345 | Adam Elga on Being Rational in a Very Large Universe
2/23/20261 hr 35 min
Behaving rationally involves facing up to conditions of uncertainty; we never navigate the world with perfect confidence. Sometimes we are uncertain about the way the world is, but we can also be uncertain about our place within the world. This kind of situation arises in cosmology (where the relevant world can extend very far in space or time), and also in quantum mechanics (where new worlds might be created at any measurement), but also when we are simply unsure about the future history of humanity or whether we live in a computer simulation. I talk with philosopher Adam Elga...
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now, and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion, and this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience and their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads. Go to libsynads.com. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N ads.com today.
Sean Carroll· Host0:39
[ding] Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the things we've talked about many times on the podcast is how you update your beliefs when new evidence comes in, that is to say, the process of Bayesian reasoning. Bayes's formula, of course, gives you a quantitative way of saying if I have some prior credence for some claim being true, and I very quantitatively measure some data, and I can calculate the likelihood of that data being obtained under all sorts of different propositions being true, I can update my credences to get, uh, one that takes that data into account. We don't necessarily every time work in such a quantitative vein, but this process