There are many ways in which science could be different. Had we done something different in the past, we would now have a different science, perhaps a better one. Were we to do something today, we would change the science to come. Or wouldn't we? What does this really mean? As far as we know, the world line of our universe is a single-trial experiment. What does it mean to contemplate different alternatives? Although we are continuously exerting counterfactual reasoning, and although social sciences are based on counterfactual logic, the hard sciences have not yet provided a context in which the meaning of counterfactual reasoning is clear. This essay is an attempt to go towards a science that provides a scientific framework in which questions as “How could science be different” are clearly framed. To that end, I discuss the way in which the geometry of the world lines describing the evolution of the universe have to change when coarse-graining the description, in order for causal (that is, directed and manipulable) relations between events to emerge from an a-causal physics.
Ines Samengo
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