MULTIVERSES
by James Robinson
Latest episode
A Story For Humanity — Minhyong Kim on Why Maths Will Never End
A Story For Humanity — Minhyong Kim on Why Maths Will Never End
About this podcast
Coffee table conversations with people thinking about foundational issues. Multiverses explores the limits of knowledge and technology. Does quantum mechanics tell us that our world is one of many? Will AI make us intellectually lazy, or expand our cognitive range? Is time a thing in itself or a measure of change? Join James Robinson as he tries to find out.
Episodes
The newest 20 of 41 episodes
- A Story For Humanity — Minhyong Kim on Why Maths Will Never End · 1 h 12 min · Season 1 Episode 41Gauss famously described mathematics as the queen of the sciences. But how should we think of this discipline? Is it an aloof ruler, mysteriously governing the laws of nature? A…
- Molecules & Mirrors —Vanessa Seifert on the Philosophy of Chemistry · 1 h 9 min · Season 1 Episode 40Why do molecules have a "handedness" when the physics that determines their structure does not?* This is a question emblematic of the philosophy of chemistry; at times, it has…
- Consciousness is not Computation — Christof Koch · 1 h 2 min · Season 1 Episode 39Christof Koch is a pioneering neuroscientist and one of the most prominent advocates of a scientific approach to consciousness. He has spent decades working at the intersection…
- Where Does It End? — Adrian Moore on The Infinite · 1 h 16 min · Season 1 Episode 38Infinity may seem simple, just the absence of limits. But the closer we examine it, the more it unravels into paradox and mystery. Can some infinities be larger than others? How…
- 37| Mind-Wandering — Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva on the Science of Spontaneous Thought · 1 h 38 min · Season 1 Episode 37Mind-wandering is often dismissed as a distraction, an idle drift away from productive thought. But what if this spontaneous movement of the mind is not just a quirk of cognition…
- 36| History of Science: Mythmaking & Contingency — Patricia Fara · 1 h 29 min · Season 1 Episode 36Scientific discoveries can often be codified in simple laws, neatly stated in textbooks with directions on applying them. But the enterprise of science is embedded in society. It…
- 35| Hypercomputation: Why Machines May never Think Like Humans — Selmer Bringsjord · 1 h 39 min · Season 1 Episode 35AI can do many things equally well as humans: such as writing plausible prose or answering exam questions. In certain domains, AI goes far beyond human capabilities — playing…
- 34| Animal Minds — Kristin Andrews on why assuming consciousness would aid science · 1 h 14 min · Season 1 Episode 34There is no consensus on what minds are, but there is plenty of agreement on where they can be found: in humans. Yet human consciousness may account for only a small proportion…
- 33| Taking Chance Seriously — Alastair Wilson on Quantum Modal Realism · 1 h 25 min · Season 1 Episode 33Things happen. Or they don't. How then should we make sense of claims that something might happen? If all these claims do is express doubt, then the puzzle can be easily…
- AI Moonshot — Nell Watson on the Near & Not So Near Future of Intelligence · 1 h 11 min · Season 1 Episode 32The launch of ChatGPT was a "Sputnik moment". In making tangible decades of progress it shot AI to the fore of public consciousness. This attention is accelerating AI development…
- Do Electrons Exist? — Céline Henne: Physicist's Views on Scientific Realism & Instrumentalism · 1 h 38 min · Season 1 Episode 31Physics helps get stuff done. Its application has put rockets in space, semiconductors in phones, and eclipses on calendars. For some philosophers, this is all physics offers…
- 30| Thinking Beyond Language — Anna Ivanova on what LLMs can learn from the brain · 1 h 39 min · Season 1 Episode 30It can be tempting to consider language and thought as inextricably linked. As such we might conclude that LLM's human-like capabilities for manipulating language indicate a…
- 29 | What are words good for? — Nikhil Krishnan on Ordinary Language Philosophy · 1 h 37 min · Season 1 Episode 29Words. (Huh? Yeah!) What are they good for? Absolutely everything. At least this was the view of some philosophers early in the 20th century, that the world was bounded by…
- 28| Music Evolution & Empirical Aesthetics — Manuel Anglada Tort · 1 h 36 min · Season 1 Episode 28Music may be magical. But it is also rooted in the material world. As such it can be the subject of empirical inquiry. How does what we are told of a performer influence our…
- 27| Why Knowledge is Not Enough — Jessie Munton · 1 h 24 min · Season 1 Episode 27If all my beliefs are correct, could I still be prejudiced? Philosophers have spent a lot of time thinking about knowledge. But their efforts have focussed on only certain…
- 26| Networks, Heartbeats & the Pace of Cities — Geoffrey West · 1 h 54 min · Season 1 Episode 26Why do whales live longer than hummingbirds? What makes megacities more energy efficient than towns? Is the rate of technological innovation sustainable? Though apparently…
- 25| Peter Nixey — AI: Disruption Ahead · 1 h 17 min · Season 1 Episode 25It's easy to recognize the potential of incremental advances — more efficient cars or faster computer chips for instance. But when a genuinely new technology emerges, often even…
- 24| How Philosophy Serves Science — David Papineau · 1 h 16 min · Season 1 Episode 24Are philosophy and science entirely different paradigms for thinking about the world? Or should we think of them as continuous: overlapping in their concerns and complementary in…
- 23| Paulina Sliwa — Moral philosophy as puzzles of daily life · 1 h 11 min · Season 1 Episode 23Why do men do less housework? What happens when an apology is offered? What are we looking for when we ask for advice? These are the sorts of problems drawn from everyday…
- 22| Sean McMahon — Astrobiology: what is life & how to know it when we see it? · 1 h 20 min · Season 1 Episode 22Life. What is it? How did it start? Is it unique to Earth, rare or abundantly distributed throughout the universe? While biology has made great strides in the last two hundred…
