TrueSciPhi

Podcast Profile: MULTIVERSES

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40 episodes
2023 to 2025
Median: 88 minutes
Collection: SciPhi-Adjacent

Description (podcaster-provided):

Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):

This podcast features long-form conversations about foundational questions at the intersection of philosophy, science, and technology. Across the episodes, the host speaks with philosophers, scientists, and practitioners to examine where established explanations start to strain—whether in physics, mathematics, cognitive science, biology, or the social consequences of new tools—and what kinds of reasoning might help.

A recurring thread is the nature and limits of knowledge: how scientific theories relate to reality, what counts as explanation or understanding, and whether some problems (such as measurement in quantum mechanics, the status of theoretical entities, or the meaning of “possible” and “could have happened”) demand philosophical interpretation alongside technical work. Discussions often move between concrete case studies—like quantum interpretations, time and causation, infinity, or the structure of laws—and higher-level questions about reductionism, realism versus instrumentalism, and the role of thought experiments and conceptual analysis in science.

Another major theme is mind and cognition. The podcast explores competing approaches to consciousness, including whether computation is sufficient, how to think about unified experience, and what neuroscience implies about the relationship between language and thought. It also considers spontaneous cognition such as mind-wandering, as well as comparative perspectives on animal minds and play, and what these imply for studying consciousness more broadly.

Technology—especially contemporary AI—appears both as an object of analysis and as a catalyst for social and ethical questions. Episodes probe the capabilities and limits of machine intelligence, potential trajectories for agentic systems, safety and governance issues, fairness tradeoffs, responsibility, and how AI might reshape knowledge-sharing, work, and human habits of thinking.

The show also ranges into broader “big picture” topics such as long-term futures and scenario planning, climate policy concepts like net zero and carbon removal, the search for life beyond Earth, and cross-disciplinary methods that apply tools from one domain (e.g., networks or phylogenetics) to another. Throughout, the emphasis is on exploring boundaries—between disciplines, between models and reality, and between what we can currently explain and what remains open.

Episodes:

Molecules & Mirrors —Vanessa Seifert on the Philosophy of Chemistry 2025-Dec-05 69 minutes

Consciousness is not Computation — Christof Koch 2025-May-02 62 minutes

Where Does It End? — Adrian Moore on The Infinite 2025-Mar-14 76 minutes

37| Mind-Wandering — Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva on the Science of Spontaneous Thought 2025-Jan-31 98 minutes

36| History of Science: Mythmaking & Contingency — Patricia Fara 2024-Dec-23 89 minutes

35| Hypercomputation: Why Machines May never Think Like Humans — Selmer Bringsjord 2024-Nov-08 99 minutes

34| Animal Minds — Kristin Andrews on why assuming consciousness would aid science 2024-Aug-27 74 minutes

33| Taking Chance Seriously — Alastair Wilson on Quantum Modal Realism 2024-Jul-19 85 minutes

AI Moonshot — Nell Watson on the Near & Not So Near Future of Intelligence 2024-Jun-21 71 minutes

Do Electrons Exist? — Céline Henne: Physicist's Views on Scientific Realism & Instrumentalism 2024-Jun-04 98 minutes

30| Thinking Beyond Language — Anna Ivanova on what LLMs can learn from the brain 2024-May-15 99 minutes

29 | What are words good for? — Nikhil Krishnan on Ordinary Language Philosophy 2024-Apr-12 97 minutes

28| Music Evolution & Empirical Aesthetics — Manuel Anglada Tort 2024-Mar-28 96 minutes

27| Why Knowledge is Not Enough — Jessie Munton 2024-Mar-14 84 minutes

26| Networks, Heartbeats & the Pace of Cities — Geoffrey West 2024-Feb-29 114 minutes

25| Peter Nixey — AI: Disruption Ahead 2024-Feb-15 77 minutes

24| How Philosophy Serves Science — David Papineau 2024-Feb-01 76 minutes

23| Paulina Sliwa — Moral philosophy as puzzles of daily life 2024-Jan-18 71 minutes

22| Sean McMahon — Astrobiology: what is life & how to know it when we see it? 2024-Jan-04 80 minutes

21| How and why do animals play? — Gordon Burghardt 2023-Dec-21 72 minutes

20| Simon Kirby — Language Evolution & Emergence of Structure 2023-Dec-07 93 minutes

19| The Meaning of Net Zero — Myles Allen 2023-Nov-16 54 minutes

18| Feeling Right: Emotions & Ethics — James Hutton 2023-Nov-02 108 minutes

17| Santiago Bilinkis — Artificial Intelligence: Risks & Rewards 2023-Oct-19 93 minutes

16| Gábor Domokos — The Gömböc, a shape at the limit of possibility 2023-Oct-05 85 minutes

15 | Simon Critchley — Philosophical itches & how to scratch 2023-Sep-21 89 minutes

14| ChatGPT as a Glider — James Intriligator 2023-Sep-07 97 minutes

13| Phylogeny & The Canterbury Tales — Peter Robinson 2023-Aug-24 68 minutes

12 | The Long Now — Peter Schwartz 2023-Aug-10 87 minutes

11| AI, Risk, Fairness & Responsibility — John Zerilli 2023-Jul-20 100 minutes

10| Plants, Roots, Spirals and Palaeobotany — Sandy Hetherington 2023-Jul-13 82 minutes

9| The Hunt for Hydrogen — Rūta Karolytė 2023-Jul-06 112 minutes

8 | Harald Wiltsche — Thought Experiments, Mach, Galileo & Phenomenology 2023-Jun-29 99 minutes

7| Anna Lewis — Genomics, polygenic risk scores, genetic ancestry, race & ethics 2023-Jun-22 107 minutes

6| Christian Bök — Poetry, Constraints, DNA & The Xenotext 2023-Jun-15 111 minutes

5| QBism: The World is Unfinished — Ruediger Schack 2023-Jun-08 93 minutes

4| Science & Poetry — Sam Illingworth 2023-Jun-01 77 minutes

3| Julian Barbour — Relational Space and Time 2023-May-25 75 minutes

2 | David Wallace — The Emergent Multiverse 2023-May-18 87 minutes

1 | Casey Handmer — Mining the Air 2023-May-11 91 minutes