Descrying the World of Physics

Interview by Richard Marshall.

While physics has had tremendous successes it is still an open question whether there is
fundamental ontology and laws and if there is whether they can be found by the methods of
physics. To the extent that this aim of physics is achieved we should be able to understand how
what Sellars calls the manifest image emerges from fundamental physics. That is what I mean
by descrying the world in physics.

Fodor, in his inimitable way, was asking why the world has this structure? That is, why there is
anything except physics? Kims answer (over simplifying a bit) was that there is only physics. My
answer (oversimplifying again) is because of physics.

It turns out that the Mentaculus is also a probability map and it plays a crucial role in
grounding times arrows, counterfactuals, causation, deliberation, and compatibilist free will.

Steinhardt (one of the original developers of Inflation) noticed that the multiverse undermines
the alleged explanatory and predictive success of the original proposal. If the multiverse is truly
a consequence of inflation then the theory undermines itself.

Barry Loewer moved to Rutgers in 1989 and has been chair and grad director. He teaches
courses and seminars in philosophy of science and philosophical logic. Here he discusses his
project descrying the world of physics, how he answers Fodors question why is there more than
physics?, materialism, consciousness, the direction of time, the behaviours of micro and macro
states, the Mentaculus, why he prefers Boltzmans realism to anti-realism, freewill, the status of
probabilities used in physics, comparing Lewiss possible worlds with Everetts many worlds,
and the philosophical challenges of cosmological inflation. Big Bang Bomb!!!
3:AM: What made you become a philosopher?

Barry Loewer: When I was a freshman at Amherst College I took a history course about the
causes of WWI and became puzzled about what it is for one event to cause another. When I
asked the professor about this he said that it is the job of philosophy to answer questions like this
and sent me to Professor Joe Epstein who was a really great teacher and he got me on a project
that I have been interested in ever since.

3:AM: Youre currently working in the philosophy of cosmology and metaphysics. One aspect
of this youve been working with is a project youve labelled descrying the world of physics?
Can you tell us what this is and why it is so interesting?

BL: Physics aims to provide an account of the worlds fundamental ontology and laws. While
physics has had tremendous successes it is still an open question whether there is fundamental
ontology and laws and if there is whether they can be found by the methods of physics. To the
extent that this aim of physics is achieved we should be able to understand how what Sellars
calls the manifest image emerges from fundamental physics. That is what I mean by
descrying the world in physics.

3:AM: So Jerry Fodor asked why is there anything except physics? He was responding to
Jaegwon Kims views about the relationship between the special sciences and physics. First
could you sketch for us what Kim was arguing and what Fodors question was challenging?

BL: In his famous paper Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)
Fodor attempted to spell out an account of the relationship between a special science like
psychology and more fundamental (and ultimately the most fundamental science- physics) that
endorsed both the idea that special science laws and causation are autonomous from but also
grounded in the laws and causation of the more fundamental science. Fodor argued that there are
laws that connect properties of the higher level science that a multiply realized by properties in
the more fundamental science that themselves are connected by laws that implement the higher
level laws. Fodor, in his inimitable way, was asking why the world has this structure? That is,
why there is anything except physics? Kims answer (over simplifying a bit) was that there is
only physics. My answer (oversimplifying again) is because of physics.

3:AM: Why dont you think Fodors proposed response to Kim works?

BL: Mainly because Fodor has a mistaken view about the structure of the laws of physics and
more specifically because he neglects the probabilistic structure of the world that derives from
statistical mechanics and the dynamical laws.
3:AM: Materialism was once claimed to be natural metaphysics within the bounds of science. It
was a position that depended on science telling us that the world is made of matter. Science
doesnt tell us that now does it, so for many physicalism has replaced materialism. Whats the
difference between materialism and physicalism and why has physicalism appealed to so many?

BL: Materialism is the view that every object in space-time is composed of matter. As science
developed it also included the idea that there are a limited number of kinds of matter- molecules
of various kinds- which themselves are composed of atoms of around 100 kinds which are
themselves composed of protons, neutrons, electrons etc.

3:AM: I guess this issue gets to the heart of your descrying project: how do we get mentality,
consciousness and intentionality, normativity, rationality, ethics, aesthetics, free will, colours,
sounds, times arrow, causation and nomological counterfactuals from physics? Consciousness is
famously a hard problem, but you raise times arrow as a hard problem for physics dont you?
Can you sketch out why the fundamental dynamical laws and the second law of thermodynamics
create a hard problem?

BL: Consciousness is indeed a hard problem. I think that some progress has made there by
proponents of the phenomenal concept strategy proposed by by Brain Loar and developed by,
among others, my wife Katalin Balog.
The direction of time is an easier problem at least as far as physical processes are concerned.
Almost all macroscopic processes exhibit a temporal directionality; e.g. ice in warm water melts,
we are born as babies and grow to adults and then die, we can influence events in one temporal
direction (what we call the future) but not in the other temporal direction (the past), we have
records (including memories) of the past but not the future, and so on. The problem for descrying
the world in physics is that the fundamental dynamical laws have a kind of temporal symmetry
wrt macroscopic processes. For every temporal sequence of particle and field configurations that
compose a macroscopic process that is compatible with the dynamical laws (say the melting of
ice) the temporally reverse process (the spontaneous forming of a block of ice out of warm
water) is also compatible with the dynamical laws. But we never see the temporally reverse
processes. Why is that? Ludwig Boltzmann partly answered this question. He was wondering
why all macroscopic processes conform to the second law of thermodynamics which, in its initial
formulation, says that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases and typically increases.

The entropy of a macroscopic system corresponds to the number (or measure) of micro states
that realize its macro state. Boltzmann posited a probability distribution over micro states that
has the consequence that the entropy of a macro system will very likely increase in the future and
so thought he answered his question. Unfortunately this proposal has the consequence that
entropy was greater in the past as well as the future. This is called the reversibility problem.
The solution, which was already suggested by Boltzmann and latter by Eddington, Feynman,
Penrose and others is to posit that the entropy of the universe was very small at the time
immediately after the big bang. This is a cosmological hypothesis that David Albert has dubbed
The Past Hypothesis. It is perhaps suprising that the facts that ice cubes typically melt but
dont spontaneously appear, that eggs cook and dont uncook, and so on are explained by a
cosmological hypothesis. David and I call the package consisting of the fundamental dynamical
laws, the Boltzmann probability distribution, and the Past Hypothesis The Mentaculus. The
word comes from an amusing scene in the Coen brothers film A Serious Man in which a
character calls a a book he is obsessively working on The Mentaculus and explains that it is a
probability map of the world. The key idea is that adding the probability distribution and the Past
Hypothesis to the dynamical laws enables one to see how macroscopic regularities are grounded
in micro physical processes. Even application of dynamical laws to macro processes like the
motions of planets and the tides require these additions if we take seriously that all macro
phenomena are composed of micro phenomena. It turns out that the Mentaculus is also a
probability map and it plays a crucial role in grounding times arrows, counterfactuals, causation,
deliberation, and compatibilist free will.

3:AM: Another hard problem you identify concerns the behaviors of micro and macro states.
Again, whats the problem here that makes it hard for physics?

BL: The vast difference in scale- a macroscopic object consists of something on the order of 10
to the 23 micro particles makes it hard to produce a detailed explanation of macro behavior in
terms of micro behavior very difficult in general. But there are certain macro regularities that are
more easily explainable in micro terms involving the fundamental dynamics together with the
Boltzmann probability distribution and the Past Hypothesis, aka the Mentaculus; for example,
the second law of thermodynamics, why we have records of the past, and so on. The Mentaculus
doesnt assume a direction of time but rather explains the asymmetry of temporal processes and
so the distinction between past and future. The Past Hypothesis earns its name because of this
asymmetry.
[Boltzmann]

3:AM: Why arent you content with an anti-realist position towards these things, as adopted by
Mach? Why go with Boltzmanns realism? Isnt it the realism that makes the hard problem hard?

BL: Boltzmanns realism re atoms has been enormously successful. When Richard Feynman
was asked to think of a single sentence that would convey the most important scientific
knowledge we possess, he answered simply: Everything is made of atoms. Anti-realist views
treat science like an instruction manual for how to make predictions. I had one of these manuals
for a car I used to own. But it gave no insight into how the car really worked so when something
went very wrong I wasnt able to figure out what to do. I am a realist because I would like to
know how the world works and I think the various sciences make the best proposals for how
things really work.

3:AM: The hard problem of freewill you characterize in terms of influence and control dont
you? If determinism in micro physics is true and we have an influence then dont we have an
influence on the past as well as the future which seems wrong? How does your Mentaculus
device help, and are we left with a robust realist view of freewill or is it just a myth?

BL: Yesgiven determinism (as we have been assuming throughout this discussion) there is a
correlation between the decisions a person makes (which I assume correspond to certain physical
processes) and the physical history back to the time of the past hypothesis. However, because of
the asymmetry that is built into the correlations grounded by the Mentaculus and the structure of
our brains these correlations are unknown to us and are not useful to us. On the other hand the
correlations between decisions and circumstances in the temporal direction away from the past
hypothesis (what we call the future.) are knowable and very useful to us. The details and
defense of this account are complicated and I cant fully develop them here. The account doesnt
endorse what philosophers call libertarian free will but it does explain why we think we have
libertarian free will even though it is a myth.

3:AM: So are probabilities used in physics objective or subjective?

BL: My view is that probabilities in physics (for example in the Mentaculus and in Quantum
mechanics) should be understood as objective probabilities. The account that I think is the best
account of objective probabilities is David Lewis Best Systems Account of laws and
probabilities. One place where I disagree with Lewis is that he thought that non-trivial objective
physical probabilities require that the dynamical laws are not deterministic. I have argued in a
number of papers that an account much like Lewis extends to the probabilities that occur in
theories with deterministic dynamical laws e.g. the Mentaculus and in deterministic version of
Quantum Mechanics. I very much like Lewis account of laws which is Humean in inspiration
and opposed to more metaphysical accounts due to Armstrong, Maudlin, and advocates of
powers like Bird and Cartwright. I like Lewis account because it is free of the metaphysical
commitments- which I think ultimately are theological in origin- of some competing accounts
and because of the ways it fits in with scientific methodology. But this is a long story.
3:AM: Everettians look at probabilities in a way that sounds a bit like a metaphysical version of
David Lewiss possible worlds, which are used in semantics and modal logic. Presumably they
clash somewhere along the line, and so presumably if this is right then modal realism is false.
How do you respond to this sort of thinking? How should we understand Everetts many worlds,
and is it the best way of thinking about quantum physics?

BL: There are some philosophers who have proposed that Lewis possible worlds and Everetts
many worlds are the same. But this isnt correct. For Lewis worlds are arrangements of perfectly
natural properties in space-times that are causally isolated from one another. They are the
fundamental elements of concrete reality. Worlds must be metaphysically possible but may have
laws that differ from the laws of what we call the actual world. The worlds in Everetts account
of quantum mechanics correspond to decoherent branches of the actual worlds universal
quantum wave function. They must obey the laws of quantum mechanics (so some metaphysical
possibilities are excluded), they are not fundamental, and they are not causally isolated from each
other since, depending on the fundamental quantum mechanical law worlds may recohere and
interfere (as in a two slit experiment). I think Everetts account is immensely interesting and
important but I think it faces an insuperable problem making sense of quantum mechanical
probabilities. Advocates of Everetts account have been working on this problem and some (e.g.
David Wallace, Sean Carroll) think they have solved it but I dont agree. I dont know what the
correct account of quantum mechanics is but I think the best account around are versions of
Bohms account (often misnamed a hidden variable account) developed by John Bell and
Shelly Goldstein and his group.

3:AM: Inflation when used in physics raises some interesting philosophical problems, one being
that it seems to predict that whatever could happen will happen, which in turn raises the problem
that its a theory that cant have empirical evidence for it. Can you sketch out the issue and then
say something about whether you think its ok for scientific theories to be beyond the bounds of
empirical evidence? On the face of it, it seems to be doing what scientists have sometimes
criticized metaphysicians of doing just speculating?

BL: Cosmology is full of issues that should interest philosophers. Inflation is an account
(originally proposed by Alan Guth and then modified and fixed up by Andre Linde and Paul
Steinhardt and Andreas Albrecht) of the very early universe according to which the universe
expanded at an accelerating rate doubling every 10 to the minus 38 seconds or so for a very short
amount of time. This period of accelerated expansion, as Guth says, put the bang into the big
bang. The subsequent expansion of the universe discovered by Hubble is a kind of coasting
after this initial impulse (However the picture was complicated by the discover in 1998 that there
is still some accelerated expansion though at a very much smaller rate that corresponds to a
cosmological constant in equations of GR that describe the expansion of the universe). Guth
claimed and most of the community of cosmologists agreed that his proposal explained certain
features of the universe; for example why the spatial geometry of the universe is Euclidian, why
the early universe was almost perfectly homogenous but not quite perfectly homogenous thus
allowing for the formation of stars, galaxies and so on.

Shortly after its proposal cosmologists mostly came to think that inflation would produce not just
the observable universe but many other universes as well. Further these other universes could
have different physical features from the observable universe e.g. different geometries, may not
be homogeneous, maybe different kinds of fundamental fields and particles. Alan Guth summed
this up by saying that inflation produces universes so that anything that can happen does happen
in some universe or other. So this is another many universes proposal though different from
Lewis and Everetts (though there are some who try to identify one of these with another one of
these). Some physicists welcomed this consequence the multiverse- thinking that it provided
the universes that could be appealed to in explanations of why certain features of our universe
seem to be fine-tuned for the existence of life. For example, Steven Weinberg suggested that the
surprisingly small value of the cosmological constant that describes the current accelerated
expansion could be explain anthropically by proposing that universes with all possible values are
generated by inflation but only those with small values can support life. But Steinhardt (one of
the original developers of Inflation) noticed that the multiverse undermines the alleged
explanatory and predictive success of the original proposal. If the multiverse is truly a
consequence of inflation then the theory undermines itself. Recently an article in The Scientific
American (Feb 2017) by Ijjas, Loeb, and Steinhardt created a kerfuffle in the cosmology
community by developing this and other criticisms of inflation. In response a number of
cosmologists and physics wrote a letter defending inflation. Since many of the issues intersect
with philosophical issues about evidence and the nature of scientific methodology this is a very
exciting flied for philosophers of science.

3:AM: And finally, are there five books that you could recommend to us that will take us further
into your philosophical world?

BL: I am incredibly fortunate to be at Rutgers and having as friends incredibly creative

philosophers who live nearby. They are among the authors of books that are really important to
me