The Possible Worlds of David Lewis | Barry Lam

What are possible worlds? Could you have been born to different parents, and could an object be both completely green and completely red? Barry Lam explains how David Lewis’s views on possible worlds can help us understand everything from time travel to the nature of who we are.
Listen to more of Barry’s episodes on David Lewis on Hi-Phi nation here: hiphination.org/season-5/
Podcast: anchor.fm/braininavat
Contact us: Mark.Oppenheimer[at]gmail and Jwerbe[at]gmail

[@jjjccc728]

loved this one. keep up the good work. your guest was very interesting. I am going to check him out.

[@APaleDot]

The motivation for the reality of possible worlds at the beginning seems very weak to me. Why would we suppose that they somehow have properties and constraints that we didn't imagine them to have?
You say it's not like a story, but that's precisely what they are like. We just tell ourselves a story and then place some constraints on it like "contains no contradiction" or "follows our laws of physics". There's no reason to think they physically exist outside our conception of them.