From Particles to People: The Laws of Nature and the Meaning of Life

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.

Sean Carroll - "From Particles to People" - TAM 2012

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.

135 Comments

135 thoughts on “From Particles to People: The Laws of Nature and the Meaning of Life”

  1. Just to add another tempest to this teapot, we have the new book testifying about a visit to the afterlife by a MD (neurology), & now, distinguished consciousness researcher Stu Hameroff (U.Ariz) appears in HUFF Post, contending the same:
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/28/soul-after-death-hameroff-penrose_n_2034711.html

    We need to have Sean, Harris, Tegmark, Penrose, Hameroff, & a few of the other heavy hitters on this subject square off for a debate on the science of the afterlife.
    How can Penrose’s microtubules sustain entanglement at room temp & avoid decoherence ?

  2. Yeah that’s right Christian, thanks for proving my point. You add nothing to this blog, why do you comment here?

  3. I am a fan of the quantum microtubules concept, at least as an idea worth considering, but not of what Stuart Hameroff says about postmortem survival through the persistence of “quantum information”. It’s actually no different to the ultra-transhumanist idea that if there’s enough “information” to reconstruct you, then you can live again. Real survival means persistence of the conscious being, not the persistence of information about what the conscious being was like when it existed.

    If human consciousness resides in entangled electrons from neural microtubules, then that specific system of electrons is the person – it is the soul, if one wishes to use the old terminology. If we entertain for the moment the arbitrary scenario that the quantum state of those electrons is copied to something else at the moment of death (let’s say a handy piece of dark matter, just to be specific), then I would maintain that the only sensible way this can really constitute personal survival, is if the true ontology of the “copying” interaction is interpretable as the persistence of a single entity, a “substance” in the old metaphysical sense of that word. It would have to be the same “fundamental degrees of freedom” which had formerly been part of the electrons and which were now part of the dark matter. For example, if you had a fundamental theory of preons which make up both ordinary matter and dark matter, and the soul was a specific bunch of entangled preons, and they were absorbed en masse by the convenient blob of dark matter.

    That would be a sort of survival (and your “soul” would now be stuck in interstellar space). But “survival” as information is no different to Ray Kurzweil wanting to resurrect his father from photographs and other memorabilia and data. At best you have a new person engineered to resemble another person who once existed. True survival requires persistence of ontological substance, that’s my slogan.

  4. @Doug,
    Lucky you, I’m rained in by Sandy so I have lots of time today.

    No, you made your own point and then didn’t back it up with anything, other than that your bigoted belief that religion is the cause of all that ails you.
    What I did was put some evidence out on the table which indicated you aren’t very familiar with why people do stuff, showed your complete and utter disregard for history and philosophy, and brought to your attention that being born into a faith doesn’t mean you practice it. Hitler spent his entire adult life trying to demolish the faith and religious beliefs of others so that he could rule through the state unopposed. That is why I classified him as secular. He also believed in the tenets of secular progressivism which he displayed in his attempts to perfect the german people into a aryan super-race through force and eugenics. If Hitler had been a practicing member of the Catholic Church, he would have known what most Catholics know; that humans are flawed and that human nature is not perfectable, though we should always try to do better as individuals by making good moral choices, and taking responsibility for our own actions. All of these things were anathema to Hitler and his views of state controlled everything.
    Doug, besides the facts that you #1. like Sean Carrolls opinions about religion, #2. you don’t like mine or anyone elses who disagree with Sean, #3 you seem to hate religion and all that you can’t measure, what have you brought to the discussion on this Blog? That you don’t know how to quote the bible in context? That you think Hitler was a practicing Catholic? Or that you haven’t done the arithmatic to estimate how many people have died in the 20th century alone in the name of Marx’s ‘social science’ of diseased utopistics?

    You have a view Doug, badly supported as it is, and you have voiced it. I also have a view, and I have voiced it as well. Why is that a problem for you? Please be a man (or whatever you are), and just accept discourse. The site is called Cosmic VARIANCE for a reason don’t cha’ know. One of the definitions of variance is : “the fact or state of being in disagreement” , So deal with it.

  5. Like I said Christian, all you do is whine, you know the score here and yet you persist. You claim a many great things and are fantastic at building and then demolishing strawmen, and moving goalposts.

    Good luck living in your alternate reality.

  6. @130 Doug
    Good points all, Doug, in this & your other posts above but remember what you’re dealing with: a crazy troll. These people tend to be psychologically unbalanced, often pathological, but the main thing to keep in mind is that they crave attention, so the less of that you give them the less you’ll see them around. Note that Prof. Carroll pays him no attention, knowing that he’s a worthless slob so it’d be a good idea for the rest of us to emulate him in that respect.

  7. Earnie @131 Yeah I know, sometimes I can’t help myself, it’s fun prodding one once in a while and the thread was pretty much dead so no harm, no foul.

    I did get a surprising admission out of him though, I think he has been reading “The Pink Swasticka” by Scott Lively, or quoted some material directly from it. Now that’s some serious crazy right there, especially because gay people weren’t given any quarter by the Nazi’s either. But to these crazies if it didn’t happen like they wanted it to happen then there must have been a cover up. It’s a recurring theme I know, but I digress.

  8. @Christian Takacs,

    I think people have a problem with you because you do the same things you criticize others of doing; and that really pisses people off. You also tend to be abrasive and stuck up; and by that, I mean that you’re comments are disrespectful and you try to talk smart instead of saying something smart. You think using intelligent language makes you intelligent; but you don’t seem to understand that trying to use intelligent language while saying something really really stupid, filled with snark, just makes you look like some stupid kid trying to find validation from anyone who will offer it because you’re insecure and lonely for whatever reason. But if you would like to rise above it all and really prove that you do have some sort of worth, then just stop arguing like some brat who can’t handle criticism. You’re telling someone else to deal with the difference of opinion while you lack the ability to do so or else you wouldn’t be trashing Sean Carroll whenever he says something you disagree with. I don’t agree with some of the things Sean says, so I either say something meaningful or I don’t say anything at all; mainly because I’d rather not say anything at all than be an intolerant jerk off. But that’s just my honest assessment of you hijacking another person’s blog with your stupid bulls***.

  9. Christian Takacs

    @farnsworth,
    Looking over your complaint, I’m sorry my use of language upsets you, but not everyone speaks with a sixth grade vocabulary, and I don’t intend to start now. I also don’t like using potty language and ad hominem as a substitute for my arguments. If that comes across as arrogant or snarky to you, I’m ok with that, considering you just dumped your laundry list of insults on me and were trying to be rude in your less than honest assessment. Please realize that Doug and Ernie have been playing tag team with me for quite some time now, One says something rude or obnoxious then the other one says ‘Yeah, me too!’, then they switch off, but more or less, that’s the extent of their debate skills it appears. Right now I’m trying to convince Doug that I didn’t make up the fact that Ernst Rohm was a homosexual nazi second in command of the Nazi Party who was quite the monster and perfectly fine with killing thousands of fellow gays, but Doug has not discovered Wikipedia yet, and so he accuses me of making things up…

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_R%C3%B6hm you will have to read down a ways…
    http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/roehm.htm ‘night of long knives’ ref.
    @Doug, Ahem,…crow tastes delicious I hear. You can’t blather on about my assertion being false when even Hitler admitted the guy who had given ‘no quarter’ to gays and been his second hand man in charge of the Nazis himself was gay. This man was also Hitler’s mentor and closest friend. Draw whatever contorted conclusions you want from that fact, I don’t really care if it ties you into a pretzel.

    back to you farnsworth…
    But if you would like to jump in and say ‘me too’, I’m fine with that as well. I’m sure Doug and Ernie can use all the help they can get, and they could use some new material for their routine anyway. I must admit I still am puzzled by the ‘intolerant’ comment, since I have not told anyone they can not believe what they wish to, I may have disagreed with what somene says, and presented argument or evidence to make my point, but disagreement does not mean the same thing as intolerance at any reading level.
    Maybe you should move on now to Sean’s new posting and cheer on David Lau and Brett as they bash philosophy and make their great claims to how “… philosophy is not there to resolve a problem but just dwelling on it”. Don’t tell either of the boys that they are inadvertantly mocking the very things Sean went to discuss at his retreat, and making a complete hash of it.

  10. Pingback: The Absolute Limits of Scientistic Arrogance | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

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