Last October I was privileged to be awarded the Emperor Has No Clothes award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The physical trophy consists of the dashing statuette here on the right, presumably the titular Emperor. It’s made by the same company that makes the Academy Award trophies. (Whenever I run into Meryl Streep, she’s just won’t shut up about how her Oscars are produced by the same company that does the Emperor’s New Clothes award.)
Part of the award-winning is the presentation of a short speech, and I wasn’t sure what to talk about. There are only so many things I have to say, but it’s boring to talk about the same stuff over and over again. More importantly, I have no real interest in giving religion-bashing talks; I care a lot more about doing the hard and constructive work of exploring the consequences of naturalism.
So I decided on a cheerful topic: Death and Physics. I talked about modern science gives us very good reasons to believe (not a proof, never a proof) that there is no such thing as an afterlife. Life is a process, not a substance, and it’s a process that begins, proceeds along for a while, and comes to an end. Certainly something I’ve said before, e.g. in my article on Physics and the Immortality of the Soul, and in the recent Afterlife Debate, but I added a bit more here about entropy, complexity, and what we mean by the word “life.”
If you’re in a reflective mood, here it is. I begin at around 3:50. One of the points I tried to make is that the finitude of life has its upside. Every moment is precious, and what we should value is what is around us right now — because that’s all there is. It’s a scary but exhilarating view of the world.
Well I don’t mind going on if Dr. Carroll doesn’t. By the way I have read one of Dr. Carroll’s books, “From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time” My copy is full of marginal notes. Is there is some blog in which you are discussing it or is that one now too long in the tooth?
Uzi, it isn’t a “dead end” it’s a circle. There is no proof from either side and no we cannot test God but we can test what we would presume to be some of his effects should he exist. But the tests aren’t “physical”. They don’t measure scalar or vector quantities, they evaluate values. There are two assumptions in your position (1) the physical is causally closed, and (2) the physical is all there is to “reality”. I agree with #1 but not #2. More importantly it is just as much a purely metaphysical assumption as “there is a God”.
Now (1) is very important to me because it is precisely the causal closure of the physical in the physical that makes it necessary to posit something else. See below on Chalmers and Nagel.
Hans, consciousness happens to be one of those things in the universe so it should, if you are right, be explicable entirely in terms of physics. David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel discuss the matter of qualia extensively (Chalmers especially) but I wouldn’t call them “straight forward” Of the two Nagel might be the easier read.
Both of these men see that there is some transition between the material and something that emerges that appears plainly to be non material precisely because it occurs only in the subjective experience of a conscious being. This is the “qualia problem”. Now both of these men are ultimately materialists and in the end their claims (both of them) come down to something remaining “undiscovered” in physics (or in Chalmers’ case panpsychism) that sets a “teleological direction!” Both men recognized that there are teleological entailments to such “undiscovered physics”.
Now this strikes me as ironic as it patently ignores one of the most important insights of physics, that there are no “teleological implications” to physical mechanisms, and that is what being “causally closed” comes down to!
Let me try this for you on qualia (although I am more interested in the matter of free will). You see a red apple. Focus on the “red”. What is happening? Some narrow group of light wavelengths is stimulating some cone cells in your retina. Between the electromagnetic stimulus and your experience of “red” all sorts of neural events are occuring. But neither the EM energy, nor any of the neural events are “red”. From whence comes this particular quality of subjective experience? Unless you are going to deny that there is anything “red” in the universe and that therefore our qualia are mere mirage (a view that collapses ultimately into skepticism) then there has to be some qualitative jump from the physical to the emergence of a non-physical phenomenon (“redness” as perceived by a subject) that is REAL and yet exists in what otherwise appears to be a causally closed physical universe.
A real materialist cannot abandon either assumption I put to Uzi above but if you go that route you have to deny that consciousness (and qualia are not the only problem see my prior reference to Lowe) is anything real at all.
Torbjörn, all of these are speculations about the connection between what we observe in the third person (like brain research) and what we actually experience subjectively. No one has actually solved the connection problem (see just above on qualia), they’ve offered only speculation on what it “might be”, and no one addresses precisely how the connection would manifest in what we know as subjective experience.
Kudos.
Dr. Carroll, talks like yours always generate discussion about esoteric theory. I’m interested in the prosaic and mundane. Religious people have an afterlife in paradise. Therefore,the earth, my precious, one and only home, is of no real value, so they trash it because they are moving on. That’s the real problem with belief in god and heaven.
Sean, you proved the old adage: “Dying is easy; comedy is hard!”
What is your opinion on immortal salvation from cryonics, mind uploading and von Neumann probes? What do you think about the singulataritarian religion?
Matthew Rapapor
I understand your point but you put on the table filing and hypotheses that have from my understanding no way to “test” or prove it
Because you speak about to two different dimensions one is infinite and the second is finite I guess that there is two way that infinite can affect finite one that don’t change the rule of what I call f(world ) only decide what I call left or right (what you call free Choice ) and this you can never test and one that can change f(world ) but this I believe theoretically possible but not practical to test .
I read the book of Dr. Carroll about the meaning of time and from my understanding
If you have a state call A and f(world ) on a f(world , a) can be only one result and time is reversible because there is no loss of data.
And in this point I challenge his theory. Dr. Carroll say Life after death does not exist so you understand that now he has life. And I say According to your theory life and death is the same thing because you don’t have life. you think you have life today but the only thing you are Flow of “atoms” no more no less . I’ll give you an example you’re driving in the car and came to the intersection and you have to decide right or left in this point call it B . now f(world ,B) on B = only one option say B1= left because on one situation can be only have one result . You cant “decide” to go right its against f(world,B) . What it mean that If you knew all the laws of nature and you had a great computer and you put all the data to a computer. And to one situation there is only one result you can calculate that I will write this post now 14:57 Israel time.
So you don’t have life and you don’t have death you are only flow of what I call “atoms” you cant think you can’t decide.
In this point the only thing you can do is to understand that we left only with the Understanding that God only possible hypothesis
Regarding What is Life? you might want also to read a updated discussion on it by Addy Pross.
http://www.amazon.com/What-Life-Chemistry-Becomes-Biology/dp/0199687773/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420379035&sr=8-1&keywords=addy+pross
Regarding consciounesss is physical.
I think we need to distinguish between consciousness has a physical foundation and consciousness is physical. The first could be true and the second not.
james
This statement is nice but you can not prove what you have placed
My congratulations for the brilliant talk and the award. I would have liked to ask only one question – You seem to have taken for granted :
Brain = Mind
This needs some justification!!!
Uzi,
My statement was just asking for clarification in the discussion about what is being asserted. Often the notion that consciousness has a physical basis is conflated with the notion that consciousness is physical.
Take the slide with the equation as an example.
This certainly is a part of consciousness of some people. It might be something you understand to some degree or I understand to some degree but certainly Sean understands better than probably you or me.
Yet trying to understand what is physical about it, what atoms underlie it, is problematic.
We can’t really say the atoms and electrons in the computer machinery that generates the image of the equation really explains the equation. We could draw the equation in the sand at the beach or write it on a whiteboard so it is not dependent on the atoms in the particular medium used for its expression. It isn’t even dependent on the particular symbols since we could choose another arbitrary set of symbols to describe the relationships.
Is it then dependent on the atoms of Sean’s brain? It might related somewhat to the atoms of Sean’s brain but the atoms of my brain, your brain, and the brains everybody else who sees it are involved too as well as the brain of countless other physicists over the years who have been involved in its development, but it is unlikely that any two of these individuals have the same understanding of the formula or even use the same neurons to derive that understanding.
So what is physical about the formula?
Does it even make any sense to describe it as physical in any way?
And if it isn’t physical then why would consciousness necessarily be considered physical?
@James
I had recently found out about the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) model by Sir Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff that states that consciousnesses is a product of quantum mechanical effects.
It seems like an interesting idea, and it seems like it could one day explain supernatural phenomena that deals with the brain. With action at a distance, it could put things like premonitions and telepathy into the realm of actual science. In other words, the working of the brain could become as crazy as quantum mechanics!
Dr. Carroll,
I liked the presentation, it was concise and right to the points. It would be great to have a complexity researcher address this question on a guest blog.
Life is many processes working collaboratively to maximize survival and procreation probability. Consciousness is just one of those processes. Why would conciousness be singled out for existence in a “higher realm”?
The brain has many functions, not just conciousness. Much of what it does is unconscious processing, some is base body systems regulation. So brain does not = mind, it is more than just mind, not the other way around (i.e. mind being more than the brain).
Consciousness can easily be altered by injury, even changing a person’s personality. How could that be if conciousness existed in a higher realm?
Hypothesizing a higher realm of supernatural existence after death would be ok even without any objective evidence if it didn’t conflict with validated scientific findings (like how matter/energy interacts, how conciousness can be manipulated and permanently altered, etc). But it does conflict given the hypotheses constructed to date. So we must dismiss these hypotheses. When a hypotheses is formed that has no conflicts, then we can go about testing it.
Uzi, if you can’t think and can’t decide, how do you happen to understand? You are in that position I described to Hans yesterday. Your view collapses into philosophical skepticism.
CEB, I point out that your view of the real significance of religion is much distorted and oversimplified. Life on this world is no less precious if there is an afterlife. We only get one shot at a mortal life and we have a mission here. If God exists he has purposes, and that means we have purposes related to his. I’ll sum this up with a short quote from one of my favorite resources on the subject:
“All things in life are means to ends. Relationships between people ARE the ends.” (The Urantia Book).
How about Reincarnation the seems to be scientific evidence supporting this theory
chromosomes carry more than just simple genes from parent to child .reference WHAT IS LIFE?
ERWIN SCHRODINGER
First published 1944
Dr. Carroll,
thank your wonderful lectures. Of course, we die and that’s it, and we are transformed into wandering atoms that will reconnect in other ways, etc. over time. One question I have is “will creation ever end”. When we are google years from now and our universe will have cooled done and entropy will be at its maximum, will there be no more space created as it is now? will dark energy still be pumped from somewhere into our universe?
What is the philosophical implication of space being continuously added/created in our universe, which results is in the accelerating pace in the expansion of the universe?
Thank you for your insights on this.
John Barrett
I go quite a bit into Penrose and Hameroff on my own blog.
http://broadspeculations.com/2013/09/28/mind-life-and-tensegrity/
Particularly interesting is their twist on the materialist arguments about general anesthetics.The argument usually goes that we can prove consciousness is in the brain because we can administer an anesthetic and a person will become unconscious. True as far as it goes but there are some odd facts relating to this. First, most general anesthetics are chemically inert so what are they doing, if not reacting, to produce their effects. Then there is fact that single-celled organisms administered anesthetics in a proportional dose become immobile. Are amoebas conscious?
Matthew Rapapor
I think it’s hard for me to express my opinion in English and you do not get my point
If everything in this universe is only laws like I understand from Dr. Carroll you are in place that you cant think you cant decide and also you cant understand . you are only flow of what I call “atoms” that is the internal contradiction in this vision and therefore false view. I don’t say its cant be reality but you cant say that this is the reality, because if this is the truth you are not in position to say it . So the only thing you can say really is that the existence of God is necessary. And God only possible hypothesis. in this kind of world you can deside you can understand you can think you are not only flow of “atoms” . f (world) is very confusing because I t is the total lows in universe what you know and what you do not know that efect you .
James Cross
My vision is that consciousness is ability that you can get only in place that God is only possible hypothesis. It can affect physics but not come from Physics because is your ability to decide “right or left” against the f(world ) so if the f (world ,a) = left you can decide right. It’s the power to transcend the laws of physics and maneuver over laws .
Hi,
I have in mind your debated with Dr. Craig at the Baptist place. In that debate time was mentioned by itself, on its own. Would all physicists not agree on the fact that time does not exist by itself, it exists only in connection with matter and space? A situation of no time, space and matter is not consistent with our understanding of the laws of nature that all physicists have. If such a situation cannot exist, placing God in such situation, would be against physical law. Would you agree? How do you think Dr. Craig would contract this argument (he said that the current findings of physics make it more probable than ever for God to exist)
An interesting idea is Integrated Information Theory of consciousness.
Guest 1234
I hope you are not heading down the Max Tegmark path.
http://broadspeculations.com/2014/02/17/consciousness-state-of-matter/
Thank you for another interesting talk, Dr. Carroll.
I saw your lecture in Zürich last year (Quantum Mechanics and Cosmology in Very Large Universes) and was fascinated.
More scientists should train to become great public speakers like you. Europe has nobody of your caliber, I think.
Dr. Carroll mention’s Schrodinger’s “What is life?” in regard to life and the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Carroll then puts forward an interesting “definition” of consciousness: “Consciousness is the encoding of information in near real-time just as life itself is the encoding of information in evolutionary time. Consciousness may also be a phase transition during which mind gains a qualitatively different level of control over the matter it is instantiated in from that of genetic and other regulatory information. This to me suggests that consciousness is an almost inevitable outcome of the evolution of living organisms”.
You can compare Carroll’s description with the discussion of consciousness by Schrodinger himself in his philosophical essay, “Mind and Matter”. See
http://web.mit.edu/philosophy/religionandscience/mindandmatter.pdf
I find Schrodinger’s thoughts on the “matter-consciousness debate” to be very interesting.
Great speech. Pretty much sums up my thoughts on it all.
Great article! Great thought! Kudos Sean!
Great complexity of universe and speech! Congratulations mister Sean Caroll!
How about interpretation of quantum mechanics? I’m also on the Everett side. I like it. The reality is a running copy of a numerical algorithm plus some (or more) randomness. The numbers axes are just infinite. They can and will run, and run, and run, all over again. Our universe, like all other universes, will run and multiplies themselves, repeating themselves, in finite-infinite loops. Complexity evolve in apparent high entropy simplicity and backwards. Complex time-spaces will emerge from simple high-entropy time-spaces. Never-ending loops inside loops, simple and complicated in the same “time”, time which is by itself an emergent notion.
Sorry. I believe in death, like you. But nothing really disappear, because nothing is reality. The numbers axes are there running non-stop. The life-game was never really stopped. And nothing can really be forgotten. The entire infinite information is there, “blocked” on the infinite numbers axes. Our universe death is just a very-small reality inside an expanding never-ending and repeatable reality. Life is not only the flame of a candle. Life is the flame of life algorithms. Always some optimism can be extracted from the most outrage truth. Because nothing really exist, then nothing can really disappear.