MULTIVERSES

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...

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...

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. &nbsp...

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...

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...

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...

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.  &nbsp...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...