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200 | Solo: The Philosophy of the Multiverse

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

Is There a Problem With Quantum Gravity?

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The eternal fluctuating cosmology is a kind of a multi verse in time. It's not like different regions of space are different universes. But if you wait long enough, whatever kind of universe you want to think about will fluctuate existence. So it is effectively a multiverse. Every single one of these three options is a consequence of other ideas. And so that's a real problem. The paper that kemmon jason and i wrote tried to say that it's easy to avoid this problem if you make certain assumptions about quantum gravity. But of course, we don't know if those assumptions are true. Ok?

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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