Sean Carroll

Rationals, people sometimes have a criticism of the form, you always think you're right.

And I mean if that means the opinion that I have at any one moment is the one that I think is right, then yes.

How could it be any other way?

But of course what they – I think that the legitimate criticism is you're unwilling to ever admit that you could be wrong, right?

Yeah.

I see.

So it's having a confidence and an opinion, but also a feeling that my confidence might be misplaced.

All right, good.

Well, let's work our way up toward that.

And there's a lot of juicy philosophical groundwork to lay here that you and I have probably read about, but maybe not the audience.

Am I right in thinking that a lot of this goes back to Derek Parfit's talk back in the day about teletransporters and self-locating uncertainty?

Why don't you explain what that particular version is?

Because I think people are familiar enough with Star Trek that they can get just an example of where self-locating uncertainty could arise in general.

it seems like a perfectly good question.

I will, as a footnote mentioned that I think regular people talk about teleportation and they talk about the transporter machine on Star Trek, but only philosophers talk about teletransportation.

Okay.

But if there are two copies of me, um, I'm, I'm just going to play the dumb podcast host now, 50, 50 that I'm one or the other.

What else could it possibly be?

Okay.

And so we can actually take stances here.