Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

215 | Barry Loewer on Physics, Counterfactuals, and the Macroworld

Oct 24, 2022

01:34:29

Highlights

AI Chapters

Episode notes

Is There Anything Special About the Actual World?

02:04

What Is a Macroscopic State?

03:17

What Is Causation in the Language of Possible Worlds?

01:45

Introduction

5min

Are You Fighting an Uphill Battle as a Plumcky Minority?

2min

The Origin of Counterfactual Thinking

2min

The Relationship Between Causation and Counterfactual Reasoning

3min

Is There a Difference Between Cause and Effect?

4min

Is There Anything Special About the Actual World?

2min

What Is Causation in the Language of Possible Worlds?

2min

The Problem of Counterfactuals

3min

The Mistakes Along the Way

2min

10.

What Is a Law of Physics?

3min

11.

What Is the Law of Nature?

2min

12.

I Wanna Get Rid of God, Right?

3min

13.

Humian Versus Anti-Humian?

2min

14.

Expos Facto - Is There Any Other Junk?

2min

15.

Is There Something Instead of Nothing?

2min

16.

How Do We Think About Counterfactuals?

3min

17.

The UMean's Opposition to Explanation

4min

18.

What Statistics Can Do to Help Us Understand Why Causes Precede Effects?

6min

19.

Are We Thinking in the Back of Our Minds?

2min

20.

What Is Probability?

5min

21.

The History of Probability and Laws

2min

22.

Is There a Credence in Probability?

3min

23.

The Intagels, the Manteculus, and the Past Hypothesis

2min

24.

The Probability Distribution of Everything That Ever Happens

3min

25.

Is There a Difference Between Past and Future?

2min

26.

Is the Past Hypothesis a Law?

2min

27.

Is the Past Hypothesis True?

3min

28.

What Is a Macroscopic State?

3min

29.

Is There Anything but Physics?

4min

30.

The Free Will Question

4min

31.

Is There a Free Will in the Laws of Physics?

3min

32.

The Concept of Laws Is Mind Dependent

2min

33.

The Many World's Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

2min

34.

Is the Vector in Hilbert Space a Vector?

2min

35.

The Probability Structure of the World

2min

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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