200 | Solo: The Philosophy of the Multiverse

The 200th episode of Mindscape! Thanks to everyone for sticking around for this long. To celebrate, a solo episode discussing a set of issues naturally arising at the intersection of philosophy and physics: how to think about probabilities and expectations in a multiverse. Here I am more about explaining the issues than offering correct answers, although I try to do a bit of that as well. Support Mindscape on Patreon . References: Guth, “ Inflation and Eternal Inflation “ Weinberg, “ Living In the Multiverse “ Susskind, “ The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory “ Carroll, Johnson, and Randall, “ Dynamical Compactification from De Sitter Space “ Sebens and Carroll, “ Self-Locating Uncertainty and the Origin of Probability in Everettian Quantum Mechanics “ Wald, “ Asymptotic behavior of homogeneous cosmological models in the presence of a positive cosmological constant “ Gibbons and Hawking, “ Cosmological Event Horizons, Thermodynamics, and Particle Creation “ Carroll and Chatwin-Davies, “ Cosmic Equilibration: A Holographic No-Hair Theorem from the Generalized Second Law “ Dyson, Kleban, and Susskind, “ Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant “ Albrecht and Sorbo, “ Can the Universe Afford Inflation? “ Boddy, Carroll, and Pollack, “ De Sitter Space Without Dynamical Quantum Fluctuations “ Carroll, “ Why Boltzmann Brains Are Bad “ Aguirre, Carroll, and Johnson, “ Out of Equilibrium: Understanding Cosmological Evolution to Lower-Entropy States “ Carroll, “ Beyond Falsifiabiliy: Normal Science in a Multiverse “ Carter and McCrea, “ The Anthropic Principle and its Implications for Biological Evolution “ Leslie, “ Doomsday Revisited “ Gott, “ Implications of the Copernican Principle for Our Future Prospects “ Bostrom, Anthropic Bias Vilenkin, “ The Principle of Mediocrity “ Olum, “ Conflict Between Anthropic Reasoning and Observation “ Elga, “ Self-Locating Belief and the Sleeping Beauty Problem “ Lewis, “ Sleeping Beauty: Reply to Elga “ Hartle and Srednicki, “ Are We Typical? “ Hartle and Srednicki, “ Science in a Very Large Universe “ Neal, “ Puzzles of Anthropic Reasoning Resolved Using Fully Non-Indexical Conditioning “ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .