Sean Carroll || the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe

Doctor Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. Recently, Carol has worked in the foundation of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, and the emergence of complexity. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Offered Peaceful and Foundation, among others.

Doctor Carroll's given a TED talk on the multiverse that has more than one point five million views, and he has participated in a number of world public debates concerning material In his latest book, which is called The Big Picture, on the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe itself. Sean so great to chat with you today. Thanks for having me on, Scott. Yeah, I've been really looking forward

to this chat my whole life. I've been deeply plagued by these existential issues, and it's so exciting to finally talk to someone who kind of tell me what the probabilities are about these things actually, you know, without me having to have no priors whatsoever. As I'm just like laying in bed thinking about this stuff. You know, it's very interesting to me how few physicists worry about this stuff.

Like really, part of it is just that we're trained not to talk about these things, right, Yeah, By these things, I mean like what if the universe didn't exist? Why does it exist at all? Right? I talk about this a little bit in the book that I'm writing right now about quantum mechanics. But we are really trained to solve tangible, specific, put your finger on them problems. Physicists

are trained to not think about more philosophical issues. So in some sense, the people best trained to address these issues about why the universes here are reluctant to even address the issue. You know, I do think that is I can actually verify that a little bit. I did

this event called the Physics Imagination retreat. I had a whole series of retreats that when I worked at the Imaginations at Penn and one of our chrees was physics, and I had a conversation with about six or seven of the top physicists at Cambridge, and I asked all these questions I've just been wondering my whole life. I was like, well, try and travel are we possible? And people are like, ah, who cares? And I was like, ohwas you know all things that like, as a human being,

a human being I care about, right right? And people were just like like, I don't know, maybe maybe not. It's just like, why do you not care? Why is that not so fascinating to you too? That question? You know that I just asked so I can verify. Yeah, And you know, I think I suspect that most physicists were initially drawn to the field by those kinds of questions. But it does get beaten out of you. I mean, it might be true. I don't know. I mean, I didn't get beaten out of me. It might just be

that other physicists were never interested those questions. But yeah, I suspect that there's a selection effect academia. If you worry too much about those things. We're not going to give you a job. Yeah, that's why I don't have a job in physics. There you go. So okay, let me ask a question. You call yourself a cheerful naturalist, Can you tell uh listeners a little bit what a naturalist is and what would a pessimistic naturalist look like? Sure?

I mean, a naturalist is just someone who thinks there's one world, the natural world. The world that we see around us is basically our experience of this natural world. So almost always these words, which are very simple but maybe you can worry about their definitions, go along with some other presuppositions, like one is, basically the conventional notion of the supernatural world is not there. That's the most important thing about naturalism is that there's no supernatural world.

There's no gods or spirits or anything like that. There's a complicated thing we can get into about consciousness that maybe we'll get into about contrasts. We will, we will, Yeah, we will, Okay. Good. The other thing that is more or less implicit in the conventional use of the phrase naturalism or the word naturalism, is the idea that we can learn about the natural world through scientific experimentation, through empirical means, we can go poke at the world and

therefore learn about it. So, I mean, that's basically it. But you know, for all intents and purposes going through the day, naturalism is opposed to supernaturalism, and in many debates it's naturalism versus theism in particular that people care about. Okay, and then the cheerful part, where's that coming? Yeah, so you might not be cheerful if you were. You know, I think that even though there's a growing number of naturalists in the world, our background cultural conversation is still

pretty theistic in its presuppositions. So there's an idea that purpose and meaningfulness in our lives comes from something beyond us, comes from something beyond the natural world. Right, it's given to us by God, or there's just some teleology, there's some point to life that we're headed toward, et cetera. And so if you start from that starting point, you can still deny that there is anything beyond the natural world.

But then you might feel a lack a gap, right, a longing like, well, now I don't have any purpose or meaning in my life, what is it all for? And you know, we had one hundred years of existentialists arguing about this right from Kirkerygarden, Nietzsche through Sartre and Kimu, and you know, mostly they landed on the right answer, which is that we human beings make up purpose and meaning for ourselves. And so I'm in this sort of post existentialist phase. So I can say, yeah, yeah, I'm

a human being. I make a purpose of meaning for myself. That's great. I'm very cheerful about that. I don't feel this existential dread about it. Wait, I've never heard that phrase post existential phase. Did you just make that up? I just made it up. Yeah, I'll copyright it. I'll quickly write an article about it. That is because no, it's kind of it's kind of awesome, like it's meaningful. There is a stage, and I can see how people

embracing that sort of post existential philosophy. Well, and I think that you going along with the idea that many physicists don't think deeply about whether or not the universe should exist. Many atheist slash naturalists in the modern world say or pretend or have opposed that says, oh, it never should have bothered us that God doesn't exist because

you know, God didn't serve any purpose whatsoever. I think that, actually, and this is one of the reasons why I put together this workshop called Moving Naturalism Forward a few years ago, because I think that accepting naturalism leaves us with plenty of important questions yet unanswered, and purpose and meaningfulness are one of them. I don't think you should give a glib, simple,

off the cuff answer to those questions. So I think that, you know, the existentialists worked hard at trying to figure this stuff out. But it's funny though, you know, someone once said said fairly recently, like no one in philosophy departments described themselves as an existentialist anymore. But maybe that's just going to be absorbed that lesson a little bit

too thoroughly. And so I think that there's still work to be done in establishing how we can create perpose and meaningfulness and mattering and morality and ethics in a natural world. So we don't speak the language of the existentialists very much anymore, but the task remains unfinished. So post existentialist phase is I think the right one. Yeah, they got some stuff wrong, right from like a psychological perspective,

the idea that existence precedes essence. Now we know that, Holy cal you know, DNA predicts existence more than they ever could have imagined. Right. They were better at ethics then at metaphism or psychology or psychology. Yeah, I don't doubt that they were better ethics than psychology. Yeah, but they wrote great novels, right, there were some great novels, you know. Yeah, there were some great novels. And some of the sentences they wrote were very poetic. Yeah. That

counts for something, and it does count for something. Well, it does. And I could actually see that segueing to your notion of poetic was it poetic naturalism? Yes, that's right. So did you like that segue? Yeah, that was very good, excellently Well, yeah, fall podcaster. By the way, I just want to say is step back and saying congratulations on the huge early success of your podcast. I mean it's

only been like three months or something, is that right? Yeah? Yeah, Yeah, it's been very gratifying, and you know, there's there's ups and downs, and uh, you know, there are people in the comments who want to, you know, be trouble, but you know, for the most part, yeah, both people have liked it, and you know, people have said nice things on the internet about it, which is kind of amazing. So most importantly, I'm having fun and I've got to talk to a lot of fascinating people by doing It's

so much fun, isn't it? Doing a podcast and not being tethered to any rules about, you know, how to have discourse. I mean, we can just have an open and see a conversation and let it emerge, let the complexity emerge, right, Yeah. And you know, one of the you know tussles that I see in the comments to mine or there, there's definitely a minority slice in there

that only want me to ever talk about physics. And you know, they have not read the instructions because I'm very clear that the whole point my podcast is to talk about lots of things other than physic, including physics. I wonder if I'm going to get in trouble in this episode we're talking about physics. Yeah, you might while

we talk about psychology a little bit. So it's okay, oh no, we'll get to it and we're going to actually we've I have this whole plan in my head, but we're going to let it emerge and we're going to what the plant emergs, so poetic naturalism. Can you tell me a little bit about what the poetic part

of that is, now that you've weighed out what naturalism is. Yeah, so I think that one way in which naturalism can veer a little bit off the rails is So what I said is the way that we learn about the world, the natural world, is through scientific exploration. Scientific exploration or experimentation is not the only way to learn true fact.

For example, math or logic are different than science. You know, they go by formal rules that get use certain results, whereas science is much more tentative and about probabilities and credence is not about certainties. Nevertheless, some people want to say, you know that science can do everything. For example, it can get us morality or meaning things like that, right, And I just think that's wrong. I think that's not what science does. Science tells us what happens, that's what

it is. It tells us what the world is made of and what that stuff does. That's pretty good. That's a lot of you know, it fills a lot of time, but it doesn't tell us what should happen or why we should care about what happens. These are different questions. So the poetic naturalism comes about by the idea that number one, even at a scientific level, there's more than one way to talk about the universe. So there's one world, the natural world. There's more than one way to talk

about it. We can talk about it as particle physicists, as chemists, that's biologists, as psychologists, et cetera. Right, these can all refer to real things in the world. I think that tables and chairs are real. Not everyone agrees, but this is the hell I'm willing to die on. And I think that if you think tables and chairs are real, then you probably think that you should think that consciousness and free will are real. But that's still

just the scientific descriptive view of the world. So poetic naturalism says there are other vocabularies we can use describing the world that are not tied down by the scientific method, such as our moral or ethical vocabularies judging right and wrong. Ultimately, two people can judge a certain action right or wrong and disagree with each other, and there's no experiment you can do to show that one of them is right,

one of them is wrong. Right, It's not science. That's the whole point of science is that in principle, there's data you can collect to adjudicate disagreements, and in morality that's not true. So poetic comes in because there's more than one way to be a moral person or to find meaning and purpose in life. And so there's a bit of human creativity that comes in to talking about

the world in those ways. At the end of the day, you're still just talking about the natural world, but you're as signing properties to it of being moral, being immoral, being something we want to strive toward, or something we can just ignore. That is on the basis of your personal predispositions just as much as it is the action

of the physical world around you. Yeah, I mean you just triggered the psychological component there, right, I mean there's individual differences and yeah, that influences our the world view we develop, the environments we create for ourselves. The more that we create those sort of bubbles for ourselves, the more we start to ignore a broader picture things like that. Well, I think, you know, it becomes especially important to get this right when it comes to morality and action in

the world. Right now, you know, I think that so much of our moral discourse is still embedded in this somewhat religious background. And I don't think that the public face of naturalism is doing ourselves any favors because it's trying to be to go too far in, you know, deriving right from wrong from science, which can't be done.

So I think we need to elevate our game a little bit here, And ultimately it comes down to the fact are you willing to admit or the question are you willing to admit that choices about right and wrong can be subjective, that there's no experiment we can do or mathematical proof we can offer that shows that something

is absolutely right or wrong. Yeah. I was going to get to the moral psychology later, but I do find that a truly interesting question from an individual differences perspective, because we use labels in our field to describe certain personalities as dark, the dark triad. I don't know if you've come across the dark triads that's narcissis, Yeah, narcissism and machavilianism and psychopathy, and you know, in one sense

of description, we're not. Actually, that's a subjective term that us humans researcher science nerdy scientists have decided to label a constellation of traits when we start talking about what is the fundamental nature reality, because that's what we're talking

about ontology. You know, that is a concept. You know, there's a level of description from physics from your point of view, where that constellation of personality traits are literally just a patterns of atomic particles that have self organized at a particular moment of time, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a level of description upon which dark try it has no meaning. Do you see what I'm saying. Oh, yeah, no, absolutely,

I think that's exactly right. So look, tables and chairs have no meaning at the level of description of particles, right, So, I mean, this is the point I'm trying to make that I completely agree with that there's only one world, but there's more than one way to talk about it. That's the short loss on poetic naturalism, and nobody should

disagree with this. There are some very very hardcore eliminatives that want to say, you know, I have friends of mine, to be honest, that want to say the only thing that exists is this deepest substructure of reality, the particles and forces or the quantum wave function of the universe

or something like that. But look, they prove themselves wrong every time they do anything in the world because, of course they talk about tables and chairs, right, tables and chairs are real phenomena there, Daniel Dennet talks about real patterns. They have causal efficacy and explanatory power in the world. You could talk about a table in terms of all of its atoms and the forces holding them together. That's dumb. It's an enormously inefficient way to talk about this immersion pattern.

Immersions happens when there's an enormously more efficient way to get useful information about a situation without going to that fundamental substrate. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend going to that fundamental level on a first date at least. Well, exactly, I've made that joke, right, Oh you've made it too, are we both like? Do we both have an awkward sense

of humors? I totally, Well, you know, so I get an extra bonus because my version of the joke is when you go on a first with someone and they says, they say, tell me about it yourself. You don't start listing all of your atoms right, all the positions of Veilosi. If your first day is with a Caltech student, that might actually work. So okay, fair enough, Oh okay, that's

so funny that you thought your think is links similar. Yeah. So, I mean there's so many like pathways to go in this in this conversation, because people make a distinction as you talk about your book, between rich ontology and sparse ontology, and I think that is relevant here. Could you please explain to our listeners the difference between these two forms

of staying in the nature of reality. Yeah. I think this is really important because we have to admit that when we're facing these issues that are deep and difficult, and we don't know the answers, you know, until we know the answer, right, until the answer is just bleeding obvious, as long as you were in that phase where things

are still a little bit up for grabs. Our human personalities and preferences and predilections affect the hypotheses to which we attach the most creedence by a lot, right, Different people have different kinds of, you know, love for different kinds of scientific hypotheses. I think this is a maybe psychologist should look at this. Certainly, philosophers or sociologists of science should look at this. But of course we hope

that eventually the data decide and we all agree. But the interesting part of science and we don't yet have enough data, we don't yet agree. So when it comes down to the deepest level, right, like what is the world right? What is the world of the fundamental level, some people are going to prefer an explanation which is more or less very close to the phenomena. So we see tables and chairs, and we see people who had

purposes and meaning in their lives. So some people are going to naturally want those things that you see to play a role in their fundamental ontology. I mean consciousness is the way that this shows up a lot with For Plato, it would have showed up in tables and chairs. He actually wants them to be part of the fundamental ontology.

We can't get away with that today, but a lot of people would still want human consciousness to be there, And other people are willing to give up that closeness of fundamental ontology to experience in favor of the ontology itself being very very lean and mean. This is the

sparse ontology. So if I can claim to have a really really simple elegant, very compact, easily written down ontology, and then I can claim that if I work hard enough at unpacking the predictions or the implications of that ontology, I can explain the world. Then that's another kind of triumph that you might want to claim. I'm definitely on the sparse ontology the side of things. I'm very, very

minimal in my preferred view of the underlying world. Of course, the data could always prove me wrong, but that's what I'm betting on right now. Yeah, so you're right, we will ultimately understand the world as a single, unified reality, not caused or sustained or influenced by anything outside itself. Could some people view that statement as arrogant in a

sense that you are so confident about that. So strictly speaking, the answer to your question is yes, obviously, because they have and they do, because you know it's I mean, you have two options. The world exists all by itself, or the world is sustained by something outside it. Nobody knows what one hundred percent certainty which option is correct. Many of us have opinions about the relative likeliness of

these two different options. I don't think it's arrogant or otherwise to say which your preference is right, I don't see why it would be any less arrogant to say the other side, you know, I don't think. I think as soon as people start talking about arrogance, they stopped having a good face conversation about ontology, right. You know, if you want to say the evidence is against my view, then that's fine. Or if you want to say, like, here's the experience we have that that leads us to

think that there's a better view, that's fine. If you just say that, you know, I'm arrogant, then you're just switching to ad hominems at that point. You're not trying to argue with the claim. No, I totally hear you. I'm trying to think of, like, at what level of probability are you allowed to say something with confidence without putting all the caveats around it, because you could have

phrased that sentence. You know, based on my current priors and the current evidence that I've amassed over a career of studying this stuff, my current understanding and prediction is that we will ultimately understand that we're bubtle et cetera, et cetera. Yea, but you stated we will understand, And you know, there are a lot of things during the course of my day, I wonder, like what should be my threshold for having confidence, you know, for a whole

wide range of things like crossing the street. You know, like, what's the probably that I can confidently you know, across the street right now? What is the probably? Et cetera, et cetera. Have you thought about, like, you know, if you want to live your life really like rationally every second of your life, Like, what's a good guideline for that? Like, I mean, above fifty percent seems right to me? But what above fifty percent? Are we talking ninety percent? Like

ninety one percent? Because you could be wrong in that statement and you admit that, but you still state it confidently because it's higher than what ninety would you say percent? What would you say? I would? You know? No, I would go I think it depends on context a little bit, right, I mean, forget exactly how I prease that statement, but you know it's absolutely we will, we will. Well, what was the beginning of that we will? Oh, fair enough,

I would need to look that up. Yeah, so you know it might be something like I believe we will or you know, confident we will or something like that. Yeah, you know, the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, right, I can't say that with one hundred percent confidence. And yet when I say it, I don't feel the need to add footnotes about the relative likelihood and stuff like that. I think that that one I would put better than ninety nine percent probability on, you know, for the world,

you know, not having an external mover. I would probably also put greater than ninety nine percent chance on that. That's huge. I mean, like if people, okay, look, I need to step back second, because this is I'm not sure people really might really get exactly how big that is. In a way, you know, throughout the course of human history, people have been conjecturing about the fundamental nature reality, or about the existence of God, and even today a lot

of people have certain religious beliefs, certain specific beliefs. You're saying that there's like a ninety nine percent probability that some people and their beliefs that they hold so dear is just simply wrong, incorrect. The only part of that I would disagree with or footnotes. Since we're trying to be very very careful right now, I appreciate it is there is a probability. I think that these probabilities are subjective. That's basing an inference for you. Everyone has a credence

for different things to be true. My credence that God exists and sustains the universe is less than one percent. Yes, based on your credences, which are fast believing God when I was a kid, and you know, more data came in and I process the data and I updated my credences, and you know, the world just makes so much more sense as a world that doesn't have God in it now. Of course, in any you know, we can always spend

plenty of time debating what is meant by God. So I mean a somewhat traditionalist view of God, the kind of typical religious believers believe in. So do our facts. By the way, I'm trying to be skeptical here from the point of view of someone that neither me or you are, because I'm I'm in more of your camp

about how I see the world. But I'm trying to think of, like, why do facts and this might be an obvious answer, but I could see someone asking why do facts take priority in credences over experiences like someone else could say, well, my credences throughout my life are like I talk to God at night when I pray. Right now, those totally can't. Those experiences are facts that that is a data in the Baysian way of thinking about it, like I talked to God, I had this experience. Therefore,

I'm going to update my credences. You know, that's perfectly legitimate by itself. Now you should also be thinking, you know what Bayes tells us to do. I don't think he told us to do. And by the way, he believed in God, he was a reverend. Thomas Bay's funny. What he would have said is, look, you can't just figure out whether or not you would have had this experience if God existed. You also need to ask what is the chance you would have an experience like that

if God didn't exist? Right? Right? And so my point is that people who take that to be strong evidence are typically vastly underestimating the probability and something like that could happen even if God didn't exist. You know, the human mind, as you might know as a psychologist, things can happen in the human mind. Like we can misremember things, we can imagine things, we can talk ourselves into things,

we can hallucinate. You can have all sorts of experiences that make perfect sense in a naturalistic world that you could also interpret as spiritual or religious. So I think the probability of either one of these under eat one of these hypotheses, that things like that happen would be very high, no point, very well. Thing. I mean, the

human mind is massively biased, and we've evolved illusions. Yeah, so I want to as we're as we're unraveling the probabilities of the reality of the universe, let's talk about how the universe probably evolved before we get to life. You know, maybe we should back up a second and start pre life about the universe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's very exciting for me, But it was very exciting. I

love physics. In college, I did a presentation on time travel got me in a and that's like I claim to fame and congratulation, you know, and yeah, thank you. So I'm so fascinst So let's talk about how our universe actually evolved. Because reading your book, I realized that we're in a heck of a lot. Since when I took physics in college, I guess it's been two thousand and two. You know, like I learned a lot of

things from that have been updated since then. So tell us what our cur a best understanding of how our universe involved is. So it's been about fourteen billion years since the Big Bang. So sometimes you'll hear people try to make it, you know, thirteen point seven thirteen point eight. We don't know that third digit very well, So let's just say fourteen matter, okay for us? Yeah, exactly. So,

oh no, there's very heated emotional really at thirteen point eight. Yea, well, within specific academic fields, there's such hud arguments about things know ys cares about. So what does that mean that there was a big bang? You know, we discovered in the nineteen twenties that the universe is number one, very big. We might have always thought that we knew the universe is very big. What we discovered is that these little blobby things that we see in the sky are actually

separate galaxies made of stars. Right before Hubble came along, we might have thought that they were just clouds within our own Milky Way galaxy. So the universe seems to be this homogeneous spread of galaxies roughly two trillion galaxies is the best current estimate in the observable universe. And number two, we discover that it's expanding. So the distance

between alexies is growing over time. So if you imagine winding that backward, in the past, things were closer together, and at one point, if you just keep going, it's natural to assume everything was on top of everything else. And that's what George Lemetra, another priest who was a scientist, called the primeval atom and what we now call the

Big Bang. So in according to general relativity right Einstein's theory of gravity that says that space and time are curved, you can again plug into the equations and ask what things were like at the Big Bang, and the answer is there was a singularity, a moment of infinite density, pressure, expansion rate, curvature, and so forth. And in some sense that suggests that it was the beginning of the universe.

There's no space time beyond the Big Bang. Now, the truth is, the story I just told you is one you will often hear, but it's only half the truth. The other half is there's no reason to believe general relativity in the regime of the Big Bang, because general relativity is a classical theory. It does not take quantum mechanics into account. Everyone knows quantum mechanics matters in conditions where you know, the density is very high and things

are very energetic, and things are all squeezed together. So the fact that there's a singularity predicted by general relativity at the beginning of the universe does not mean that the universe began at that time. All it means is that our classical way of describing the universe using general relativity breaks down. Something big happened, transition in the phase transition or something. Well, it's not the beginning of the universe, it's the end of our theoretical understanding, is the way

that I'd like to say. So it's very possible that that was the first moment in the history of the universe, the moment before which there were no other moments. But it's also very possible there was something before that that we don't know. So that's all mystery land What happened at or before the Big Bang? After the Big Bang, you know, one second after the Big Bang, we have a very good handle on what the universe was doing. It was a nuclear reactor turning protons and neutrons into

helium nuclei, and it's been expanding ever since. It was hot, so hot and dense that it was opaque for the first few hundred thousand years, and then it became transparent, and we can see the leftover radiation from that hot, dense early phase in what we call the cosmic microwave background. And we can you know, back when we had television sets with antennas on them, some non negligible fraction of the static in your TV set came from the cosmic

microwave background radiation. It's all around us, and it's there from the Big Bang, and we can learn an enormous amount about what things were like back then. And basically what things were like were very, very smooth. That was the interesting thing. There's not a lot of feature. There's not a lot of structure in the universe at that time. There's a little bit of variation of density from place

to place, but not that much. And what has happened over fourteen billion years is gravity has taken the regions with a little bit more matter and pulled things together to make them even denser, and regions with a little bit less matter and emptied them out to make them even less dense. So structure the contrast novel in the universe is and turned up over these fourteen billion years, and now we see a universe that is full of planets and stars and galaxies. Right, And at that smooth stage,

there was very low entropy. Right. Yes, So there's a whole complicated discussion about entropy, one of the son Even professional cosmologists get this wrong all the time. If you have a box of gas on your desk. For whatever reason, physicists do this. Sometimes there's a box of gas on your desk and you heat it up and you let it go to its maximum entropy state. So entropy is a way of talking about the disorderliness, right, the randomness,

the disorganization of things. So if you let things go all by themselves, there's the law, the second law of thermodynamics that says that entropy goes up until maybe it hits a maximum and then it just remains constant. So the maximum entropy that that box of gas could be in the maximum trope state. If you open it up and look at it, it's what we call thermal equilibrium.

It looks like it's very smooth and it's giving off radiation with a certain very specific spectrum of a different wavelength, and when you look at the early universe, that's also exactly what you see. It's very smooth that it's giving off radiation with exactly that kind of radiation, that that

kind of spectrum. So phys is to say to themselves, Aha, the early universe looks like it is a very high entropy state, which is exactly wrong, exactly backwards, because the reason why is there something very very different about the early universe than about your box of gas. Namely, the early universe was really heavy, It had a lot of mass in it, It It had a lot of gravitational pull to it. The box of gas on your desk, the

gravitational pull between the different gas molecules is negligible. Gravity is a very very weak force, but in the universe, the gravitational force is very very important. Once you turn on gravity, a high entropy state does not any longer look like a smooth thermal box of gas. You could take that box of gas and turn it into a black hole and you would have a much higher entropy.

The early universe could have had a much higher entropy if all the matter that we see smoothly distributed had in fact been very lumpy, and in fact, best of all, if a lot of it had been in the form of black hole. So that's a puzzle. The early universe was actually compared to what it could be really really low entropy and low entropy states are very rare in the space of all possible states. You know, if you ask, how could the universe have looked at the beginning? What

might it have looked like? Choose? You would never have chosen the actual configuration of the universe. It's just too unlikely. And why is that? There must be something you know, maybe God did it. That's one of the explanations, but

there are other explanations on the table. Also, Yeah, is it possible that when you have too much entropy like that, too much that the system can handle like it explodes like and then enters and then there's a state of complete voluntry like kind of the cycle starts over again? Is that po Because I think, can I just tell you why I bring this up? Yeah, because I'm trying to make a linkage to my field. So there's a tick of her and colleagues of mine that have come

up with this really neat theory of psychological entropy. They've taken the same principles of the second world thermodynamics and they try to apply it to the mind and our need for certainty, you know, the human need for certainty, and the theory of psychological entropy. You know, we get

to this state where sometimes we get so overwhelmed. But you know when people who are high on the personality neuroticism already walk around in a high state of entropy in their daily life, I laugh because that's basically me, you know, like, you know, I can relate to that. Yeah, this's just like so much a certainty, and I can

get overwhelmed. But then there's something that it's interesting happens psychologically when the system just gets so over On a less humorous note, a more serious note, like people have had abuse in childhood or very severe trauma actually get to a point where they just don't care anymore. They actually get to a point of you can almost characterize it as low entropy because there's just been too much entropy.

So I'm just saying, like, if we have this analogous to the creation of the universe, is it pau like there was a prior, larger universe or prior different kind of universe that maybe was doing its own thing for like, this is my imagination running wild but kind of doing its own thing. For like, you know, one hundred trillion years got to that state, the same state that we're predicting one google years from now, all black holes in

our universe will have evaporated into a thin mist of particles. Okay, is it possible that happened already? And then what you naturally get as a result of that is like pop, you know, like this very low entropy state. I don't know, this is crazy talk. It is partly crazy, but partly very sensible. So let me see, like you remember everything I need to say here. Okay, to answer your immediate question, it's certainly possible that there was something before the Big

Bang that we would have recognized as high entropy. Yes, in fact, this is my favorite theory that I've written about. You know, a way by using the mechanism that we used was I'm sorry, I need to back up a little bit. What would the universe look like if it

were high entropy? You might ask, And again, gravity is the most important thing here, and the answer is the universe would look like empty space if it were high entropy, which is what you predict eventually we're going to have, right, because entropy is growing, So just let the universe go, it'll empty out. And so the real cosmological question that none of my fellow cosmologists recognized is the right question, but it is, is why don't we live in empty space? Yeah? No,

it's a good darn good question. Why is there stuff in the universe? Why are there the eighty eighth particles around us? And so what we suggested this is Jennifer Chen who was a graduate student of mine and i in two thousand and four suggested, well, maybe there can be a quantum transition where you have a big empty universe and it's almost like a little nucleus that is radioactive that spits off a photon or something like that. This big empty universe spits off a little baby universe,

right right, that starts small and dense and energetic. And then what we recognize is by itself very low entropy. But secretly, of course, it's part of this bigger system that is high entropy. So it's just a localized bit of low entropy. It's not the whole universe is going down in entropy, but the whole universe is creating a more universe that starts low entropy and then grows. That

is absolutely possible. And now that what's the crazy part. Okay, the crazy part is I'm not sure that I agree with the analogy that the psychologists have suggested between entropy and and back channel. I'd love to send you the paper, okay, so you can read it and I'll put in the show notes. Yeah, but it might be very fixable in the sense that human beings are quintessentially not closed systems, right,

that's we interact with the environment around us. So the fact that entropy tends to go up, you know, if that's all you thought ever happened, that would mean that you could never take a bottle of champagne and cool it down in your refrigerator because the entropy of the bottle of champagne goes down. Of course, it's not acting all by itself. It's in a refrigerator, right, and the

refrigerator is viewing heat out the back. So human beings, I don't think are very well modeled as closed systems that obey the second law of thromodynamics, or to which the second mology Human beings are dynamical systems that are you know, channels through which a lot of things come in and a lot of things go out. And so what you're really looking for is the different steady state configurations or quasi steady state configurations subject to these inputs

and outputs. I think that you can try to model that with entropy like notions, but the simple thing of looking at as a closed system is not going to fit the data very well. Yeah, So these are the four propositions, four major tenets of entropy the entropy model of uncertainty. So one, uncertainty poses a critical adaptive challenge for any organism, so individuals are motivated to keep it at amaginable level. So uncertainty management is a huge thing

that humans have. Two. Uncertainty emerges as a function of the conflict between competing perceptual and behavioral affordances. Three. Adopting clear goals and polief structures helps to constrain the experience of uncertainty by reducing the spread of competing affordances. And the uncertainty is experienced subjectively as anxiety and is associated with activity in the anterior sing or cortex and with

heightened neuroadrenaline release. By placing the discussion of uncertainty management a fundamental biological necessity, which I think is what you were talking about, within the framework of information theory and self organizing systems or model helps us situate key psychological processes within a broader physical, conceptual, and evolutionary context. So I presume you agree with that. Well, yeah, I mean

the assumptions sound plausible on the face of them. Of course, there's probably some mathematization of them or formalization of them that goes into it. But again, I think that there's a missing ingredient there, which is the environment in which people are embedded. So or even before that, there's I don't know how much we want to get into this, Give me a minute to just indulge myself here. You know, I think that much more emphasis needs to be placed

on the idea of homeostasis. I know that Antonio Domacio has been writing about this idea. But here is the important fact as I see it. If you turn your computer on your laptop, it doesn't do anything it turns on. It just sits there. It doesn't get bored, right, It's not gonna sort of twiddle its thumbs and be annoyed that you haven't given anything to do. It is happy sitting there for a very long time, whereas a human

being is not. A human being can meditate, and you can sit there and close your eyes and steal your breath, et cetera. But human being is still a fundamentally really really different thing than a computer or a chair. But the point is that a chair is more or less static because it's made out of pieces that are individually static. Right, it's almost essentially a lattice of different atoms and molecules. A person can be fairly static, but there's an enormous

amount of activity going on underneath the surface. Right at the very least your heart is beating, there are chemical electro chemical signals going down your central nervous system ATP is being generated. Right, So your staticness is being maintained by an enormous of activity beneath the surface. And that activity depends on the fact that you're embedded in an environment that is very, very far from thermal equilibrium. We bring in free energy, we use it up, we expel it,

and that's a process that has to keep going. So if I were to build psychological models in a sort of an entropic or information theoretic framework, I would look for these quasi static equilibria based on certain free energy inputs and high entropy output. This is really exciting, actually, I read about this quite a bit in my book. As the physicist Irwin Schrodinger argued in this highly influential book what is Life, which you talk about in your book,

So it's really cool to make these linkages. All living systems survive by reducing their internal entropy while necessarily increasing

the entropy in their external environment. All living organisms reduce enterpy by consuming energy and ordered states such as food or sunlight, and using that energy to maintain their own order, but with various byproducts at least back into the environment, such as heat and acrement, so that the sum totals that they increase entropy in general while maintaining their own low entropy. Humans aren't exempt from the second world thermodynamics.

The toll amount of entropy or disorder in the universe will increase over time, whether we like it or not. Things fall apart. All organized systems will deteriorate and dissolve unless they're actively maintained, which require a constant supply of energy and resources from the environment, such as food, water, oxygen. Without these resources, our buis and minds deteriorate and eventually

cease to exist. When we consume energy from the environment, however, we necessarily destroy the order that existed there Consider the immense amount of biological organization is contained within every living thing. Consuming other organisms is necessary for us to maintain our internal biological order. However, in the process of doing so, we destroy the order that existed outside our bodies before we launch the plants and animals, and our plants organized systems.

After lunch, the systems are absorbed into our bodies just like us. Those other life forms were able to survive only by consuming energy from the environment and leading disorder in their wake. The process of all living systems is therefore to minimize internal disorder with the effect of increasing external disorder. There are deep implications here, not just for our physiological functioning, but also for our ecology. And this is what the linkage I try to make in this

new book I'm working on. This hasn't even been published yet, but I am excited to get the opportunity to just say it out loud to you. I mean, no one else is listening. Hopefully they will turned out. Yeah, I know. We use a fair amount of physical energy to run our brains. Just tell me if this makes sense, because

this is I tried to make this connection. We use a fair amount of physical energy to run our brains, which allows us to maintain a reasonable degree of predictability and coherence and determine what actions will move as closer to our goals. The more uncertainty we perceive in our lives, the more metabolic resources we waste, and the more stress we experience. When internal disorder becomes too great, we are at risk of resorting to strategies that are destructive to others,

not to mention to our own selves. Our sense of possibility strengths, and we're dominated by an exquisitely narrow repertoire of emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, leaving us with diminished potential to become the person we truly want to become. Okay,

I'm going to stop there just to discuss this. So just the way I was thinking of applying some of those physics principles to the notion that we, you know, are what does it mean when we have like high anxiety and like our whole world narrows into this one, like we rummage around it. What is rumination? Rumination is when you rummage around in your prefontal cortex and you can't get out of it, or you know, a particular part of your neural structure you can't like see a

bigger picture. Do you see the linkage there? Well? Yeah, absolutely, But I think that there are you know, things I would poke at. I mean, starting not with you, but with Schrodeger. You know, it was a brilliant book, and I think I think he's very influential and very far seeing, and everything he says is sort of mostly true on the right track, but you know, step one in a

thousand step journey in some sense. For instance, he says, you know, we try to minimize the order within ourselves by the disorder within ourselves, by increasing disorder around us. That's going a little bit too far. It's not clear that we minimize the disorder. We have lower disorder than we could, but it's not at all clear that there's something quite as cut and dried as minimizing the disorder.

You know, putting ourselves in a refrigerator would lower our disorder, and yet we don't do that, right, So I think that it's more subtle than that. Why why would I lower my disorder if I put myself in refrigerator? Well, just as you lower your temperature. Oh, I see, there are fewer things that your atoms can do. Like if you froze yourself solid, you would have almost zero entropy. I see, but not necessarily with it, But not necessarily

the disorder in my head. Right, Like if I'm feeling anxious and I go and refrigerator, will that actually calm down? So this is the other point I wanted to make you know. This is a doable thing, but it's important to do, which is to distinguish between the entropy or the disorder of the physical stuff of which you are made, including the neurons in your brain, and you know, the

higher level. As a poetic naturalist, we're allowed to talk about the higher level descriptions of you know, your thoughts and beliefs and mental states and emotions, and these are things that we can also imagine being in states of more or less disorder. It might be more difficult to quantify that, but okay, we can, you know, we can approximate it. I think that there's something real in here. There's a few things going on, and I think that there's you know, there's a lot of ideas, so I'd

be reluctant to say which I think is right. You know, there's Carl Fristen and his basian brain ideas, So he's about the brain of prediction machine prediction machines, right exactly, And that makes perfect sense, you know, and evolutionarily right that we want to be able to make predictions about our environment as quickly and accurately as we can. Sadly, the desire to do that quickly competes with the desire

to do it accurately. So that's why we meant heuristics and system one takes over all the time and things like that. Right. So again, that fact there's this competition between quickness and accuracy might make it hard to identify something simple that is being minimized when the brain is doing something. But the other thing is what we learned from neuroscience about the actual brain is that the brain there's something nice about being in between a state of

minimum order and maximum order. The brain is close to, but not exactly at a critical balancing point between these two states, because on the one hand, you want to. I think this is part of this balance between being quick and being right. You know, if you have a machine, if you ask you to answer no question, it always says no. That's very quick, but it might not be

right all the time. If you have one that takes a long time to think about it, it might be right, but it might be dead before it gets around to answering it. So these what we see in both in nature and in sort of self assembled systems like the Internet or something like that, is that hierarchical structures, which are not fully chaotic nor fully orderly, are often the best way to robustly deal with these problems of doing things both quickly and correctly. So you just have me thinking, now,

is that possible? That explains why consciousness evolved in the first place to give us that kind of equipment. But maybe there was a point in our evolution where our system one was getting too was not being adaptive anymore, and we actually had to evolve some mechanism of control that would all kind of put the brakes on it a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I think that's very similar to something I talked about in the Big Picture, which is an idea from Malcolm mcgiver about one of

the great leaps forward in consciousness. He suggests was when fish crawled out onto land, right, and the idea was very close to what you just said. If you're a fish, all the evolutionary pressure is make decisions quickly because you can't see that far and water. Once you can see something with your eyeballs, it's right on top of you. You You got to make a choice right away. On land where you're seeing through air and you can see kilometers away.

It opens up the space of ways to organize your brain, to let yourself think a little bit more right, even to imagine possible future, alternative hypotheses, and you know, contemplate things. And we know again from neuroscience that contemplating imagining the future happens in the brain seeing the same hardware that

remembering the past does. So it's easy to imagine that fish evolved primitive memories and that then when they hopped on the land, they repurposed that little memory machine as an imagination machine, and that was one of the steps towards getting consciousness. Yeah, yeah, and I love that part, by the way, and you have to give like a picture that was cute around that section. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean you raise something that is really kind of gets the heart of what I've been fascinated with is

the human imagination. And the default mode network is the seed of the kind of imagination you're talking about, the ability to you know, to draw in the past in order to reconstruct a future. And mostly it's social content. So like the kind of imagination Einstein Hatter or that you have in your work that you do is draws on a different network than the default mode network. It

draws more on visual spatial network. But the kind of you know, those findings you're talking about episodic memory, it's social content. So that suggests like through the course of human evolution, we must have been very social creatures, you know, more so than thinking about the nature of the cosmos. Yeah,

I mean that sounds plausible to me. I would not be enough to say that it is right or wrong, but you know, I think that to get back, you know, to touch it back to you know, this issue of can we think about the brain in useful terms and tropically you know, I think that it's fascinating to imagine that there are aspects of psychology they could be explained by either minimizing or maximizing or extremizing some information theoretic

characterization of what's going on. I think that's very possibly true, and could even you know, in chaotic dynamical systems, we often see things that are more or less smoothly going on for a long time. In banging, something completely unpredictable happens. So you might even be able to fit in sudden changes of psychological state into such a framework. But I think that it's going to be work to do it.

I think that, you know, physicists who are you know again, Physicists just do the simplest stuff, right, Like we think about so simple, you know, the nature of the universe. It's way easier than the brain. And yet even physicists are reluctant to think about out of equilibrium dynamics, right, things actually changing in interesting ways. If you take a typical undergraduate thermodynamics course, they'll teach you what happens in equilibrium.

We're very very slowly changing, and if something changes rapidly like well, I don't know, we can't really say anything, right, And so we're only in the last fifteen years there's been quite a little mini revolution in statistical mechanics where we now have some tools based in part on information theory that lets us talk about those things. Yeah. Good.

So I'm returning to this idea of you know, remembering the past, I mean, or the times arrow the direction, cause I mean, there's this very interesting quirk of the Big Bang in that it did create the situation where we can remember our past but we can't remember our future, you know, right, that idea of us our inability to we can imagine the future, and it's not the signing is remembering the future? What are the links there to

free will? Yeah? So then let me just say one thing because I don't want people to misunderstand the fact that we remember the past and not the future is not a psychological fact. It's a fact about memories and records. Right, forget about our memories. There can be photographs of the past, but not photographs of the future. Right, that's the same fact as we remember the past. So it's not time machines yet. Then, No, that's right. But it's not supposed

to be a claim about the brain or consciousness. It's just a claim about pistemology. We have a much greater epistemic anchor on the past than we do on the future, even though the laws of physics treat them equally. And the explanation for that is the low entropy of the big band. So what it says about free will is exactly what you would expect you to say. Free will is supposed to say that we can make choices about the future. Right, nobody believes. No one who I've ever

met believes we can make choices about the past. We would like to be able to do that. We'd like to combine our knowledge of the past with the ability to change it by making choices now, but we can't. So we have a epistemic handle on the past. We know something about it. We don't know about the future, but we have a causal handle on the future, in

the usual folk way of talking about things. And so the connection of that with entropy is just the fact that since entropy is increasing, there's many many possible futures, and since entropy was very low in the past, there are relatively few possible pasts compatible with what we know about it. So free will is enabled by our ignorance in this point of view. Right, it's a reflection of the fact that we are complicated, chaotic, dynamical systems. We

can't make predictions about ourselves very well. And therefore the best you can say about a human being is that they are an agent making decisions with certain information, certain inclinations, certain preferences and predilections and so forth. And we call that free will. And if you don't want to call it free will, I don't care. Like people get very emotional about this one too, and I really can't get worked up about I don't care what you call it.

But everybody, no matter how skeptical they are, free will acts as if people make choices. Okay, why do they make choice about the future and not the past because the future is not anchored by the low entropy past condition.

You're the big bang, right. There's obviously this deeply intertwined with the nature of consciousness, because what is the you that we're talking about that doesn't have access to all the fundamental right, because if there was a being, a universal consciousness that did have access, in principle, it wouldn't make sense to talk about choices because you know everything that has all run raveled, you know, well, I would say it wouldn't make sense for that being to talk

about choices, right, as long as we don't have access to what that being knows, right, then we talk about choices all the time. That's why we talk about choice is right. Yeah, but who is the eye that is self aware of that fact that we don't have access to? You know, who is that person just talking just now? You just talk to me, right like? There are different levels of reductionism that we can get at. And when we build up, you know from the topic, there's some eye,

there's some conscious, self aware I that can. To me, it's miraculous. I don't know if you find it, just as I know that you prefer wonder overall, as you write in your books. I almost said all inspiring, but I shouldn't say that I find it all inspiring wondrous, and I find it one. I find both all inspiring and wondrous because I feel I know that you don't

like the reverence aspect of it. But I stand in a lot of humility, a lot of I stand like, holy cow, like that is pretty incredible that there did, Like if the universe could, if there was a god, if there was a universe that was conscious, I think it would be pretty darn amazed that holy cow, like you know when it comes back fourteen billion years later, right, Like, let's say God like took a fourteen billion year vacation and then comes which is understandable after Yeah, how smooth

God was at the beginning, I know, But it comes back fourteen billion years and it's like, wow, that evolved, Like really, I think God would be in awe of that fact as well, that like, wow, that probably a random perturbation led to this random perturbation led to this to the extent that we can actually like witness, we can witness the laws of nature unfolding. To me, that

is just absolutely so incredible. Yeah, and I think, you know, it's always hard to ask questions about how incredible something is or how surprising it should be. Right, there are these results in quantum field theory that seem very surprising, and there are literally back and forth articles in the philosophy of science literature solely about the question should we

be surprised by this? Some people say, well, now that I understand, it's not surprising at all, but you didn't understand it, so it was surprising, so it could be surprising. Like I don't want to deny anyone's surprise at this wonderful fact that consciousness has arisen, self awareness and ability to grasp the universe in our minds, or at least

part of the universe. Could I very easily imagine a somewhat deflationary story that says, you know, well, entropy is increasing and complexity arises as entropy increases before it then eventually fades away. And certain structures are met as stable because they actually use free energy around them to increase the entropy of the universe. And in an information theoretic sense, these structures begin to represent the world around them because it helps them survive and go on through the world.

And that information theoretic representation of the world we can think of as knowledge in the brains or minds of these systems, and of course knowledge of the self is an important part and blah blah blah. So we could tell us story in which you would say, yeah, sure, that sounds like something that would happen. You know, I get both sides of that debate. I don't think he's

a right or wrong there. I think that you know, if I had just told you about the Big Bang and said, you know what, what is they going to be like? Fourteen billion years from now, chances you would have talked about human beings are very very small. That I completely agree with. But can you demystify it after the fact by some scientific investigation you know that I'm willing to believe. Also, Okay, well, let's try to demystify

consciousness because I still do think it's incredible. And by the way, I you know, David Chalmers, the philosopher, is a friend of mine and we were talking about this, and he says he's going to be in your podcast, and maybe I shouldn't reveal this I can. Yeah, that'll be a special bonus for listeners of your podcast that they will now know that they care. Okay, well, you know, the top conscious researchers are still kind of in awe

of the fact that consciousness exists right within psychology. So why are some physicists not as you know, like you, for instance, do you not see the hard as hard as some people in our field see it? Yeah? I think that's exactly the right way to put it. I don't see it as hard. Yeah. So, by the way, this harkens back to when we're defining naturalism, because you know, David Chalmers is an excellent example someone who is a naturalist but not a physicalist. Okay, so physicalists are subsets

of naturalists. Naturalists think that there's only one world, the natural world. Physicalists think that all of the aspects of the natural world can be summarized as physical aspects things happening in the world. David thinks that there needs to be a whole other category for mental properties in the world. He doesn't believe there's a separate spirit realm where there's disembodied brains or anything like that, but he believes that consciousness is not reducible to the physical goings on in

the world. And I do and again belief. You know, we talk about the degree of belief. Neither one of us is one hundred percent, right, okay, but we have our preferences, and yeah, you know, I think that, yeah,

let's put it this way. And if again, you took a background view and you didn't know who you were, and then even you just ask yourself, like, of all the phenomena that we see in the universe, at some stage of scientific advancement, which is the thing we will understand the least, you know, consciousness would be a good bet the thing we understand the least, it's like the most complicated thing being done by the most complicated thing

that we know in the universe, the human brain. Right, it's zero surprise that we don't yet understand consciousness, and that involves in my mind, both you know, straightforward scientific understanding and also philosophical clarification of important concepts. So I think I both have specific disagreements with David's point of view and general ones. I don't think that zombies, philosophical zombies who act just like us but don't have consciousness,

are even conceivable. I think that that's not a thing that could possibly happen, because I think the consciousness is just a manifestation of atoms talking about themselves in a particularly complicated way. There's an enormous road to go before we understand how that exactly plays out. But I don't see this barrier in principle to it playing out. No, that's fair enough, I guess I don't understand why you're not as amazed that we went so many years after

life existed. There are a lot of possibilities for that emergent that can put I mean, like dolphins have a pretty complex neural system, there are other animals that do other animals don't come close to being as conscious as we are. Why Like why us? And I'm not trying to get all like religious here all of a sudden, but it's pretty amazing. I shouldn't say ridiculous, but I think there. I don't think it's marcus at all or

amazing at all. I think that that's a pretty obvious case of survivors bias, like someone had to be first, and whoever was first, whichever species developed consciousness first, would have this conversation why us? How amazing? Is that I'm not that impressed by us so far. I think that's like the only thing I can tell so far that that referentiates us a little bit, because I am in general,

I actually really and there's no actually about it. I really appreciate your spirit, your truth seeking attitude, and I share that very much. But I tend to just walk around with so much wonder of the maraculous of the fact that I can witness this impartial universe unfolding. I think it's just incredible that we've been giving. It's almost like a privilege, Like you know, we talk in positive psychology about gratitude, but I feel like I want to coin a phrase. I was thinking about this of their

existential gratitude, like, would that be fair? Like I feel like I walk around with a lot of existential gratitude in my life, and no one's talking about that in the field of positive psychology. We're talking about more mundine, you know, like I'm so glad my mother, you know, baked that cake for me, or you know whatnot. But I walk around almost every day. It's like the universe did not plan for us to be aware of it,

you know. Yeah, No, I mean I think that I actually love the phrase existential gratitude because it's a good counter way to existential despair, which talk about all the time, right, right, And we should be grateful and that's great. But I keep wanting to say, but because I think, you know, we, like you said, we agree on most everything with the r scientists, you know, let's concentrate on what we disagree on.

That's that's where things are fun. You know. I also think, and maybe this is the hidden positive psychologist within me. I also dwell on how crucially important it is to be grateful and appreciative of some of the many mundane things about life, right, some of the things that wouldn't be on most lists of the miraculous and the incredible. But you know, a good slice of pizza, or you know, when my cat jumps into my lap or whatever, and the phenomenon of consciousness is there, Like, I don't need

it to be incredible to be grateful for it. Certainly the fact I am impressed by many, many things. I'm impressed by the rate at which human beings have figured stuff out about the universe. I'm impressed with the wonderful variety of human experience and the things that we've done, and you know, the obvious things art in music and poetry and so forth. So I don't feel like I need to judge how likely or unlikely these things were

to be impressed by them and grateful for them. Okay, well, I appreciate your perspective, you know, I definitely appreciate it. So let's talk about the link between quantum reality and consciousness, because you're also skeptical that quantum mechanics will help us understand consciousness. Is that right? Yeah, this is a very four conversation. There is no link between quantum reality and consciousness. Yeah, sorry,

what do you say is a conversation? There is a very short comm short short sure, sure, right, right, well, you you know you sent me and I'm very grateful you sent me some new material where you talk about that possibility. And it's obviously from both directions. Right, So does consciouness play a role in accounting for quantum mechanics?

And you would say no as well? Right, all right, exactly, yeah, I mean there's no. So this is interesting and important and in my mind more or less solved in both directions. So when quantum mechanics first came along, it comes along with a problem. The problem still exists, called the measurement problem.

What really happens when you measure a quantum system? What makes quantum mechanics so different and so difficult to understand compared to every pre existing version of physics is that seemingly we need separate rules for what happens to physical systems when we're looking at them and when we're not looking at them. That's you know, and why is that? What exactly are those rules? Do we really need them?

This is the measurement problem. The witty short motto for this is quantum mechanics says that what exists is very different than what you see and is capably so. So it was natural then to imagine in the early days that well, since the act of observation or seeing or looking is something that human beings do, maybe that to explain this problem, we need to understand something about consciousness.

Maybe the human consciousness really changes the world when you look at it an important way, or even brings the world into existence in some interesting way. And you know, people are still welcome to believe that. People can believe whatever they want, but it's absolutely false to say we can't account for quantum measurements unless there's something special about consciousness. There's perfectly good explanations for the measurement problem now that

didn't exist in the nineteen thirties. They have nothing to do with consciousness or human perception at all. So you know, you're welcome to believe those things, but there's no need for it or evidence in favor of them. Yeah. You know, some of this may sound really technical to our listeners. I just want to impress upon everyone just how profound this argument you're making is, because it does you know, as far as I see it, this gets at the crux of whether or not we live after death, because

the only thing we care about. Living after death is our consciousness. I mean, when we really get down to it, it is our you know that there's some continuity of some sort of awareness, our memories can persist in some way, and our awareness of those mets. I'm raised. If doesn't where memories exist and we're not aware of them, then it's like what's the point, right, Okay? So exactly, so this does get the heart of like, you know, like is their life after death? I mean, the question is

their life ever death? Like that is one of the most pressing questions of humankind. And it sounds like you're like ninety nine percent certain there is no life after death. Yeah, that's right, okay, And that's so cool that we could so objectively and rationally and coolly just answer that question

like right. And you know, again, I don't want to be dismissive with people who disagree with me here, because some of them are very smart and I admire them, and in any sorts of numbers of ways, I'm going to halt you after her. Yeah, that's exactly. I'm also setting myself up for Pascal's wager kind of come up. And but I'm not saying things that have other people that I'm in reading for my podcast that they will be talking about these issues with, So stay tuned to

feature episodes of the Mind Skate podcast. Yeah, you're more discussion about these things. But yeah, I think that consciousness is, as far as we can tell, is inextricably twined to the stuff that is happening in your body, in your brain. I mean, there's no evidence for consciousness happening in the absence of brains, let's put it that way. That's a

fairly weak claim, right. Yeah. I talk in my book In the Big Picture about the story of Princess Elizabeth, who I want to act as her public relations advisor because she needs a lot more credit. She was the one who challenged Descartes on his mind body dualism based on the idea that you know, he hadn't specified how the mind and body should interact with each other. And

these days philosphers called this the interaction problem. And I think what you're getting at here is that we what I claim the book anyway, is that we now know so much more about the body than Descartes did. We know that our bodies are made of atoms. We know that atoms are made of electrons and protons and neutrons. We know the equations that govern how those particles move around. So as much as Elizabeth was able to say there's no room for this imagerial mind to affect your body,

that problem is a million times harder. Now. There's just no way to alter the equations of physics in any sort of harmless way that would allow something other than those physical electrons and protons and neutrons, et cetera to do their thing. So that doesn't mean it's impossible. That means it's a huge burden on those who would have that be the case, to show how you could change the laws of physics as we know them, and if you don't, then there can't be any life after death.

Then the laws of physics as we know them are unambiguous about that, and I need to emphasize, as we know them, they could be wrong. It's just that there's zero evidence that they're wrong in the relevant regime, there's zero reason to believe it, and attempts to change them to make this happen are, you know, ranged from non

existent to abysmal failures. So as a good BAYSI and calculating my credences the credence that somehow the information, Like these days neuroscientists can locate which neuron certain memories are associated with, right, if that neuron is not there anymore, how can the memory be there anymore? There's just no way for that to happen. Yeah, and I agree with that, But you know, can you use the human imagination to think of some possibility that there is a life ut

or death? Not that possibility because I agree with you that when the physical system supporting consciousness is no longer in existence, it's kind of hard. It will be hard for consciousness to exist. Yes, I agree with that, But can you imagine the possibility of Like my friends and I we sit around, we're not physicists, but we like think of, well, maybe like the universe is not infinite. We don't know for a fact that it is infinite, and how do we know that, like doesn't loop back

on itself. Like when we die, there's going to be an infinite or a really long time that we're dead. But there might be hope that there will be like a time maybe for trillion years. It'll feel like a second us. But where that constitution of atoms that made us us? Somehow reconfigures itself just through chance. Yeah, but it won't be you. I tried, I try. It won't be you. I try. You know it won't be I mean all I am from a physics point of view, is you made note? Is you know this really improbable

pattern of atoms? I mean, how do you know that? Like, given enough, you're a persistent pattern. And so it's the persistent part that's important here, isn't it. Yeah, so of course for every time it's not clear that we do. Let's imagine that we live in a world where random

fluctuations continue infinitely far into the future. Okay, then, since you're made of a finite number of particles in a finite region of space, if you have an infinite amount of time for random fluctuations to happen, something just like you will appear in the number of times. However, for every one time that happens, there will be an enormously larger time when something kind of like you appears but not really exactly the same, like every possible variation on you.

It's Boorhaes's infinite library, right, So, and all of these will say like, well, did I just fluctuate into existence or you know, they'll have false memories or whatever. There's no useful sense in which any of those are you or descended from you, or anything like that. The idea of a person we talked about emergent phenomena. Right. Tables and chairs are useful categories because they have certain properties,

which include the fact that they stick around. You know, they're here, and they're here it again, you know, the next moment, et cetera. People are the same way. People are collections of atoms arranged in a certain pattern. Most of our atoms, by the way, you know, don't last through our body the whole life span. Right, we have my four year old it self is dead. Yeah, that is not the right word. But your atoms are not there anymore, except for maybe in your teeth or something

like that. Non existent well, you know, has evolved into something else. But there's a reason why it is useful to categorize your four year old self and your present self as different moments in the life of the same person.

There is zero reason to categorize yourself now and yourself ten to the ten to the one hundred and twenty years from now that fluctuated existence as different moments in life and the same person, So you can't think of any legitimate physics thing that could surprise you where like you didn't think of it now, you know, Let's say you die and then something happens where you are still maybe like some atom is conscious, like but it's not a body anymore, or something like and like, can you

imagine something that still bays the laws of physics where there's hope that we live after we die or you're like nine nine point nine repeating sure that that's not going to happen. Yeah, no, I mean if you so you add it on that obeys the laws of physics, like if you want to obey the laws of physics, whenever you ask a theoretical physicists, can you imagine there's always sure? If I try hard enough, I can do it. I remember, it's funny, that's very funny. It's true. We

have two minutes to digress. You know. I sometimes act as a science consultant for movies, and the movies are usually written even before I get to look at them, So it's more a matter of like cleaning some things up, not adding new ideas. So once we were doing this movie and the actress who was going to play a physicist wanted to come to cal Tech to talk to

some real physicists. So I introduced her and one of the producers to some my graduate students, and they explained the plot of the movie, which is utterly implausible by physicist standards, and you know, so they explained it to the grad students and said, you know, well, so what how would you explain this physically? You know, if you if this had happened, And the gradutudents are like, Nope,

that cannot happen, that would never happen. And so then I explained to them, I said, look, when you have a movie plot, don't think of the plot of the movie as a new theory. Think of the plot of the movie as data. You don't have the option of not believing it. Right, You're forced to explain it. How would you explain it? Five minutes later they had like twenty different explanations that they come up. Right, So, can I imagine ways that despite everything we know about a

law position, some knowledge, you're so cynical. I am no, I'm just a good abductor, I'm a good basia. Yeah, And there's a rational part of me that agrees with that. Yes, there's a rational part, now do you, I mean, does it? It must really frustrate you then when you're talking to someone who israel religious and says, well, you're just not open enough or you're not in touch with God like I am, that that argument must frustrate you. Well, it does,

because I don't think it's a sensible argument. I mean it just like the arrogance argument, you know, like, is it more arrogant for me to say the universe that we see is all there is than to say that, oh, I have personal knowledge of an I phenomenon in being. That's a great point. That is such a great point that you're right, You're right. Yeah, both are kind of arrogant in a way. Yeah, So I mean people can

always say so, Look, it's possible. I mean that among the things that are possible to imagine is that there are ways to access the world that different people have different capabilities in. Right. I mean, this is what Alvin Plantinga believes, right, that there is a divine sense, census divinnatas in some of us but not in others. And he says atheists just don't experience it. So if you believe that, you know, again, my basy and prior for

that would be very small. You know, I'm tempted to say that I don't have that, but I have a census bullshittiis that says that, you know, maybe you just made that up, but it could be right. It's absolutely possible, and in that case that they have access to information that I don't have. But you have to make your choices about layer cretencies. Yeah, this is so much fun. Let's end this podcast talking about if we accept as true the ninety nine percent probable ability these things are true,

how should we live our life? Right? So you have this whole section of your book on caring and morality leading up to existential therapy, So I want to end this podcast talking about that because this is very important. So Carl Sagan has this quote our star stuff, which is taking its destiny into its own hands. Now, first of all, I find that absolete and all inspiring. So Carl Sagan says that, and I'm in all, you know, the fact that we are a species that can take

the destiny into our own hands. And I was thinking about morality in the sense like every time, it seems like every time we make a choice to take the moral decision when we're faced with a dilemma. To me,

that's the true test of free will. And I wanted to run that by you because in a way, we're kind of defying the universe every time that we And I know that sounds too grandiose, but you know, it just seems to me like there's a certain satisfaction we get when we don't give into some impulse that is destructive and instead we choose the choice that is growth oriented or healthy, or caring or even caring, you know, we can use the word caring. There's something about that,

you know. And also the sense of like consciousness and self. I mean, there's this really interesting research shows that other things we can lose, other things we can lose our memory of you know, like fat actient, we weren't in high school, et cetera. But as long as our moral sense is intact, we still feel a sense of self. So it's something about this moral Yeah. So, I mean, I think there's a couple of background things to say,

and they'll try to answer the question. You know, in that section of the book called caring, some people got frustrated because my personal interest in that section was more on meta ethics and meta morality and meta meaning rather than ethics the morality and meaning. So I didn't tell anyone how to behave or how to find meaning in their lives, right. I talked about what it would mean to find meaning in your life, what it might mean to come up with rules for being a good person

and stuff like that. And people don't want that. People want rules like people like, tell me what to do? You know, That's what I want, even if I disagree with you, I want you to say there are rules I can disagree with you, not just give me a platform for thinking about it. You mean, like Jordan Peterson's the Rule. I know. Yeah, you know. That's why he sold more copy than I did. Yeah, you know, it's one of the reasons. One, so one of the reasons.

So but okay, But so, having said that, there's some you know, perfectly kind of obvious aspects to making choices that are moral and ethical and good and meaningful and so forth. The reason why I called the book or the section caring is because I think that what we have to work with is the fact that we all care about stuff. You can care about things in a bad way, right, like you can have you know, bad motivations and care about you know, doing them. Revenge is

something you might care about. But that's the starting point for me for developing, you know, our personal views on morality and meaningfulness and so forth. So I mean, I think what you're saying is good as a more substantive direction to move in when it comes to bringing meaning and morality to our lives. You know, we can, we can. You're a psychologists, you're better at this than I am. But we can imagine that there are sort of the simple things to do and the more challenging things to do.

And in some sense, you know, there's a struggle between system one and system two maybe, or at least between the most obvious heuristics that get used to get through the day versus more reflective, carefully thought out things. I think it's an aspect of free will, you know, But I would also call free will what happens when I choose to wear the white shirt or the black shirt, you know, in the morning. I don't think that it

needs to be fraught with moral weight. But yeah, you know, I think this idea of when it goes back to the idea of you know, explaining the brain and personality by entery considerations as wonderful as it would be to explain things by simple principles, I think that when it comes to complex systems like life, there's so much more often a tension at work, right, And it's not one overarching thing that gets minimized or maximized for the competition

between different things. And you're right that it, you know, very roughly speaking, I think that John Stuart Mill would have told us that we have, you know, higher desires and lower desires or something like that, higher pleasures and lower pleasures, and you know, want to work to sort of boost up the higher ones a little bit. I think that's a wonderful thing to do. It is definitely the kind of thing that a poetic naturalist would be

happy to endorse. Yeah, and also I see a lot of similaris to one of my favorite psychotherapist, role in May. I don't know if you've read his writings on existential humanistic psychotherapy, and he's been my one of my biggest influences.

He talks a lot about caring is simply just throwing your weight, you know, for something, and his book you know, Love and Will, I highly would recommend you read Love and will Actually I love to like grab a beer with you someday and discuss love and will you know. But so I think it very much in line with your thinking about desire and care as intertwined. You talk about, you know, relating to this point of there's no ten commandments.

You didn't want to put it forward, and I really appreciate that because there's such a push and to write self help book these days, right where you have a certain number of things. I reserve the right to write a health help book, something good, good, good, and you know it makes a lot more money. I'm sure. Well you know what you got to say, crowded market, But yeah, you got to have an angle. You need an angle.

So these ten guides that you put forward, you know, i'll call them guides to living or yet obviously considerations. I like that a lot, you know, I really like this one about how there's no natural way to be. Yeah, we are the final product of a cacophony of competing impulses. This seems very relevant to what we're just discussing about morality and over rising above our competing impulses. You say we're the final product of a cacophony of competing impulses,

and so are other people. It's that we are not simple, unified, fixed creatures. We have inclinations, desires, probably one of our any dispositions. But we also have the opportunity to change

as individuals and as a society. So there is an optimism here at the end of the book that even though we're in this totally meaningless universe and we're all going to die, and like all these other things we figured out here, still in this short life span that we have, we still have the opportunity to make others better as well as ourselves better. Right, Yeah, absolutely, And I think that. I mean maybe in retrospect I had this in mind and might even have said it, but

didn't emphasize it nearly enough. The poetic naturalist will accept both that we have basic instincts, desires, things that are given to us by evolution or things that are just accidental or whatever, and we have higher cognitive capacities which allow us to take those basic ingredients and shape them. Right, And it's you know, you can't I think that again.

Too many people want to say, like, well, we're just you know, beasts in the wild, giving into our evolutionary desires, or we are perfectly rational or we should try to be perfectly rational things. I think that the interface of those two things, or the relationship between those two things, is central. David Hume, who I really like. You know, reason is the slave of the passions. Like you know, your passions tell you where to start going, and reason

will help get you there. And one of the reason things that reason can say is, you know what, that passion was a bad idea. And I think this is what it means to do moral philosophy in a morally constructivist framework, where you think that morality is not out there to be located in the world by you know, rationality or scientific experiment. It's something we make up that leaves us with an enormous amount of work to do.

You know, what are we going to make up? Like where do we start to how are we going to do it? And certainly our rationality and higher cognitive functions play a huge role in that. Certainly, certainly you know, in this recent Scientific American article I wrote about what would be the implications if we all believe that we're all one. You know, a lot of spiritual people believe and there is a sense as I'm reading this book and understanding the latest laws of physics, there's a sense

in which we're all one. In a sense, we all are living under the same fundamental laws of nature. So you know, some scientists have starting to look at what would happen if we all really believed it, And in a sense, it's not a belief, it's actually the truth. And so I want to end this podcast day with

this great quote from your book. All lives are different, and some face hardships that others will never know, but we all share the same universe, the same walls of nature, and the same fundamental task of creating meaning and of mattering for ourselves and those around us in this brief amount of time we have in this world. Book Sean, I consider it miraculous and improbable that I got a chance to talk to you today about whether or not we matter in this impartial universe. So I have a

lot of existential gratitude for this chat today. So thank you, darned. I was going to tell you a lot of exent, but you took it from me. But I did great pleasure for me too. Yeah, it was a lot of fun, a lot to think about here. We should talk again sometimes I'd love that. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thus Psychology podcast

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