Joel David Hamkins: belief

Transcript context

…Like reverse-engineering the forcing? Yeah, something like that. Forcing is a way of producing a new universe. And so you could start somewhere and go to that new universe, or you could look where you are and say, “Well, look, I got here by doing that already in the past.” So we defined models of the bedrock model and ground, sort of undoing the forcing. And really, it was quite fruitful. And I view this as part of the pluralist perspective, except the difference is that set-theoretic geology is amenable to the universe view. So even though the work was inspired by this philosophical view on the multiverse view, nevertheless, the central ideas of geology have now been picked up by the people with the research program in the universe view, because it turns out that set-theoretic geology is helping them or us to discover the nature of the one true universe relates to its mantle. There’s this concept of the set-theoretic mantle that I had introduced in a way that is extremely interesting. And so it’s historically quite funny, I think, because this research program that grew entirely out of the pluralist point of view ended up being picked up by the universe point of view research program in a way that is quite important. Can you prove something in the world that you arrived at through forcing and then take some of that back to the ground model?…

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