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. IIT begins not with the brain, but with experience itself. It takes as its starting point what is undenia...
May 02, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 39
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 Hotel, Cantor’s revolutionary work on transfinite numbers, and the philosophical and even theological...
Mar 14, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 38
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 Neuroscience of Thought Laboratory. Her work explores the neural mechanisms behind mind-wandering, uncovering how ...
Jan 31, 2025•1 hr 38 min•Season 1Ep. 37
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 British Society for the History of Science and has written Science: A Four Thousand Year History, Newton: The Ma...
Dec 23, 2024•1 hr 30 min•Season 1Ep. 36
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 day fall within the ken of AI. But what if there are concepts and ways of thinking that are off-lim...
Nov 08, 2024•1 hr 40 min•Season 1Ep. 35
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 scientists and has spent time living in the jungle to observe research on orangutans. Kristin notes that com...
Aug 27, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 34
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 about our modal claims (claims like “either candidate could win” or “if Szilard hadn’t got Spanish flu,...
Jul 19, 2024•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 33
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 trajectories. She sits in several IEEE groups looking at AI Ethics, safety & transparency, has founded AI companies, and is a co...
Jun 21, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 32
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 instrumentalists, scientific realists argue that the success of theories shows that they map onto the structure of the wo...
Jun 04, 2024•1 hr 38 min•Season 1Ep. 31
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 problem-solving. Language is a medium into which we can translate and transport concepts. Our guest this week is Anna I...
May 15, 2024•1 hr 39 min•Season 1Ep. 30
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 contributor to the The New Yorker His book A Terribly Serious Adventure, traces the path of Ordinary L...
Apr 12, 2024•1 hr 37 min•Season 1Ep. 29
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 Goldsmiths, University of London. He has investigated all those topics. We discuss the fields of Empirical ...
Mar 28, 2024•1 hr 37 min•Season 1Ep. 28
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 epistemology to ask: what sort of things do we (and should we) inquire about and how should we arrange our be...
Mar 14, 2024•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 27
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. By looking at the network structure of organisms, cities, and companies Geoffrey was able to explain mathematically ...
Feb 29, 2024•1 hr 54 min•Season 1Ep. 26
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 reasons that large language models are poised to bring enormous benefits, particularly in enabling far f...
Feb 15, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 25
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 — and in all of these he advocates engagement with science. The philosopher should take its cue fro...
Feb 01, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 24
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 carefully at evidence accessible to us all — daily conversations, testimony from shows like This America...
Jan 18, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 23
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 not aliens. The success of the space telescope Kepler in discovering exoplanets may come to mind. Equ...
Jan 04, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Season 1Ep. 22
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 the primeval soil of culture? Our guest this week is Gordon Burghardt, a professor at The University of Tennessee and the a...
Dec 21, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 21
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 founders of the Centre for Langauge Evolution and Change. Over several decades he and his collaborators have run ...
Dec 07, 2023•1 hr 34 min•Season 1Ep. 20
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 intent of net zero and what we really need to aim for: zero transfer of carbon between the geosphere (Earth's cr...
Nov 16, 2023•54 min•Season 1Ep. 19
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 moral beliefs, but that they do have a place in our moral inventory. In particular, the destabilizin...
Nov 02, 2023•1 hr 49 min•Season 1Ep. 18
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 interaction between humanity and technology. Artificial, his latest book, has just been released in Spanis...
Oct 19, 2023•1 hr 34 min•Season 1Ep. 17
The Gomboc is a curious shape. So curious many mathematicians thought it could not exist. And even to the untrained eye, it looks alien: neither the product of human or natural processes. This week Gábor Domokos relates his decade-long quest to prove the existence of a (convex, homogenous) shape with only two balance points. The Gömböc is not just a mathematical curio, its discovery led to a theory of how "things fall apart", of the processes of abrasion that — whether on Earth, mars, or deep sp...
Oct 05, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 16
From what human need does philosophy emerge? And where can it lead us? Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York, and a scholar of Heidegger, Pessoa, Football (Liverpool FC), and humour — among other things. He crosses over between analytic and continental traditions and freely draws on quotes from Hume, poetry and British pop bands. Simon argues that philosophy begins in disappointment, not wonder. But its goals can be wisdom, knowledge, enlightenment, ...
Sep 21, 2023•1 hr 30 min•Season 1Ep. 15
Large language models, such as ChatGPT are poised to change the way we develop, research, and perhaps even think. But how do we best understand LLMs to get the most from our prompting? Thinking of LLMs as deep neural networks, while correct, is not very useful in practical terms. It doesn't help us interact with them, rather as thinking of human behavior as nothing more than the result of neurons firing won't make you many friends. However, thinking of LLMs as search engines is also faulty — the...
Sep 07, 2023•1 hr 38 min•Season 1Ep. 14
The physical solidity of books encourages notions of "the text" or "the canonical edition". The challenges to this view from post-modernist thought are well known. But there are other ways in which this model of a static text may fail. Our guest this week is Peter Robinson (my dad!) who takes us through his work on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. This is a paradigmatic case of a work of literature that defies understanding as fixed text. Originally it would have been read, or performed. What exists ...
Aug 24, 2023•1 hr 9 min
For hundreds of years, things changed slowly. Innovations were infrequent and spread inchmeal. Population, culture, and the atmosphere, all were static decade-to-decade. We now see rapid change. It's hard to contemplate what now? let alone what next? Peter Schwartz is a futurist, SVP for Scenario Planning at Salesforce, author of The Art of Long View, and a founder of the Long Now Foundation. He thinks about the future, both envisioning its many possibilities and harnessing these scenarios to an...
Aug 10, 2023•1 hr 28 min
AI is already changing the world. It's tempting to assume that AI will be so transformative that we'll inevitably fail to harness it correctly, succumbing to its Promethean flames. While caution is due, it's instructive to note that in many respects AI does not create entirely new challenges but rather exacerbates or uncovers existing ones. This is one of the key themes that emerge in this discussion with John Zerilli. John is a philosopher specializing in AI, Data, and the Rule of Law at the Un...
Jul 20, 2023•1 hr 40 min•Season 1Ep. 11
Plants have transformed the surface of the earth and the contents of our atmosphere. To do this they've developed elaborate systems of roots and branches which (sometimes) follow uncanny mathematical patterns such as the Fibonacci sequence. Our guest this week, Sandy Hetherington, leads Edinburgh's Molecular Palaeobotany and Evolution Group. They take a no-holds-barred approach to understanding plant development by combining genomics, fossil records, herbaria, and 3D modeling. Dig in! Show notes...
Jul 13, 2023•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 10
