The Origin of Counterfactual Thinking

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The origin of counterfactual thinking is somewhat, as I think it was, subjunctive thinking about how we're going to act. And then that's get extended to what would have happened, were this to have occurred or that to have occurred. It turns out that this way of talking has been enormously useful as a way of talking about what actually happens.

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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