Welcome to the October 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

Blog post with AMA questions and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/10/13/ama-october-2025/

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Certain features of our universe seem unnatural to us. These include "constants of nature" such as the cosmological constant and the mass of the Higgs boson, as well as features of the initial conditions like the curvature of space and the initial entropy. But they can't truly be "unnatural" -- they are literally features of Nature itself. Some have turned to the anthropic principle and the multiverse, while others look to theism for an explanation. I talk here about my views on the various attitudes one might take toward these apparent fine-tunings, and why it is important to think about them.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/10/06/331-solo-fine-tuning-god-and-the-multiverse/

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Some readings of relevance:

• Livio and Rees, Fine-Tuning, Complexity, and Life in the Multiverse
• Carroll, In What Sense Is the Early Universe Fine-Tuned?
• Barnes, A Reasonable Little Question: A Formulation of the Fine-Tuning Argument
• Goff, Our Improbable Existence Is No Evidence for a Multiverse
• Neal, Puzzles of Anthropic Reasoning Resolved Using Full Non-indexical Conditioning

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A characteristic of complex systems is that individual components combine to exhibit large-scale emergent behavior even when the components were not specifically designed for any particular purpose within the collective. Sometimes those individual components are us -- people interacting within societies or online communities. Studying the dynamics of such interactions is interesting both to better understand what is happening, and hopefully to designing better communities. I talk with Petter Törnberg about flows of information, how polarization develops, and how artificial agents can help steer things in better directions.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/09/29/330-petter-tornberg-on-the-dynamics-of-misinformation/

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Petter Törnberg received a Ph.D. in complex systems from Chalmers University of Technology. He is now an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Language, Logic and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, Associate Professor in Complex Systems at Chalmers University of Technology, NWO VENI laurate, and senior researcher at the University of Neuchâtel.

• Web site
• Univ. Amsterdam web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Amazon author page
• Bluesky

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