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200 | Solo: The Philosophy of the Multiverse

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

The Doomsday Argument

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This leads to what is called the doomsday argument, that you predict imminent demise for humanityd let me explain what i mean by that. So we have a reference class, were gont asume we're typical within it. But what we do as we first assign a prior probability, and then we assume we're typicalWithin all the observers within that scenario. In theory a, the small universe theory, be a theory in which there are 200 billion human beings who will ever live. Theory b has 200 trillion, so over a thousand times the number that have already existed. Now those are our two scenarios. We have some prior that they are a likely or unlikely. What is the data

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.

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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“

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