MULTIVERSES

Gauss 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 vital tool for bettering our lot? Or a story that helps us understand nature?   Professor Minhyong Kim directs the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences and the Centre for Mathematics for Humanity in Edinburg...

Why 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 been used to argue that chemistry cannot be reduced to physics. However, Vanessa Seifert has a different — yet equally intriguing — answer. This symmetry breaking is closely linked to that contentious area of qua...

Christof 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 of neuroscience, philosophy, and computation. Christof is one of the foremost proponents of Integrated Information Theory (IIT) — a radical proposal that attempts to explain consciousness in terms of causal structure. &nbsp...

Infinity 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 can an infinite hotel be fully booked yet still have room for more guests? In this episode of Multiverses, I’m joined by Adrian Moore, professor of philosophy at Oxford, to explore these questions. We dive into Hilbert’s H...

Mind-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 but a fundamental feature of how we think, create, and find meaning?   Our guest, Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia where she leads The Cognitive Neurosc...

Scientific 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 depends on individuals and economies. It is far from simple to answer the question: How did we get these laws?  Patricia Fara is an Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. She is a former president of the Britis...

AI 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 chess for instance. We might expect that nothing prevents machines from one day besting humans at every task. Indeed, it is often asserted that, in principle, everything (and more) within the range of human cognition will one...

There 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 of the consciousness on our planet.   Our guest, Kristin Andrews, is a Professor of Animal Minds at the University of York, Ontario, Canada. She is a philosopher working in close contact with biologists and cognitive s...

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 abo...

The 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 as dollars are poured into scaling models.   What is the next stage in this journey? And where is the destination?    My guest this week, Nell Watson, offers a broad perspective on the possible traject...

Physics 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. It is a mere instrument, albeit of great power, giving us control over tangible things. It is a set of gears and widgets (wavefunctions, strings, even electrons) to crank out predictions.  In contrast to instrumen...

It 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 corresponding level of thinking.    However, neuroscience research suggests that thought and language can be teased apart, perhaps the latter is more akin to an input-output interface, or an area of triage for proble...

Words. (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 language. ("The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" to use Wittgenstein's formulation over the Edwin Starr adaptation) My guest this week is Nikhil Krishnan a philosopher at University of Cambridge and frequent co...

Music 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 appreciation of the performance? Does sunshine change our listening habits? How do rhythms and melodies change as they are passed along, as in a game of Chinese whispers? Our guest is Manuel Anglada Tort, a lecturer at G...

If 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 questions. What makes it such that a person knows something? What styles of inquiry deliver knowledge? Jessie Munton is a philosopher at the University of Cambridge. She is one of several people broadening the scope of epistemol...

Why do whales live longer than hummingbirds? What makes megacities more energy efficient than towns? Is the rate of technological innovation sustainable?   Though apparently disparate the answer to these questions can be found in the work of theoretical physicist Geoffrey West. Geoffrey is Shannan Distinguished Professor at the Santa Fe Institute where he was formerly the president. &nbs...

It'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 its creators are unaware of how it will reshape our lives. So it is with AI, and this is where I start my discussion with Peter Nixey. Peter is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, developer, and startup advisor. He reas...

Are 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 their tools? David Papineau is a professor at Kings College London and the author of over a dozen books. He's thought about many topics — consciousness, causation the arrow of time, the interpretation of quantum mechanics...

Why 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 experience that Paulina Sliwa intends to resolve and in doing so make sense of the ways we negotiate blame and responsibility. Paulina is a Professor of Moral & Political Philosophy at the University of Vienna. She looks care...

Life. 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 years, these foundational questions remain almost as mysterious as ever. However, in the last three decades, astrobiology has emerged as an academic discipline focused on their resolution. Already we have seen progress, if n...

Many animals play. But why?  Play has emerged in species as distinct as rats, turtles, and octopi although they are separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution.  While some behaviors —  hunting or mating for example — are straightforwardly adaptive, play is more subtle. So how does it help animals survive and procreate?  Is it just fun? Or, as Huizinga put it, is it...

Language is the ultimate Lego. With it, we can take simple elements and construct them into an edifice of meaning. Its power is not only in mapping signs to concepts but in that individual words can be composed into larger structures.  How did this systematicity arise in language? Simon Kirby is the head of Linguistics and English Language at The University of Edinburgh and one of the founder...

To stop global warming it is not enough to stop atmospheric CO2 rising. That is not the meaning of net zero. Despite net zero being a core concept in the Paris Agreement, it appears to be much misunderstood. The idea of net zero can be traced back to the work of  Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science at Oxford and a veteran of several IPCC assessments.  Myles explains the original...

Can we trust our emotions as a guide to right and wrong? This week's guest James Hutton is a philosopher at the University of Delft who argues that emotions provide a way of testing our moral beliefs — similar to the way observations are used in natural sciences as evidence for or against theories. This is not to say that emotions are infallible, nor that they are not themselves influenced by our...

Could AI's ability to make us fall in love with be our downfall? Will AI be like cars, machines that encourage us to be sedentary, or will we use it like a cognitive bicycle — extending our intellectual range while still exercising our minds? These are some of the questions raised by this week's guest Santiago Bilinkis. Santiago is a serial entrepreneur who's written several books about the intera...