New and Forthcoming Papers
- Causation: an Overview of our Emerging Understanding
in Time and Causation in the Sciences, edited by Samantha Kleinberg, Cambridge University Press - Determinism, Counterpredictive Devices and the Impossibility of Laplacean Intelligences
The Monist, 2019, 102, 478-498 - Do You See Space? How to Recover the Visible and Tangible Reality of Space (without space)
Forthcoming in Philosophy Beyond Space-time 2, edited by Christian Wuthrich and Nick Huggett, Oxford University Press - Essay on Free Will
Times Literary Supplement - Experience, Transformation and Imagination: commentary on L.A. Paul's Transformative Experience
in Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia, Vol. 10 (2019), n. 3, 316-324 - Humean Disillusion
in Humean Laws for Humean Agents, edited by Christian Low, Michael Hicks and Sigried Jaag, Oxford University Press, 2023 - Interview about How Physics Makes Us Free, with Andres Lomena Cantos
- On Chance (or, Why I am only a half-Humean)
Forthcoming in Time and Causation in the Sciences, edited by Samantha Kleinberg, Cambridge University Press - Reflections on the Asymmetry of Causation
Entropy, forthcoming - Rethinking Time and Determinism: what happens to determinism when you take relativity seriously
Time and Science, edited by Remy Lestienne and Paul Harris, World Scientific Publishing - Review of Carlo Rovelli's Helgoland
Times Literary Supplement - Symmetry and Superfluous Structure: lessons from history and tempered enthusiasm
Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Physics, edited by Alastair Wilson, Routledge, forthcoming. - Time and the Visual Imagination
Oxford Handbook for the Philosophy of Mind, ed. Uriah Kriegel - What Entanglement Might Be Telling Us: Space-Time, Quantum Mechanics, and Bohm's Fishtanks
in The Foundation of Reality: Fundamentality, Space and Time, Eds. David Glick and Anna Marmodoro, Oxford University Press - Why Physics Should Care about the Mind, and How to Think About it Without Worrying About the Mind-Body Problem
in Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness, edited by Shan Gao, Oxford University Press, forthcoming
Causation: an Overview of our Emerging Understandingin Time and Causation in the Sciences, edited by Samantha Kleinberg, Cambridge University Press
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Determinism, Counterpredictive Devices and the Impossibility of Laplacean IntelligencesThe Monist, 2019, 102, 478-498
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Do You See Space? How to Recover the Visible and Tangible Reality of Space (without space)Forthcoming in Philosophy Beyond Space-time 2, edited by Christian Wuthrich and Nick Huggett, Oxford University Press
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Essay on Free WillTimes Literary Supplement
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Experience, Transformation and Imagination: commentary on L.A. Paul's Transformative Experiencein Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia, Vol. 10 (2019), n. 3, 316-324
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Humean Disillusionin Humean Laws for Humean Agents, edited by Christian Low, Michael Hicks and Sigried Jaag, Oxford University Press, 2023
The great divide in the metaphysics of scientific modality is that between Humean and anti-Humean accounts. Pragmatists tend to like the anti-metaphysical character of Humeanism, but there is a tension at the heart of Humeanism. The tension is that between the Humean account of what laws and chances are and what they do. According to the Humean account, laws and chances are distributed patterns in the Humean mosaic, knowable fully only from a God’s-eye view, i.e. from the perspective of one who sees the full mosaic. But what laws and chances are supposed to do is guide action and belief for situated observers who only have very incomplete knowledge of those patterns, and for whom that knowledge is always limited to the past. Someone who knows what the laws and chances are, on a Humean account, wouldn’t need them to do what the laws and chances do. And someone that needs them to do what the laws and chance do wouldn’t know what the laws and chances are. This chapter argues that the tension can be resolved, but not without giving up the reductive ambitions of Humeanism and the metaphysical commitment to recombination at the level of local matters of particular fact.
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Interview about How Physics Makes Us Free, with Andres Lomena Cantos
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On Chance (or, Why I am only a half-Humean)Forthcoming in Time and Causation in the Sciences, edited by Samantha Kleinberg, Cambridge University Press
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Reflections on the Asymmetry of Causation Entropy, forthcoming
Themost immediately salient asymmetry in our experience of theworld is the Q2 Q3 asymmetry of causation. In the last fewdecades, two developments have shed new light on the asymmetry of causation: clarity in the foundations of statistical mechanics, and the development of the interventionist conception of causation. In this paper, we ask what is the status of the causal arrow, assuming a thermodynamic gradient and the interventionist account of causation? We find that there is an objective asymmetry rooted in the thermodynamic gradient that underwrites the causal asymmetry. Along a thermodynamic gradient, interventionist causal pathways—scaffolded intervention-supporting probabilistic relationships between variables—will propagate influence into the future, but not into the past. The reason is that the present macrostate of the world, in the presence of a lowentropy boundary condition, will screen off probabilistic correlations to the past. The asymmetry, however, emerges only under the macroscopic coarse-graining and that raises the question of whether the arrow is simply an artefact of the macroscopic lenses through which we see the world. The question is sharpened and an answer proposed.
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Rethinking Time and Determinism: what happens to determinism when you take relativity seriously Time and Science, edited by Remy Lestienne and Paul Harris, World Scientific Publishing
Determinism is a centrally important notion for physics: it links time to laws and connects events along spatial surfaces to events along the temporal dimension. In philosophy determinism has played a central role as a challenge to free will. Relativity introduces changes in our conceptions of time and law. In this paper I examine what happens to determinism when we take those changes seriously. I argue that the effect of these changes is to undermine the common understanding of the significance of determinism. It is not true in a relativistic theory, for example, that the causal past of any point determines events at a finite distance in the causal future and the theory eliminates at the level of geometry the standpoint from which one can leverage the fixity of the past into the fixity of the future.
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Review of Carlo Rovelli's HelgolandTimes Literary Supplement
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Symmetry and Superfluous Structure: lessons from history and tempered enthusiasm Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Physics, edited by Alastair Wilson, Routledge, forthcoming.
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Time and the Visual ImaginationOxford Handbook for the Philosophy of Mind, ed. Uriah Kriegel
The visual imagination plays an especially prominent role in spacetime physics. Spacetime diagrams and other visualizations play a role conveying the content of the theory and guide the imagination in computation. I believe it is also behind some of the most trenchant misunderstandings about what physics tells us about the nature of time. In this paper I discuss the images of time coming out of physics and the philosophical confusions to which they give rise.
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What Entanglement Might Be Telling Us: Space-Time, Quantum Mechanics, and Bohm's Fishtanks in The Foundation of Reality: Fundamentality, Space and Time, Eds. David Glick and Anna Marmodoro, Oxford University Press
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