October 14,

 

Time, Causation and the Future 

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Centre for Time Room, Main Quad,

The University of Sydney

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Gema Martin-Ordas, Stirling 

 

12.15 -1.40 

Causal intervention in non-human animals

 

The environment poses important challenges (e.g., access to food) to human and non-human animals (henceforth animals). Associative learning can help dealing with such challenges, but the question that has long attracted philosophers and psychologists is whether animals use causal cognition. If, for example, an ape sees the wind shake a tree and apples fall, could the ape infer that if they were to shake the tree the apple would fall? Could an ape go from observing an association to designing an intervention based on that association? This type of sophisticated causal cognition is argued to be uniquely human. Importantly, whereas associative learning yields correlations and enables predictions, causal cognition allows organisms to (1) appreciate that objects have properties that determine how objects interact, and (2) guide their actions to manipulate and/or control these interactions. In this talk, I will present two experimental designs to be conducted with non-human animals that try to get to the idea of causal intervention by focusing either on its temporal component or on the sources of information required to generate a causal intervention—the latter being possible without a temporal aspect. 

 

 

 

1.45- 3.00  Rasmus Pedersen, The University of Sydney 

 

 

How Mental Imagery Influences Temporally Extended Agency 

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Planning Action With or Without a Mind’s Eye

 

Abstract: In this talk I explore how mental imagery, the capacity to form internal perception-like representation in the absence of external sensory input, affect our ability to form, retain, and retrieve intentions-to-act. While research on the connection between episodic future thinking mental imagery capacities is thriving, it remains unclear how differences in mental imagery influence our ability to form, retain, and retrieve intentions-to-act. I focus on aphantasics (people with a near-complete absence of mental imagery) and hyperphantasics (people with mental imagery so vivid it rivals real perception) as case studies, since they offer naturally occurring “knock-out” test. If mental imagery plays functional roles in temporally extended agency, then aphantasics and hyperphantasics should differ in how they form, retain, and/or retrieve intentions-to-act. I explore these connections and possible philosophical consequences.

 

 

3.00.420:  Jan Voosholz

 

Causal Necessity and Time 

 

In this talk, I explore the connections between causal necessity and time. In the first part, I briefly outline why the relationship between modality and temporality is of central philosophical interest, situating the issue within debates in metaphysics/ontology and general philosophy of science. In the second part, I examine two types of approaches to the more specific question of how causal necessity relates to time: first, accounts that seek to derive or explain spacetime or time from causal necessity (as found in philosophy of physics and cosmology); and second, approaches that take (spatio-)temporal structure as fundamental for understanding causation (as often found in metaphysics). In the final part of the talk, I sketch a tentative argument suggesting which of these approaches from types might be combined to yield a more satisfactory account of the interplay between causal necessity and time, in line with the broader aims introduced at the outset.

 

 

4.30-5.45: Luca Gasparinetti, Milan  (by zoom).

 

The Temporal Structure of Spacetime 

 

Abstract: Recent proposals have advanced novel causal theories of spacetime within Causal Set Theory and General Relativity. The main motivation stems from a series of theorems showing that the geometry of spacetime (up to a conformal factor) can be recovered from a partial order relation. Based on these mathematical results, and arguably on physicists’ customary talk, philosophers have widely taken the partial order relation at the core of these theorems to be causal, thus reviving the causal theory of spacetime program.  Although scattered and rather tentative alternatives exist, no sustained effort has been made to scrutinise the metaphysical status of this relation. Given the far-reaching philosophical consequences drawn from it, such scrutiny is needed. In this paper, I advance an alternative reading of this partial order relation. The proposed view, which interprets the relation as temporal rather than causal, retains the same explanatory power as the causal interpretation while requiring fewer metaphysical commitments and avoiding three problems that affect the latter.

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