Jacob Barandes
speaker
7,673 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Jacob Barandes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I would say that my view was a little more eliminativist about microphysical causation in the sense that I didn't think there was a well-defined notion of causation at the microphysical level for a long time.
Um my views changed because of this project I've been working on, this individual indivisible stochastic approach, which provides a probabilistic dynamics for the microphysical degrees of freedom, microphysical configurations of nature.
Um and these
conditional probabilities that that form the laws in this theory naturally have a directedness.
It's important to note that this directedness does not single out uh an arrow of time.
It threads a kind of a uh uh uh it threads a needle here.
One view is that in order to have a notion of causation, you have to have an asymmetry between causes and their effects.
Effects are supposed to happen after the causes, causes supposed to precede their effects.
And it's it's a little difficult to understand how you can ground this notion of causation in our best physical theories, our best microphysical uh uh best microphysical theories.
Like the standard model of particle physics, in which there doesn't appear to be at a logical level any distinction between the past and the future.
There's some time asymmetry in some uh esoteric processes in the standard model, but not of the kind that would underwrite the kind of temporal time asymmetry that seems to be necessary to talk about causes preceding their effects.
In this indivisible stochastic approach, we get an asymmetrical.
symmetry between causes and their effects, the conditional probabilities point in a direction from causes to their effects.
But without preferring a direction in time.
The idea th the the the fact that a direction of time seems to occur in our world appears to be a contingent fact r related to the initial conditions of the universe.
Um
And an arrow of time emerges in indivisible theory in the same way.
It's not there fundamentally in the laws any more than it would be otherwise.
I think if I had not encountered microphysical laws that were able to to to ground a notion of directedness, I wouldn't believe that there could be or should be a directed notion of microphysical causation.
So I would say that
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