Is There Anything but Physics?

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I think there are physics-based explanations for this, but I don't have the complete one to present to the world. This is a feature of the world that we know and that the meticulous should have something to say about. So what the special sciences are doing is they're finding features of the world such that when we conditionalize on them, we get regularities among other features of theworld that interest us. But in some sense, they sit upon on top of the meticulous.

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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