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Sean Carroll: Need to hire? You need indeed.com slash Mindscape. Indeed is the hiring platform where you can attract, interview, and hire all in one place. Barry Lower talks about how philosophy and physics are almost indistinguishable from each other. How do you go from physics to the MENTACULOUS, the probability map of everything that can happen in the world? Can we talk about human beings in those special-sized things they are called?

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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