Poetic Naturalism (Sean Carroll)

Lecture from the 2nd mini-series (Is "God" Explanatory) from the "Philosophy of Cosmology" project. A University of Oxford and Cambridge Collaboration.

[JohnMartinJrJazz]

So awesome to live in a time where I can find so much informative media so easily.

[ericbrown]

Wish some who knew someone would get Sean Carroll to host the next season of Cosmos.

[code_monkey_steve]

"Unless you have the Large Hadron Collider in your pocket ..."

No, just happy to see you.

[tejasgokhale]

Sean Caroll, Absolutely fantastic!!!!

Especially heartening for those like me who would never understand the equations of standard model nor would need a god but still strive to take a moral side on things ... lol

[whirledpeas]

Carroll is the most underestimated theorist of of my time. Deserves more than we realize.

[rgaleny]

Out of Greek Stoicism the idea that life is hard but it's good to be alive, that for all it's short coming, you shouldn't reject existence as St Augustine did, but, rather approach it with "Grateful Indifference".

[popvinnik]

I find the bit about not having detected any such particles or forces that would be accountable for such phenomena as telekinesis, telepathy, mind reading/psychic ability, souls/afterlife, etc., highly interesting. Because mostly all of the people I discuss these things with who believe that they're real always fall back on the trump card "well there may be forces out there we know nothing about so don't be so dismissive." Well thus far, nothing of the sort has been detected so the case for such   phenomena has taken a further plunge on the likeliness scale. 

[fernandodosa]

Very insightful agree with everything he said in a language that is easily understandable
Excellent communicator thanks dr Carroll.

[bioblitz]

I have watch this video a bunch of time and I never get tired of It.

[colinshawhan]

Sean Carroll is my favorite scientific communicator. He is not only overwhelmingly well-informed, making arguments so thoroughly as to make countering them seem utterly pointless, but funny! I never fail to laugh during his lectures because he is clever and witty as well as extremely intelligent and vastly well educated. A true gem of a speaker and author.

My take is this: physics is a membrane on which life as we experience it vibrates, like music on a speaker or carried on the radio, digits or record grooves. Paganini looks remarkably similar to Necrophagist (extreme death metal) physically. Physics doesn't care if the music is Paganini or Necrophagist, but you might. One may be quite nice for an evening meal, the other is more of a niche taste. Which is better?

On the topic of life after death I would go further and say life and death are both concepts, but in a different sense polar ends of the same phenomenon. This is a life-death with nothing "before" or "after" except for the causal conception of the artifacts we can see that indicate that something occured that led to this now. We have no way of proving they did occur in a past "time, " that is just a useful concept in making sense of our observations.

I wholeheartedly agree with no lige after death but no life before birth, either. We just are, now, unless we aren't. If we are thinking the thought we are, which is living-dying as energy is used and entropy increases. One day entropy will be locally high enough awareness will no be possible so it will stop. For now we are aware.

Further, as I type this paragraph I am no longer the same person who began typing it. This is quantum mechanically true, though on a certain level we see continuity from moment to moment. This is useful for brains building pictures of the world, and memories, but not necessary for life to exist. Does a plant "know" it's a plant?

The self is an idea, and a very dangerous one. Time is an idea. Life and death are ideas. Look at the boundaries and we observe they aren't very well defined. What about brain death or even dementia? If I forget that I am, am I? Am I alive in deep (non-REM sleep)? Is a virus alive?

Physics doesn't really care. If I am an atheist or Amish I look very much the same to an equation, or a computer. I would say it is valuable to explore the fuzziness of concepts like life and time and death because they underly the very structures of society which determine how we treat each other.

What does anyone care if I were to love another man? This only matters from a standpoint of very rigid belief in concepts of life, death, time, etc.

Doubting or questioning these makes us more reasonable, and probably nicer.

[bendavis]

I wouldn’t say that “moral reasoning” is nowhere to be found in that equation. It’s damn complicated, but by definition it HAS to be in that equation if it exists. Since morals exist as a thought in humans, my guess is that is how you’d represent it in the equation. This doesn’t mean that there’s a fundamental grounding for morals, just that it’s subject to the laws of physics just like the rest of human ideas.

Anyways, great talk Sean!

[whynottalklikeapirat]

I was never properly credited for this but I did in fact discover the "Pigs Field" and demonstrated it to be messy but real under laboratory conditions. This took place under great difficulty in the Bay of Pigs on a navy research vessel with the great help and support of my cousin who was hired on as a Pigs Bosun. I am, btw, also the grandfather of the Theory of Automechanics.

[dlbooneok]

Ferris Bueller got smart ! I could listen to Dr. Carroll for hours on end.

[TheCrossroads]

I read Carroll's "The Big Picture" book, enjoyed its unrelenting thought-provoking ideas. But after all that, poetic naturalism left me utterly cold. Its utter materialism is ultimately bleak; there must be more to the cosmos. All said and done, make mine poetic (super)naturalism.

[havenbastion]

I've been saying all this for a while now, in my own narrative. I draw a boundary between the empirically verifiable world and the "spiritual" world which is that of human intent, desire, etc. That, plus the whole way you show the inter-relation of levels of reality, which also applies to the "spiritual" world of concepts.

[blanktester]

I don't believe in astrology, but despite our arguments, my dad does. His explanation of how the position of planets have an effect on our lives is that it simply isn't a force from the planets on us, but rather that the details of the ancient, deterministic circumstances leading to your birth that also simultaneously lead to the position of Saturn when you were born (i.e. the big bang itself) can be teased out by observing the planets. I don't know what to say to that. Any ideas? Besides calling my dad an idiot.

[robertlunn]

Can the nucleus be split with strong magnetic force? It seems positive force large enough to force a proton out, rather than collision. Move electrons with negative charge.

[RickDelmonico]

So let 's assume we haven't asked all of the questions we could ask. How dynamic is scale? Was the prime mover an emergent phenomena? If everything is information, where are the feedback loops? The stories we can tell have resolution. We get different stories at different scales. The image begins as a course grained image (truth is related to the symmetry), and over many iterations (time is related to the iterations) a picture or story emerges. We know were the image comes from but not the symmetry or the reiterations. Penrose talks about this zooming in effect. In deep time, the universe sort of forgets.
The core is harmonic regularity, the outer darkness is random noise, we are in the space between them, every engine takes advantage of a difference. These two extremes are woven into each other. The eternal now is the processing of meaning.
Echoes have a fractal quality of increasing complexity because they are carrying information about the source, the journey, and the space. Can scale be bent?. If matter can bend spacetime, what is bending scale? The path integrals are constrain by ratio so that they never completely fills the space they occupy, in the same way a tree never fill the space. In the material world we can never completely describe this tree, the best description of the tree is the tree itself.
Truth lives in the macropast and uncertainty lives in the microfuture.
Truth lives in a time and space where the distinction between truth and uncertainty is separated by the now.

[aforsy]

Dang, they really didn't take a SHINE to his joke about the lack of sun in England...

[sureshapte]

what are the criteria if any for distiguishing different levels of theories i.e. which theory is higher level and which one a lower level theory? As prof.sean has made abundently clear that different theories can have incompatible elements, (like reversibility and arrow of time) and so both such theories cannot be true at the same level of description, can we, therefore, say that different theories of nature are different perspectives on the working of nautre as a whole?
one other point concerning incompatibility of certain features of the theories at different levels of description is that if all such theories are mathematical then both of them must be incomplete in the sense of giving us the complete theory of reality,
what do you think?