Once again I have not really been the world’s most conscientious blogger, have I? Sometimes other responsibilities have to take precedence — such as looming book deadlines. And I’m working on a new book, and that deadline is definitely looming!
And here it is. The title is The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. It’s scheduled to be published on May 17, 2016; you can pre-order it at Amazon and elsewhere right now.
An alternative subtitle was What Is, and What Matters. It’s a cheerfully grandiose (I’m supposed to say “ambitious”) attempt to connect our everyday lives to the underlying laws of nature. That’s a lot of ground to cover: I need to explain (what I take to be) the right way to think about the fundamental nature of reality, what the laws of physics actually are, sketch some cosmology and connect to the arrow of time, explore why there is something rather than nothing, show how interesting complex structures can arise in an undirected universe, talk about the meaning of consciousness and how it can be purely physical, and finally trying to understand meaning and morality in a universe devoid of transcendent purpose. I’m getting tired just thinking about it.
From another perspective, the book is an explication of, and argument for, naturalism — and in particular, a flavor I label Poetic Naturalism. The “Poetic” simply means that there are many ways of talking about the world, and any one that is both (1) useful, and (2) compatible with the underlying fundamental reality, deserves a place at the table. Some of those ways of talking will simply be emergent descriptions of physics and higher levels, but some will also be matters of judgment and meaning.
As of right now the book is organized into seven parts, each with several short chapters. All that is subject to change, of course. But this will give you the general idea.
* Part One: Being and Stories
How we think about the fundamental nature of reality. Poetic Naturalism: there is only one world, but there are many ways of talking about it. Suggestions of naturalism: the world moves by itself, time progresses by moments rather than toward a goal. What really exists.
* Part Two: Knowledge and Belief
Telling different stories about the same underlying truth. Acquiring and updating reliable beliefs. Knowledge of our actual world is never perfect. Constructing consistent planets of belief, guarding against our biases.
* Part Three: Time and Cosmos
The structure and development of our universe. Time’s arrow and cosmic history. The emergence of memories, causes, and reasons. Why is there a universe at all, and is it best explained by something outside itself?
* Part Four: Essence and Possibility
Drawing the boundary between known and unknown. The quantum nature of deep reality: observation, entanglement, uncertainty. Vibrating fields and the Core Theory underlying everyday life. What we can say with confidence about life and the soul.
* Part Five: Complexity and Evolution
Why complex structures naturally arise as the universe moves from order to disorder. Self-organization and incremental progress. The origin of life, and its physical purpose. The anthropic principle, environmental selection, and our role in the universe.
* Part Six: Thinking and Feeling
The mind, the brain, and the body. What consciousness is, and how it might have come to be. Contemplating other times and possible worlds. The emergence of inner experiences from non-conscious matter. How free will is compatible with physics.
* Part Seven: Caring and Mattering
Why we can’t derive ought from is, even if “is” is all there is. And why we nevertheless care about ourselves and others, and why that matters. Constructing meaning and morality in our universe. Confronting the finitude of life, deciding what stories we want to tell along the way.
Hope that whets the appetite a bit. Now back to work with me.
Soon to be a major motion picture!
Julio Siqueira:
I can’t speak for Carroll’s concept of naturalism, but for me, it’s not about the mere possibility of the existence of a supernatural being/force/etc.
Maybe an analogy would help. It’s logically possible that average humans have 13 fingers. There is no logical contradiction to be found in that, which is what it means to say it is logically possible. There is also no violation of physical laws implied by the fact that “13-fingered humans exist,” so they are also physically possible (i.e., no contradiction with the physical world, as opposed to a purely logical or mathematical statement). All of the same laws would apply to them as physical objects like it would for us. It just so happens to be that our evolutionary history has produced 10-fingered humans instead 13-fingered humans. It could have been the case that there are 13-fingered humans, but it is not the case: we’re almost always born with 10 fingers. So, it is false that there are 13-fingered average humans. Of course there might be mutations that cause that even now, or you could conceivably have “cosmetic” surgery to give yourself more fingers, but I’m talking about the whole population in general.
That’s the sense in which naturalism makes a claim that supernatural beings don’t exist: it’s logically possible that they exist, and maybe they do without anybody knowing that fact. However, given all the available evidence, there is ample reason to think it is very likely false that supernatural beings exist. Making the claim any stronger than that isn’t necessary. You don’t need to disprove the logical possibility of 13-fingered humans by showing they CAN’T exist, simply to point to the huge mass of evidence that average humans like that DON’T exist.
I would say no, because naturalism means that any being with mental properties/functions reduces to, is composed of, and originates from, things without mental properties. I think because I have a brain, a brain which is composed of non-thinking matter, in certain stable and complicated configurations. The atoms in my brain can’t think. I can think, and if I didn’t have my brain, I wouldn’t be able to do that.
If somebody believes in a supernatural being of some kind, they don’t believe that. They think mental properties exist (in the case of humans) because we have a soul. A soul is not claimed to be a physical object. Or they may also think there are gods, ghosts, angels, demons, magical powers, psychic powers, reincarnated spirits, etc. — none of which are supposed to require a physical substrate that allows them to be agents (or things that agents can physically do) with mental functions like thinking, experiencing, remembering, etc. If those did exist, they would not be natural things but supernatural things.
The views are mistaken (not necessarily stupid) because in fact those things don’t exist, with the exception of consciousness and free will. The latter two are okay, if understood naturalistically, after pruning back some of the unimportant and unessential nonsense that often accompanies them. Your consciousness doesn’t exist independently of your body, and I would say it’s generally better to think of it as a function that your body does instead of a thing. You don’t have the free will to violate physics or ignore it whenever you please, and you do have the ability (if not coerced at gunpoint, for example) to make voluntary and rational and responsible choices.
@AXL Rose: Ignore the List price. That’s only if you buy the book at the airport.
I don’t want to seem presumptuous but I think this is important, I have a suggestion about chapter 5 (if possible and if you haven’t done this already). I feel a lot of (or all) books by Dawkins and Coyne, etc. punt on explaining complexity as a result of natural selection by using the artificial selection metaphor. It’s like asking someone how a car works and saying it works like a truck. I think a better explanation uses probability. The probability of an event occurring in at least one organism is:
1-(1-p)^N [1 minus the probability of the event never occurring],
if N is the number of organisms and p is the probability of the event occurring at a particular time. If the probability of one event is memoryless then:
p=1-e^(-\mu t),
where t is time and \mu is the mutation rate. Therefore the probability of at least one mutation (of the type we’re looking for) is:
1-e^(-N \mu t) [equation 12.4 in Martin Nowak’s Evolutionary Dynamics]
The more organisms the greater N is, since natural selection increases the number of organisms with a precursor mutation it increases N (the number of organisms that could benefit from a new mutation). 1-e^(N \mu t) therefore approaches one, this is how natural selection increases the probability of adding onto a complex system to create a system which is even more complex. I think there are ways to get this across to a popular audience (even though the math is simple for Carroll) that popularizers of evolutionary biology have left out.
Thank you for an actually-helpful suggestion. 🙂 That’s very similar to what I’m doing.
Is there a book tour in the works?
ack….looks very samey and tedious darling. Another physicist-with-no theory, writes a book in which he divulges his philosophy and gritty wisdom, attained in the much celebrated, almost legendary, personal life-journey.
I’m sorry to be so horrid about it, but seriously Mr Carroll….what have you done with your life that you think you have something important to teach at this level? What did you overcome in childhood? What act was yours of such courage and decency that others in witness gave thanks that they had been and were never the same after that again.
Have you travelled…lived with the monks? Been a special forces hero? Self made billionaire? What have you accomplished?
It’s not you personally I’m aiming this kick at, but the lot of you. The whole generation. Where’s the fucking scientific progress that’s the news we the public want to be hearing about.
I probably won’t buy the book, but might check it out if and when it arrives at my local library, which I pay dues and donations to, thus indirectly supporting the book’s purchase. So far I have not read any books by Dawkins or Harris or Dennet because I expect I already know, either from blog readings or my own semi-original thoughts, most of their arguments. I can look at the night sky (on a dark night in the country) and intuitively feel that this universe is not a vehicle for creating dualistic immortal yet undetectable souls, and that humans have no significant role in it.
As for the magical properties associated with dualism, such as willing things to occur, anyone who has written a computer program and had to debug it knows in his or her bones, that all the will, magic, prayer, psychic power, or whatever else dualism claims to involve, will have no effect at removing the bugs, and that they must be found and understood (via the general approach of the scientific method, which is essentially the method of natural evolution: try everything but test what you try) before they can be removed. Again, my intuition tells me that what is true for computer programs is true for everything else – absent any good evidence to the contrary, and the Randi Million-Dollar prize remains unclaimed.
Another way (my much rougher way) of mathematically evaluating evolution: assume the the typical time for one species to bifurcate into two species is about 2 million years (as a recent paper suggests), and make the simplifying assumption that only such bifurcations (no trifurcations, etc.) occur. Then starting with one species roughly 3.5-4 billion years ago, there has been enough time for roughly 10^200 (10 raised to the 200th power) species to evolve, each with the afore-mentioned 2 million years of development time. (Whereas artificial selection is known to produce significant results in a small fraction of that time, e.g., wolves into dogs.) People who claim that natural evolution could not have produced the diversity we see haven’t done the math.
On the other hand, I might learn some science from the book (if I didn’t, it would be my fault) – and certainly it will be more readable than my own thoughts.
Thank you for your comments, DBB. I do not necessarily agree with them. But they are priceless nonetheless.
Best Wishes,
Julio
Robert Vander Velde said:
“since natural selection increases the number of organisms with a precursor mutation it increases N (the number of organisms that could benefit from a new mutation). 1-e^(N \mu t) therefore approaches one, this is how natural selection increases the probability of adding onto a complex system to create a system which is even more complex.”
Apparently, Sean Carroll replied:
“Thank you for an actually-helpful suggestion.”
To me, Robert is only making the explanation more difficult to understand. Much as I dislike Dawkins, I do not think that he tries to explain the workings of a car by saying “Hey Guys, it is just like trucks work!” Instead, he explains how trucks work (i.e. artificial selection, like dog breeding) and then he points out that this is the way cars work (natural selection). You do not need math for that. Unless you want to lose a lot of readers, and gain a few others…
Regarding ‘Part Seven: Caring and Mattering’:
I certainly hope this is treated in a way that I don’t just laugh. I will read it in any case.
Regarding the comments about ‘free will’, and evolution ‘wanting’ something, etc.:
If you could just step back and see that these things really are about math and statistics, then you would see that these higher complexity systems are just a result of much lower complexity physics.
But you can’t step back. Because you are not actually in control of anything. Including yourself. Nor am I.
I hope Sean isn’t jumping the shark with this book but unfortunately I will be forced to watch (read) even if he does.
Regarding complexity, particularly of the biological sort, IEET just published some of my own speculations on it:
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/cross20150930
@Julio Siqueira
I think there is a middle ground, what I’m essentially saying is that increasing numbers increases the probability of an event occurring, therefore natural selection increases probability by increasing numbers. In a popular science book that could be represented graphically, but that’s hard to do in the comment section. So the math isn’t really necessary if that point is made.
How many pages in does it tell us that there is no big picture, and it actually doesn’t exist? jk. I think it would be nice if you wrote about these emergent consciousness’ that you have tried to disprove that cannot exist, which you have mentioned in your blog in the past year. I don’t know of anyone who has ever written about that topic or even mentioned that it was a thing in theoretical physics. I find the idea rather intriguing, even though it may be unlikely. It would be nice to read an unbiased interpretation of how that all started. It seems like it would fit in with the title as well…
Yes… so it is hard to be too critical without having read the book. But… from the chapter summaries alone, this just seems so lame.
I wish authors would be able to tell you how much of their book is actually marketing crap to produce a popular book. But they can’t, right?
Sean is extremely smart and savvy, so he could probably write an excellent romance novel or sci-fi thriller that would have screen-play written all over it. And I am sure it would be f*ing awesome.
I won’t wait for it, though. Why? Because I think he wants to be taken seriously by his community of scientists. Why? I have no idea.
I personally am very encouraged by this first step toward entertainment writing. I really enjoy sci-fi movies where I actually have to think about science.
Please just let go of academia Sean!
I look forward to this book. It has an arc seldom attempted.
A comment: There is a wide gulf between Part 4 and Part 5. It would be useful to bridge that with the relevant Chemistry and Thermodynamics which narrows the complex systems in Part 5 to the ones relevant to Biology. Systems Chemistry introduces phenomena at the non-living level that is the precursor to natural selection. Evolution will later be seen to be a more complex version of what goes on in chemistry.
Variety of diverse and complex topics included in book many of which do not fall within domain of Physics or Science. When a Physicist ventures into topics of non Physicist field, without adequate knowledge on subject, mistakes are natural to arise. One thing which many people may agree that Physics is not panacea for understanding all the subjects in universe
Apologies for my earlier gratuitously hostile comment.
Looking forward to seeing the book.
The naturalism may turn out to be fairly routine; any attempts to impute much substance to concepts like ‘meaning’ and ‘caring’ in Part 7, within this naturalistic framework, may be the most interesting area to me personally.
It’s a shame comments are switched off for older posts. I would have liked to say something about the various lines of reasoning expressed here relating to the MWI.
Sean Carrol constructs most argument from the proposition the postulates as he gives them, are testable/falsifiable. The multiverse, and MWI multiversal dynamics are predictions of the postulates.
The oddity of this idea is that conventionally speaking the postulates are the one thing that don’t have to be tested or proven, beyond internal consistency. For example, postulates are typically or frequently tautological or ‘self evident truth’. In almost all, or all, instances postulates are the initial conditions the theorist minimally needs to get things rolling. They are the assumptions walking in.
This cannot be changed at all…it isn’t an improvement to make them into the subject. This is because if you make the postulates the subject, you have effectively shifted what were postulates now into the position of ‘subject’. But it can’t just appear from nowhere….there cannot be no assumption, no postulate, walking in. So you need the assumptions of the postulates, or postulates of the postulates. It’s a logical regression ultimately catastrophic.
Sean Carroll can accomplish what he appears to want to do, but he’d sensibly re-label things for their new placing in the schema. This isn’t a fussy point about due process or whatever. If you don’t do that you are likely to make mistakes down the line. Carrol’s mistake is that he makes the postulates the subject, and so correctly (kinda, sorta) re-assigns what would have been consequences into predictions. But he doesn’t recognize that he now must back-derive new postulates from the two original statements. There must be assumptions from which those two original ‘postulates’ are derivable consequences.
Just to mention why this is non-trivial. If Sean Carrol does this piece of work, he’ll quicky notice that the terms on which the disagreement (between himself and MWI skeptics) will be logically decided, have changed dramatically. The sceptical case for untestability will still be there, but differently hinged. The case Carrol makes now will not be valid. Not to say he can’t make the case, but only that, he has not made that case yet. There’s no case to answer.
The main problem of a materialistic metaphysics, like Naturalism, is including the laws of nature in its framework. If one defines a law of nature as a timeless order in the motion of the matter, which was also called “an unbroken pattern” by S. Carroll, then one introduces a new metaphysical element beside the space, time and matter. Since all known laws of nature are mathematical, this means that the corresponding mathematical theory of Nature will obey the Godel incompleteness theorems, which means that the theory will be complete only if there is an infinite number of axioms, or laws of nature. Hence a materialistic metaphysics with mathematical laws of nature requires an infinitely many non-material and space-time independent entities, which makes it a subset of the Platonic realm of ideas. In other words, a materialistic metaphysics with natural laws can only be a part of a platonic metaphysics. However, a big problem for a materialist adopting a platonic metaphysics is the existence of non-material and space-time independent entities. The only way a materialist can avoid platonism is to declare that the natural laws are long-lasting patterns which appear at random in the movement of matter. Although a logical possibility, this type of metaphysics is highly implausible. For example, the Solar system can disintegrate tomorrow (see arxiv:1509.02674 for more details).
Aleksander,
Your conclusion is based on a potentially false premise, that Godel’s theorem necessarily applies to the laws of nature. While all these laws are mathematical, and there exist mathematical statements that cannot be deduced from a particular finite set of axioms, that does not imply that a particular set of theorems (or laws) require an infinite set of axioms. Essentially all the theorems we have discovered are from a finite set of axioms. The same can be true of the laws of nature.
Regards
Exactly. I love it.
“Sean Carroll can accomplish what he appears to want to do”
Of course!
Some physicists make lousy philosophers, others make naturally good ones. Luckily Sean is one of the latter. The discussion of dualities in From Eternity to Here was brilliant; hopefully the Part Two section on “different stories about the same underlying truth” takes that ball and runs with it.
If you haven’t already watched Jenann Ismael’s talk on free will and physics (0:55:00-1:45:00) – well, it’s right up your alley. Alternately, this paper of hers is a quicker version. It leaves out the part about how entropy makes the past seem “fixed” (macroscopically, it basically is fixed), but your expertise can easily fill that in. From that point, hasty philosophers project that fixity of the past, via causal laws, onto the future. Thus inventing the “problem” of determinism.
Rich says “Exactly. I love it –> “Sean Carroll can accomplish what he appears to want to do” –> Of course!
There was no weighty significance in the sentence that you quote, on my side. I apologise for being dense…but when you say ‘exactly, I love it’ what is it that you concur exactly with? What is the subject of your exclamation “Of course!”. I just don’t see what is added with “of course he can accomplish what we appears to want to do?”. I’d like to understand if possible.