Sean Carroll: evaluation

Transcript context

…But if it in fact is correct, isn’t this the weirdest thing of anything we know? Yes. In fact, let me put it this way. The single best reason in my mind to be skeptical about many-worlds is not because it doesn’t make sense or it doesn’t fit the data or I don’t know where the worlds are going or whatever, it’s because to make that extrapolation, to take seriously the equation that we know is correct in other regimes requires new philosophy, requires a new way of thinking about identity, about probability, about prediction, a whole bunch of things. It’s work to do that philosophy, and I’ve been doing it and others have done it, and I think it’s very, very doable, but it’s not straightforward. It’s not a simple extrapolation from what we already know, it’s a grand extrapolation very far away. And if you just wanted to be methodologically conservative and say, “That’s a step too far; I don’t want to buy it,” I’m sympathetic to that. I think that you’re just wimping out, I think that you should have more courage, but I get the impulse. And there is, under many-worlds, an era of time where, if you rewind it back, there’s going to be one initial state.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.