Self-locating Uncertainty in the Cosmological Multiverse Workshop

August 26, 2021 - August 27, 2021
Rotman Institute of Philosophy, Western University

London N6A 3K7
Canada

Speakers:

University of Groningen
University of Pittsburgh
London School of Economics

Talks at this conference

Add a talk

Details

Self-locating Uncertainty in the Cosmological Multiverse Workshop August 26-27, 2021, 9:00am-12:00pm EST (via Zoom)

Several issues in cosmology have increasingly raised concerns about self-locating uncertainty.  It seems to many that to understand how the universe originated and how it is, we need to better understand how to think about where we are in it, or where we should expect ourselves to be.  On one hand, considerations of self-locating belief may hold our best hope for confirming or disconfirming multiverse theories.  On the other, self-locating considerations lead to seemingly intractable puzzles.  Prominent among those is the “measure problem”:  to assign an appropriate self-locating probability measure over a countably infinite multiverse.  Can alternative approaches to probability overcome this challenge?  Is an altogether non-probabilistic inductive logic called for?  Does freedom in the choice of a measure and an “observer proxy” make cosmologists’ results unreliable?  Do self-locating considerations require us to rethink familiar applications of probability theory in quantum mechanics or games of chance?  Can we confirm theories in a large universe without considering self-location?  These are among the questions that we seek to debate, connect, and progress in this workshop.

Speakers:

Simon Friederich (University of Groningen), The Problem of Researcher Degrees of Freedom in Multiverse Theory Testing Marie Gueguen (University of Pittsburgh), The Born Supremacy John D. Norton (University of Pittsburgh), Eternal Inflation: When Probabilities Fail Matthew W. Parker (Rotman Institute of Philosophy), The Teacup Game: Probability and Permutation Invariance in an Infinite Universe Sylvia Wenmackers (KU Leuven), Paradoxical Probabilities in the Context of Cosmology  

Supporting material

Add supporting material (slides, programs, etc.)

Reminders

Registration

Yes

August 25, 2021, 9:00am EST

External Site

Who is attending?

No one has said they will attend yet.

Will you attend this event?


Let us know so we can notify you of any change of plan.

RSVPing on PhilEvents is not sufficient to register for this event.

Custom tags:

#WesternPhilosophy