Exploring Counterfactuals and Constructor Theory in Physics

This is the first episode in a new series devoted to an entirely new book: “The Science of Can and Can’t” by Chiara Marletto. Get the book anywhere ebooks are available (as of May, 2021) and learn more about Chiara and her work here: https://www.chiaramarletto.com​

This book is an amazing work. It presents for the lay reader an introduction to “Constructor Theory” without losing any scientific or philosophical rigour. In this first episode, I explain the motivation for Constructor Theory as a departure from the traditional conception of physics as being about “dynamical laws”. For the first time in science, Constructor Theory attempts to provide a way of creating physical theories about counterfactuals. We go some way to exploring what a counterfactual is and at this early stage of the series outline a sketch of where the constructor theory approach may be found useful. This episode constitutes the first part of chapter 1. It covers some of the philosophy of counterfactuals and the application of constructor theory to epistemology. Discussion of the physics will be left to episode 2.