Sean Carroll
speaker
26,727 appearances
49 recordings
4 series
first heard Apr 2024
last heard 21 Sep
Sean Carroll’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 29 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 6.
Appearances
And the idea is just except for indexical facts, which is to say, if there are multiple copies of me, I don't know which one I am.
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That's a true uncertainty.
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And he lets that's that you're allowed to think yourself typical within the set of all people who look exactly like you, okay?
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That's fine.
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But there's no reason to forget everything else you know about the universe and think you're typical within the set of all observers.
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And so the question is saying, you know, if you do that, if you do that way, how how can you recover
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ts traditional anthropic reasoning.
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Wouldn't you favor uh I if I understand the question, I'm not completely sure.
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Um but if if you favor a universe where every place is hospitable to life, isn't it just more likely, I'm guessing this is the idea, um
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It's just more likely to exist in that universe than one where some regions of space allow for life, but not others.
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So there's two things going on here, two parts of the answer here.
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One is
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There's a very standard um uh standard in the sense that everyone agrees on it thing, part of Bayesian reasoning, which is you need a prior on these different theories.
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So if you had two theories, one of which predicted many, many, many regions of space, all of which were hospitable to life, and another one which only predicted a tiny fraction are hospitable to life, and
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your priors on both of them were equal, right?
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They seemed equally reasonable in terms of the physical mechanism that could create these kinds of universes, et cetera, then I'm perfectly happy pr preferring the one that has more living beings in it, right?
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Uh that that's just the saying that that universe is more likely to support an observer like me.
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I I don't actually have any problem with that.
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I mean, if
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I think that the general reason why you appeal to anthropic reasoning is because in order to have a theory where
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Showing 801–820 of 26,727 · page 41 of 1337
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