Causation and Time Reversal

Time - Reversal And

Time-Reversal and Entropy

There is a relation between the irreversibility of thermodynamic processes as expressed by the breaking of time-reversal symmetry, and the entropy production in such processes. We explain on an elementary mathematical level the relations between entropy production, phase-space contraction and time-reversal starting from a deterministic dynamics. Both closed and open systems, in the transient an...

The Time-Asymmetry of Causation

Time and Causation in Gödel’s Universe

In 1949 the great logician Kurt Gödel constructed the first mathematical models of the universe in which travel into the past is, in theory at least, possible. Within the framework of Einstein’s general theory of relativity Gödel produced cosmological solutions to Einstein’s field equations which contain closed time-like curves, that is, curves in spacetime which, despite being closed, still re...

Causation and Mental Causation

How the mind of a human being can determine the bodily spirits [i.e., the fluids in the nerves, muscles, etc.] in producing voluntary actions, being only a thinking substance. For it appears that all determination of movement is produced by the pushing of the thing being moved, by the manner in which it is pushed by that which moves it, or else by the qualification and figure of the surface of ...