AMA | September 2025
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll
4.7 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2025
⏱️ 210 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to the September 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!
Blog post with AMA questions and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/09/08/ama-september-2025/
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, everyone. Welcome to the September 2025. Ask Me Anything Edition of the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Big news here at Mindscape World International Headquarters is, of course, the 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 |
| 0:23.3 | ago, just called at that point topics in philosophy of physics. But we have a good number of |
| 0:28.3 | philosophers of physics where people able to teach those things at Hopkins. So we're trying to |
| 0:32.6 | rationalize a division of labor between what we're teaching. And obviously, cosmology is a good fit for me. |
| 0:38.9 | I'm interpreting cosmology very broadly to include basic philosophical questions about |
| 0:45.0 | how do you treat epistemology. |
| 0:48.8 | And for that matter, metaphysics, when you're living in a world that is very, very big. |
| 0:53.0 | The way that the world might be very big is maybe because there's a multiverse |
| 0:56.6 | or maybe because there's a quantum mechanical many-world situation going on, |
| 1:00.8 | where you enter into these situations of self-locating uncertainty |
| 1:04.6 | or anthropic reasoning, things like that. |
| 1:07.7 | So we'll talk about the arrow of time. |
| 1:09.3 | We'll talk about inflation and the cosmological multiverse and fine-tuning. And then we'll talk about the arrow of time. We'll talk about inflation and the |
| 1:11.3 | cosmological multiverse and fine-tuning. And then we will talk about quantum mechanics and |
| 1:15.9 | many worlds. It's a great fun course to teach because Hopkins is going through a transitional |
| 1:22.3 | period with its course requirements and they have this new system. I'm not quite sure how well |
| 1:27.3 | the system is doing how well the system |
| 1:27.7 | is doing, but the system is that rather than saying you have to take, you know, so many |
| 1:32.1 | science courses, so many humanities courses or whatever, they have different, I forget |
| 1:37.6 | what they're called, foundational abilities or something like that. And different courses |
| 1:42.6 | can satisfy the requirement for a different kind of foundational |
| 1:46.0 | ability. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Sean Carroll, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Sean Carroll and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.