The New Theory of Cause and Effect Is Not Dispensable

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

It's amazing to be the extent to which this very simple kind of everyday thing that Aristotle put at the center of everything twenty five hundred years ago is something we still understand. Partly it's because you know we know a lot more physics now and there's sort of work to be done mapping the physics onto the folk wisdom or the manifest image but there were people like Bertrand Russell who said the best thing to do is just get rid of the notion of cause and effect. And so then that began along philosophical project of trying to recover from these time symmetric underlying laws together with auxiliary facts about the world how it is that we can re-import causal notions into physics.

Physics is simple; people are complicated. But even people are ultimately physical systems, made of particles and forces that follow the rules of the Core Theory. How do we bridge the gap from one kind of description to another, explaining how someone we know and care about can also be “just” a set of quantum fields obeying impersonal laws? This is a hard question that comes up in a variety of forms — What is the “self”? Do we have free will, the ability to make choices? What are the moral and ethical ramifications of these considerations? Jenann Ismael is a philosopher at the leading edge of connecting human life to the fundamental laws of nature, for example in her recent book How Physics Makes Us Free. We talk about free will, consciousness, values, and other topics about which I’m sure everyone will simply agree.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Jenann Ismael received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University. She is currently Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Her work includes both the foundations of physics (spacetime, quantum mechanics, symmetry) and the philosophy of mind and cognition. She has been awarded fellowships from Stanford University, the Australian Research Council, the Scots Philosophical Association, and the Center for Advanced Study in Social and Behavioral Sciences, as well as an Essay Prize from the British Society for the Philosophy of Science.