What’s so Special About Initial Conditions? Understanding the Past Hypothesis in Directionless Time

Farr, Matt

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-96775-8_8

Cited by 3 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Parker (2005) argues that conditionalising on the initial state of the universe does not have the explanatory power to explain irreversible behaviour. Baras and Shenker (2020) and Farr (2022) analyse the notion of explanation that is involved in this debate and argue that different questions are in play that require different answers.…”

Section: Conditional Probabilities and The Mentaculusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Foundations of Statistical Mechanics

Frigg,

Werndl

2023

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Statistical mechanics is the third pillar of modern physics, next to quantum theory and relativity theory. It aims to account for the behaviour of macroscopic systems in terms of the dynamical laws that govern their microscopic constituents and probabilistic assumptions about them. In this Element, the authors investigate the philosophical and foundational issues that arise in SM. The authors introduce the two main theoretical approaches in SM, Boltzmannian SM and Gibbsian SM, and discuss how they conceptualise equilibrium and explain the approach to it. In doing so, the authors examine how probabilities are introduced into the theories, how they deal with irreversibility, how they understand the relation between the micro and the macro level, and how the two approaches relate to each other. Throughout, the authors also pinpoint open problems that can be subject of future research. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

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Section: Conditional Probabilities and The Mentaculusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Foundations of Statistical Mechanics

Frigg,

Werndl

2023

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“…Swahili has a so-called 'consecutive tense' marker, ka, to signal that an eventuality happened or will happen after another eventuality-that is, the marker caters both for the past and the future (see, e.g., Givón 2005, p. 154 [52]). The concept does not conform to the strict definition of grammatical (qua absolute) tense 13 , but it is there, a grammaticalised temporal concept, a relative tense, and as such, serves us well as an example in the search for what languages foreground as their lexicon and grammar. What is foregrounded is the sequence, often conveying causation, which, we have to remember from our initial setup, is another emergent, not to be found in the underlying matter of the universe.…”

Section: The Status Of the Diversitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To this, we have to add the levels at which modality is expressed: sub-sentential, sentential, or discourse, as well as the modal senses of generics and habituals, PRO constructions (or what Portner (2009) [64] calls covert modality) as in (13), the modal sense of tense and aspect with respect to the certainty of the situation (cf. here future will, or progressive aspect signalling incompleteness), verbal mood, such as subjunctive, and the modal sense of propositional attitude constructions as in (14).…”

Section: Relations To Eventualitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Flowing Time: Emergentism and Linguistic Diversity

Jaszczolt

2023

Philosophies

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Humans are complex systems, ‘macro-entities’, whose existence, behaviour and consciousness stem out of the configurations of physical entities on the micro-level of the physical world. But an explanation of what humans do and think cannot be found through ‘tracking us back’, so to speak, to micro-particles. So, in explaining human behaviour, including linguistic behaviour on which this paper focuses, emergentism opens up a powerful opportunity to explain what it is exactly that emerged on that level, bearing in mind the end product in the form of the intra- and inter-cultural diversity. Currently there is a gap in emergentism research. On one hand, there are discussions in philosophy of the emergent human reality; on the other, there are discussions of social, cultural, or individual variation of these emergent aspects of humanity in the fields of anthropology, sociology, linguistics or psychology. What I do in this paper is look for a way to ‘trace’ some such diversified emergents from what is universal about their ‘coming to being’, all the way through to their diversification. My chosen emergent is human time, my domain of inquiry is natural-language discourse, and the drive behind this project is to understand the link between ‘real’ time of spacetime on the micro-level from which we emerged and the human time devised by us, paying close attention to the overwhelming diversity in which temporal reference is expressed in human languages. The main question is, where does this diversity fit in? Does understanding of this diversity, as well as of what lurks under the surface of this diversity, aid the emergentism story? My contribution to this volume on ‘the nature of structure and the structure of nature’ thus takes the following take on the title. The structure of human communication is at the same time uniform, universal, and relative to culture, in that it is emergent as a human characteristic, and as such compatible with the micro-level correlates in some essential ways, but also free to fly in different directions that are specific to societies and cultures. I explore here the grey area between the micro-level and the linguistic reflections of time—the middle ground that is emergent itself but that tends to be by-passed by those who approach the question of human flowing time from either end: metaphysics and the philosophy of time on the one hand, and contrastive linguistics, anthropological linguistics and language documentation on the other. I illustrate the debate with examples from tensed and tenseless languages from different language families, entertaining the possibility of a conceptual universal pertaining to time as degrees of epistemic modality. Needless to say, putting the question in this way also sets out my (not unassailable) methodology.

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“…A common answer to Q5 is the "past hypothesis", in which the thermodynamic asymmetry is explained via an assumption about the initial state of the universe (typically the assumption that the entropy of the early universe was very low) (Albert, 2000). (See Frisch (2005a), Wallace (2011), Brown (2017), and Farr (2021 for a further discussion of the past hypothesis. )…”

Section: Coarse-grainingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding probability and irreversibility in the Mori-Zwanzig projection operator formalism

Vrugt

2022

Euro Jnl Phil Sci

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Explaining the emergence of stochastic irreversible macroscopic dynamics from time-reversible deterministic microscopic dynamics is one of the key problems in philosophy of physics. The Mori-Zwanzig (MZ) projection operator formalism, which is one of the most important methods of modern nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, allows for a systematic derivation of irreversible transport equations from reversible microdynamics and thus provides a useful framework for understanding this issue. However, discussions of the MZ formalism in philosophy of physics tend to focus on simple variants rather than on the more sophisticated ones used in modern physical research. In this work, I will close this gap by studying the problems of probability and irreversibility using the example of Grabert’s time-dependent projection operator formalism. This allows to better understand how general proposals for understanding probability in statistical mechanics, namely (a) quantum approaches and (b) almost-objective probabilities, can be accomodated in the MZ formalism. Moreover, I will provide a detailed physical analysis, based on the MZ formalism, of various proposals from the philosophical literature, such as (a) Robertson’s theory of justifying coarse-graining via autonomous macrodynamics, (b) Myrvold’s problem of explaining autonomous macrodynamics, and (c) Wallace’s simple dynamical conjecture.

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What’s so Special About Initial Conditions? Understanding the Past Hypothesis in Directionless Time

Abstract: Understanding the past hypothesis in directionless time[To appear in Y. Ben-Menahem (ed), Rethinking Laws of Nature, Springer.] *

Cited by 3 publications

References 21 publications

Foundations of Statistical Mechanics

Foundations of Statistical Mechanics

Flowing Time: Emergentism and Linguistic Diversity

Understanding probability and irreversibility in the Mori-Zwanzig projection operator formalism

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