Chance And Temporal Asymmetry PDF Download
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Author | : Alastair Wilson |
Publisher | : Oxford University Press, USA |
Total Pages | : 307 |
Release | : 2014 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : 019967342X |
Download Chance and Temporal Asymmetry Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
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 | : Thierry Schütz |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 82 |
Release | : 2018 |
Genre | : Metaphysics |
ISBN | : |
Download Temporal Asymmetry and the Passage of Time Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Author | : David Z Albert |
Publisher | : Harvard University Press |
Total Pages | : 188 |
Release | : 2003-02-28 |
Genre | : Science |
ISBN | : 0674020138 |
Download Time and Chance Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
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 | : Karlene Cheryl Hanko |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 168 |
Release | : 2008 |
Genre | : |
ISBN | : |
Download On Once and Future Things Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Author | : Toby Handfield |
Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | : 265 |
Release | : 2012-04-05 |
Genre | : Science |
ISBN | : 1107080010 |
Download A Philosophical Guide to Chance Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
It is a commonplace that scientific inquiry makes extensive use of probabilities, many of which seem to be objective chances, describing features of reality that are independent of our minds. Such chances appear to have a number of paradoxical or puzzling features: they appear to be mind-independent facts, but they are intimately connected with rational psychology; they display a temporal asymmetry, but they are supposed to be grounded in physical laws that are time-symmetric; and chances are used to explain and predict frequencies of events, although they cannot be reduced to those frequencies. This book offers an accessible and non-technical introduction to these and other puzzles. Toby Handfield engages with traditional metaphysics and philosophy of science, drawing upon recent work in the foundations of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics to provide a novel account of objective probability that is empirically informed without requiring specialist scientific knowledge.
Author | : Wayne C. Myrvold |
Publisher | : Oxford University Press, USA |
Total Pages | : 303 |
Release | : 2021-02-11 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : 0198865090 |
Download Beyond Chance and Credence Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
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 | : John Earman |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : |
Release | : 1968 |
Genre | : |
ISBN | : |
Download Some Aspects of Temporal Asymmetry Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Author | : Paul Horwich |
Publisher | : MIT Press |
Total Pages | : 235 |
Release | : 1987-04-01 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : 0262580888 |
Download Asymmetries In Time Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
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 |
Total Pages | : 232 |
Release | : 2020-01-30 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : 0198846215 |
Download The Nature of Contingency Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
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 |
Total Pages | : 282 |
Release | : 2002-01-01 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : 9780802036032 |
Download A Theory of Physical Probability Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
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.