Rannsóknarfyrirlestur í heimspeki: Huw Price

Huw Price heldur fyrirlestur á vegum Heimspekistofnunar föstudaginn 1. nóvember kl. 11:00-12:30 í stofu V007, sem er á neðstu hæð í Veröld – húsi Vigdísar, Háskóla Íslands. Fyrirlesturinn nefnist „Side-stepping the Rhinoceros: Copernican Pragmatism and Quantum Entanglement“. Fyrirlesturinn verður á ensku og er opinn öllum.

Útdráttur á ensku

In philosophy, as in science, it is often important to pay close attention to the peculiarities of our own perspective. This move is particularly congenial to pragmatists, keen to expose what William James called 'the trail of the human serpent'. A century earlier, it was at the heart of Kant’s Copernican Revolution. This talk, based on joint work with the physicist Ken Wharton, applies this Copernican move to quantum entanglement. Entanglement is often regarded as the most puzzling feature of the quantum world. Writing about its mysteries, Roger Penrose puts the issue like this.

"The first mystery is the phenomenon itself. How are we to come to terms with quantum entanglement and to make sense of it in terms of ideas that we can comprehend, so that we can manage to accept it as something that forms an important part of the workings of our actual universe?" (Penrose 2004)

We propose a Copernican answer to Penrose’s question. The relevant peculiarity of our perspective on the world is the fact that we can often control it. Once we ‘side-step’ this perspective, and the contingent physical facts on which it depends, entanglement turns out to be explicable using notions familiar from causal modelling: it is a special sort of ‘selection artefact’, or 'collider bias'. This explanation seems to have been missed because the peculiarity of our ordinary standpoint has not previously been taken into account. (The talk is based on a paper that may be found here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04571.)

Um fyrirlesarann

Huw Price er Emeritus Fellow við Trinity College, Cambridge. Hann hefur áður starfað sem prófessor við margra virtar háskólastofnanir, þar á meðal Háskólann í Bonn, Háskólann í Sydney og Háskólann í Cambridge. Rannsóknir Price spanna vítt svið, allt frá málspeki og frumspeki til vísindaheimspeki, og hafa þær haft gríðarlega áhrif bæði innan og utan heimspekinnar. Price er sérstaklega þekktur fyrir framlag sitt til skilnings á eðli orsakasambandsins, sannleikans, og tímans. Price hefur meðal annars verið meðal helstu talsmönnum pragmatismans í heimspeki samtímans.