Eddy Keming Chen is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. He works on philosophy of physics, philosophy of science, and metaphysics. He is also a fellow of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics and an affiliated faculty member of the UCSD Chinese studies program. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy, a M.Sc in mathematics, and a graduate certificate in cognitive science from Rutgers University, New Brunswick in 2019.
What would your childhood self say if someone told you that you would grow up to be a philosopher?
“Wait… I’m not going to study dinosaurs? No!!!”
If you could be anyone else for a day, who would that be and why?
Either one of my two cats. It’d be extremely useful for me to understand why they try to wake me up every morning at 4 a.m. by meowing loudly outside the bedroom.
What do you like to do outside work?
Sports: I love stand-up paddle boarding, although I am still a beginner. Non-sports: I enjoy science fiction stories. I am currently co-writing a screenplay about a time-travel romance. My task is to describe a physically possible scenario (consistent with the laws of physics) where the romance can take place. I’m still trying to figure that out. This SEP article provides some nice toy models.
What topic do you think that is under explored in philosophy?
Whether and how vagueness can be a feature of the fundamental laws of physics. It’s a highly theoretical issue but I think it has interesting implications for both philosophy and science.
We usually think of vagueness as features associated with a heap of sand, the edge of a cloud, and someone’s baldness. We might think that vagueness won’t exist at the fundamental level of reality. In particular, the fundamental laws of physics shouldn’t be vague. Well, that idea has some plausibility. If the world is governed (or described) by some fundamental laws of physics, and if those laws are perfectly expressed using precise mathematical equations, then there seems to be no room for fundamental laws to be vague. Every fundamental law has to be exact.
I am not sure that is the case. I explain it here. A popular version was published in the September 5, 2019 issue of the British science magazine New Scientist. Here is a penultimate version. Now, if some fundamental laws turn out to be vague, and if vagueness cannot be perfectly expressed using conventional mathematics (built on set theory), then not every part of fundamental physics can be perfectly expressed in the language of conventional mathematics. That seems to go against a long tradition in science. What then is the perfect language? I am not sure, and I hope to do more work on this in the future.
What are you working on right now?
For the past few years, I’ve been developing a framework for thinking about the distinction between the past and the future in relation to the problems of quantum entanglement. I call the framework the “Wentaculus.” It provides a certain kind of unification of the foundations of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. It also offers new solutions to several problems in philosophy of physics and metaphysics of science. See here and here.
Right now, I am working on applying the Wentaculus to a new idea called “nomic vagueness” (see also answer to the previous question). Nomic vagueness is vagueness in the fundamental laws of nature. It arises when we try to add a fundamental law (called the “Past Hypothesis”) to explain the macroscopic arrows of time. In such a world, nomic vagueness is difficult to eliminate, if the world is governed by classical mechanical laws (think of Newton’s laws). Surprisingly, if the world is quantum mechanical, in the way described by the Wentaculus, such nomic vagueness can be easily eliminated. An interesting upshot is that, far from making the world fuzzy, quantum mechanics actually makes it more precise in some sense.
I am also working on a few other projects. Here are three I hope to finish soon. The first is on the intrinsic structure of quantum mechanics (an extension of Hartry Field’s nominalistic program), which I started as part of my Ph.D. dissertation at Rutgers. The second is a joint paper with the mathematical physicist Shelly Goldstein on “minimal primitivism about laws of nature” where we develop a minimalist non-Humean conception of fundamental laws that does not assume a fundamental arrow of time. The third is a book project on laws of physics under contract with Cambridge University Press (as part of the Cambridge Elements in Philosophy of Physics). I’m also working on a few other papers about decision theory, philosophy of mind, and Chinese philosophy.
If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know?
The fundamental laws of physics and the ‘initial condition’ of the universe. If I had enough computational power, from them I would be able to derive everything else (physical).
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Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
