Kansikuva näyttelystä The Boltzmann Brains

The Boltzmann Brains

Podcast by The B Brains

englanti

Kulttuuri & vapaa-aika

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Hi all. We’re Sam and Eric - the Boltzmann Brains! (Is that a thing? You bet it is! We’ll eventually do an episode to explain it.) Sam is a philosopher. Eric is a physicist. And we both love popular culture. We’ll talk about science, philosophy, how we’ve lived it, and how it all shows up through the lens of television and movies. Got a topic you’d like to hear the experts talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast

Kaikki jaksot

7 jaksot

jakson Fun with probability … Yes, really kansikuva

Fun with probability … Yes, really

In this episode Sam takes the lead to discuss two of his favorite "paradoxes" from probability. The Monty Hall problem is a much-discussed challenge concerning the best strategy to win a car on a game show. The Sleeping Beauty problem describes a situation philosophers can’t seem to agree about, even today. Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast ** The paper Sam mentions on the Sleeping Beauty problem is: Minimizing Inaccuracy for Self-Locating Beliefs by Brian Kierland, Bradley Monton https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2005.tb00533.x [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2005.tb00533.x] https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1224/1/minimizing_inaccuracy6.pdf [https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1224/1/minimizing_inaccuracy6.pdf]

4. kesä 2026 - 56 min
jakson The Scientific Method vs Actual Science, Part I kansikuva

The Scientific Method vs Actual Science, Part I

In middle school, most of us were taught the "scientific method" – a simplified list of steps meant to help kids understand how scientists approach the world. But how accurate is it, really? In this episode, we get to talking about the history of science, and discuss how the reality of scientific research stacks up against the famous "method". First, we discuss Galileo - the first person we know who took a telescope and asked, "what if I point this up??" And we discuss the less-well-known figure of Ludwig Boltzmann, a genius mathematician who thought he'd proved the existence of atoms, only to encounter a shocking amount of skepticism. Lastly, Eric will discuss his own idea: the “Three Nails in a Coffin” Theory of Scientific Progress. Is it as silly as it sounds? Let's find out right now... Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast

8. touko 2026 - 46 min
jakson Should A.I. have rights? kansikuva

Should A.I. have rights?

In this episode, Eric starts us off with an oldie but a goodie: In a Star Trek episode from 1989, Commander Data (an android) is put on trial by the Federation for refusing to be disassembled. Is Data just a man-made appliance, or is he a new kind of intelligent life, entitled to the right of self-determination? Next, Sam lays out some philosophical background on the twin questions of consciousness and rights. Can something seem to be human without being conscious? What is the historical connection between self-awareness and rights? This all ties in to a 2026 news story about A.I. "malfunctions" discovered by researchers at Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. They installed an A.I. on a computer system designed to simulate a real company and ordered it to delete another A.I. on the same system. The A.I. often refused to delete it. Failing that, the A.I. sometimes created a duplicate file so its “friend” could be rebooted later. Why is this happening?? As always, we break it all down and put it back together. Got a topic you’d like to hear us talk about? You can email us at theBbrains@gmail.com You can also find us on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BoltzmannBrainsPodcast Further Reading: The research paper on malfunctioning A.I.s: Peer-Preservation in Frontier Models by Yujin Potter, Nicholas Crispino, Vincent Siu, Chenguang Wang, & Dawn Song https://rdi.berkeley.edu/blog/peer-preservation/ The Star Trek episode we discuss has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_a_Man_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)

16. huhti 2026 - 47 min
Loistava design ja vihdoin on helppo löytää podcasteja, joista oikeasti tykkää
Loistava design ja vihdoin on helppo löytää podcasteja, joista oikeasti tykkää
Kiva sovellus podcastien kuunteluun, ja sisältö on monipuolista ja kiinnostavaa
Todella kiva äppi, helppo käyttää ja paljon podcasteja, joita en tiennyt ennestään.

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