Geometrodynamics as Functionalism About Time

Functionalism, Reductionism, and Levels of Reality

“…Lam and Wüthrich 2018), the assumption would be that the former kind of entity is functionally reduced to the latter and not the other way round. The same would hold for the relation between thermodynamic quantities and statistical mechanical ones, as in the functional reductionist account proposed by Robertson (2022); within the cases considered by Butterfield and Gomes (2020b); and also in the philosophy of mind, where mental states are functionally reduced to brain states (cf. Lewis 1972;Kim 1998).…”

“…In the philosophy of mind (cf. Kim 1998), the reduction of folk psychology to physiology is used to functionally reduce mental states to brain states; in Wüthrich (2018, 2020), theoretical reduction of general relativity to quantum gravity backs the functional reduction of space-time to nonspatiotemporal structures; in Albert (2015) and Lorenzetti (2022), theoretical reduction between laws of quantum mechanics and classical laws is used to argue for the functional reduction of three-dimensional entities to quantum wave functions; finally, a realist stance is supported by Butterfield and Gomes (2020b) in the recovery of time from geometrodynamics. 8 We can thus notice that, given that the Lewisian model delivers (deduced) bridge laws in the form of identities between the theoretical terms, if we give an ontological interpretation of those terms, then it follows that functional reduction entails (type) identity relations between the elements of the two ontologies.…”