This is philosophy bytes with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
Philosophy bytes is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
Philosophy bytes is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.
It's obvious, isn't it, that time travel is incoherent, since if it were not, I could go back in time, kill my parents, and thus make sure that I wasn't born.
I can affect what happens in the future, but surely not what has already occurred in the past.
But Hugh Price believes that backward causation is not only conceivable, but in fact offers the best explanation for the strange discoveries of modern physics.
Hugh Price, welcome to philosophy bites.
Thank you, Nigel.
The topic we're going to focus on is backward causation.
Now, it seems fairly obvious that I can't affect things in the past now because they've already happened.
But those people who believe that backward causation occurs think I could do that.
Okay, well, a good question to start with, I think, is the question as to what's going on when we think we can affect the future, and in particular, we're the strongly one way sense of causation that we come from, where it's actually grounded.
And one of the striking things of modern physics is that physics seems to show us that underneath the most fundamental level, everything is basically time symmetric.
Physics has no sense of past and future.
So lots of philosophers have been puzzled, therefore, as to how something which seems to us as fundamental as causation could exist in the world and could be grounded on physics.
If it's not grounded on physics, then where could it be grounded?
So those sorts of thoughts have bothered philosophers for pretty much exactly 100 years, since one of the first people who raised them was Russell in 1912 in his famous paper on the notion of a cause.
So a typical story about cause and effect is one thing.
A biliable rolls into another biliable and causes it to move.