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.