The Enigma of Boltzmann Brains

Huw Price is the former Bertrand Russell Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and was before that Challis Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney, and then—even before that—was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh. Huw is an expert across a wide variety of subdomains within the family of philosophy of science and physics, and in this episode he and Robinson discuss topics drawn from the philosophy of time, ranging from its flow and direction to its relationship to causation and quantum mechanics. Huw is also the author of Naturalism Without Mirrors and Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time. You can keep up with Huw on his website, prce.hu, and via his Twitter account, @HuwPriceAU.

OUTLINE

00:00 Introduction

2:22 Huw's Background

4:23 The A- and B-Series of Time

12:57 The Flow of Time

25:49 Boltzmann Brains

33:30 The Arrow of Time

38:23 The Fixed Past and The Open Future

50:31 Quantum Mechanics and Retrocausality

Robinson's Website: http://robinsonerhardt.com

Robinson Erhardt researches symbolic logic and the foundations of mathematics at Stanford University. Join him in conversations with philosophers, scientists, weightlifters, artists, and everyone in-between.