete understanding of 10d type-IIB supergravity as well as specifically towards better control of dS constructions in string theory involving gaugino condensation.