Tired of the overwhelming focus on mind/body problems in philosophy? There also is a debate between scientists and philosophers about who is more important and if philosophy really has any use in today's science research. Thankfully, a recent interview in The Atlantic with Tim Maudlin , philosophical cosmologist, brings the two fields back to the basics of philosophy 101.
Maudlin has primarily focused his career on the philosophy of physics, metaphysics and logic. [Listeners can further examine these debates in PEL episodes 7, 34, 66, 67, 68.] Along with other well known philosophers, he has helped develop the Philosophy of Cosmology - a science-philosophy hybrid discipline focused on answering such questions as “What happened before the beginning?” and “What are the cosmological laws that might supersede the Big Bang?”
Philosophy of Cosmology is the newest branch in the Philosophy of Physics built via alliances between top American universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Check out the official website here. Philosophy of Cosmology blends quantum physics and philosophy to explore the origins of the universe. This may sound like a stretch from familiar philosophical territory but Maudlin’s interview brings the subject of the universe back to the days of Socrates. He maps out an understanding of the beginnings of science as etched from the Philosopher’s Stone although that has long since been forgotten in favor of mathematical formulation via quantum physics. Discussing the rift between physics and philosophy, he says:
I think most physicists would quite rightly say "I don't have the tools to answer a question like 'what is time?' - I have the tools to solve a differential equation...the asking of fundamental physical questions is just not part of the training of a physicist anymore. There can be a philosophy of anything really, but it's perhaps not as fancy as you're making it out. The basic philosophical question, going back to Plato, is What is x? What is virtue? What is justice? What is matter? What is time?
Maudlin's point and that of the Philosophy of Cosmology initiative is that there is use for philosophy in science (or at least physics). The basic philosophical questions that underlie the mathematical structure of science were asked thousands of years ago and remain unanswered by both philosophy and science. Each discipline trying on it's own having been unsuccessful, is there an opportunity for them to work together on new approaches and new answers?
Rian Mitch
There’s also that lovely Kant line about the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. The mind/body problem in a very roundabout way seeks to answer the question of the moral law. We’ve given up its possible relation to the rest of the seemingly infinite and inhuman universe, it just looks impossible given the drastic differences we’ve come to learn about the two that they could have anything to do with one another in the way that Kant believed they were so intimately related.
I am very excited to hear about their developments. Here are a couple lecture series from their website
http://philcosmo.physics.ox.ac.uk/Media
http://astroweb1.physics.ox.ac.uk/~philcosmo2009/shtml/talk_shtml/talks
Because you omitted the Oxford comma, your sentence reads as if Oxford is an American University. Which, yes.
That one is on me, I edited the post prior to publication.
Sorry, but you also let through a rogue apostrophe: the last sentence’s “it’s”. Oop’s 🙂
Thanks Rian:
Quantum physics has its hands full keeping up with it’s own mathmatical models, and trying to provide evidence of its theories. I read their adventures like a mystery novel, and develop wonder about the implications of the possibilities of their stories (Briefer History In Time, Hawking; Grand Design, Hawking; Elegant Universe, Green; Infinity Puzzle, etc.) and I must admit creates a black hole in my thinking from a philosophical perspective. I find it interesting that a physics person who has great quantitative skills would spend much time on a black hole for most of them–philosophy.
There are certain issues which quantum physics raises uniquely. Those are the issues I think would be helpful to explore in this union of non classical physics and philosophy. However, I think science fiction is doing most of the heavy lifting in this area.
A couple of writers come to mind off the top to help address the philosophy of science, including Alfred North Whitehead, and Giles Deluze. Of course philosophy is not dead, nor is science fiction, just not a lot of overlap to work with. Of course Merleau-Ponty would be a good guide to keep excessive scientism from creeping (storming?) in. Complexity and chaos theory also are helpful. See the Quark and Jaguar by Murray Gellman
“The basic philosophical questions that underlie the mathematical structure of science were asked thousands of years ago and remain unanswered by both philosophy and science.” This seems like a self-negating set. Is there any basic philosophical question that HAS been definitively answered? If a philosophical question were to be definitively answered, would it remain in the field of philosophy or be shuffled of to some other field?
Thanks so much for your post, Rian. I’d love PEL to spend more time on the philosophy of science generally and physics in particular. I thought the Heisenberg episode was a lot of fun. I’ve returned to it a few times.
I’m particularly interested in what they might say on the philosphy of time. I took a class on the direction of time back when I was a philosophy undergrad – 86 or 87. The philosphiocal question arose because the math required for our best models of the universe in physics was symetrical with respect to time – i.e., it didn’t care whether time moved from past to future or furture to past. This called into question the ontological status of the conventional “arrow” of time – past to present to future – that everyone experiences. Was this a “real” feature of the world?
My recolletion is that the faculty I encountered were trying really hard to avoid a continental (they might have said “mystical”) approach to questions regarding the ontological status of time. Instead, they tried to establish the arrow of time’s status as a necessary feature of reality through the second law of thermodynamics, which (I’m stretching the memory banks here) says that isolated systems tend to move from lower to higher entropic states and depends on math that is time asymmetric.
This never satisfied me because I couldn’t get over the feeling that the relationship between increasing entropy and time’s arrow was a correlation and not a causal relation. I still experience the same arrow of time when I experience a non-isloated system that is going from a high entropy state to a low entropy state (when I organize my closet, for example) – i.e., there are cases where the arrow of time obtains where the second law of thermodynamics doesn’t (because it is a non-isolated system with energy being poured into it (e.g., cleaning the closet)).
Around the same time time I had taken a class on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and so I was, instead, hung up on the idea that the experience of time having a direction was just a consequence of the structure of our particular mechanism for understanding. If the math required for our best physical models said that time could go backwards and forwards, it probably did. We just failed to sense that because we can only experience time in one direction. I got the sense though that this was sort of a discredited way of thinking about the issue because it wasn’t sufficiently “scientific” – grounded in empirical observation. I wonder whether that is still true (and whether it was really true back then).
I’ve thought since then that the two views are reconcilable if you allow for the possibility of time “really” going backwards and forwards and you accept that human consciousness is the result of evolution. Obviously, there is a direction of time baked into evolution. The theory describes a particular process over time, from past to future. It only operates in a conventionally “arrowed” universe. It stands to reason that the intellect, as a product of that process is tailored to it and that we simply are not equipped with the apparatus of experience necessary to experience time moving in any direction other than the conventional one of past to future. Why would evolution select otherwise?
If that is the case, how would we know that time really does move in other directions? Would there be empirical signs that were accessible to us in our conventionally arrowed experience? If the answer is “yes” but we haven’t seen these that would be interesting.
Anyway, I’m interested in learning more about this sort of stuff. If anyone else finds it interesting maybe we could do a not-school thing on it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qqaHGUiew4
Martin Hägglund: The Trace of Time and the Death of Life: Bergson, Heidegger, Derrida
Isn’t time in physics just another quantity like length? Why does it make more sense to say “time can run backwards” than “length can run backwards”.
If you ask for the length of a stick and get the answer: five feet, would it then make sense to ask, “yes, but in what direction?”.
There seems to be other concepts also called time, not only defined as a quantity, but something more. What does physics say of this?
If by time one means something like a list of causations: A casues B, B causes C etc. Then it makes sense to say time cannot go backwards, meaning something cannot cause previous things on the list.
But I don’t see physics as saying anything conclusive about if there is such a time or not. There seems to be quite possible in physics to exist time such as A causes B, B causes A.
There is nothing in the human brain that stops humans from understanding time running backwards like this. Anyone can understand a simple tale of time-travel.
I can’t actually. I can’t understand how events A-B-C happening subsequently followed by events C’-B’-A’ happening afterward constitutes any coherent notion of time travel occurring in the sense that people seem to want for it to mean. Which also clears up to me why there is always a gaping hole in the logic of every attempt at employing time travel as a narrative device. The problem for physics is that it does have a direction of time which can certainly be arbitrary but does not therefore negate itself nonetheless, as I believe Hagglund in the video above would put it this also constitutes the necessary trace of time.
Sims- great post; I too find physics and the philosophy of science extraordinarily interesting. Incidentally, there is a Not School group which goes into most of the topics you mentioned in depth, including (what I believe is) the correct understanding of time. We’ll be getting to that section of our book this month, so you should join up- I think having your perspective will enrich our discussions greatly. http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/groups/the-fates-unwind-infinity/
K’s post about time I think raises the crucial point: causality. In the book, I argue that time is naught but change, that the passing of time is entirely the consequence of physical changes. Physical changes occur due to a cascade of causality required by the laws of physics for every system of energy in the Universe. K- I think your conclusion “There seems to be quite possible in physics to exist time such as A causes B, B causes A” couldn’t be more incorrect- if A causes B, then the occurrence A is required before B can exist; it is impossible for B to cause event A, because in order for event B to happen, event A already had to occur. Such reverse causality, I would contend, is logically impossible, and it is for this reason that there is an arrow of time: causes cause effects, and never the other way around.
Well it seems to me that closed timelike curves are possible in universes were general relativety holds, such as ours.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_timelike_curve
Since they are not ruled out at the moment by other physics, and you can build consistent matemathical models of them, I think it’s fair to say that they are quite possible.
I see no reason to assume, without evidence, that if an event A causes event B, then A must preceed B. This second claim is about the nature of the so called time, the very nature that is in fact under question.
There is nothing wrong in logic saying things like A therefore A, why is it wrong saying A causes A?
Closed timelike curves do not effect time travel; as the article makes plain, they only give the illusion of time travel relative to observers external to the timelike curve: “Additionally, with enough of a tilt, there are event locations that lie in the “past” as seen from the outside. With a suitable movement of what appears to it its own space axis, the object appears to travel though time as seen externally.”
I would say that literally all the evidence in the world points to the conclusion that if an event A causes event B, A must precede B- in my entire life, every single event I’ve encountered has unfolded this way, every phenomena I’ve learned about is described by this form of causality, I’ve never heard of a case that violates this scheme, and I cannot possibly imagine a series of events that defy this form of causality. You don’t have to look far to find evidence- an immediate example: my fingers are pressing keys on a keyboard which through a string of electronic and logical causality causes these letters to appear on this screen. I’m sure your response will involve the same causal pattern.
It is wrong to say that A causes A, because saying one thing causes another means that the existence of the latter depends on the existence of the former; A would have to exist prior to A (prior to its own existence) in order to be the cause of A, yet A in this instance cannot exist without first being caused by A. This is irresolvably paradoxical, and therefore logically impossible.
In my understanding some closed timelike curves would indeed allow for time travel, as implied by these quotes from the same article:
“and so it should be possible for the object to engage in time travel under these conditions”
“If CTCs exist, their existence would seem to imply at least the theoretical possibility of time travel backwards in time”
” However, in a CTC, causality breaks down, because an event can be “simultaneous” with its cause—in some sense an event may be able to cause itself.”
The fact that you may experience causality with an direction is a psychological fact, a fact that in no way guarantees that casuality always behave this way or behaves this way at all. To quote Gödel, who discovered one CTC model:
“This again shows that to assume an objective lapse of time would
lose every justification in these worlds.(meaning CTC worlds) For, in whatever way one may
assume time to be lapsing, there will always exist possible observers to
whose experienced lapse of time no objective lapse corresponds… But if the
experience of the lapse of time can exist without an objective lapse of time,
no reason can be given why an objective lapse of time should be assumed
at all.”
I will now give a psychological fact of my own: If Gödel thinks something is logically consistent, there is reason to belive it is logically consistent.
“saying one thing causes another means that the existence of the latter depends on the existence of the former”
My intention saying A causes B was taken as meaning something like two billiard balls collide (event A), one ball changes trajectory in a definite way (event B). It makes no sense of bringing existence into the issue. The billiard balls exist quite regardless of the events. Your argument seems to be repeating the claim: “if an event A causes event B, then A must preceed B”, just using different words such as “A would have to exist prior to A (prior to its own existence) in order to be the cause of A”. If this were true I agree with you that it would indeed be impossible for A to cause A, however I’m not sure this is true, and you have not given conclusive evidence that it is so.
I used the word “existence” for A only because A is a general case- if A is a property, like the magnetism of an atom, you would say that the existence of that property causes the effects which that property causes. If A is an event, like one billiard ball striking another, you could substitute the word “occurrence” there. If A is an event, then A would certainly have to occur prior to A in order for it to be the cause of occurrence A, in the same way that billiard ball A must first strike ball B in order for ball B to be effected.
As for ctcs, I agree that Godel is a reliable source, but I don’t think he is making as strong a claim as you think. And it is not merely a psychological quirk that we experience causality this way- the understanding of our world we’ve reached through scientific experimentation (which uses every available method to eliminate psychological biases) is entirely based on linear causality- if you throw out linear causality due to a mathematical curiosity (which may or may not perfectly apply to the physics of the Universe; general relativity may break down in these extreme cases (we certainly don’t have any experiments which show otherwise, nor an understanding of general relativity that jives with quantum mechanics)) then nothing about how the Universe operates makes any sense. I’d say that fact alone offers abundant evidence to the contrary of any reverse causality argument.
dmf, K and Adam,
Thanks so much for your posts. The last two led me to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which contains the following article on backward causation:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-backwards/
The introduction includes the following:
“A common feature of our world seems to be that in all cases of causation, the cause and the effect are placed in time so that the cause precedes its effect temporally. Our normal understanding of causation assumes this feature to such a degree that we intuitively have great difficulty imagining things differently. The notion of backward causation, however, stands for the idea that the temporal order of cause and effect is a mere contingent feature and that there may be cases where the cause is causally prior to its effect but where the temporal order of the cause and effect is reversed with respect to normal causation, i.e. there may be cases where the effect temporally, but not causally, precedes its cause.”
After that it gets to be pretty tough sledding and I haven’t worked through the whole thing yet. Seems directly on point though so I thought I would bring it to your attention.
Adam thanks so much for the invitation, I’ll take a look!
This is the point of contention. It would be the general concensus among everybody that it is just not true or even interesting to think about. We have a notion of backwards causation because causation is inherently directional. There is no non-directional causation. To then go on to say that an effect is a cause and a cause is rather the effect is just to confuse the order of the events and nothing more. It must be one way or the other. Unless reverse causation is committed to saying that first A takes place, and then B takes place, and then A takes place again, identically in the same way as though it were to have happened the first time. Only this would not be enough. Because even if it is in every single way constructively identical, it is still merely the event of some A’ and not A. It is A-B-A’. I have no idea what the reverse causal claim would respond to this problem. A can not happen twice and be the same event occuring both times. It is nearly identical events happening separately or it is one event that happens once.
We also have observed the event of physical occurrences that basically obey all of the rules that the reversal causal claims hope to stake out. It is events in space that seems from one perspective that there is some order to the events and from another perspective there is a different order to the events. This is not to say that an effect can be a cause.
Agreed-I’d say the arrow of time arises from the causal order of events, and that the entropic tally is a perfect indicator for whether a system in our Universe is progressing forward in time or not- if a system of energy obeys the second law of thermodynamics, it is traveling with us forward through time.
In any case, I’d submit that time passes as energy undergoes change, and that “backwards causal” systems still travel forward in time (still undergo and contribute to a global rise in entropy). Even a Universe in a reverse state, progressing from high entropy to low would be traveling forward through time, changing linearly through cause and effect and gaining distance in time from past causes.