On Sunday I was privileged to give the keynote address at the American Humanist Association annual conference. Even better, people actually showed up for the talk, which for a Sunday morning event is pretty sweet.
The talks were live-streamed, and naturally some enterprising young humanist (thanks Carl Wong!) captured them and put them on YouTube. So here is mine; don’t forget to check out the others (or directly from the AHA site).
My talk was similar to ones I had given before at TAM and at Skepticon, but about half of it was new. The general idea is the relationship between everyday human concerns of meaning and morality and the underlying laws of physics. For this one, I used the framing device of “purpose” — what is it, and where does it come from? The universe itself doesn’t have a purpose, nor is there one inherent in the fundamental laws of physics. But teleology (movement toward a goal) can plausibly be a useful concept when we invent the best description of higher-level phenomena, and at the human level there are purposes we can create for ourselves. All part of the “poetic naturalism” bandwagon I hope to get launched, although I didn’t specifically use that term.
My actual slides aren’t always crystal clear from the above view, so I also put them on Slideshare. Enjoy!
Meh – Honestly, I do not know very well what Dick was saying in his comment. You say I am refusing to accept logic, this is absolutely not true. I may make logical errors, I may be unconsciously biased (as you and everyone else may be), but I assure you I do not refuse to accept logic.
Looking back at Dick’s statement, my understanding of what he said was that he was making a logical argument – That because religions try to understand God, therefore they presume the existence of God, therefore they have created their God. I have read it over again a number of times, and perhaps what he meant was that because *I* said that religions try to understand God, it was I who was presuming the existence of God, but then how does it follow that religions must have created their God? The statement “else there is nothing to understand” puzzles me in both cases. If you take my first interpretation, I answered very logically. If you take the second interpretation, then I need to make it very clear that when I said “religions try to understand God” I do not mean to imply that *I* presume the existence of God. I see now that the statment could give that impression rather than my intended impression that it is religions that presume the existence of God. Just to be clear, I can state absolutely, categorically and without reservation that I do not assume the existence of God. Please mentally tack this statement onto any statement I make that appears to indicate otherwise.
To condense your other point, you say that you cannot convince me that God does not exist because I refuse to accept logic. I have searched the thread for yours or anyone’s proof that God does not exist, and I find little. The closest I can find to a logical argument is that the concept of God cannot exist outside of the context of an organized religion, and the conclusions that they draw from their idea of God are invalid, therefore their idea of God is invalid, therefore God does not exist. This statement is absolutely rife with logical errors, so much so that I cannot believe it is the argument you are actually putting forth. Please give me a logical proof that God does not exist, and I will respond to it as logically as I possibly can. As for Einstein I take his statement “The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer.” at face value. As far as I can determine, he was an agnostic. See http://atheism.about.com/od/einsteingodreligion/tp/Was-Einstein-an-Atheist-.htm
“I’m sure if you take enough LSD, then god does exist.”
Meh,
Not quite correct. If you take enough LSD, you know you are God.
@frankl: guess how many perfect moments of infinity you have missed by not tuning in? … look at the space between the following parentheses ( ) this is as much of a proof as I can give you of the non-existence of any god(s) … your move … show me examples of what a deity would/could do if it existed …. you remind me of all the platos of history and the socrates et al … totally useless info … only Science matters … there is such a thing as useless knowledge though … i for one do not need to know what the triceratops ate and why they died … your mentionning any god is just that …. drivel … why do you not write down what you think and analyse it and be extremely self-critical when rating yourself … if you end up knowing you are an idiot it is not all that bad specially since it is not your fault … reflections are yours/your fault though … saying something idiotic does not make one an idiot … defending such idiotic saying makes you an idiot … there is a limit/area for acceptance and karmic buddha like such acceptance one with the universe et al that crap … look in the mirror and if you do not see the worst piece of shit creation has come up with then look again … i do just that and everytime i still see a failed organism that is/lives because of fortuitous/random chemical happenstances … but it is not my fault … I was ‘made’ so … your students must really enjoy that 50 minutes of break/sleep they get in your class …
Hey Roland you know what – you’re right, to hell with it. Let’s get back to work.
Dr. Carroll,
I’m a bit confused on your comments about the “Laplace Demon”. Was Laplace right or wrong? From your long (very interesting) answer I think you are saying that yes Laplace was correct (in principle, but impossible to do), and not only that but we can now go further and know more about the universe because we know the ‘rules’ of the universe better, e.g. we can’t have perpetual motion machines, no life after death, etc.
The nutty question asker seemed to think you disagreed with Laplace and you seemed to agree with him, but maybe you where just getting him off the floor as fast as possible.
thank you so much for your answer (if you see this and have time)
btw, great book! I’ve given two away as presents. Keep them coming 🙂
-stu
Laplace was certainly right in the context of Newtonian mechanics, but these days we have quantum mechanics. Whether or not there is an equivalent “demon” in quantum mechanics depends on whether you think the theory is truly stochastic, or whether there is hidden determinism. If the latter (as in hidden-variable theories or the Everett formulation) you still have to deal with the fact that observations within any one “world” are apparently probabilistic. So it gets very interpretation-dependent. In Everett, there could be a demon that describes the whole wave function of the universe, but individual observers still can’t make deterministic predictions.
I fell behind on my blog reading, so I’m a little late to the party, and given how long the thread is, probably my comment will go mostly unread, but many entries above, Meh wrote about organized religions that “they still follow that mindset of letting our civilization, laws, and culture be highly influenced by belief rather than observable fact. And that’s the scariest problem ever.”
 
I, too, am concerned about the policies promoted by certain members of religious groups in my country (the USA), but I don’t think that many my positions are any more founded in “observable fact” than theirs. I, for example, am a strong supporter of gay marriage; many of those religious groups are against it. I don’t see any “observable facts” that tell me that gay people should be allowed to marry; it’s just my deeply held belief that it is right. Observable facts can help us to shape effective policy, but I don’t think that they can tell us which policy to choose; those are almost always value judgments. Religion, at least, gives a framework by which to make those judgments. You may not like the framework, but it’s usually fairly explicit about what is considered good or evil.
 
My only point is that I think it’s a mistake to dismiss positions based on religion as being “unfounded” while positions held by atheists/skeptics/whatever are based on fact. Ultimately, all of these positions come down to a moral/ethical belief, and I think we’re better off if we don’t fool ourselves into thinking that because we don’t believe in a God, our moral positions are more
God-given…er… correct than theirs.When you assert that Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason is “nonsense,” that’s great, but I don’t suppose you have an actual argument instead of an assertion (or can otherwise reference one)? Of course, maybe this is impossible, given that using reason to prove that there are no reasons seems to be quite paradoxical (and Leibniz seemed to believe that everything was caused by an infinity of reasons, not just one reason). Do you think there are any reasons why “thinge are the way they are”? Is the universe just random? Because if so, I would not expect to find regularities in a random universe, especially not the kind that allow us to describe them extremely accurately with mathematical language. Can you give any cases where the law of identity does not apply, or cases where A+A≠2A (I’m not referring to the human language of mathematics, but rather I am talking about the underlying ontological processes and patterns), or explain how we otherwise seem to be living in an ordered universe with causal laws as well as explaining the ontology of causality and fundamental physical laws? It is possible that I am hopelessly confused about this, but I am not here because I’m trying to prove a belief in some ridiculous deity. Thanks Dr. Carroll 🙂
urbster1:
I don’t take Sean to be asserting that the universe is meaningless or has no reason for its existence, or that he can prove that is the case.
Instead, he’s simply saying that the opposite – the assertion that the universe must have a meaning or reason for its existence – is unjustified. It may be that the universe has no meaning or reason. If it does, how do we investigate it? Is it empirical? A fundamental property of the universe?
The point is that many a theologian use the PoSR to place the burden on non-believers for explaining why the universe “is”. Well, who said there has to be a reason in the first place? Maybe it just “is”, and there’s nothing more to it than that. But regardless, it has to be established that the universe does have a meaning or reason for its existence before anyone can be burdened to explain what the meaning or reason actually is.
Maybe a bit off topic but I am hoping Dr Carroll will address a question I have on the model he and his grad student Dr Chen proposed on the quantum tunnling of baby universes from an empty de Sitter space. This model has a lot of nice features , it nicely evade the BGV theorem creating a model that is both past and future eternal. The model also predicts low entropy boundary conditions at origin and that’s where my question lies. Given that it’s very difficult to get an inflation model which doesn’t generate eternal exponential expansion does this have any consequence for the entropy at origin prediction of the model since the origin boundary is at the vacua phase change, bubble nucleation , and not at the launch of inflation. It seems to me that , given that in any bubble in its internal time all the big bangs lie along the same now slice, it doesn’t make a difference with regard to the low entropy predictions at the boundary for this model. However, I hope Dr Carroll will offer his opinion as to whether or not this makes any sense.
Based on string theory and eternal inflation our universe is the result of a bubble nucleation in a future eternal inflating space time. Each bubble with respect to any possible observer has infinite space containing an infinite number of O regions. Each bubble has one of 1E500 vacua states , the particular set of compactification and flux configurations that establishes a particular set of physics laws. But the question I don’t see addressed is what establishes the laws of physics outside the bubbles in the eternal inflating space. As I see it, string theory or any other model that postulates a landscape model for the laws of physics, must really be a theory of meta laws and explain which laws of physics transcends the set of vacua states in the bubble nucleations. A candidate for these meta laws would seem to be a quantum theory of gravity.