Expos Facto - Is There Any Other Junk?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

There's no other junk in the world. Other than the ordinary facts, right? There's the facts and that is what makes up the world. And so... The whole fact about the facts,right? Nothing but the facts. Right, fair enough. But there's two questions that even though I'm on this side, I really do struggle with. One is if what we think of as the laws are sort of exposed fact though, there's the world and all the facts and then we sort of abstract the laws from them, why are there laws? Why is the world so regular and predictable? That's a great, great question. If I thought it was gonna come up,

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.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.