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.
I liked that talk a lot. There’s just one thing I would dispute from the Q&A at the end. I believe that even if we had 100% information of the state of a brain and 100% undestanding of physics around it, we would not be able to simulate it accurately, meaning to predict any output it would produce. The brain is an analog device, and is too close to quantum world for it to have no effect on its working. Whether a few more or less molecules of neurotransmitter get released for one particular excitation due to quantum effects may not have any immediately apparent effect but the difference builds up.
Sean, Interesting talk. But your quote of Schrodinger was very selective. I am sure you know that he was very much impressed with Vedanta (Hindu philosophy) which says that the source of consciousness is external. He specifically liked the Vedantic metaphor that the reason our consciousness looks similar even though our bodies look greatly different,is that the external consciousness is reflected like an object is reflected in multiple mirrors!
Dr. Carroll, thank you for posting this lecture. My only complaint with Youtube is that it doesn’t have enough science lectures (I’ve seen so many and am always looking for more).
Will you please write a book called ‘Life is a Candle Flame’ or ‘There is No Life After Death: What Science Has to Say About the Lack of Heaven’ or something like that. I have a feeling it would sell big and I know I would buy it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
Life in all its glory, from the arts to the sciences and from the deep thoughts of the mind of man, come creative possibilities that simply have no precedence in nature and says that something exists within us and outside of us. You can call it the Eternal Creative force or God.
I have solved the “problem of consciousness” – if only to my own satisfaction. It consists of two parts:
A) What does conscious do /how does it work? There are comments above that summarize more complete answers than mine. Mine is simply that consciousness is the operating system of our brains and nervous systems, similar to the operating system of a computer, e.g., Windows. It is the interface between internal application programs and the outside. Just as Windows takes mouse and keyboard input, passes on data to an application such as Excel, and then updates the graphic screen with the results Excel produces, our consciousnesses get external inputs and transmit them to neural networks for processing. Just as Windows does not know how Excel does its magic, our consciousness receives neural results without understanding how they are produced (since there are no nerve cells which monitor neural functions).
B) Why does consciousness feel the way it feels? Because it had to feel like something to function, and that is the way it feels in this universe, given our brains and nervous systems. It is exactly the same reason that a rose smells like a rose instead of an orange: the chemicals that react with our olfactory organs to produce the scent of a rose had to smell like something in order to be sensed, and that is the way those chemicals smell in this universe, given our sensory means. A computer could be programmed to recognize the scent of a rose from some apparatus that it was connected to, and to tag that scent with some sort of flag, with no non-material means needed. (We could describe that flag in terms of physical differences in the computer with and without it, just as we can describe the chemical and electric processes that occur in our bodies as we smell a rose – but we can’t describe how the computer “feels”.) Our brains have evolved their own tagging mechanism which we call distinctive scents.
In other words, there is no more magic in consciousness than in anything else – quarks, wave-functions, black-holes, dark energy, etc. I wasn’t born understanding these things (and never will completely) but I accept that they are part of the way the universe seems to work.
In any case, “magic”, “god”, etc. don’t explain anything as far as I am concerned. They are just excuses for not having explanations. Suppose you ask for an explanation of how this universe came into existence, and someone gives you this: “The flub-stubber flub-stubbed it.” You then ask some follow-ups:
Q: What is a flub-stubber? A: It’s incomprehensible to us.
Q: Where did it come from? A: I don’t know.
Q: How does it flub-stub: A: I don’t know.
Q: Can you show it to me? A: No.
Did you really get an explanation? (Of course a flub-stubber could prove its own existence by appearing and doing demonstrations of flub-stubbing, which we could then study scientifically, but until then …)
P.S. After posting, I saw this comment: “… creative possibilities that simply have no precedence in nature and says that something exists within us and outside of us.”
Actually no, nature itself, via biological evolution, has created lots of things more complex, amazing, and beautiful than humans have. In general terms, the process of evolution consists of:
1) Random generation of something (chemicals in tide pools, ideas in brains, etc.).
2) A selection process that promotes the more successful products of 1) and discourages the less successful (biological survival and reproduction, survival in the marketplace, peer review, comments voted up or down on the Internet, etc.)
3) Some form or forms of memory/communication to transmit the successful products to future generations, until they are replaced by something better (DNA, peer-reviewed papers, design blueprints, etc.)
This not only works well (over billions of years operating in massive parallelism, e.g., septillions of DNA entities, or over 20 years on billions of microbes in Dr. Lenski’s experiment) in biological evolution, I think based on my experience as a design engineer that it is the way human designs and human thoughts work. We have all seen cars and phones evolve in our lifetimes.
Examples:
Thomas Edison:
“I never allow myself to become discouraged under any circumstances. I recall that after we had conducted thousands of experiments on a certain project without solving the problem, one of my associates, after we had conducted the crowning experiment and it had proved a failure, expressed discouragement and disgust over our having failed ‘to find out anything.’ I cheerily assured him that we had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldn’t be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way.”
Franklin D Roosevelt on how he intended to respond to the Great Depression:
“The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something…”
That’s how evolution works, and how humans have created what little they have (compared to nature).
An engaging talk…provocative and thoughtful. I listened to the Intelligence Squared debate which was a great lead-in to your comments.
I thought you might be interested in a recent post (today) on “Why Evolution is True,” by Matthew Cobb who is a frequent contributor. It is on a letter that Francis Crick wrote to Erwin Schrodinger on aperiodic crystals. I’d never seen or heard of it or had Cobb (that surprised me somehow). Cobb does not know whether Crick ever received a reply.
( )
That little book of Schrodinger’s is just plain smart (I need to re-read it.) and launched the careers of a several physicists into biology creating the field of molecular biology, especially during the phage years (Delbruck, I think, is an example.)
Again, thanks for this talk as well as for this blog.
Well of course the main claims about life after death come from Christianity and Islam and what they say is not “life continues after death” but that we are resurrected at some later stage in different bodies. If we are simply saying that there is no evidence for the idea then, fine.
But you appear to be saying that there is scientific evidence against the proposition. So what is the science that says that our minds are a process that cannot possibly be replicated on any medium except the on on which they are currently instantiated?
If there is evidence for this then the Computationalists will be disappointed indeed.
Sean,
The statement, “There is no afterlife” is not falsifiable. Therefore, it is an unscientific statement.
Tom S
I think that quote is mine not Sean’s.
http://broadspeculations.com/2012/12/22/the-algorithmic-origins-of-life/
But I can’t understand why everyone is so impressed about Sean Carroll’s frankly daft argument about the afterlife.
If he had simply said “there is no evidence for an afterlife and no reason to believe there is one” and left it at that then fine. I would agree.
But he proceeds to mount a completely incoherent objection to the idea. That seems somewhat counter productive to me.
James Cross: “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.”
Robin Herbert: “If he had simply said “there is no evidence for an afterlife and no reason to believe there is one” and left it at that then fine. I would agree.
But he proceeds to mount a completely incoherent objection to the idea. That seems somewhat counter productive to me.”
The response to both would be that the Higg’s completion of the standard model for particles forbids it. The remaining interactions that hasn’t already showed up, and the particle physics vacuum see all interactions, are too weak to do any of the following:
‘Souls’, ‘afterlife’, ‘rebirth’ and ‘prayer communication’. The number of synapses makes a complete brain mapping by proposed dualities impossible.
Conversely we can claim beyond reasonable doubt that everyday physics do not admit magic dualities. (If basic thermodynamics, basic quantum physics or basic self consistent inflation cosmology isn’t enough to convince.)
Dear Sean, I like your writing, content and style and I have no doubt whatever as to your competence and the level of sophistication of your mind. However, when one claims to know everything there is to be known about matter (well, atoms at least), the thought pops to mind of physicists who at the turn of the nineteenth century believed that they knew everything there was to be known about physical reality. How wrong they were! I would be inclined to leave the subject of consciousness out of any scientific debate, because no physical or mathematical model can be developed, not yet anyway, that could model it, for it is clearly non-physical. Even if one happens to believe that it arises as a result of some physical processes, there is no proof either way, and therefore any such debate cannot be considered scientific.
Hi Torbjörn,
“The response to both would be that the Higg’s completion of the standard model for particles forbids it.”
The standard model for particle forbids that the same information processed on one thing cannot be processed on another?
I don’t think so.
The trouble is that Sean introduces this silly straw man, that an afterlife must involve what he calls a ‘blob of spirit energy’, whatever that might be. He does not say where he picked up this peculiar idea, I have googled ‘spirit energy’ and only find articles about the healing properties of crystals and the like.
Now as far as I can see, the only thing that would be necessary for an after life is that the information processed on one thing might also be processed on another. We don’t know what consciousness is beyond information processing, but it is at least information processing.
And as far as I know there is no major objection to the idea that the same information might be processed by different things. In fact it is pretty well established that it can.
So all that stuff about Lagrangians and Dirac equation are completely beside the point.
Now as I said before, I have no reason to think that there is anything which is going to provide me with an afterlife. I am just pointing out that Sean Carroll’s argument about it is incoherent.
So, as above, nothing in physics precludes that two different devices can process the same information. The IT industry would be in big trouble if that was so.
But some will still object that reading the same information will still require Dr Carroll’s ‘blob of spirit energy’ (whatever it is) and that observing a system still requires an interaction with the system and that new term on the right of the Dirac equation and so on.
This misunderstands what people mean by ‘non-physical’. Say I take one of these marvelous equations about which Dr Carroll enthuses, and plug it into a computer program which can model, say, the behaviour of an electron. Now do I need to add another term to that equation in order for me observe that behaviour? No, of course not – I am not a part of the physical system I am modelling. I am invisible to it, I can observe anything in that system without disturbing it.
Now Theists do not hold that we are a computer simulation, at least most of them, but this at least illustrates the idea of not being part of a physical system and still being able to observe any part of it, and that is all that is necessary for a proposed mechanism for an afterlife.
Suppose, for example, we are all part of a simulation. If so then the techies could fairly easily provide us an afterlife if they wanted (perhaps on a different device). To do so they wouldn’t have to change any of the equations in the system because the techies are not part of that system. They are ‘non-physical’ in terms of the simulation.
Again, I have no reason to believe we are a simulation, never mind that I will be provided with an after life. The point is that objections to the idea based on physics completely miss the point.
OK, so there is no technical problem with an afterlife – but some of you will be saying “what about those who died with dementia, how can they be resurrected when their minds have gone?”.
So I have my Universe simulation and there are beings in it who each are born and die and their brains stop working.
At some point, like a thief in the night, as it were, I select “File, Exit” on my simulation, being careful not to click ‘Discard’.
Then, in the twinkling of an eye, I click “trumpet.wav” for the last time and resurrect all these beings incorruptible (or at least with very robust clustering) using data from the trace logs.
For each of them their brains will have stopped working so I obviously have to resurrect them to a state before their brains stopped working. For those with dementia I obviously will bring them up in a consistent state. The same with mental illness.
You might ask that if I could fix these problems then why didn’t I fix them in the first place? But hey, I am just dealing with the technical issues here.
A simple way to refute a materialistic metaphysics is to use Goedel’s theorems in logic. Namely, let us assume that all that exists is space, time and atoms (matter) which move in space. In order to make sense of this, one needs the evolution laws, or the laws of nature. Then one has to decide whether the laws of nature are irreducible or reducible to the initial set of the basic elements (space, time and atoms). If we opt for irreducibility, then one has new elements which are not space, time or matter. Therefore in that case one has to introduce non-material elements in the materialistic metaphysics. Since the laws of nature are mathematical, one has to introduce an infinitely many such elements, due to Goedel’s theorems in logic. Therefore we arrive at a platonic metaphysics, which allows both material and non-material objects (ideas). Hence one can have consciousness which is different from matter.
On the other had, if one opts for the reducibility of the laws of nature, that means that the laws of nature are random regular patterns which appear in the motion of atoms, and which last very long. Although this is a logical possibility, a materialistic metaphysics is unstable (the Earth can disintegrate tomorrow) and has zero explanatory power, because one can say that the cause of any natural phenomenon is pure chance.
@Robin Herbert, as to your statement:
Well of course the main claims about life after death come from Christianity and Islam and what they say is not “life continues after death” but that we are resurrected at some later stage in different bodies. If we are simply saying that there is no evidence for the idea then, fine
— actually the afterlife and the resurrection of the flesh are two different things. I do not know about Islam but many christian factions believe in both. To catholics life after death lasts until judgement day; resurrection of the body is what happens after judgment. And while there is a bit of an argument inside the church about that, more traditional believers think that it is exactly the same bodies that will be raised from the grave (following Augustines admonition that they should “perish the thought that the omnipotence of the Creator is unable, for the raising of our bodies […], to recall all [their] parts”).
So while Sean Carroll does not address resurrection the part about the afterlife seems still relevant.
“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.” –
this is such a great quote… but i wonder if we can afford to ignore the first half of it altogether. i always struggle with strategy of survival of our species versus actually exploring the universe.
Jay,
I too was encouraged by this remark and by a couple of references in the lecture to naturalists (as well as atheists). Sean is one of the few leading secular lights to champion a positive, comprehensive naturalism – as distinct from atheism – and as he says there’s lots to be done in drawing out its consequences as a worldview. Of course, not everyone who rejects religious supernaturalisms is looking for or needs a replacement worldview, but making such a thing available is a worthy project.
Re death, here’s one naturalistic alternative to the supposition of an afterlife. It’s based on a Derek Parfit-type thought experiment involving the moderate, then radical, transformation of a person during a period of unconsciousness: http://www.naturalism.org/death.htm
James Cross,
Very sorry to both you and Sean for quoting your work and assigning it to Sean. Don’t know how that happened. My own consciousness seems to be in need of repair.
Dr. Carroll your comparison of the candle. There are subtleties there which on one hand align something taboo and utterly terrifying, death, with something that everyone – family, friends, young and old – can grasp.
although some may prefer the technical content of your output, somehow you have the ability to tap your inner philospher and say things that resonate profoundly.
I have quickly become a fan!
Tom Clark – absolutely agree.
Sam Harris’s new book “Waking up” is a great thrust in this very needed area. Sean has always been very quietly living in that space and I’ve really enjoyed his approach. the general take away is that at the very core the mystery of consciousness is persistent and annoying, (i call it “the burden of existence”). And when you dig below all the bullshit religion hits the same root. We’re all in the same boat.
Anyway great quote from Sean that I’ve been using widely since I read it.
Both novel/informative and confusing – thanks much. The novel/informative part was the “brain-relevant physics” argument that death is final, at least w/ current technology. The confusing part is that I no longer know whether burning the candle at both ends is wise (redundancy) or unwise (twice the burn rate:-)
‘To try to fully understand the cosmos, and our part in it, if that cosmos is the product of a creator operating at an entirely higher level than ourselves, will necessarily be futile’. This statement is surely hard to refute. How can you possibly know that the faculties of your consciousness will ever be sufficient to completely analyse the creation, never mind the creator, or alternatively to explain it and him away as essentially a meaningless false concept in the meaninglessness and nothingness? The creator may simply have decided not to make the keys, whether within us or without us, to full understanding, available. If so, the potential for ultimate knowledge arising from the investigations of man in any field have been constrained and will self limit, and there is nothing we can do about it.
If such a creator, who framed the universe, has defined the essence of a person and decides to transfer them to another cosmic context, it will happen whatever ones mental constructs about the matter.