Humean Laws for Humean Agents, edited by Christian Low, Michael Hicks and Sigried Jaag, Oxford University Press, 2023
I give reasons for being disillusioned with Humeanism, the view that laws and chances are reducib... more I give reasons for being disillusioned with Humeanism, the view that laws and chances are reducible to patterns in the mosaic of actual fact.
Oxford Handbook on the Philosophy of Mind, edited by Uriah Kriegel, Oxford University Press, 2023
The visual imagination is one of our most powerful tools in helping us think
through abstract pro... more The visual imagination is one of our most powerful tools in helping us think through abstract problems in physics and it plays an especially prominent role in spacetime physics, but it is also behind some of the most trenchant misunderstandings about what physics tells us about the nature of time. This chapter is about the images of time coming out of physics and the philosophical confusions to which they give rise. It is not a new idea that philosophical problems can have their roots in mental pictures. This is a theme in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. I am interested here both to make the confusion explicit and to explain the powerful grip it has on the imagination.
Time and Science, edited by Remy Lestienne and Paul Harris, World Scientific Publishing, 2023
Determinism is a centrally important notion for physics: it links time to
laws and connects event... more Determinism is a centrally important notion for physics: it links time to laws and connects events along spatial surfaces to events along the temporal dimension. It has also played an important role in philosophical discussions. These mostly take place in a non-relativistic setting. I examine what happens to determinism in a relativistic context and argue against some of the common philosophical assessments of its implications
The most immediately salient asymmetry in our experience of the world is the
asymmetry of causati... more The most immediately salient asymmetry in our experience of the world is the asymmetry of causation. In the last fewdecades, two developments have shed new light on the asymmetry of causation: clarity in the foundations of statistical mechanics, and the development of the interventionist conception of causation. In this paper, we ask what is the status of the causal arrow, assuming a thermodynamic gradient and the interventionist account of causation? We find that there is an objective asymmetry rooted in the thermodynamic gradient that underwrites the causal asymmetry: along a thermodynamic gradient, interventionist causal pathways—scaffolded intervention-supporting probabilistic relationships between variables—will propagate influence into the future, but not into the past. The reason is that the present macrostate of the world, in the presence of a low entropy boundary condition, will screen off probabilistic correlations to the past. The asymmetry, however, emerges only under the macroscopic coarse-graining and that raises the question of whether the arrow is simply an artefact of the macroscopic lenses through which we see the world. The question is sharpened and an answer proposed.
Isaac Newton’s theory of motion was superseded by Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity. By th... more Isaac Newton’s theory of motion was superseded by Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity. By the early 20th century, it was clear that there was something wrong with Newton’s theory. Newton’s theory together with Maxwell’s newly proposed equations of electromagnetism predicted that the speed of light should depend on the motion of the observer, but experiments found that the velocity of light is independent of the motion of the observer. Einstein proposed the special theory of relativity in 1905 which merged space and time into a four-dimensional structure known as spacetime. Ten years later he proposed the general theory which extended the special theory to include gravity. With Einstein’s theories, an ancient philosophical debate between Heraclitus and Parmenides on change as the fundamental character of time was revived.
Time: A Very Short Introduction explores questions about the nature of time that have been at the... more Time: A Very Short Introduction explores questions about the nature of time that have been at the heart of philosophical thinking since its beginnings: questions like whether time has a beginning or end, whether and in what sense time passes, how time is different from space, whether time has a direction, and whether it is possible to travel in time. These questions passed into the hands of scientists with the work of Isaac Newton when the structure of space and time became connected to motion and included the subject matter of physics. This VSI charts the way that the history of physics, from Isaac Newton through Albert Einstein’s two revolutions, wrought changes to the conception of time. There are parts of physics that are in a state of confusion, but this strand of development is a story of philosophical illumination and conceptual beauty. The discussion here provides an opportunity to see what distinguishes the methods of physics from those of philosophy. It brings together phy...
I discuss a rival program in metaphysics advocated and developed by Huw Price, that unites differ... more I discuss a rival program in metaphysics advocated and developed by Huw Price, that unites different strands of pragmatism in the philosophical literature (Ramsey, Brandom, Wittgenstein, e.g.). The Sydney Plan is anti-representationalist, anti-reductionist. It searches for practical accounts of different bits of discourse rather than metaphysical reductions.
ABSTRACT The Hard Problem of the mind is addressed and it is argued that physical-phenomenal prop... more ABSTRACT The Hard Problem of the mind is addressed and it is argued that physical-phenomenal property identities have the same status as the identification of an ostended bit of physical space and the coordinates assigned the spot on a map of the terrain. It is argued, that is to say, that such identities are, or follow from, stipulations which interpret the map.
In Cosmological and Psychological Time, edited by Yuval Abrams, Springer., 2016
Time as experienced is said to have several properties that the physical
image of time lacks.
In ... more Time as experienced is said to have several properties that the physical image of time lacks. In this paper, I outline a strategy for bridging the gap between the time of everyday experience and the time of physics that treats the Block Universe as a non-perspectival view of History and shows how to recover the everyday experience of time as a view of History through the eyes of the embedded, embodied participant in it. I also address questions about whether features of our temporal experience like passage and flow are properly thought of as illusory, the temptation to reify these features in the absolute fabric of the universe, and the question of whether this strategy takes passage seriously.
Huw Price has argued that on an interventionist account of cause the distinction is perspectival,... more Huw Price has argued that on an interventionist account of cause the distinction is perspectival, and the claim prompted some interesting responses from interventionists and in particular an exchange with Woodward that raises questions about what it means to say that one or another structure is perspectival. I’ll introduce his reasons for claiming that the distinction between cause and effect on an interventionist account is perspectival. Then I’ll introduce a distinction between different ways in which a class of concepts can be said to depend on facts about their users Three importantly different forms of dependence will emerge from the discussion: (1) Pragmatic dependence on us: truth conditions for x-beliefs can be given by a function f0 of more fundamental physical structures making no explicit reference to human agents. But there are any other number of functions (f2…fn) ontologically on a par with x and what explains the distinguish role f plays in our practical and epistemic lives are facts about us. (2) Implicit relativization: truth conditions for x-beliefs are relative to agent or context. The context supplies the value of a hidden parameter (’hidden’ in the sense that it is not explicitly represented in the surface syntax) that determines the truth of x-beliefs. (3) Indexicals: like implicit relativization except that the surface syntax contains a term whose semantic value is context-dependent I suggest that Price’s insights are best understood in the first way. This will draw a crucial disanalogy with his central examples of perspectival concepts, but it will refine the thesis in a way that is more faithful to what his arguments show. The refined thesis will also support generalization to other concepts, and clarify the foundations of the quite distinctive research program that Price has been developing for a number of years.
... Interventionism Recent work by Pearl, Woodward and others suggests 1 That interventions are a... more ... Interventionism Recent work by Pearl, Woodward and others suggests 1 That interventions are at the core of an understanding of causality 2 That the “Ptolemaic” view of interventions is problematic. Jenann Ismael & Huw Price Two Bits of Noûs From 1979 Page 27. ...
The intuitive difference between a system that choreographs the motion of its
parts in the servic... more The intuitive difference between a system that choreographs the motion of its parts in the service of goals of its own formulation and a system composed of a collection of parts doing their own thing without coordination has been shaken by now familiar examples of self-organization. There is a broad and growing presumption in parts of philosophy and across the sciences that the appearance of centralized information-processing and control in the service of systemwide goals is mere appearance, i.e., an explanatory heuristic we have evolved to predict behavior, but one that will eventually get swept away in the advancing tide of self-organization. I argue that there is a distinction of central importance here, and that no adequate science of complex systems can dispense with it.
Structures of many different sorts arise in physics, e.g., the concrete structures of material bo... more Structures of many different sorts arise in physics, e.g., the concrete structures of material bodies, the structure exemplified by the spatiotemporal configuration of a set of bodies, the structures of more abstract objects like states, state-spaces, laws, and so on. To each structure of any of these types there corresponds a set of transformations which map it onto itself. These are its symmetries. Increasingly ubiquitous in theoretical discussions in physics, the notion of symmetry is also at the root of some time-worn philosophical debates. This dissertation consists of a set of essays on topics drawn from places where the two fields overlap. The first essay is an informal introduction to the mathematical study of symmetry. The second essay defends a famous principle of Pierre Curie which states that the symmetries of a cause are always symmetries of its effect. The third essay takes up the case of reflection in space in the context of a controversy stemming from one of Kant'...
Humean Laws for Humean Agents, edited by Christian Low, Michael Hicks and Sigried Jaag, Oxford University Press, 2023
I give reasons for being disillusioned with Humeanism, the view that laws and chances are reducib... more I give reasons for being disillusioned with Humeanism, the view that laws and chances are reducible to patterns in the mosaic of actual fact.
Oxford Handbook on the Philosophy of Mind, edited by Uriah Kriegel, Oxford University Press, 2023
The visual imagination is one of our most powerful tools in helping us think
through abstract pro... more The visual imagination is one of our most powerful tools in helping us think through abstract problems in physics and it plays an especially prominent role in spacetime physics, but it is also behind some of the most trenchant misunderstandings about what physics tells us about the nature of time. This chapter is about the images of time coming out of physics and the philosophical confusions to which they give rise. It is not a new idea that philosophical problems can have their roots in mental pictures. This is a theme in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. I am interested here both to make the confusion explicit and to explain the powerful grip it has on the imagination.
Time and Science, edited by Remy Lestienne and Paul Harris, World Scientific Publishing, 2023
Determinism is a centrally important notion for physics: it links time to
laws and connects event... more Determinism is a centrally important notion for physics: it links time to laws and connects events along spatial surfaces to events along the temporal dimension. It has also played an important role in philosophical discussions. These mostly take place in a non-relativistic setting. I examine what happens to determinism in a relativistic context and argue against some of the common philosophical assessments of its implications
The most immediately salient asymmetry in our experience of the world is the
asymmetry of causati... more The most immediately salient asymmetry in our experience of the world is the asymmetry of causation. In the last fewdecades, two developments have shed new light on the asymmetry of causation: clarity in the foundations of statistical mechanics, and the development of the interventionist conception of causation. In this paper, we ask what is the status of the causal arrow, assuming a thermodynamic gradient and the interventionist account of causation? We find that there is an objective asymmetry rooted in the thermodynamic gradient that underwrites the causal asymmetry: along a thermodynamic gradient, interventionist causal pathways—scaffolded intervention-supporting probabilistic relationships between variables—will propagate influence into the future, but not into the past. The reason is that the present macrostate of the world, in the presence of a low entropy boundary condition, will screen off probabilistic correlations to the past. The asymmetry, however, emerges only under the macroscopic coarse-graining and that raises the question of whether the arrow is simply an artefact of the macroscopic lenses through which we see the world. The question is sharpened and an answer proposed.
Isaac Newton’s theory of motion was superseded by Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity. By th... more Isaac Newton’s theory of motion was superseded by Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity. By the early 20th century, it was clear that there was something wrong with Newton’s theory. Newton’s theory together with Maxwell’s newly proposed equations of electromagnetism predicted that the speed of light should depend on the motion of the observer, but experiments found that the velocity of light is independent of the motion of the observer. Einstein proposed the special theory of relativity in 1905 which merged space and time into a four-dimensional structure known as spacetime. Ten years later he proposed the general theory which extended the special theory to include gravity. With Einstein’s theories, an ancient philosophical debate between Heraclitus and Parmenides on change as the fundamental character of time was revived.
Time: A Very Short Introduction explores questions about the nature of time that have been at the... more Time: A Very Short Introduction explores questions about the nature of time that have been at the heart of philosophical thinking since its beginnings: questions like whether time has a beginning or end, whether and in what sense time passes, how time is different from space, whether time has a direction, and whether it is possible to travel in time. These questions passed into the hands of scientists with the work of Isaac Newton when the structure of space and time became connected to motion and included the subject matter of physics. This VSI charts the way that the history of physics, from Isaac Newton through Albert Einstein’s two revolutions, wrought changes to the conception of time. There are parts of physics that are in a state of confusion, but this strand of development is a story of philosophical illumination and conceptual beauty. The discussion here provides an opportunity to see what distinguishes the methods of physics from those of philosophy. It brings together phy...
I discuss a rival program in metaphysics advocated and developed by Huw Price, that unites differ... more I discuss a rival program in metaphysics advocated and developed by Huw Price, that unites different strands of pragmatism in the philosophical literature (Ramsey, Brandom, Wittgenstein, e.g.). The Sydney Plan is anti-representationalist, anti-reductionist. It searches for practical accounts of different bits of discourse rather than metaphysical reductions.
ABSTRACT The Hard Problem of the mind is addressed and it is argued that physical-phenomenal prop... more ABSTRACT The Hard Problem of the mind is addressed and it is argued that physical-phenomenal property identities have the same status as the identification of an ostended bit of physical space and the coordinates assigned the spot on a map of the terrain. It is argued, that is to say, that such identities are, or follow from, stipulations which interpret the map.
In Cosmological and Psychological Time, edited by Yuval Abrams, Springer., 2016
Time as experienced is said to have several properties that the physical
image of time lacks.
In ... more Time as experienced is said to have several properties that the physical image of time lacks. In this paper, I outline a strategy for bridging the gap between the time of everyday experience and the time of physics that treats the Block Universe as a non-perspectival view of History and shows how to recover the everyday experience of time as a view of History through the eyes of the embedded, embodied participant in it. I also address questions about whether features of our temporal experience like passage and flow are properly thought of as illusory, the temptation to reify these features in the absolute fabric of the universe, and the question of whether this strategy takes passage seriously.
Huw Price has argued that on an interventionist account of cause the distinction is perspectival,... more Huw Price has argued that on an interventionist account of cause the distinction is perspectival, and the claim prompted some interesting responses from interventionists and in particular an exchange with Woodward that raises questions about what it means to say that one or another structure is perspectival. I’ll introduce his reasons for claiming that the distinction between cause and effect on an interventionist account is perspectival. Then I’ll introduce a distinction between different ways in which a class of concepts can be said to depend on facts about their users Three importantly different forms of dependence will emerge from the discussion: (1) Pragmatic dependence on us: truth conditions for x-beliefs can be given by a function f0 of more fundamental physical structures making no explicit reference to human agents. But there are any other number of functions (f2…fn) ontologically on a par with x and what explains the distinguish role f plays in our practical and epistemic lives are facts about us. (2) Implicit relativization: truth conditions for x-beliefs are relative to agent or context. The context supplies the value of a hidden parameter (’hidden’ in the sense that it is not explicitly represented in the surface syntax) that determines the truth of x-beliefs. (3) Indexicals: like implicit relativization except that the surface syntax contains a term whose semantic value is context-dependent I suggest that Price’s insights are best understood in the first way. This will draw a crucial disanalogy with his central examples of perspectival concepts, but it will refine the thesis in a way that is more faithful to what his arguments show. The refined thesis will also support generalization to other concepts, and clarify the foundations of the quite distinctive research program that Price has been developing for a number of years.
... Interventionism Recent work by Pearl, Woodward and others suggests 1 That interventions are a... more ... Interventionism Recent work by Pearl, Woodward and others suggests 1 That interventions are at the core of an understanding of causality 2 That the “Ptolemaic” view of interventions is problematic. Jenann Ismael & Huw Price Two Bits of Noûs From 1979 Page 27. ...
The intuitive difference between a system that choreographs the motion of its
parts in the servic... more The intuitive difference between a system that choreographs the motion of its parts in the service of goals of its own formulation and a system composed of a collection of parts doing their own thing without coordination has been shaken by now familiar examples of self-organization. There is a broad and growing presumption in parts of philosophy and across the sciences that the appearance of centralized information-processing and control in the service of systemwide goals is mere appearance, i.e., an explanatory heuristic we have evolved to predict behavior, but one that will eventually get swept away in the advancing tide of self-organization. I argue that there is a distinction of central importance here, and that no adequate science of complex systems can dispense with it.
Structures of many different sorts arise in physics, e.g., the concrete structures of material bo... more Structures of many different sorts arise in physics, e.g., the concrete structures of material bodies, the structure exemplified by the spatiotemporal configuration of a set of bodies, the structures of more abstract objects like states, state-spaces, laws, and so on. To each structure of any of these types there corresponds a set of transformations which map it onto itself. These are its symmetries. Increasingly ubiquitous in theoretical discussions in physics, the notion of symmetry is also at the root of some time-worn philosophical debates. This dissertation consists of a set of essays on topics drawn from places where the two fields overlap. The first essay is an informal introduction to the mathematical study of symmetry. The second essay defends a famous principle of Pierre Curie which states that the symmetries of a cause are always symmetries of its effect. The third essay takes up the case of reflection in space in the context of a controversy stemming from one of Kant'...
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through abstract problems in physics and it plays an especially prominent
role in spacetime physics, but it is also behind some of the most trenchant
misunderstandings about what physics tells us about the nature of time.
This chapter is about the images of time coming out of physics and the
philosophical confusions to which they give rise.
It is not a new idea that philosophical problems can have their roots in
mental pictures. This is a theme in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. I am
interested here both to make the confusion explicit and to explain the
powerful grip it has on the imagination.
laws and connects events along spatial surfaces to events along the temporal dimension. It has also played an important role in philosophical discussions. These mostly take place in a non-relativistic setting. I examine what happens to determinism in a relativistic context and argue against some of the common philosophical assessments of its implications
asymmetry of causation. In the last fewdecades, two developments have shed
new light on the asymmetry of causation: clarity in the foundations of statistical
mechanics, and the development of the interventionist conception of
causation. In this paper, we ask what is the status of the causal arrow, assuming
a thermodynamic gradient and the interventionist account of causation?
We find that there is an objective asymmetry rooted in the thermodynamic
gradient that underwrites the causal asymmetry: along a thermodynamic gradient,
interventionist causal pathways—scaffolded intervention-supporting
probabilistic relationships between variables—will propagate influence into
the future, but not into the past. The reason is that the present macrostate of
the world, in the presence of a low entropy boundary condition, will screen
off probabilistic correlations to the past. The asymmetry, however, emerges
only under the macroscopic coarse-graining and that raises the question of
whether the arrow is simply an artefact of the macroscopic lenses through
which we see the world. The question is sharpened and an answer proposed.
image of time lacks.
In this paper, I outline a strategy for bridging the gap between the time of everyday
experience and the time of physics that treats the Block Universe as a non-perspectival
view of History and shows how to recover the everyday experience of
time as a view of History through the eyes of the embedded, embodied participant
in it. I also address questions about whether features of our temporal experience like
passage and flow are properly thought of as illusory, the temptation to reify these
features in the absolute fabric of the universe, and the question of whether this strategy
takes passage seriously.
But there are any other number of functions (f2…fn) ontologically on a par with x and what explains the distinguish role f plays in our practical and epistemic lives are facts about us. (2) Implicit relativization: truth conditions for x-beliefs are relative to agent or context. The context supplies the value of a hidden parameter (’hidden’ in the sense that it is not explicitly represented in the surface syntax) that determines the truth of x-beliefs. (3) Indexicals: like implicit relativization except that the surface syntax contains a term whose semantic value is context-dependent I suggest that Price’s insights are best understood in the first way. This will draw a crucial disanalogy with his central examples of perspectival concepts, but it will refine the thesis in a way that is more faithful to what his arguments show. The refined thesis will also support generalization to other concepts, and clarify the foundations of the quite distinctive research program that Price has been developing for a number of years.
parts in the service of goals of its own formulation and a system composed of a
collection of parts doing their own thing without coordination has been shaken
by now familiar examples of self-organization. There is a broad and growing
presumption in parts of philosophy and across the sciences that the appearance
of centralized information-processing and control in the service of systemwide
goals is mere appearance, i.e., an explanatory heuristic we have evolved to
predict behavior, but one that will eventually get swept away in the advancing tide
of self-organization. I argue that there is a distinction of central importance here,
and that no adequate science of complex systems can dispense with it.
through abstract problems in physics and it plays an especially prominent
role in spacetime physics, but it is also behind some of the most trenchant
misunderstandings about what physics tells us about the nature of time.
This chapter is about the images of time coming out of physics and the
philosophical confusions to which they give rise.
It is not a new idea that philosophical problems can have their roots in
mental pictures. This is a theme in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. I am
interested here both to make the confusion explicit and to explain the
powerful grip it has on the imagination.
laws and connects events along spatial surfaces to events along the temporal dimension. It has also played an important role in philosophical discussions. These mostly take place in a non-relativistic setting. I examine what happens to determinism in a relativistic context and argue against some of the common philosophical assessments of its implications
asymmetry of causation. In the last fewdecades, two developments have shed
new light on the asymmetry of causation: clarity in the foundations of statistical
mechanics, and the development of the interventionist conception of
causation. In this paper, we ask what is the status of the causal arrow, assuming
a thermodynamic gradient and the interventionist account of causation?
We find that there is an objective asymmetry rooted in the thermodynamic
gradient that underwrites the causal asymmetry: along a thermodynamic gradient,
interventionist causal pathways—scaffolded intervention-supporting
probabilistic relationships between variables—will propagate influence into
the future, but not into the past. The reason is that the present macrostate of
the world, in the presence of a low entropy boundary condition, will screen
off probabilistic correlations to the past. The asymmetry, however, emerges
only under the macroscopic coarse-graining and that raises the question of
whether the arrow is simply an artefact of the macroscopic lenses through
which we see the world. The question is sharpened and an answer proposed.
image of time lacks.
In this paper, I outline a strategy for bridging the gap between the time of everyday
experience and the time of physics that treats the Block Universe as a non-perspectival
view of History and shows how to recover the everyday experience of
time as a view of History through the eyes of the embedded, embodied participant
in it. I also address questions about whether features of our temporal experience like
passage and flow are properly thought of as illusory, the temptation to reify these
features in the absolute fabric of the universe, and the question of whether this strategy
takes passage seriously.
But there are any other number of functions (f2…fn) ontologically on a par with x and what explains the distinguish role f plays in our practical and epistemic lives are facts about us. (2) Implicit relativization: truth conditions for x-beliefs are relative to agent or context. The context supplies the value of a hidden parameter (’hidden’ in the sense that it is not explicitly represented in the surface syntax) that determines the truth of x-beliefs. (3) Indexicals: like implicit relativization except that the surface syntax contains a term whose semantic value is context-dependent I suggest that Price’s insights are best understood in the first way. This will draw a crucial disanalogy with his central examples of perspectival concepts, but it will refine the thesis in a way that is more faithful to what his arguments show. The refined thesis will also support generalization to other concepts, and clarify the foundations of the quite distinctive research program that Price has been developing for a number of years.
parts in the service of goals of its own formulation and a system composed of a
collection of parts doing their own thing without coordination has been shaken
by now familiar examples of self-organization. There is a broad and growing
presumption in parts of philosophy and across the sciences that the appearance
of centralized information-processing and control in the service of systemwide
goals is mere appearance, i.e., an explanatory heuristic we have evolved to
predict behavior, but one that will eventually get swept away in the advancing tide
of self-organization. I argue that there is a distinction of central importance here,
and that no adequate science of complex systems can dispense with it.