That’s the charmingly grandiose title of a talk I gave at The Amazing Meeting this past July, now available online. I hope that the basic message comes through, although the YouTube comments indicate that the nitpicking has already begun in earnest. There’s a rather lot of material to squeeze into half an hour, so some parts are going to be sketchy.
There are actually three points I try to hit here. The first is that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood. There is an enormous amount that we don’t know about how the world works, but we actually do know the basic rules underlying atoms and their interactions — enough to rule out telekinesis, life after death, and so on. The second point is that those laws are dysteleological — they describe a universe without intrinsic meaning or purpose, just one that moves from moment to moment.
The third point — the important one, and the most subtle — is that the absence of meaning “out there in the universe” does not mean that people can’t live meaningful lives. Far from it. It simply means that whatever meaning our lives might have must be created by us, not given to us by the natural or supernatural world. There is one world that exists, but many ways to talk about; many stories we can imagine telling about that world and our place within it, without succumbing to the temptation to ignore the laws of nature. That’s the hard part of living life in a natural world, and we need to summon the courage to face up to the challenge.
Or at least, so you will hear me opine if you click on the link. Curious as to what people think.
@Tony #16
How true, how true. If it weren’t for the fact that gods & angels & such ARE around, there might’ve been evil countries out there like, say, commie China, whose first ruler slaughtered 85 million of his countrymen for no valid reason & whose murderous, imperialist successors are carrying on the tradition, massacring many, many thousands of people, including making genocidal attempts at the Tibetans & Uighurs, etc., & who have nukes & who try to steal islands from other countries in the surrounding seas & so on. But thank goodness & saints be praised! Gods & angels & such DO exist out there & there IS NO such country as commie China out there. What luck! Whew!
Agreed, Vmarko #48…
Atheism can be just as dogmatic as Catholicism.
@ #51
So according to your comment, those gods and angels weren’t around at the time when those 85 millions were slaughtered. What happened? Did the gods and angels fall asleep at that time or were they lagging? Where were they at the time of 911 incident? Oh, I got it. God must have a plan for those victims. We can’t question it. If something good happens, then God is responsible for helping out. But if something bad happens, then God must have a plan for them. Religion and god hypothesis are so twisted. Arrogant in its own way but shallow on the other end. As I said earlier, science is the true glory, while religion and god-like beliefs is fabricated glory.
@#51 again
Science flies people in an airplane, religion flies people into the building. That’s it!
Great talk!
I like the way you talk about complementary levels of description, which I find one of the most important “discoveries” in physics.
It shows that to truly understand the universe we need not one way of looking at it, but we need to try to exhaust all complementary levels of description. (Hmm… I’m starting to sound like an article of Bohr.. 😉
@55:
“It shows that to truly understand the universe we need not one way of looking at it, but we need to try to exhaust all complementary levels of description.”
This reminds me of one passage in H2G2 (and I’m trying to quote Douglas Adams from memory here, slight ommisions are possible):
“The Universe largely depends on how one observes it. In fact, the Universe doesn’t exist at all. The Universe is actually defined as a set of all possible ways one could observe it if it had existed.”
Now this is real art! 😀 Combine scientific with philosophical with satirical, while making fun of each of those, all in one go! 😉
A lot of things are ruled out by our current understanding. Nothing is ruled out by our future understanding. It is only arrogance to believe we know everything there is to know and what little we don’t doesn’t matter, can’t matter. Sean, if you believe this why are you wasting your time on it.
@#55
Yes, Complementarity principle of Bohr. Great discovery in physics. But lots of people on the commenting list don’t understand it. Science is humble compare to the arrogant religion, especially the western religion.
Thanks for your input.
@#57
Scientists never claim that they know everything, that’s why we are still in the process of making progress. Unlike religion, they seem to have the answers to everything. Sean certainly never mention that we know everything. In fact, scientists like us will not be sure to claim anything unless we are absolutely sure ( the golden 5 sigma level), meaning if we have less than one in a million chance of getting it wrong, then that’is the level we claim it and it usually takes 10 to 20 years of data analysis. This is how cutting edge medications were developed. As complexities arise, we have to modify and expand and improve to overcome those complexities. Science is forever changing and getting better and the beneficial factors are immense. What has religion done? No progress at all and only claiming that everything they say is right. It is a disaster and create conflicts and wars and separation among humanity, now that it is a major factor in politics as well which made it even worse. The laws of science were here long ago before us, and the rules in religion were created after we got here due to our lack of self courage and fear of death. To this day, those kind of people are the true victims for they keep circling around false hopes and comforting.
God is Love, Hatred is the breath of Hell. Honestly I tell the Truth, Truth is God as well, and God is Life itself. Wisdom is God as well, it is she who came in the Person of Christ. This is why it is impossible to imagine God. No one can unless God shows Himself to the person and as Christ revealed Himself to me. I realise that most if not all of you will think of me as out of my mind, but it is the reality of what happened. To imagine Love in all its power is simply beyond all human understanding, we have nothing to compare it with, absolutely nothing at all. This of course leaves me open to intense ridicule, but none the less it is true and I feel I must say it. So my friends when your time of death arrives there is a path that leads to the light of Love, so be sure to take it, it begins here and ends there. This was not a vision, but was in the light of day.
@#60
Well, it seems like you have been through that path or else you wouldn’t be so sure of it. When my time comes, I’ll be sure to let you know that you were right all along. I guess I can do it through dreams, or through a medium or any of those supernatural means. I think both me and Sean will have to accomplish that.
@David Lau, #53
Dude, I think you missed the pt. Read the 3rd from last sentence again!
my point is if those gods and angels are around, what are they doing now ? The world is a mess and it is getting worse. But never mind answering this, for there is no conclusion about science and fairy tales coming to a consensus.
@31. Richard M.
Well that’s kind of misstating (or at best oversimplifying) Sean’s point. He said the laws *describe* a Universe that moves from moment to moment — you left out the primary verb.
Well, in my post I did put up Sean’s entire quote, and once again, it is there below.
“The second point is that those laws are dysteleological — they describe a universe without intrinsic meaning or purpose, just one that moves from moment to moment.”
The thing is, “intrinsic meaning or purpose” doesn’t make sense anyway. When we talk about purpose or meaning, it is always with respect to some larger system.
But my real point was – how can one tell whether a system has purpose or not by looking at its descriptive laws ?
For instance, suppose I run some code to which gradually builds up a picture of the Mandelbrot set on your computer. Now someone just looking at the code would say, “This has no intrinsic meaning or purpose. All the code does is describe how the pixels on the screen change colour from one moment to the next”.
But the code definitely was written for a purpose. Its just that by looking at the code, it may be impossible or very difficult to figure out what the purpose is.
Note: I am not insisting that there IS a purpose to the universe. I’m just saying that everything Sean wants to say can be expressed without making grandiose claims about the purpose of the universe or lack thereof.
Brett @37:
Agree with you. The deeper issue is that any form of genuine choice or “meaning creation” assumes that we have the ability to act beyond the laws of nature.
But if you seriously accept that we are part of the universe, completely subject to its laws, then any choice we make or any purpose we create for ourselves is also predetermined by the system.
So, if I hear Sean’s lecture and sink into despair, that’s determined by the laws. If I decide to spend my life arguing against it, then that’s also determined by the laws.
Hence, Sean’s entire project to “create meaning” is doomed from the start, really. All we can do is PRETEND we have free will and try to make decisions for our happiness
You say QFT is the most successful theory, which says “there is no such thing as particles,” and then you say, about the theory of the everyday world, “there are three types of particles.” Doesn’t that seem a bit illogical? (Yeah, I know, particles are made of fermions… but shouldn’t you check your language?)
@ #66
Sean specifically said ” if you look at the field, you’ll see particles”. Particles are manifestations of quantum field. He is a great physicist and he knows what he is talking about. Don’t pick on little language issue as physicists often mix and interchange words, focus on the whole content that he talked about and look at the big picture. He can teach you a lot about real science.
He means that QFT is the most successful EFFECTIVE theory we have.
Problem is QFT doesn’t even explain gravity, which requires a completely separate theory.
QFT also doesn’t explain the mind, and Sean’s hope that it is just an emergent complex phenomena is not much advance on religious belief to be fair.
And also note that Sean has a non-orthodox understanding of QFT since he claims it is based on a deterministic quantum theory, which a minority of his fellow scientists believe.
So his grandiose claims are not only inaccurate, they are based on fringe ideas.
To those who say there can be no meaning without a supreme being to judge us, we’ll my meaning is one I learned from my father: leave the world a better place than you found it. Granted, every thing in the universe will eventually die, so in the grand scheme of things it really doesn’t matter, but we may as well make the most of it while we are riding this bus.
As for a moral code for atheists, it’s quite simple: treat others the way you would like them to treat you and don’t always think of yourself first. I consider this a far superior code to what most Christians follow, in which they fear their god so they don’t do anything that would make him want to torture them forever and they do nice things to buy their way into some place of eternal pleasure.
I ask you Christians: if you were the lord and creator of the universe and were in a position to decide which people you would want to hang around you, would you pick people who spent their lives doing good deeds to curry favor with you, or people who did what was right just because it was in their nature and never expected any heavenly reward for it?
I am definitely believing the statistics here now based on the comments on this list, that 46% of Americans still believe in the fact that God created the universe in less than 10000 years ago and that there are angels and fairies more so than evolution. The belief in creationism is more popular in this country compare to any other. Let it be.
@ #65,
I agree with that. I think the experiences we receive throughout our lives, and the way we handle those experiences and analyze them, is the reason why we react to stimuli the way we do. We don’t have free will in that we can’t spontaneously decide without a reason for that decision coming from a physical action that stems from the beginning of our universe; even though trying to trace that action back to that point would be impossible because we aren’t mathematically or physically advanced enough to do that. We do have free will in that we can choose from a list of responses to environmental stimuli based on our knowledge of the system we exist in. The limits and conditions of our response are case dependent though. Say and asteroid is heading towards the earth; there’s absolutely nothing a single person can do about it, but there is a very limited list of things our civilization could do about it (which would probably result in impact anyway because they are pretty pathetic options). So our free will is very similar to quantum mechanics: We have a range of possible responses (I can’t stop bullets matrix style if I get mugged, but I can just give the person my wallet to prevent them from shooting me), those responses are effected by external stimuli within range (if the mugger hears a loud noise down the street then he might get startled and shoot me anyway), and since the limit of interaction is our universe, then any attempt to measure free will breaks down into chaos. The process of free will is so vague and easily effected by external factors that it is impossible to pin down free will to an exact decision, but easy to get within a range of possibilities depending on our ability to manipulate the outcome of an interaction with nature.
#65, I guess what I’m saying is that people tend to greatly oversimplify the idea that we are a product of the laws of the universe. The laws of nature don’t present us with a single determined choice, they present us with a set of choices that we can choose from which can change at any moment because of the influence of Time. You can decide to argue against Sean’s lecture, or you can decide to accept it because both options are in the set of possibilities. The only instances in physics where a system can only choose one choice or the opposite are the limits of existence, which I would argue are the extremes in which our universe’s physics are active, the entire universe and the Planck length.
It’s still difficult to understand how consciousness and especially free will emerge from deterministic fundamental laws. There actually is a ghost in the machine – it’s Maxwell’s Demon; life’s ability ot maintain its low entropy state by selectively letting low entropy in and high entropy out. How that function emerged is going to be an interesting investigation. Life has energy, and it can choose (free will) how to use it. A rock cannot.
I would argue that’s an oversimplification as well; though a very intelligent and insightful point to make. In the grand scheme of a person’s life, we don’t have a choice how we use that energy. We are always loosing energy and need to eat and drink water in order to replenish that energy and as we age we are less able to do so. Our perception of free will depends on the time and metric scales we choose. At a quantum level, life and the rock are exactly the same. Even the molecules and compounds that compose the life and the rock are subject to the exact same laws differing only by the length of time chemical interactions take place. Rocks can add energy and get bigger or they can loose energy and get smaller. So can people. I could argue that a person has a set amount of energy they can use in their lifetime, and that amount of energy changes depending on the interaction with external environmental stimuli throughout the length of a life. The same happens with a rock. It can be moved to a stream where it changes dramatically over time. It can be dropped into a volcano or fall into a fault line during an earthquake.
Quite true #73. Here we have a lecture that supposes to discuss the “meaning of life” yet never attempts to ponder “life” itself. Further, he glosses over consciousnesses, admitting we don’t understand it. I would argue that all of life’s meaning lies in consciousness, self awareness and free will. Carrol shows how weak gravity is by demonstrating how easily it is counteracted by jumping. – But for a rock (as the poster above points out) counteracting gravity is not only exceedingly difficult – it’s not even a possibility. And #74 I could choose (an internal force) to jump into a stream or a volcano, yet the rock would depend on external forces. And I can also ponder the meaning my existence (self awareness)- a rock cannot (although, it appears physicists are nearly as disadvantaged as rocks in this department)