Speaker Series: Emily Adlam, (Chapman Univ.) Against Self-Location

Title:  Against Self-Location

Abstract: In this talk, I will make a distinction between pure self-locating credences and superficially self-locating credences, and then argue that there is never any rationally compelling way to assign pure self-locating credences. I will first argue that from a practical point of view, pure self-locating credences simply encode our pragmatic goals, and thus pragmatic rationality does not dictate how they must be set. I will thenuse considerations motivated by Bertrand's paradox to argue that the indifference principle and other popular constraints on self-locating credences fail to be a priori principles of epistemic rationality, and critique some approaches to deriving self-locating credences based on analogies to non-self-locating cases. Finally, I will consider the implications of this conclusion for various applications of self-locating probabilities in scientific contexts, arguing that it may undermine certain kinds of reasoning about multiverses, the simulation hypothesis, Boltzmann brains and vast-world scenarios. 

Emily Adlam is an assistant professor of quantum mechanics at Chapman University. She works on the foundations of quantum mechanics and related issues in the philosophy of physics, studying issues ranging from the interpretation of quantum mechanics to broader philosophy topics like retro causality and determinism.