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