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Author: Alastair Wilson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019967342X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
This volume presents twelve original essays on the metaphysics of science, with particular focus on the physics of chance and time. Experts in the field subject familiar approaches to searching critiques, and make bold new proposals in a number of key areas. Together, they set the agenda for future work on the subject.
Author: Alastair Wilson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019967342X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 307
Get Book
Book Description
This volume presents twelve original essays on the metaphysics of science, with particular focus on the physics of chance and time. Experts in the field subject familiar approaches to searching critiques, and make bold new proposals in a number of key areas. Together, they set the agenda for future work on the subject.
Author: Alastair Wilson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191654485
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Chance and Temporal Asymmetry presents a collection of cutting-edge research papers in the metaphysics of science, tackling the perplexing philosophical problems raised by recent progress in the physics and metaphysics of chance and time. How do the probabilities found in fundamental physics and the probabilities of the special sciences relate to one another? Can a constraint on the initial conditions of the universe underwrite the second law of thermodynamics? How does contemporary quantum theory reframe debates over the nature of chance? What grounds do we have for believing in a fundamental direction to time? And how do all these questions connect up? The aim of the volume is both to survey and summarize recent debates about chance and temporal asymmetry and to push them forward. Familiar approaches are subjected to searching new critiques, and bold new proposals are made concerning (inter alia) the semantics of chance-attributions, the justification of the Principal Principle connecting chance and degree of belief, and the source of the temporal asymmetry of human experience. The contributors include world-leading figures in the field, all presenting new work rather than rehashing old ideas, as well as a number of promising junior scholars. A wide-ranging introduction connects the different chapters together, and provides essential background to the debates they take up. Technicality is kept to a minimum and philosophical and conceptual foundations take centre stage. Chance and Temporal Asymmetry sets the agenda for future work on time and chance, which are central to the emerging sub-field of metaphysics of science. It will be indispensable to graduate students and to specialists in metaphysics and philosophy of science.
Author: David Z Albert
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674020138
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students.
Author: Harald Atmanspacher
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 184540629X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 517
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Book Description
Are choice and free will possible in a world governed by deterministic fundamental equations? What sense would determinism make if many events and processes in the world seemed to be governed by chance? These and many other questions emphasize the fact that chance and choice are two leading actors on stage whenever issues of determinism are under discussion. This volume collects essays by accomplished scientists and philosophers, addressing numerous facets of the concept of determinism. The contributions cover viewpoints from mathematics, physics, cognitive science and social science as well as various branches of philosophy. They offer valuable reading for everyone interested in the interdisciplinary relations between determinism, chance and free will. The desire to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue on determinism, chance and free will was the initial impetus leading to an international workshop on determinism taking place at Ringberg Castle near Lake Tegernsee, south of Munich, in June 2001. Representatives from mathematics, physics, cognitive and social science, and various branches of philosophy convened to discuss numerous aspects of determinism from their disciplinary perspectives. This volume is based on elaborated and refereed manuscripts of their lectures.
Author: Toby Handfield
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110701378X
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
An introduction to the philosophy of chance which challenges realist accounts of chance.
Author: Wayne C. Myrvold
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198865090
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
Beyond Chance and Credence introduces a new way of thinking of probabilities in science that combines physical and epistemic considerations. Myrvold shows that conceiving of probabilities in this way solves puzzles associated with the use of probability and statistical mechanics.
Author: Paul Horwich
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262580888
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
Time is generally thought to be one of the more mysterious ingredients of the universe. In this intriguing book, Paul Horwich makes precise and explicit the interrelationships between time and a large number of philosophically important notions. Ideas of temporal order and priority interact in subtle and convoluted ways with the deepest elements in our network of basic concepts. Confronting this conceptual jigsaw puzzle, Horwich notes that there are glaring differences in how we regard the past and future directions of time. For example, we can influence the future but not the past, and can easily gain knowledge of the past but not of the future. Moreover we see a profusion of decay processes but little spontaneous generation of order; time appears to "flow" in one privileged direction, not the other; and we tend to explain phenomena in terms of antecedent circumstances, rather than subsequent ones. Horwich explains such time asymmetries and examines their bearing on the nature of time itself. Asymmetries in Time covers many notoriously difficult problems in the philosophy of science: causation, knowledge, entropy, explanation, time travel, rational choice (including Newcomb's problem), laws of nature, and counterfactual implication—and gives a unified treatment of these matters. The book covers an unusually broad range of topics in a lucid and nontechnical way and includes alternative points of view in the philosophical literature.
Author: Alastair Wilson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198846215
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
This book defends a radical new theory of contingency as a physical phenomenon. Drawing on the many-worlds approach to quantum theory and cutting-edge metaphysics and philosophy of science, it argues that quantum theories are best understood as telling us about the space of genuine possibilities, rather than as telling us solely about actuality. When quantum physics is taken seriously in the way first proposed by Hugh Everett III, it provides the resources for a new systematic metaphysical framework encompassing possibility, necessity, actuality, chance, counterfactuals, and a host of related modal notions. Rationalist metaphysicians argue that the metaphysics of modality is strictly prior to any scientific investigation; metaphysics establishes which worlds are possible, and physics merely checks which of these worlds is actual. Naturalistic metaphysicians respond that science may discover new possibilities and new impossibilities. This book's quantum theory of contingency takes naturalistic metaphysics one step further, allowing that science may discover what it is to be possible. As electromagnetism revealed the nature of light, as acoustics revealed the nature of sound, as statistical mechanics revealed the nature of heat, so quantum physics reveals the nature of contingency.
Author: Richard Johns
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802036032
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Richard Johns argues that random events are fully caused and lack only determination by their causes; according to his causal theory of chance, the physical chance of an event is the degree to which the event is determined by its causes.
Author: Gerhard Ernst
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139485431
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
Statistical mechanics attempts to explain the behaviour of macroscopic physical systems in terms of the mechanical properties of their constituents. Although it is one of the fundamental theories of physics, it has received little attention from philosophers of science. Nevertheless, it raises philosophical questions of fundamental importance on the nature of time, chance and reduction. Most philosophical issues in this domain relate to the question of the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics. This book addresses issues inherent in this reduction: the time-asymmetry of thermodynamics and its absence in statistical mechanics; the role and essential nature of chance and probability in this reduction when thermodynamics is non-probabilistic; and how, if at all, the reduction is possible. Compiling contributions on current research by experts in the field, this is an invaluable survey of the philosophy of statistical mechanics for academic researchers and graduate students interested in the foundations of physics.
