Here you can find and download my work (papers, articles, and other work) as pdfs.
- Empirical Confirmation in Multiverse Cosmology (senior thesis).
Abstract:
This paper is concerned with a specific issue in the philosophy of cosmology that arises in the context of inflationary models that describe our universe as one among many in a larger ‘multiverse’. In the particular idealized setting of interest, all universes are causally disconnected from each other, so we have observational evidence only about our universe. In this context, asking how we should interpret evidence to conduct empirical confirmation for multiverse theories is an interesting question. Some, like Vilenkin and Bostrom, have argued that we ought to treat our evidence as if we are randomly selected from a reference class of observers in the multiverse and expect our evidence to correspond to the evidence a typical observer sees. This assumption is known as the typicality assumption, and Vilenkin and Bostrom have argued that we should prefer multiverse theories that describe us as typical observers over those that do not. Others, like Srednicki, Hartle, and Adlam have criticized this position and argued that we cannot assume we are typical. In this paper, I analyze the arguments given by proponents of typicality and assess whether they are justified in the multiverse context. I conclude that they are not justified in this context and furthermore, there is a way to conduct empirical confirmation for multiverse theories that does not make use of any assumptions about typicality or atypicality