[PhilPhys] Warsaw Spacetime Colloquium: Chen & Goldstein (3 June on Zoom)

[Antonio Vassallo]

(With apologies for cross-posting)

On Friday, 3 June, Eddy Keming Chen (UC San Diego) and Sheldon Goldstein
(Rutgers) will give a talk titled "Governing Without A Fundamental
Direction of Time: Minimal Primitivism about Laws of Nature" (abstract
below).

The meeting will be online on Zoom (17:00-19:00 CEST). If you have not
registered yet, you can do so here <https://forms.gle/qpb8vVjtrF4y2nZ76>.

The Colloquium is organized by the Philosophy of Physics Group
<https://ans.pw.edu.pl/Nauka/Zespoly-badawcze/Philosophy-of-Physics-Group>
at the Faculty of Administration and Social Sciences, Warsaw University of
Technology.

The videos of the previous meetings are available on YouTube
<https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM-1yNCyvJJC0KUgEqXTsFA38luoSiqXo>.

You can address any inquiry to antonio.vassallo at pw.edu.pl.

ABSTRACT
The Great Divide in metaphysical debates about laws of nature is between
Humeans who think that laws merely describe the distribution of matter and
non-Humeans who think that laws govern it. The metaphysics can place
demands on the proper formulations of physical theories. It is sometimes
assumed that the governing view requires a fundamental/intrinsic direction
of time: to govern, laws must be dynamical, producing later states of the
world from earlier ones, in accord with the fundamental direction of time
in the universe. In this paper, we propose a minimal primitivism about laws
of nature (MinP) according to which there is no such requirement. On our
view, laws govern by constraining the physical possibilities. Our view
captures the essence of the governing view without taking on extraneous
commitments about the direction of time or dynamic production. Moreover, as
a version of primitivism, our view requires no reduction/analysis of laws
in terms of universals, powers, or dispositions. Our view accommodates
several potential candidates for fundamental laws, including the principle
of least action, the Past Hypothesis, the Einstein equation of general
relativity, and even controversial examples found in the Wheeler-Feynman
theory of electrodynamics and retrocausal theories of quantum mechanics. By
understanding governing as constraining, non-Humeans who accept MinP have
the same freedom to contemplate a wide variety of candidate fundamental
laws as Humeans do.
#You are encouraged but not required to read the preprint before attending
the talk: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.09226.pdf
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