[PhilWeb] Lugano Philosophy Colloquia (Hybrid)

We are pleased to announce that on Friday, May 9 at 5.30pm (CET), Cristian Mariani (University of Italian Switzerland) will give the talk Non-Markovian Collapse Models as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia Spring 2025 organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI. This hybrid talk will take place in Room 1.2 FTL Building (USI west campus) and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to events.isfi(a)usi.ch. Here is the abstract of the talk: Spontaneous collapse models (SCM) employ an imaginary noise term in the modification of Schrödinger's equation in order to achieve a stochastic collapse process. Such noise term is typically assumed to be white, and therefore uncorrelated in time, which results in the dynamics being Markovian. In this talk I begin by discussing the reasons why physicists are exploring the possibility to instead employ non-white stochastic noise terms in the dynamics of SCM, and I then briefly introduce these models. In the second part, I am going to evaluate two broadly philosophical consequences of the non-Markovian models. First, I challenge some arguments, made by Builes & Impagnatiello (forthcoming) and by Adlam (2018), pointing to a connection between Markovianity (or lack thereof) and temporal ontology. Second, I discuss the ontological status of the noise field within the context of SCM. For more information: https://www.usi.ch/en/feeds/31750