CEFISES Seminar: Enrico Cinti, “Parallel Convergences: Consilience, Closed Universes, and the Trivial Universe Hypothesis”

Livestream https://www.youtube.com/@CEFISES

Series: OLOFOS-ONEIROS

Speaker: Enrico Cinti (Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation / Institute of Physics, University of Amsterdam)

Title: Parallel Convergences: Consilience, Closed Universes, and the Trivial Universe Hypothesis

Abstract

We discuss the viability of consilience arguments in the context of quantum gravity. We do so by comparing the case of Hawking radiation with arguments for the Hilbert space of closed universes being one dimensional. While the former is not a genuine case of consilience, we argue that the latter is an instance of a particular type of consilience argument, which we call theoretical consilience. We analyze theoretical consilience, identify its virtues and limitations, and compare it with discussions of non-empirical confirmation in the quantum gravity and string theory literature.