Abstract
Although we use randomness when we don’t know any better, a principle of indifference cannot be used to explain anything interesting or fundamental. For example, in thermodynamics it can be shown that the real explanatory work is being done by the Second Law, not the equal a priori probability postulate. But to explain the interesting Second Law, many physicists try to retreat to a “random explanation,” which fails. Looking at this problem from a different perspective reveals a natural solution: boundary-based explanations that arguably should be viewed as no less fundamental than other physical laws.
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- 1.
We’ll circle back to this in due course. Dynamical explanations explain relationships between states, not the states themselves.
- 2.
Unless someone tells you which rule to use (which “coarse-graining”), actual states cannot be said to have any entropy at all!
- 3.
A recent defense of random anthropic models can be found in [16].
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the Foundational Questions Institute, the Fetzer Franklin Fund, and the Peter & Patricia Gruber Foundation for hosting and sponsoring these always-interesting contests. Further thanks are due to those who led to improvements in this published version of the essay: Zeeya Merali, Alyssa Ney, Dean Rickles, and everyone else who commented on the original version.
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Wharton, K. (2019). Fundamental is Non-random. In: Aguirre, A., Foster, B., Merali, Z. (eds) What is Fundamental?. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11301-8_14
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