The One You Feed - Sean Carroll: Theoretical Physics and the Meaning of Life
Episode Date: August 22, 2017Think theoretical physics is irrelevant to your everyday life and way over your head? You'll think differently after listening to this interview with Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist, poetic natura...list, and author.The meaning of life, the finitude of life, the choices we make and our experience of happiness and suffering all have a connection back to the scientific realm that will both fascinate and provoke thought in you.   This week we talk to Sean Carroll Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Harvard University. His research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology, especially issues of dark matter, dark energy, spacetime symmetries, and the origin of the universe. Recently, Carroll has worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, and the emergence of complexity. Carroll is the author of The Particle at the End of the Universe and From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and the Royal Society of London. He has appeared on TV shows such as The Colbert Report, PBS's NOVA, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, and frequently serves as a science consultant for film and television.  His latest book is called: The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself In This Interview, Sean Carroll and I Discuss... The Wolf Parable His book, The Big Picture; On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself That who we become is a combination of the choices we make and what the Universe gives us The philosophy of Poetic Naturalism - 1 world, many ways of talking about it 3 Levels of Stories: Fundamental, Emergent, Comprehensive What it means to be real You can't make "ought" out of "is" That facts and moral values are different things His perspective on life mattering - that it comes from within, that it's not imposed on us from the outside The fact that we care is the origin of things mattering in this life and world Life is a process, it's something that's happening - always moving and changing - and that there's always something else that we want How his book lays out the design for you to decide how to live your life and what kind of person you want to be The mistake of fetishizing happiness How you cannot separate happiness and suffering in life - especially a life well lived That our goal shouldn't be to reach some state of happiness and stay there because life is a dynamic process and it doesn't work like that The finitude of life The average human lives for three billion heartbeats That the difference between right and wrong is up to us to decide and that can be scary That the world - including us - is only really made up of 3 basic particles and 3 basic forces That the big bang isn't necessarily the beginning of the universe but it's as far back as we can go Physics books for the non-science people - look for books by either Brian Greene or Lisa Randall Life's Ratchet by Peter Hoffman is another interesting book for a non-science person  Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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I'm in favor of happiness. I'm not in favor of suffering, but I don't think you can separate them.
Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance
of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't
strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.
This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
how they feed their good wolf.
Hey, y'all.
I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls.
This January, join me for our third annual January Jumpstart series.
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Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sean Carroll. He's a theoretical physicist at
the California Institute of Technology.
His research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology, especially issues of dark matter,
dark energy, space-time symmetries, and the origin of the universe. Recently, Sean has worked on the
foundations of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, and the emergence of complexity. He is the
author of The Particle at the End of
the Universe, From Eternity to Here, The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, and Space-Time
and Geometry, An Introduction to General Relativity. His latest book is called The Big Picture,
On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself.
If you're getting value out of this show, please go to oneufeed.net meaning and the universe itself. is if you're interested in the book that we're discussing on today's episode, go to oneufeed.net and find the episode that we're talking about.
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Thanks again for listening.
And here's the interview with Sean Carroll.
Hi, Sean. Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me on.
Very excited to have you on. Your book is called The Big Picture, On the Origins of Life,
Meaning, and the Universe Itself. I really enjoyed the read. It's going to be a challenge to sum it up in a podcast conversation, let alone even in a full-length book.
But it really brought up a lot of great points, so we'll get to that in just a minute.
But I'd like to start off where we normally do with a parable.
There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson.
He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love.
And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.
And the grandson stops, and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins?
And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
To be honest, I had not heard the parable before coming on the podcast and reading about it.
But I think it's a very nice little story that really says something about how we become who we are. Every person
is buffeted around by things outside their control, as any cosmologist or physicist knows.
We live in a universe with a lot going on, but we also have some agency within that universe.
And one of the things I talk about in the big picture is how to reconcile the idea that we are collections of atoms obeying the laws of physics.
While at the same time, it's okay to talk about us as human beings making choices, people with free will and agency.
able to make choices, then sort of what parts of you become important, come to the fore, get nurtured and become prominent is one of the biggest choices you make, often an implicit one,
right? Often one that we just sort of make without really reflecting on it too much. So I think it's
a very good way of reminding us that who we eventually become is a combination of the choices
we make and what the universe gives us. Yeah, it was really interesting the way you point all that out. And in the book, you ascribe to a,
I don't know if I'd call it a philosophy, but I'll use that word for now, called poetic naturalism.
Can you explain kind of what that means?
Yeah, I think that naturalism is a very old tradition within what we might call ontology,
right? The study of what the universe is
fundamentally made of. So naturalism says the universe is fundamentally just the universe.
That's it. There's one thing, the world, the natural world, the world that we learn about
and study by doing empirical scientific investigation. But within naturalism,
there are different camps. And there's sort of very, very austere camps, what we call eliminativists, who don't think that anything exists other than the most fundamental layer of reality.
So all that exists in this point of view is, let's say, particles and forces of particle physics coming together to make other things.
But the other things, the tables, the chairs, and so forth, they're not really real.
Only the atoms are.
I think that's going a little bit too far. I think that we can accept the reality of different
layers. The atomic or particle physics layer is real, but also the layer of tables and chairs
is equally real. On the other side, there are naturalists who want to believe in only one world,
but want to assign to it different properties that we don't see by ordinary scientific investigation.
Objective moral truths or mental properties that help explain the nature of consciousness, things like that.
And I think that's going too far in the other direction.
So poetic naturalism says that there is only one world, but the world can be described in different ways.
There's many ways of talking about the world.
That's where the poetic part comes in.
Some of these ways of talking are purely scientific, and maybe there's not that much poetry
there. But others, as we just discussed, involve human choices about how to live our lives, how to
judge right from wrong. That's where the true poetry of naturalism shows itself.
You describe three different levels of stories that we can talk about. You talk about the most fundamental,
which is the universe exactly kind of as it works. Then you talk about emergent or effective descriptions. And then finally, values. So walk us through kind of what those three different levels
of stories are. And what I thought was interesting is that you say each level can describe things
differently, but can't be incompatible with the other levels.
That's right. I mean, at the science level, the level of emergent or effective descriptions,
the classic and still very, very good example is the air in the room.
You know, we talk about air and we have talked about air for hundreds of years in terms of its temperature, its pressure, its velocity, its humidity, and so forth.
We learned in the 1800s
that the air is really made of atoms. It is not a smooth fluid with a pressure or a density at
every point. It is an atomic collection made of atoms and molecules, but there's so many of them
that to us, on our human-sized observational scales, it appears just like a smooth fluid. So you might ask yourself,
should we then say that the idea of the air is a fluid or a gas, is that an illusion or is that
real, right? This is a fundamental ontological question. So the way that a scientist would say
is, of course, it's real to assign a temperature and a pressure and a density to the air in the room, but it's
only true at a non-fundamental level, at an effective or emergent level. At the most comprehensive
level, the air in the room is made of atoms, but it's still true to say that it is a fluid
made of temperature and pressure and so forth, as long as we only work at that emergent level.
And this idea that there are multiple levels, multiple ways of talking about reality
appears over and over again,
not just physics, but biology, sociology, politics, and so forth.
So even at the level of science,
there are many, many vocabularies we can use
to describe the world that might be real.
Now, this raises the question,
what does it mean to be real?
Who says whether something is real or not? And as far as the scientific levels are concerned, that's not such a hard question. When something is an of those emergent descriptions of reality do you see
beauty or right versus wrong or purpose or meaning or anything like that. The next question is,
do those things exist and are they real or should we just say they cannot possibly exist? And so
what I say is they can exist and they can be real, but they're necessarily subjective. They're not
out there in the world in
the same way that atoms and particles and temperature and pressure are. They're choices
that we make when we choose to describe the world in different ways. But to us, they can be perfectly
real. This is a distance that we can go that a lot of people don't really want to follow.
A lot of people, even the most committed naturalists, really want values to be objectively grounded in the world. And I would like that too,
but I try to make the case in the book that that doesn't seem to be true.
Right. And you give some examples of that. I thought maybe it would be interesting,
since you brought that up, to talk about the idea that you can't make is out of ought.
Yeah, that's right. This is an old slogan that goes back to David Hume
in the 1700s, the philosopher, the Scottish philosopher.
And Hume is still very, very worthwhile reading today.
Basically, he points out that he reads all these philosophers
trying to figure out what is right and what is wrong.
And these philosophers will say,
well, this is true and this is true and this is true.
And therefore, suddenly, without knowing,
they start saying, therefore, this ought to be true, therefore, this ought to be true, or we ought to behave in a certain way. And there's always that leap. And he says, no one ever tells
me why that leap can be made. And he sort of implies, without coming right out and saying it,
that it's because you can't, because there's no way of getting there. And that's not a disaster in any way. It's really just a matter of logic.
If you imagine syllogisms, right? Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, therefore Socrates is
mortal. If you start with premises that are only is statements, this is true, that is true,
your conclusion will never be an ought statement, because the word ought never appeared in any of the premises.
And there's just no possible way around that.
What Hume is suggesting is that we need an extra premise over and above things that are true about the world.
We need to make assumptions or axioms, if you like, about what ought to be true about the world.
And then we can argue about whether those are the right assumptions or the right axioms. But the main point is you're not going to derive them scientifically from observing how the universe behaves.
So an example of that that you use in the book is something along the lines of,
Eric promised to pay Chris back the money that he borrowed. Then we jump to, therefore,
Eric ought to pay Chris back. And you're saying
that there's nothing in that first statement that leads us there. There's an assumption that,
because I made a promise, I should follow it through. And that's where we're going from a
statement of fact, what is, to a statement of value, the ought. That's exactly right. And in
every single attempt to derive ought from is,
or to derive moral precepts from scientific observations, there's always that hidden
assumption. And it's usually not that hard to pull it out and make it explicit. And then a lot of
people say, yes, but it's just so obviously true. How can we argue, right? You made a promise. You
ought to obey your promise. But once you make it explicit,
you often realize, you know, it's not 100% true. Like, are there no promises that you should ever break under any circumstances? And then you start having the conversation that we should have all
along about what are the axioms, the postulates, the precepts that we should decide on to let our moral lives become real.
And so what you're getting at here is that any sort of moral idea is being created by humans.
It doesn't exist in any objective way.
And so you ask a question that I think is really important.
And you say that if the value we place in such things isn't objectively determined,
so the morals that we're talking about,
and if you won't be around to witness any of it in 100 years or so,
how can you say your life matters?
And that's kind of at the heart of all this,
is you're saying on one hand, things just kind of are what they are.
The universe emerges.
It is.
It's a fact.
But it makes no, there's no meaning that comes out of that,
that all the meaning that comes out of it, we have to generate. And so given that, how do we
say that our life matters? So for you, how do you arrive at that your life matters given those sort
of facts? Right. Yeah. I want to emphasize that the quote that you just read, that was a rhetorical
question, which I then go on to answer by saying, yes, you can have meaning and purpose in your life. It's just not imposed on you from outside.
And that's why the title for that section of the book is not right and wrong or morality or purpose.
It's caring because we care about the universe. We human beings care. That's the fundamental basis for all judgments about
right and wrong and purpose and meaning. If it weren't for the existence of human beings or maybe
someday intelligent robots or aliens or something like that, but objects, people, characters, agents
who have cares about what happens, who assign significance and meaning to it, that is the origin of why it
matters what goes on in the universe. It's not from the outside. And that's a fairly easy thing
to swallow as long as you can also say, and that's okay. We're trained from birth and from
philosophical tradition to think that the meaningfulness of the world does come from outside.
It either, back in the day, might have come from God, or more recently, it might come
from science or maybe patriotism or community or love or whatever.
But it doesn't have to.
You can choose to take meaning from those things, but that's a choice that you are
making, not something that is imposed on you.
And once you sort of make that leap, once you realize that all along throughout human history,
everything everyone cared about was a choice they made to care about it, and working out
the consequences of that choice, it's not a diminution of the fact that we care about the
world. It's just a wonderful fact about human creativity and agency, that it's up to us to make these hard choices.
You say that in human terms, the dynamic nature of life manifests itself as desire. There's always
something we want, even if what we want is to break free of the bonds of desire. So you're
saying that sort of underlying this caring, this thing that is driving sort of the human activity and meaning is kind of what we want, what we are drawn to as people.
I intentionally word it that way to sort of make it seem as down-to-earth and straightforward and non-cosmic as possible. A way of talking about caring is just talking about wanting things.
I talk about the fact that life itself, if you go back to what the biology of life tells us,
life is not a substance. It's not a fluid that sort of fills you up when you get born and then
leaves your body when you die. Life is a process. It is a way of talking about things that are
happening. You can't have a living creature that is absolutely stationary.
That would not count as life.
Nothing would be happening to that.
And because we are moving and changing, we're processing energy and information from the
world around us, there's always a place we want to be.
The best trained yogi in the world cannot meditate without moving for years on end,
right? At some point,
you got to get up and move around and eat and things like that. Whether it's very base things
like food and water or more elevated things like love and companionship and achievement and
education and discovery, there are things that we want out of life. And I want to argue that, again,
that's okay. These are not things to be denied. These are things to be understood, not overly indulged in, to be put in their proper place.
But it's what makes life happen, what makes life interesting, the fact that there's always a little bit more that we care about that we want.
You're kind of getting at one of the themes that underlies this show for me that I'm always coming back to. And it's that desire. And
you talk about how desire gets a bad rap. There's this idea that attachment and desire is what
causes our suffering. And there's definitely some truth to that, right? And then there's also the
truth that you're pointing out that seems completely obvious to me that life is desire.
It's this growth. It's this expansion
that's wired into us. And so how do you balance those two things? What's the right balance of
desire and the need to grow and expand with the more spiritual teachings on being present to where
you are and content with what you have? And those two things being in a right balance seems to me
to be a big part of what makes life work, if you can get those things in balance. That's right. And I think
that the balance is the tricky part there. I mean, I think you can overdo it in either
side. You can certainly overdo it in terms of wants and desires, right? You can just sort of
give in to your most base instincts, and that does not lead to a very fulfilling, worthwhile existence.
On the other hand, I point out that if you look at something that resembles a living being but
is not quite the same, such as your laptop, you open it up, you turn it on, and what does it do?
It just sits there. If you don't tell it what to do, the laptop is perfectly content sitting there
and not doing anything. It did not evolve out of some evolutionary process that gave it this self-preservation instinct, these cares and desires and loves in the world.
So to deny those is to turn ourselves into laptops or abacuses or chairs, to deny our essence as living beings.
It's not about overly wanting or desiring things,
but finding that balance. That's always the hard part, right? There's, in any question,
in any question about how to live a life, there's probably two extreme answers, both of which are
wrong. And somewhere in between is the one we should seek out. Yeah. And you said that earlier,
that your book strikes a middle ground between these different extremes. And that's always kind of
what I'm interested in looking for is, you know, where is that middle ground? Because it seems that
wisdom is usually found, at least I found, in that middle space. Yeah, I think I totally agree.
And then, of course, the hard part is saying where in the middle it should be, of course. And I have
no simple answers to that. I mean, I think one of the reasons, some people who read the book loved that last section, some people didn't like it at
all. And I think that among the people who didn't like it at all, the common refrain was that it was
a little bit too wishy-washy, that I was not telling them how to live their lives. I was not
giving them the rules for being a good person or something like that. And, you know, we could have
a discussion about how to be a good person, but that was not my goal in the book.
My goal was to sort of lay out the groundwork for you to decide
what it means for you to be a good person.
Yeah, I was going to say that's kind of the point of what you're getting at
is that you can't give that answer because it's not an objective answer that exists.
It's really each individual.
Yes, that's absolutely right. Hey y'all.
I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls.
And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running.
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These are unedited post-interview conversations that Eric has with the guests. Thank you. with Sean Carroll. You talk about the movie It's a Wonderful Life and how it applies to this,
and I thought it was really an interesting way to look at it. Can you sort of share
your thoughts on that? Yeah, to be fair, I borrowed this from Chris Johnson, who is an author
who has a wonderful book called A Better Life, where he went around and interviewed a bunch of
naturalists and atheists about what gives them joy and meaning in their lives.
And he talks about the fact that It's a Wonderful Life
is clearly a religious movie, right?
I mean, I'm sure the writers or directors,
whoever was in charge,
had a religious message that they were giving there.
There's an angel who comes down
and shows the character whose name I'm blanking on already.
George Bailey, I think.
George Bailey, yes.
So George is very depressed.
He thinks that he hasn't been helpful to the world,
to his friends or whatever.
The angel shows him what a mess it would be
without his good influence.
And there's that religious aspect to it.
But at the end of the day, Chris Johnson points out,
what did matter was the effect that Bailey had there on earth,
right? To his town, to his friends, to the people that he knew and loved. That was what really
mattered. The fact that it was sort of shown to him by an angel is a secondary consideration
compared to the fact that the true significance, the reward of it, came right there here on earth.
Right. It wasn't the existence of the angel that changed him. It was the fact that his life did
have meaning to the people around him. That's right.
So one of the things that poetic naturalism leads us to when we're talking about values is the idea
that there is simply not an afterlife. This is kind of it. This is the whole show. And that is certainly an area that I think
depresses a lot of people, or they find to be particularly challenging in, I'm not going to
call it an ideology, in a, would you call it a philosophy, poetic naturalism? Yeah, it's a
philosophy. It's an approach to ontology, but philosophy is fine. Yeah. So that's one of the
downsides. So how do you reconcile that? Because to you, it doesn't
sound like you're particularly bothered by that piece, or at least you have a way of accepting
that our life here is what's going to happen, and then that's the end of it.
Yeah, you know, I'm a little bit bothered. I think if you were to list the downsides of
accepting the scientific worldview, the fact that there's no life after death has to mostly count as one of them,
at least if the other option,
the alternative was heaven in some sense.
But I think that there's a couple things.
Number one, if you look at people's ideas
of what heaven would be,
they don't really match up, right?
It's actually very, very hard for human beings
even to conceptualize of a situation
where you would be sort of happy and fulfilled forever, for a number of years that goes on to
eternity. And that's because, number two, I don't think that people quite understand the importance
in how we actually live our lives of finitude, of ups and downs,
of the process, not just the destination. It's not just heaven that I think doesn't quite work.
The very idea that we fetishize happiness as much as we do, I think, is a mistake. I'm in
favor of happiness. I'm not in favor of suffering, but I don't think you can separate them. I don't
think that a life well lived would ever be free of suffering, but I don't think you can separate them. I don't think that a life well lived would ever be free of suffering entirely.
I don't think that our goal should be to reach some state of happiness and stay there because life is a dynamic process.
Our goal has to be to make that process play itself out in a way that has its rewards as well as its downsides.
Yeah, I'm going to read something you wrote because I think it's very beautiful.
So you say,
The finitude of life lends poignancy to our situations.
Each of us will have a last word we say, a last book we read, a last time we fall in love.
At each moment, who we are and how we behave is a choice that we individually make.
The challenges are real.
The opportunities are incredible.
Yeah, that's pretty good. I mean,
that was good writing. It sure was. And interestingly, one of my favorite musicians,
Jason Isbell, has a new record coming out. And one of the songs on the record is called
If We Were Vampires. And it's about how he's talking about how he's, you know, it's sad that
he's only going to get to spend so many years with the love of his life, but that if they were vampires and they could live forever, it wouldn't matter in the same way.
He wouldn't feel the urgency to love as much as he does today to push today.
And I think this very much aligns with the Buddhist idea of meditating on your own death.
I think it's a very similar idea that it is the fact that this is going to end that does make it have a sense of poignancy and importance and also a sadness that's there.
And I think that's okay.
Yeah, exactly.
I think that's okay.
That could be the alternate title of my book.
And it's okay.
Here's a bunch of true things about the universe and they're okay i think the final chapter of the book is titled three billion heartbeats because on average a human
being will live for about three billion heartbeats there's no information contained in that statement
other than you know we live on average between 70 and 80 years but a heartbeat is a short period of
time and three billion is a pretty big number but it's not an absurdly big number, right?
We talk about billions of dollars all the time.
And so when it's pointed out to you that you have a finite number of heartbeats, which is the entirety of your existence, and there's only 3 billion of them, and they're going by at one a second, roughly speaking, that preciousness of every moment of your life really does begin
to hit home.
And the idea that all we're doing for these three billion heartbeats is trying to make
sure that we end up on the good side of the ledger, not the bad side when we die so that
we have the right afterlife is kind of horrible and repulsive to me, to be frank.
I mean, I would be in favor of an afterlife. I
think I could probably, even if an infinite number of years might be hard to keep things interesting,
you know, a few hundred thousand years would be fine. I'd be very happy with that. But the idea
that we're being judged and some people get an infinite reward and some people don't is one that
I'm glad the world of science has rejected.
You early in the book use an analogy of where we sort of find ourselves in the world today.
And you use the analogy of Wile E. Coyote, right?
In those cartoons, you know, he's always running
and he goes off a cliff and he's sort of hung in space.
There is, his legs are running, but he's fine
until he looks down and realizes
that there's no ground under him and
he plummets to his, not usually death, but, you know, humorous, some sort of humorous injury.
How does that apply to where we are in the world today?
Well, I think that the cliff on which we were walking was a set of beliefs that we had about
how the universe worked. Those beliefs might take different specific forms in different places, different times,
but the general idea that the universe had a purpose and we were part of that purpose.
There was a reason why we are here, whether it was explicitly God or a set of gods or
spirits or just some sort of philosophical predisposition to thinking that there was
teleology, there was a goal to recognize in the universe, that sort of there was an objective idea of how human life
should be lived. And the trick is to find out what that objective idea is and then follow it.
And that's been removed. That's just no longer true. We understand what the universe is at a
deep level much better than we used to. We know that it's not a story of
purposes and designs. It's a story of patterns working themselves out, patterns that we call
the laws of nature. And yet, our discussions about how to live a good life haven't changed,
right? They're still largely in the same kinds of traditions that they were 500 years ago.
So even though how we understand the universe we
live in has changed, how we understand how we live in the universe hasn't caught up.
Yeah, I think that's really true. We've talked on this show a couple times before about
in the, we'll just call it the older world, all you had to do, what you were supposed to believe
and do was pretty clear. You just had the effort of living up
to it, right? And for some people, that works pretty well. And for other people, that's always
a challenge. But that was pretty much it. Today, we not only have the living up to the ideals and
the beliefs, but we have to figure them out, too. And I think your point is that that is a change
that maybe we haven't fully grasped. And that's why it looks like there's a lot of Wile E. Coyote running in the air going on.
Yeah, absolutely, and it's scary, and I admit that right up in front.
The idea that the difference between right and wrong is up to us to decide rather than something that we can be told or could discover by doing the right chain of reasoning and observation and whatever,
that can be frightening.
It comes down to the fact that two people might just disagree, right?
Two people might just have different ideas about right and wrong.
And it's not that one of them is making a mistake.
They have to somehow learn to live with each other if that's possible.
But neither one is going to prove the other one wrong by some brilliant swing of logic or anything like that. And most people, to be frank, don't want to spend too
much of their life fretting about the fundamental mysteries of reality, right? They don't want to
think about why they're here and what it means to be a good person. They kind of want that to
be told to them so they can just do that and get on with other things that they care about. So I do hope that our cultural
conversation shifts a little bit so that we do come closer to matching what we understand about
the world. And I think I like to think, although I can't be sure, that if we do that, we'll all be
better off because of it. Yeah, let's swing back around to the science in the book. A lot of the book is, I mean,
you're a physicist, so the book is very much grounded in the current understanding of the
way the world is. And a lot of the book, I would say, is kind of making the case for
the naturalism part of what we have. We spent most of this interview talking about the poetic part,
the naturalism. And I don't want to walk through the argument and try and, you know, because A,
I'm not, I don't feel qualified to do that. And we're going to wade into some areas that I am
probably hopelessly underprepared for. But there's some ideas that I thought were really
interesting that I'd like to explore. And the very first one that just makes me stop and go,
wow, is this statement. The ordinary
stuff out of which you and I are made, as well as the earth and everything you see around you,
only really involves three matter particles and three forces.
That's the amazing lesson. That's a lesson that can get lost for two reasons. Number one,
there are other particles and forces we know about.
You know, we just discovered the Higgs boson at CERN a few years ago in 2012. And particle physicists have a great time discovering all sorts of new things. And there's no reason to think
that we're finished in the project of discovering new things. There's many, many things we don't yet
understand. So that brings me to the second point, which is that therefore, you're tempted
to think that we don't know anything, because it's clear we don't know everything. It's tempting to
say, therefore, you can't be sure about anything. You know, science doesn't know everything. Who
knows what's going to happen? But even though science certainly doesn't know everything,
and I'm not making any claims whatsoever about when we will or if we will
ever know everything, that doesn't mean we don't know something. And it turns out that the something
we know encompasses everything, all the fundamental building blocks of what you see in your everyday
life. Those particles that you and I are made out of, it's just a few particles jumbled together in
different combinations. And the amazing thing is not just
there's just three particles and three forces, but we won't ever discover new ones that matter
for our lives. It's not just that we haven't found them yet. We know what it would take to find them,
and we've done what it would take to find them, and we haven't found them. They're not there.
There's an enormous amount of new science to be discovered in how
those particles, which by the way are basically protons, neutrons, and electrons, or if you like,
up quarks, down quarks, and electrons equivalently, those three particles come together
in different ways. And everything that goes under the rubric of chemistry and biology and atomic
physics and geography and the environmental science,
it's all just the interplay of electrons, protons, and neutrons with each other.
And there's enormous amount we don't know about that interplay, but it doesn't affect the fact
that whatever discoveries we make in fundamental particle physics are not going to have any impact
whatsoever on biology, chemistry, ecology, and so forth.
So what you're saying is that the things that we do know perfectly explain what we're seeing
in the physical world, and so there's no reason to believe that there's something else there
because what we are able to see explains what's happening.
Is that another way to say what you said?
Yeah, I think I'm saying something even a little bit stronger. It's not just that we can explain it. It's that we know what it would be
like if there was something missing. That we know the basic fundamental principles of physics tell
us if there were other particles and forces, other influences, other ways of things happening
that we hadn't yet discovered,
we know exactly what experiments we should do to find them.
In particular, if there are new particles or forces,
we can find them by smashing together the particles and forces we know about and seeing what gets produced.
We've done that.
That's the favorite leisure time activity of experimental particle physicists,
smashing things together and seeing what comes out.
And many new things have come out, top quarks, Higgs bosons.
None of them can possibly affect our everyday lives because they just exist for a tiny fraction
of a second before disappearing.
They're not things that make up you and me. Hey, y'all.
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Another thing that you talk about that I thought was very, very interesting was the idea we have a sense that life is driven by cause and effect.
Right.
I do this, then that happens.
This happens, then that happens.
And you're saying that in the fundamental laws that underlie our existence, that's not necessarily true or maybe not true at all.
Can you, in the time frame we have, give a Reader's Digest version of that?
Yeah.
So two very important things.
One is that on the level that we do live in our everyday lives, right, the macroscopic world that we see with our eyeballs and experience with our fingers and so forth, cause and effect are very, very sensible concepts to use to explain what goes on. The window broke. Why did it break? What was
its cause? Well, a baseball came through it that some kids hit playing in the yard outside. Makes
perfect sense. And we know which way it goes, right? You don't say the baseball came through
the window because the window was going to break, right? That would not really make sense to us. But that asymmetry between cause and effect doesn't exist at the fundamental
level of reality, at the level of the particles and forces as we currently know them. Everything
is completely the same forward and backward in time at that fundamental level. So then, rather
than talking a language of causes and effects, it makes sense to
talk a language of patterns. If this, then that, both before and after, right? If that, then this
must have come first. And we call those patterns the laws of nature. For any math or physics geeks
out there, they're differential equations. There's a very, very specific way that the patterns of nature reveal themselves to us. And the lesson of emergence is that that's okay, that having this
vocabulary of cause and effect at the macroscopic level is completely compatible with not having it
at the microscopic level. It doesn't mean that anything goes, that all hell is broken loose,
that chaos is loosed upon the world. It's not
either cause and effect or random nonsense. There's a very different kind of structure
at the microscopic level, but it's still based on a very firm set of rules.
This sort of leads to another idea that you bring up in the book, that there may be certain things
that there just isn't an answer for. We have this sense that if something
exists, it had to have happened for a reason or that something had to have caused it. And you're
saying, again, at the fundamental level, that's not necessarily true. And there are certain things
that it's reasonable to believe that perhaps the answer is because that's the way it is. It's kind of like what your parents tell you when you're like, you know, why can't I do this?
Well, because I said so.
That's right.
You're saying that at the fundamental level, we've got something similar.
Yeah, your parents, bless their hearts, they probably could have given you a better answer than they did.
But the laws of nature, the universe might not be able to.
Or they might be able to.
So if you ask a question like electrical charge, okay, we have particles like electrons that have a negative electric charge, positive like protons that have a positive electric charge.
Every time we do an experiment, the total amount of electric charge remains the same.
So we can take one proton and turn it into two protons plus an electron by smashing it together with other things.
But the total amount of charge adds up to the same number before and after.
Conservation of charge.
And you can ask, why is this true?
And it might have been the case you just said, well, that's just it.
That's just how it is.
We actually have discovered a deeper reason.
There's a symmetry of nature that the work of a mathematician named Emmy Noether has shown us.
Symmetries always give rise to conserved quantities in nature. But then you can ask,
okay, why is there that symmetry? And at some level you have to say, well, yeah, that's just
the way it is. I mean, maybe there's a deeper reason. We'll keep looking. But what we can't do
is demand that there be a reason, because it's absolutely possible that the reason is just
that's the way it is. And the most important question for which that's a plausible answer is,
why does the universe exist at all? This is something where many people for thousands of
years have tried to come up with good answers, including modern scientists. I suspect there
isn't an answer. Again, maybe there is, maybe we can find one.
I'm not discouraging people from looking, but I'm discouraging people from insisting that there must
be the kind of answer they would find satisfying. Right. Another thing that I found very fascinating
that you talk about in the book, and I think I'd heard this one other place before, but it was
interesting to hear it again, because I think in the general, you know, layperson world, we believe that the Big Bang is the beginning of
the universe. And we know that to be a fact. And really what what you're saying is that,
well, not necessarily, it's about as far back as we can see, we don't know what happened,
what could have happened before that. So we're not necessarily saying that's the beginning of
the universe. We're just saying that's as far back as we're able to observe or see.
Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, I think that the Big Bang or the origin of the universe is
one of those areas in which I and my fellow cosmologists sometimes come across as a bit
too sure of ourselves than we really have any right to be. The truth is, number one,
we know something happened 14 billion years ago, something that we call the Big Bang, something where the universe
is extremely hot, dense, and rapidly expanding. Number two, Einstein's theory of general relativity,
which is our best understanding of space and time, seems to imply that at that moment there
was a singularity, a moment of infinite density and temperature and expansion.
And the problem is we have zero reason to think that Einstein's theory of general relativity is correct at that moment of the Big Bang.
It's certainly very, very accurate here in our solar system or in the universe expanding today.
But it's going to break down at some point.
It's not compatible with quantum
mechanics, for example. So there's just no reason to accept this prediction of general relativity
that the Big Bang really was the beginning, a boundary, a moment when the universe came into
existence. So therefore, what the truth is, we should just say we don't know. Maybe the Big Bang
was the beginning. Maybe it's just a phase the universe went through and there was something before it. Certainly there are models that scientists pursue on both sides.
And right now, the only safe thing is to say that we don't know the answer.
So if someone like myself, who does not have a very strong scientific background,
wanted to read other things similar to what you did, maybe that, you know, your book takes the
basic scientific facts and then kind of goes, you know, into the poetic naturalism. Do you have some
recommendations of basic reading? Because a lot of this stuff, you kind of come in and it's like,
well, all right, that seems already a little over my head from right where I'm starting, right?
That's right. Yes. Well, you know, I don't know of any books that choose to cover exactly the same topics that mine did.
That's probably not a coincidence.
But for basic physics books, I think that books by Brian Greene or Lisa Randall are very, very good.
These are both very accomplished scientists who are also very good at explaining things.
For the biology and complexity parts, it's harder.
There is, mostly just because I'm not as familiar,
I have my favorite books,
but I'm not as widely familiar with the literature there.
There's a great book called Life's Ratchet by Peter Hoffman
that explains how things randomly jiggling around
inside your body lead to the smooth, controlled movements that are characteristic of our everyday
lives. It's a weird thing, that sort of chaos and a maelstrom on the microscopic level gives rise to
this orderliness on the macroscopic level. And then there's a bunch of books that are very good
at the sort of level of consciousness and thinking and meaning and morality. There's
a book by Owen Flanagan, a philosopher, called The Very Hard Problem, The Search for Meaning
in a Natural World. And these are not questions anyone has the final answers to,
so it's a pretty good idea to read more than one person writing about them.
Yep, exactly. So I want to wrap up. We're out of time. I could ask you a thousand more questions,
I think. But I'm going to end with a concept that you talk about in the book. And you spend time
talking about probabilities, you know, Bayesian probabilities. And it lands on an important
statement that I think is that our prior beliefs matter. So the Bayesian process, very simply,
right, is we start with
our original credences, that we get new information, we adjust those as time goes,
and we eventually get to, hopefully, what is truth. But underlying that is the fact that
where we start from, what we believe, what we bring in, has a lot to do with where things are
going to go. And so I was wondering
if you could just explain that a little bit, because I think it gets back to this,
I don't know everything mindset and how that can be helpful.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who first worked out sort of a primitive
version of this idea, it's a theorem. It's a mathematical theorem. It can't be wrong,
Bayes' theorem. It tells us if we have a
certain probability that we give to certain things being true, how does that probability change when
we learn new information? So that's just a theorem. But then there's this deep idea behind it that the
way we should think about probability is to first guess, more or less, right? To first, before we
know anything, say, well, I think there's right? To first, before we know anything,
say, well, I think there's a certain probability
of something's going to happen,
another probability, something else, etc.
And then the objective part comes in
when we gather new information
and can update those probabilities.
So the existence of this first guessing stage,
what are called the prior probabilities
in Bayesian logic,
people don't like that. People
want everything to be perfectly 100% objective, just like they do with morality. But when it
comes to choosing scientific theories, for example, general relativity versus Newtonian mechanics or
something, the fact that we have prior expectations is not only inevitable, but a good thing, right?
The example I give in the book is,
if a neighbor comes up and says,
oh, I saw someone bicycling by your house,
if your neighbor's generally trustworthy,
you would say, oh yeah, probably that's true.
That's completely compatible with my prior expectations.
If someone says they saw a headless horseman
riding by your house,
the person might be just as trustworthy,
but you're not going to
give the same amount of belief to that statement because your prior probabilities are much smaller.
And admitting that these prior probabilities are always part of who we are and how we view the
world is an important part of that process of coming closer to true understanding. Eventually,
if you gather enough evidence, everyone should agree on the right final
answer, but the process of getting there can be a little up and down. And so the issue isn't that
we go into things with prior beliefs. That's inevitable. It's really where I think we get in
trouble, you're saying, is when we're not updating those prior beliefs based on evidence. And there's
all sorts of cognitive biases that can get in the way of this. You talk about the self-serving bias. We've got the confirmation bias. So the issue isn't that we start with a point of view. Everybody starts with a point of view. The issue comes when we're not updating that point of view based on the new evidence that we're getting.
all the theorems he wants, and you can say that this is how you should update your credences,
your beliefs about the world in the face of new information. Empirically, that's not how real human beings actually do it. There's even something called the backfire effect, where if you have a
belief, especially one that is a politically charged belief, and you are shown evidence,
data that contradicts your belief, afterward, you have that belief more strongly than you did before
because you get defensive about it, right? There's a natural human tendency. We have not just one
belief. We have a whole constellation of beliefs and they fit together. You know, they reinforce
each other and they sort of form a seamless web, or as they called them in the book, a planet
of belief made of all these different little pieces.
And you can't just take one of them and toss it out because the data says it's not true.
So a big part of wisdom, I would say, not that I'm especially wise, but I know that it's a good idea to do everything we can to overcome these biases and these irrationalities. You know,
the human brain was not evolved to solve
logic puzzles or to solve equations, right? It was bred to survive in a very specific kind of
set of circumstances. And so, you know, the least we can do is recognize these biases within
ourselves and try to compensate for them the best we can. Excellent. Well, I think that is a great
place to wrap up. Thanks so much
for taking the time to come on. I really enjoyed the book. Like I said, I think I could ask you
500 more questions, but we'll leave it where it is for right now. And I will have links in the
show notes to the book. You've got lots of things on your website. You've got video talks. You've
got links to your other books. So I'll make sure we link to all of that stuff in the show notes.
So, Sean, thanks so much for coming on.
It was my pleasure.
Great to talk to you, Eric.
All right.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
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