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Join me as I explore the limits of knowledge and technology in weekly interviews with academics, writers & entrepreneurs. In discussion with philosophers, poets, and physicists we’ll delve into foundational questions in arts and science.
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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.
Things 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 resolved. But if the claims capture some objective feature of the world, what is it?
Our guest is Alastair Wilson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Leeds. He takes chance seriously, in particular, he is a realist about our modal claims (claims like “either candidate could win” or “if Szilard hadn’t got Spanish flu, the atom bomb would not have been invented”) may be true or false, not just opinions or expressions of ignorance.
Alastair does this by connecting our modal talk to Everettian quantum mechanics. He argues that modal claims are assertions about the many worlds within the universal wavefunction. If in all worlds where Szilard did not succumb to Spanish flu, the atom bomb was never invented, then this claim would be true.
It is a bold and fascinating way of bringing physics and metaphysics together. What can happen, what is possible, what could have been? These become questions for natural science.
![33| Taking Chance Seriously — Alastair Wilson on Quantum Modal Realism](https://i0.wp.com/media.zencastr.com/image-files/60705078bbf173004d3d8eb5/d099f5b4-e657-4fdc-8c8c-bd9896023b8a.png?w=915&ssl=1)