200 | Solo: The Philosophy of the Multiverse

<p>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.</p><p><em>Support Mindscape on&nbsp;</em><a href="https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Patreon</em></a><em>.</em></p><p>References:</p><ul><li>Guth, “<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0002156" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Inflation and Eternal Inflation</a>“</li><li>Weinberg, “<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0511037" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Living In the Multiverse</a>“</li><li>Susskind, “<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0302219" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory</a>“</li><li>Carroll, Johnson, and Randall, “<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/0904.3115" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Dynamical Compactification from De Sitter Space</a>“</li><li>Sebens and Carroll, “<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.7577" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Self-Locating Uncertainty and the Origin of Probability in Everettian Quantum Mechanics</a>“</li><li>Wald, “<a href="https://inspirehep.net/literature/188658" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Asymptotic behavior of homogeneous cosmological models in the presence of a positive cosmological constant</a>“</li><li>Gibbons and Hawking, “<a href="https://inspirehep.net/literature/125663" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cosmological Event Horizons, Thermodynamics, and Particle Creation</a>“</li><li>Carroll and Chatwin-Davies, “<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.09241" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cosmic Equilibration: A Holographic No-Hair Theorem from the Generalized Second Law</a>“</li><li>Dyson, Kle