The Free Will Question

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Sociologists or economists should go be physicists, some sociologists. I don't think there's anything bad, taking anything bad away from them doing it. We are such that our neurons are such that they make a difference to what goes on in one temporal direction but not the other. The reason is because the rest of the macroscopic past contains records of what happened and who ate for lunch yesterday.

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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