There is a wide gulf between the worldviews of physicists and philosophers. Many physicists present a rather sweetly naive, child-like view of the world, where philosophers bring a distinctly more adult, cynical tone. This being the case, it can be a little worrying when a physicist dips a toe into the philosophical mire. Infamously, in The Grand Design , Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow told us that philosophy was now dead because science could deal with anything it had previously been needed for. Thankfully, Carlo Rovelli is not trying to do away with philosophy, though it has to be said that when he veers into the topic that physicist's naivety can make it feel like the philosophising of an earnest eighteen-year-old. Take the opening paragraph, which tells us 'electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies do not essentially differ in nature from one another. They are notions that illuminate each other'. I almost expected a Pink Floyd soundtr...

Embarrassingly, I read and reviewed this book back when it came out in 2022, but forgot I had when I wanted to read more about the simulation hypothesis and virtual reality as it's a topic that comes up when considering multiverses  - but originally I focused more on it as a piece on VR, where this time I was more focused on the simulation hypothesis. I've written a new review, but in case you want to see if my opinion has changed (it hasn't much) I've included the old review below. David Chalmers uses the idea that we might be living in a computer simulation, rather than a real universe, to explore a number of philosophical queries. Initially I was really enjoying his approach, bringing in pop cultural references (the inevitable Matrix but various others too), though the cartoon illustrations are somewhat painful. However, after a while we seemed to lose sight of the deeper philosophical applications to provide a heavy going manifesto for our digital existence. Chalme...

Free will is one of those subjects that you have to be brave to take on: Kevin Mitchell makes an impressive job of defending a concept that some feel is incompatible with science. We start by taking a look at the common reasoning against free will - that because everything that happens is deterministically based on the interactions of particles (fields if you prefer), then there is no actual ability to 'choose' - everything simply follows on from its previous state in a mechanical fashion. Admittedly when we then add in quantum physics, there is an element of randomness introduced, but that does not appear to provide any room for agents to select what will happen next. So far, so common a view. But Mitchell argues that this is too limited an approach. While there are indubitably structural limitations on our ability to act with agency, whether down to nature or nurture, he still suggests that we (and other organisms) have the opportunity to make choices, in part due to being ca...

It's not often you start reading a book and within a few pages are thinking 'this is something special.' Peter Lamont writes with a distinctive style, in places verging on poetry or liturgy in the way he uses repeated sentences for emphasis. There's also something of the dance of the seven veils about the whole thing - he glides around a subject, letting the reader catch a glimpse of something interesting, but taking his time to coyly reveal things. That can be a touch irritating at times, but it certainly catches the attention. What this book isn't despite the subtitle, is a 'how to' guide, except at the most basic level. And it probably isn't about radical thinking per se either - it's more about the nature of thinking in general, and critical thinking in particular. Lamont uses various walks around bits of Edinburgh (where he lives and works), using historical connections to expose us to the nature of what we think about things and what to make of...

Some titles tell you nothing about the book itself - but The AI Mirror puts Shannon Vallor's central argument front and centre: that artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI such as ChatGPT, is not intelligence at all, but rather holds a mirror up to our own intelligence. As Vallor points out, your reflection in a mirror certainly looks and acts like you - but it is not a person. This is a metaphor that works impressively well. It reflects (get it?) the total lack of understanding in systems that are simply reflecting back data from a vast amount of human output. That's not to say that they have no value, but we always have to be aware of their nature and their abilities both to produce errors as a result and to reflect our in-built biases, which we may consciously suppress but nonetheless come through in the data. To quote Vallor, these systems 'aren't designed to be accurate, they are designed to sound accurate'. What Vallor tells us we have that AI d...

This is one of the strangest sort-of popular science (or philosophy, or something or other) books I've ever read. If you can picture the impact of a cross between Douglas Hofstadter's  Gödel Escher Bach and Gaileo's Two New Sciences  (at least, its conversational structure), then thrown in a touch of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest , and you can get a feel for what the experience of reading it is like - bewildering with the feeling that there is something deep that you can never quite extract from it. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom is probably best known in popular science for his book Superintelligence in which he looked at the implications of having artificial intelligence (AI) that goes beyond human capabilities. In a sense, Deep Utopia is a sequel, picking out one aspect of this speculation: what life would be like for us if technology had solved all our existential problems, while (in the form of superintelligence) it had also taken away much of our appare...

What with multiverses and metaverses, you just can't move for verses at the moment (amusingly, the 'verse' part essentially refers to a turn, which makes no sense in either case). 'Multiverse' as a concept was always going to be a trifle confusing, as 'universe' is supposed to refer to everything in existence, but as we will see, there are plenty of different ways, both philosophically and physically, that the term is applied to something beyond the familiar, four dimensional universe. Paul Halpern packs plenty into this book - in order to put the various kinds of multiverse concept into context he pretty much goes through quantum physics, Big Bang cosmology and string theory (plus a touch of loop quantum gravity) in a fair amount of detail. We see how the most straightforward multiverse concept of a series of bubble universes in the same normal spacetime has been used to explain the fine tuning of the universe or is put forward as a consequence of the conte...

It might seem a bit odd to review a popular philosophy book here, but Philip Goff's content overlaps sufficiently with cosmology that it's appropriate, and that content is fascinating, even though chances are you won't agree with Goff all the way. The point of this book is to suggest that there is purpose behind the cosmos. The main evidence for this that Goff uses is the fine tuning of our universe that makes it suitable for life. Most cosmologists agree that this is odd, but many try to explain it using the idea of the multiverse. With some nifty mathematic-less probability (though he does invoke and describe Bayes theorem), Goff demonstrates convincingly that this argument does not hold up. (You can see some detail of how he shows that it's rubbish here .)  We then take a look at a couple of alternative explanations - a deity, or the universe itself embodying a degree of purpose, which comes under the banner of panpsychism. I didn't honestly find the arguments in...

This is very much an attempt to emulate Carlo Rovelli's success with short books containing seven or eight essays, beginning with Seven Brief Lessons in Physics . In this case, Italian Nobel Prize winning physicist Giorgio Parisi gives us a set of eight unconnected essays, some solidly scientific, such as the opening one on how his team studied starling murmurations, others more philosophical or memoir-like, such as his account of ‘physics in Rome around fifty years ago’.  I personally couldn’t see a lot of interest in the less scientific essays, but the detail of his work on starlings was very interesting - I had read about various computer models of murmurations but had no idea how actual flocks were studied, and Parisi gives us a good account of the methods used. Some of the other essays with a strong science content are a lot less engaging, though, because Parisi (or his translator) really doesn’t know how to describe topics like the particle physics of the 1970s in a way that ...

You wait ages for a good book on Ancient Greek philosopher, and two come along in a matter of weeks. Hot on the heels of Rovelli's Anaximander comes Aristotle from John Sellars. For me, this is the ideal way to get an introduction to one of the great philosophers (I find it hard to truly support Sellars' superlative) - like most people, I suspect, I had heard of Aristotle but didn't know much about him. I'd read bits of his books on logic, physics and natural history and all his surviving Poetics , but had no overview. This is a proper introduction to the topic, not a watered-down text book - not too long at around 100 pages, and aimed at those with very little existing knowledge, presenting Aristotle's life, work and impact in an approachable fashion. As was the case with Anaximander, one of the impressive things about Aristotle was that his work covered such a wide range of topics. Sellars introduces us to, amongst other things, Aristotle on the nature of being, ...