The Human Anti-Human Distinction

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In the correlation case, we don't have a strong reason to think that if you were to clap your hands an additional number of times, it would have made the noise. So I wondered if this was part of your counterfactual, your love of counterfactuals. In the macroscopic world where we have incomplete information, and we have an arrow of time, then we're saying well, given the way that the universe evolves macroscopically, every time you clapyour hands, you hear a noise. That's a perfectly fair thing to attach the words cause and effect to. It's an emergent higher level thing that when you clap my hands,

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 Or is it a relic of an outdated, pre-empirical way of thinking about the world?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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