AMA | September 2025

Hello everyone, welcome to the September 2025 Ask Me Anything edition to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Big news here at Mindscape World International Headquarters is, of course, that teaching has started. It's the school year again. It's September.

I think as I've already mentioned, I'm teaching two courses this year. One is the philosophy of cosmology. which is a descendant of a course I taught three years ago, just called, at that point, Topics in Philosophy of Physics, but we have a good number of philosophers of physics or people able to teach those things at Hopkins. So we're trying to rationalize a division of labor between what we are teaching, and obviously cosmology is a good fit for me. I'm interpreting cosmology very broadly to include

Basic philosophical questions about how do you treat uh epistemology and for that matter metaphysics when you're living in a world that is very, very big. The way that the world might be very big is maybe because there's a multiverse or maybe because there's a quantum mechanical many worlds situation going on, where you enter into these situations of self-locating uncertainty or anthropic reasoning. things like that. So we'll talk about the arrow of time, we'll talk about inflation and the cosmological multiverse and fine-tuning, and then we will talk about quantum mechanics and and many worlds. It's a great fun course to teach because Hopkins is going through a transitional period with its course requirements and they have this new system.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (210 minutes, 39,111 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.