Lucy Mason (Royal Holloway): ‘Temporal Perspectives, Probabilities, and Openness’

Abstract: One way to interpret the difference between presentism and eternalism is perspectively. This suggestion, from Savitt (2006), argues that from a perspective outside of time the world is eternalist, and from a perspective embedded within time the world is presentist. In this paper, I develop what it means to be in an embedded, presentist perspective and connect this to the hypothesis that the future is open (which essentially comes down to failures of predictability). I then connect this to practical limits on prediction that come from being in an embedded presentist perspective, such as the lightcone structure of spacetime and being embedded at emergent levels of reality. Understood in this way, the presentist perspective offers a powerful way to ground the explanatory success of theories such as thermodynamics, which often use local, semi-isolated subsystems as well as emergent probabilities. It also provides a new way of thinking about the accusations that thermodynamics is subjective or epistemic by looking at the way that information forms part of the physical structure of the world.

Lucy Mason is a postdoc at Royal Holloway working as part of the project ‘What is metrology if quantum measurements participate in making reality’.

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