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200 | Solo: The Philosophy of the Multiverse

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

The Probability of You Existing

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The probability of you existing is going to be proportional to the number of observers, right? Beause if we rule out these eternal, infinitely fluctuating universes, then the more observers we have in a universe that is doing all sorts of things, the more likely it is to land on exactly an observer like you. So roughly, this will sort of saturate, right? If you get to enough observers that there's probably more than one observer like you, than ou stop giving an extra bonus to large universes. The usual anthropic reasoning goes through as long as you don't use the fact you already know the cosmogical constant.

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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