I Wanna Get Rid of God, Right?

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David Lewis said that physicists are interested in describing all the facts that will hold throughout all its base in time. What you want is an axiom system which will best balance informativeness, giving us as much information as one can about all those facts in a simple way as possible. And something you mentioned earlier fits into this very well, because dividing the facts up into initial conditions and general dynamics turns out to be a way of doing that for a world like ours. Didn't have to be, this is a contingent feature in nature of our world, but it seems to be so for our world.

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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