Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast!

Episode Date: July 1, 2018

I've decided to officially take the plunge into the world of podcasting. The new show will be called Mindscape, and will mostly consist of me talking to smart people about interesting ideas. (Occasionally it will be me talking by myself about ideas of questionable merit.) I'm a grizzled veteran at appearing on other podcasts, and it's past time I sat in the director's chair here. [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/episode-zero-audio.mp3" artist="Sean Carroll" social_gplus="false" social_email="true" tweet_text="Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast, Episode 0: Welcome!" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Today I'm just releasing a short teaser podcast, in both audio (bottom of this post) and video (right here) form. Next week will be a more official launch, with several real episodes, all of which I had enormous fun recording. FAQ: It won't just be about physics, although physics will naturally appear. Indeed, the opportunity to talk about things other than physics is a large part of my motivation here. I have plans/hopes to talk to historians, psychologists, biologists, philosophers, artists, filmmakers, neuroscientists, economists, writers, theologians, political scientists, musicians, and more. The video above is just to lure you in. Almost all episodes will be audio-only. I don't have a strict release schedule, that will depend on other obligations. I would guess one every two weeks, perhaps weekly if things start going super-well. (So if you want more episodes, encourage others to subscribe!) Typical episodes will be an hour long, at least to start, though don't hold me to that. Right now you can both subscribe to the RSS feed, and/or to an email list, both available on the sidebar to the right. If you join the email list, you can choose to either get just the episodes as they are released, or just special announcements relevant to the podcast, or both. Soon I hope to be available on iTunes and Google Play and various other platforms, but I'm not sure how quickly that happens. There won't be any ads to start, but I am planning to monetize it if things go well. These microphones don't pay for themselves. I'm not really in it for the money, but if money starts rolling in, my incentive to keep going will be correspondingly boosted. Feel free to leave comments and discuss individual episodes as they appear. There is also a subreddit which might make a good conversation spot. Like everything else I do that isn't physics research, this is a hobby, and might have to take a temporary back seat if things get busy. But so far it's been a lot of fun, and I'm excited to see where it will go. Show notes for this episode: I mention a study of the different ways in which artists and regular people look at images, which you can read about here. And we're ready to go! Thanks to everyone who has helped me set this up, including Gia Mora (web and technical help), Julian Morris (prodding), Cara Santa Maria (podcasting wisdom), Jason Torchinsky (art), Ted Pyne (music), Robert Alexander (gear), and Jennifer Ouellette (patience, support, wine). Comment here if you have suggestions, for good ideas to talk about, good people to talk to, or format/technical wisdom. (As always, demands that I not talk about this or that will be summarily deleted; those are my choices to make, not anybody else's.) Still very new at this, mistakes both technical and judgmental are practically guaranteed to happen, but I'm optimistic that it should be a fun ride. Download Episode [smart_podcast_player permalink="https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ]

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Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll, and this is Episode Zero, by which I mean it's not a regular episode. It's more like a teaser trailer, trying to give you the general overview of who I am, what we're going to be doing over the course of the podcast. I want to confess, I was tempted to dedicate Episode Zero to an hour-long disquisition on the nature of rationality. That would be very true to who I am. But I thought that we're getting to know each other. We're starting a new endeavor over here. Maybe I should try to keep things short and sweet,

not give people too much of the right idea, and try to get to the bottom of why I would even do this in the first place. You know, by vocation, I'm a physicist. I work at Caltech right now. I do theoretical physics. That is to say, I think about quantum mechanics, space time, the nature of the universe. increasingly these days I'm thinking about complex systems, entropy, information theory, and things like that.

But I've been interested in lots of things for much longer than that, not just physics, philosophy, economics, literature, art, history, all sorts of different things. And as an academic, I'm not really allowed to think about those things in a professional capacity. I'm allowed to think about them in my spare time, but my job is thinking about theoretical physics. And in the meantime, I've been on plenty of podcasts, you know, from, Joe Rogan to the rights to Ricky Sanchez, always had a good time. As someone who enjoys doing new and interesting things, I've often thought about doing it myself, but the usual things got in the way. It's not my job. How much time would it take? And so forth. What finally pushed me, nudged me over towards actually doing it is the idea that these podcast hosts get to talk to

whoever they want, as long as they can get them to say yes on the podcast, but there's no restrictions on topic. They can talk about basketball if they're a basketball podcast if they want to, but they could also talk about other things. People don't have to listen. It's okay. So I realized that this for me would be a license to talk about all sorts of ideas that I don't get to confront and deal with as an academic in my day-to-day environment. Not writing papers about them, not being an expert myself, but talking to the world's experts. Both other academics and people in other fields of endeavor, really smart people who are working on some of the most interesting ideas out there. So that's going to be the focus of this podcast. In terms of format, it's

pretty conventional. I'm expecting most of the episodes will be me interviewing one other person. Sometimes it will just be me talking about something I have something to say about, but mostly it'll be me picking someone who I think has something really interesting to say. And rather than looking for fun personal anecdotes or jumping from topic to topic, really digging into a particular big idea, a particular thing that we'd like to get to the bottom of. At a popular level, in the sense it should be accessible to everyone, no special technical jargon presumed to be known, but at a way that we have time enough to really get into it, to really try to understand what's going on. So for me, that's where the fun is. It's very unlikely that someone like Lady Gaga is going to be,

a guest on this podcast. But if she did, she did come on, I wouldn't be asking her about celebrity gossip or the latest thing that was going on. I would ask her about performance and writing and the artistry of being a rock star or a pop star in the modern age. Everyone has something interesting to say if they're at the top of their profession in that way. So by the way, Gaga, if you're listening to this, we would love to have you on the podcast, have your people contact my people. We will definitely set that up. But meanwhile, whether or not anyone else is interested in these things, one of the things about this format that appeals to me is that I will get to learn something. I will get to learn smart ideas from very interesting people. Hopefully, I will also get better at dealing

with ideas that I'm both unfamiliar with myself or even disagree with myself. You know, in the modern world, especially when we have the internet to mediate many of our conversations, we're not always good at confronting and thinking about things that we don't immediately agree with. Whether it's anger and dismissiveness or just sarcasm or snark, we tend to respond instantly and unreflectively to such ideas. And I bring this up, not to accuse anybody else, but to say that I've been very bad about this. I'm just as guilty as anybody else of being snarky or dismissive when something comes along I don't agree with. And I think it's important to disagree with things sometimes, but I would like to usually disagree with them in a thoughtful, careful, considered way. So that's the kind of thing I'm going to be looking for on the podcast.

I'm sure I will be often interviewing people who I do agree with, but hopefully there'll be more than enough people who challenge me in some way, and I'm going to try to get better at dealing with those in a way that is useful, that is useful to me and useful to everyone listening. And with that in mind, I do have something I want to say about the nature of rationality. If you've gotten this far into it, indulge me a little bit, because I think that this is important. Here's the thing about rationality.

It's hard. It's hard to be reasonable about things. Not utterly, not reasonable at all. We can be slightly rational about things, but being perfectly rational is very, very hard. The human brain was not trained to do this. We grew up over evolutionary timescales to solve certain problems,

and logical reasoning wasn't always among those problems. Very few human beings could take the square root of a 10-digit number, But any pocket calculator can do that with no problem. There's other things we human brains are very good at, but not simple mathematical, logical, kind of constructions. Interestingly, the human brain is very efficient computationally. Human physicists know that when you have a computational process that includes both analyzing information but also recording it and deleting it from a hard drive, this creates heat. You might have noticed this in your computer. Your laptop sitting on your lap heats up.

If you have a gaming rig, you need to spend money to keep it cool. This is the generation of entropy. This is the second law of thermodynamics in action. All computational processes do this, but some do it more efficiently than others. The human brain, it turns out, is actually really efficient. Unlike your laptop, even when you're thinking really hard, your brain doesn't melt. Part of that efficiency is that the human brain is not just brute forcing its calculation. it's taking shortcuts.

We've developed heuristics and rules of thumb to deal with the universe. And these are usually very helpful, but sometimes they lead us astray. Sometimes they lead us to, for example, cognitive biases. Most people have heard, for example, of the idea of confirmation bias. If you like an idea, if you want it to be true, you tend to look at evidence that favors that idea. You tend to not pay attention to evidence that goes against it. And the subject of cognitive bias and how we deal with it, how we train ourselves to do better in the face of these biases has been very, very well studied. There's something that I don't think has been as well studied, which is another aspect of rationality, namely what we pay attention to in the first place.

When I was an undergraduate, I took a philosophy class, and one of my philosophy professors started one of the lectures by saying, how many facts are there in this room right now? How many facts? It's kind of a rhetorical question. There's no answer to that question, or the answer is just infinity. Even if there's only a finite number of things in the room, there's an infinite number of things that might be in the room, but aren't, right? The fact that there is no elephant in the room is a fact. And this simple fact about facts is something that has enormous implications for how we think, how we try to make sense of our world. ask journalists or scientists to be objective in what they do, and we don't quite give credit to how impossible it is to be fully objective. When a journalist reports something, they can be objective about the facts they report. They can report facts truthfully and accurately, but there's necessarily a subjective component to deciding what facts to report. Whenever we tell a story about something, we are choosing what aspects to emphasize. And this choice is seemingly automatic, but it can be trained out of us. Psychologists have done studies, for example,

where they show people a picture. And they say, we're going to ask you questions about this picture, so study it carefully, and they look at how people's eyes track across the picture. To no one's surprise, really, professional artists look at pictures very differently than non-artists do. Regular human beings tend to look at people. They look at the faces of people, or they look at other animals. Artists who are trained are much better at giving equal attention to different parts of the foreground and background of a picture. And this idea of training our attention, I think, is really crucial to becoming more rational in this complicated world with our imperfect brains. Let me just give you two examples that sort of span the spectrum from science to high emotional impact human drama. On the science end of things, there's the question of interpretations of quantum mechanics.

This question has its own human drama in it also, but it's one of my favorite scientific questions. You might know that quantum mechanics is our best theory of how the world works at a deep level. You might also know that physicists don't agree on what it is that quantum mechanics says fundamentally about what reality is and how it works. So we have competing formulations of the theory. My favorite formulation is what's called the many worlds formulation. I'm writing a book about that. I'm sure we'll talk about it in the podcast, but the basic idea. is that when you make a quantum measurement,

there's different possible outcomes, and each one of those outcomes becomes real in a separate world. Now, there's many reasons to like this, to not like it, good reasons, bad reasons. I think that one of the reasons why some people don't like it, which maybe is not what they articulate, but is nevertheless there,

is that in this many-worlds formulation, there's a huge gap between the mathematical formalism and the world we immediately see. If you ask someone who believes in many worlds, what is nature at its most fundamental level? They'll tell you something like it is a quantum state described by a vector in a very high-dimensional complex Hilbert space. And an ordinary person will say, I don't get it. The world around me has tables and chairs and objects and things like that. Where are those things?

Where is space-time itself in your abstract quantum formalism? So there are competing formulations of quantum mechanics where the tangents. where the tangible things of everyday life are much more front and center, much more evident where they're located in the formalism. And I think that there's a matter of taste that comes in here. If what you care about most,

if what you pay attention to most in a scientific theory is the directness with which that theory accounts for the world that you see around you, then you're going to try to favor an interpretation of quantum mechanics that puts those aspects right in the foreground. If what you care about more in a scientific theory is the underlying formalism, is it powerful, is it simple, is it mathematically elegant, then many worlds is your bet. Everyone agrees, even people who don't think that many worlds is right, everyone agrees that its underlying formalism is as simple as you can possibly get.

So there is a matter of taste. It's not just a matter of equations or experimental data, because we're talking about two different theories. We don't know which one is right. someday we'll figure out which one is right, but until we do, your personal what you pay attention to question is really, really important when we favor or disfavor one version of quantum mechanics over the other. The other end of the spectrum, let's look at sexual harassment. You may know, this is 2018. There's been a lot of effort recently, a lot of news about people in very high-profile places who have been accused of sexual harassment with enormous amounts of evidence against them. credible accusations of sexual harassment, and they've gotten in trouble for this, and rightfully so. And this has been true especially, you know, we've heard about Hollywood, but it's also been

true in physics and astronomy and academia. A famous example is Jeffrey Marcy, who is an exoplanet researcher. He looked at planets around other stars, other than the sun, and he was very famous, in line for the Nobel Prize. He was very successful, and a couple years ago it came to light that he was a serial sexual harasser, going back many, many years. There was a new, enormous amounts of evidence against him, and he resigned his position at UC Berkeley, etc. But when the news first broke, there was an email that went around to the faculty at Berkeley from the department chair, so his boss in some sense, and the email, I'll quote what had said. It said, of course, this is hardest for Jeff in this moment. For those who are willing and able,

he certainly can use any understanding or support you may offer. Now, other people pointed out fairly quickly that maybe a sexual harassment situation is actually not hardest on the harasser. Maybe it's hardest on the victims of the harassment. People who might have had their lives ruined, left the field, really suffered from depression or questioned who they were or whatever. If something like this has happened for many, many years, it can be very devastating to many other people. And yet that was not what occurred to the department chair when he was writing this letter. what occurred to him was his friend and colleague was going to be upset, and that is correct.

I'm sure he was upset. I'm sure it was hard on him. The difference is, what are you paying attention to? I think this goes beyond this specific example. I don't think even the department chair was especially evil or conniving about it. I think it's a simple matter that when we're faced with a situation like this, our attention immediately leaps somewhere, right? When we hear that someone famous or someone we respected or knew personally,

been accused of something terrible, does our attention immediately go to the victims of that terrible thing they did, or does our attention immediately go to, well, what about them? What about the person being accused? Was it a wrongful accusation? Are they being treated fairly? And there's no right or wrong here. In some sense, we can all learn to sympathize across the board a little bit better than we do.

But this underlying issue of what we pay attention to, what matters to us, is to me a crucially important part of being more rational, of understanding the world better. I'm hopeful this will be a theme in the podcast across the episodes, not just what is this good idea or what is this interesting finding, a little bit less of the sort of whizbang, latest news from the science frontier kind of stuff, and more like, why are we doing this?

Why are we thinking about this? Why is this interesting to us? Why is this important? And hopefully, as I said, along the way, not only will I learn things, but I might even change my mind. I could be wrong about any of my favorite ideas. So it will certainly be useful for me. I'm hoping it will be equally interesting for you people out there.

At the very least, I think the journey will be a lot of fun. Thanks for joining along. Deadline shift. Plans change. And sometimes you just need promo products fast. Turn to Four Imprint. Four Imprint has hundreds of promotional items available with 24-hour turnaround. From custom apparel and drinkware to trade show gear, writing tools and more. Your logo is printed with care. Your order ships fast. And with their

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