Dear all, The Serious Metaphysics Group will meet this Wednesday from 4.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m. in the Faculty Board Room.
Our speaker is Matt Farr (Cambridge). His title and abstract are as follows. Title: Do we need to explain initial conditions? Abstract: It is common to think of the universe as a grand time-directed process that started out in some initial state — call this the ‘time-directed universe’ hypothesis (TDU). On TDU, the initial state is explanatorily unique — it is the only one that did not evolve from some prior set of conditions. Some have appealed to this explanatory uniqueness to suggest that it is misguided to seek an explanation as to why the early universe was extremely low-entropy, and so argue that TDU plays an important explanatory role in physics. But what if we reject TDU? This talk considers the options for those that assume a temporally adirectional metaphysics, which I call the ‘C theory’. Given the C theory holds there is no intrinsic difference between ‘initial’ and ‘final’ states of physical systems, it is unclear what we are to make of the explanatory demands of the low entropy early universe. I assess a series of options for the C theory, arguing that the rejection of TDU leaves us no worse off with regard to explaining the low entropy early universe. The full termcard is available on the webpage <https://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/SMG>. Best wishes, Alex Alexander Roberts Lecturer, Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge Website <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd4036/> _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
