Sponsor
Philosophy
We All Live in a Jello Submarine: Existence Monism from Quantum Physics
Friday, April 3,
-
Speaker(s): Elise Crull, CUNY: City College & the Graduate Center
While a number of metaphysicians working in fundamental ontology agree that the ultimate grounds of physical objects must be some sort of quantum soup, they mostly avoid endorsing existence monism for the obvious reason that it incurs the prohibitive onus of reconstructing the world of everyday objects from scant material. How could a maximally sparse ontology possibly yield rich enough structure to support manifest reality?
In their 2008 book Austere Realism, Horgan and Potrč argue provocatively - but I think persuasively - for a version of existence monism they call "blobjectivism". Though their arguments are driven primarily by semantics and logic, they do address the above-mentioned objection concerning physical structure because it is so frequently raised. Their first-pass response, which they admit requires scientific building-out, is to imagine a world made entirely of Jello, emphasizing that one can nevertheless identify a variety of relations and structures (e.g. color, density, etc.) within it.
In this talk I try to provide a scientific building-out of this response. In particular, I argue that recent experimental work in quantum physics utilizing Page-Wootters devices to model a static universe successfully demonstrates the emergence of complex dynamical structure from a composite system with no dynamics of its own. Therefore let us embrace Jello world, for it is indeed capable of supporting interesting objects... like submarines.
In their 2008 book Austere Realism, Horgan and Potrč argue provocatively - but I think persuasively - for a version of existence monism they call "blobjectivism". Though their arguments are driven primarily by semantics and logic, they do address the above-mentioned objection concerning physical structure because it is so frequently raised. Their first-pass response, which they admit requires scientific building-out, is to imagine a world made entirely of Jello, emphasizing that one can nevertheless identify a variety of relations and structures (e.g. color, density, etc.) within it.
In this talk I try to provide a scientific building-out of this response. In particular, I argue that recent experimental work in quantum physics utilizing Page-Wootters devices to model a static universe successfully demonstrates the emergence of complex dynamical structure from a composite system with no dynamics of its own. Therefore let us embrace Jello world, for it is indeed capable of supporting interesting objects... like submarines.
