Emily Adlam

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1,263 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 20 Jul

Emily Adlam’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal · Emily Adlam: Reality Is a Completed Puzzle, Not a Flowing River · 11 Apr 2025 podcast

So the the goal of

This paper was to sort of provide

a a clarifying story which would help explain um, you know, what's going on with these terms and perhaps can can we have a sort of community wide uh consensus about how to use these words so we can have discussions more clearly.

Uh yes.

So uh time travel, you know, much like a retro causality, could be temporally local or temporally non local.

Um, you know, if your vision of time travel involves people literally moving backwards in time.

Sorry, the cat is

uh in those people literally traveling backwards in time, that's gonna look like a temporally local form of of of time travel if the if there's a sort of literal path back in in time that they go around.

Um on the other hand, if they just kind of disappear at one point and then reappear at another point, that's gonna look temporarily non local because there's a sort of cause that just jumped across time.

Uh so I think I either of those is possible as a model of time travel.

The if you look at uh the the all at once style of model, that does seem like it has some implications for free will, uh, because some people have thought that uh, you know, something that's important to free will is the idea that the future is genuinely open, that you know, in this moment as I am acting, there is no fact of the matter about what my action is gonna be.

Um and it's uh in in an all-at-on style model, that way of thinking about free will is not available to you.

uh the whole of the universe exists at once, uh I'm acting now, but there is already some some fact from the atemporal point of view about what my action is going to be.

So uh you know, I don't don't think that means we have to say there is no such thing as free will in that context, but certainly we're going to have to be a bit more careful about how we analyze free will and what that means.

Yeah, so even if it if even if you have a probabilistic model in the all at once context, uh what that's gonna going to look like is either it's gonna be some kind of frequency constraint, uh uh as Eddie Chen has suggested, or perhaps it's going to be uh, you know

the the hist co the course of history is selected in a probabilistic way from some set of possibilities.

But either way you ha you end up saying the course of history is determined all at once.

So there's no sense in which I'm acting now and yet my future actions are still open, uh even if they're probabilistic, they have from this atemporal point of view already been chosen.

Yeah, um s I mean so because I think that causation is is not fundamental in any case, um, I think that you know understanding how the the the history comes about is not going to involve any kind of of causal story.

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