The Deterministic System of Time Machines

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I am a eternalist who is going to be open to the closest we can come to genuinely probabilistic indeterministic events, which is just that something is going to happen. It's purely epistemological. And so what you're saying is that because I have a time machine now, I do know what's going to happen - and does that imply something? So it seems like that implies something that might have been surprising, but maybe you'll be surprised by this. Whether or not the sort of experimental setup was indeterministic turns out to now be a global feature of the entire system.

Is metaphysics like physics, but cooler? Or is it a relic of an outdated, pre-empirical way of thinking about the world? Closer to the former than the latter. Rather than building specific quantitative theories about the world, metaphysics aims to get a handle on the basic logical structures that help us think about it. I talk with philosopher Katie Elliott on how metaphysics helps us think about questions like counterfactuals, possible worlds, time travel, mathematical equivalence, and whether everything happens for a reason.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/24/244-katie-elliott-on-metaphysics-chance-and-time/

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Katrina (Katie) Elliott received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. After being an assistant professor of philosophy at UCLA, she is now on the faculty at Brandeis. Her research covers topics in metaphysics and the philosophy of science, including explanation, chances, and the logic of time travel.

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