Philosophy Meets Physics

Philosophical Questions Raised by Physics

The firing of Tucker Carlson has been a big story, but the most important point about it is that he has done much to stoke the fires of Trumpism and populist outrage.
Text messages from Carlson, which were entered into evidence for the Dominion lawsuit against Fox, reveal that he hates Trump passionately and believes he is a demonic force and destroyer.
Carlson's fraudulence should matter, and it should be impossible for him to have an audience after this revelation.
Tim Maudlin is a philosophy professor at NYU and the founder and director of the John Bell Institute for the foundations of physics.
Maudlin's interests focus on the foundations of physics, metaphysics, and logic.
Reductionism and emergence are two key concepts in the philosophy of physics.
The supervenience claim is true for what we call the ontology, which means that everything can be accounted for by studying how atoms and electrons interact.
However, different categories of understanding, such as computational, economic, and biological, provide better insight and explanations than just a physical structure.
Functionalism in the philosophy of mind acknowledges that any physical instantiation of a certain function can reduce to physics, but it has a logical structure that can be implemented in multiple instantiations.
The same logic can be implemented very differently in different physical substrates, but the causal properties of each sequence of events are a matter of what the physics is doing.
The physical specification of a broker's brain should allow you to predict where his finger is going to go, but for all that, it gives no insight of the kind we want.
Philosophical questions raised by physics include the nature of scientific reductionism, emergence, the nature of time, causation, the nature of possibility, natural law, rival interpretations of quantum mechanics, and free will.The Nature of Time and Emergence
The concept of emergence provides different levels of insight into a situation beyond the physical level.
Emergence allows for the creation of complex instruments like pianos.
The hard problem of consciousness is an example of an emergence phenomenon that cannot be predicted by physics.
Mathematics and arithmetic are considered independent of the physical realm and exist on their own.
Physics has not fundamentally challenged the notion that time is directed and has a certain structure.
Newton's concept of time involves the notion of a global simultaneity and a succession of global instances.
The theory of relativity denies global simultaneity and instead posits a light cone structure with objective past and future light cones.
The past and future light cones are objective and have nothing to do with reference frames.
Space-like separation events have no definite temporal order with respect to a given event.
The perception of time is a complicated neurological construct that is different from physical time itself.
Emergence and substrate independence are key concepts in understanding the nature of time and the universe.
The concept of a present moment is limited and not coherent outside of a specific reference frame.The Direction of Time and the Block Universe
The fundamental direction of time is a belief that time goes forward and that there is a real direction to time.
The block universe is a theory that suggests that the past, present, and future are all equally real.
The first clause of the block universe theory is the belief that the past, present, and future are all equally real, and the second clause is that there is no fundamental direction of time.
The speaker endorses the first clause but rejects the second clause of the block universe theory.
Presentism is a belief that only the present moment exists, and the past and future do not.
Eternalism, also known as the block universe, suggests that the past, present, and future are all equally real.
The block universe theory fully spatializes time and gives it no real preferential direction.
The speaker believes that there is a fundamental direction of time, and there is nothing in physics that suggests otherwise.
The equations of physics do show a directionality of time, and there is a time symmetry in quantum field theory.
Entropy is often used to explain the time asymmetries we see in everyday life, but it does not suggest that time does not exist.
Causation is often used to define time order, not the other way around.
The possibility of something is the assertion that reality includes things that do not exist, and it seems to exert an influence on what is actual in a way that is inscrutable.Philosophical Conscience and the Actual vs Possible Debate
The text discusses the philosophical debate around the actual and the possible.
The author questions whether the actual and the possible are identical sets.
The idea of unrealized possibles is discussed, including the example of angels.
Nelson Goodman's book "Fact, Fiction, and Forecast" is mentioned as a source of discussion on these questions.
Goodman's idea of a philosophical conscience is introduced, which is a set of beliefs one is comfortable with.
Different people have different philosophical consciences.
Goodman's list of things he can't accept without further explanation is mentioned, including unrealized possibles and neutrinos.
The author mentions that people might have different opinions on what is acceptable in their philosophical conscience.
The concept of unactualized possibles is brought up as something that is agreed upon.
The author suggests that in reality, there is only what has actually happened, and everything else is just an idea.
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