Is the Past Hypothesis True?

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"I think that this idea works to answer all of the questions that bothered me when I first think about counterfactuals as an undergraduate," he says. "It's simultaneously the best account out there and nobody believes it." The Manteculus probability distribution will entail things, in accordance with the Manteculus, about what will be going on at later times, including whether there's still oxygen around. And so it'll entail how likely it is that the match will light or not. That's where the truth conditions ofcounterfactuals are going to come from".

The founders of statistical mechanics in the 19th century faced an uphill battle to convince their fellow physicists that the laws of thermodynamics could be derived from the random motions of microscopic atoms. This insight turns out to be even more important than they realized: the emergence of patterns characterizing our macroscopic world relies crucially on the increase of entropy over time. Barry Loewer has (in collaboration with David Albert) been developing a theory of the Mentaculus — the probability map of the world — that connects microscopic physics to time, causation, and other familiar features of our experience.

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Barry Loewer received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University. He is currently distinguished professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. His research focuses on the foundations of physics and the metaphysics of laws and chance.

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