The Big Picture: The Talk

I’m giving the last lecture on my mini-tour for The Big Picture tonight at the Natural History Museum here in Los Angeles. If you can’t make it, here’s a decent substitute: video of the talk I gave last week at Google headquarters in Mountain View.

The Big Picture | Sean Carroll | Talks at Google

I don’t think I’ve quite worked out all the kinks in this talk, but you get the general idea. My biggest regret was that I didn’t have the time to trace the flow of free energy from the Sun to photosynthesis to ATP to muscle contractions. It’s a great demonstration of how biological organisms are maintained through the creation of entropy.

152 Comments

152 thoughts on “The Big Picture: The Talk”

  1. zarzuelazen:

    You are totally making my own points for me: that quantum mechanics includes a theory of perception 😉 Look at the expressions you used: ‘future you’, ‘real you’, ‘observes’ , ‘remembers’ etc. What you are talking about is actually a theory of mind.

    Again, emphatically, no.

    Were I attempting a similar elementary-level description of any other branch of science, I’d likely frame it similarly. “If you drop a watermelon and a grape at the same time, you will see both of them hit the ground at the same time.” “If you shuffle a deck of cards fairly and deal one card each to 52 people, you will not know which person has which card until you ask them to show the cards to you.” “If you look at such-and-such a declination and ascension at this time from these geographic coordinates, you will see the ISS pass in front of the Moon.”

    Although I clearly described the phenomena from the perspective of the person performing the experiment, not a single one of them is in any way observer-dependent. Quantum Mechanics is entirely observer-independent in exactly the same way. Particles have been diffracting through slits and slit-equivalents for a baker’s dozen billion years. If Many-Worlds is a good description of what’s been going on, each of those interactions has resulted in multiple universes — with no observers required. To suggest that you must be on the scene for it to complete the accounting…is the exact same hubris as had the ancients thinking the Earth was the center of Divine Creation and Mankind its crowning glory.

    The ‘switch’ between levels of abstraction that got pulled involved the generation of an ‘extra’ piece of information: namely the rules that connect the higher level description to the lower level ones, and this ‘extra’ piece of info isn’t actually in the laws of physics.

    That is not how emergence happens in any other system. There is no transfer of extra information. Nothing in the emergent phenomena is outside the laws of physics.

    Sean provides an excellent introduction to emergence, and especially to effective theories, in The Big Picture. May I suggest you read at least those bits and consider whether or not revisions are called for in your model?

    b&

  2. Ben:

    “Quantum Mechanics is entirely observer-independent in exactly the same way. Particles have been diffracting through slits and slit-equivalents for a baker’s dozen billion years. If Many-Worlds is a good description of what’s been going on, each of those interactions has resulted in multiple universes — with no observers required.”

    I know quantum physics, it doesn’t work in the way you think it does. The wave functions are pure information, there’s no ‘physical reality’ behind it. The separate ‘universes’ in MWI can’t be objectively defined, they are simply a feature of the way observers are interpreting the information in the wave functions.

    This is no different to how your mind constructs a ‘physical reality’ when you are watching a movie or playing a video game. The ‘physical reality’ in those cases is simply a construct of the way you are interpreting the information presented to you (in the former case, flickering lights on a screen from the movie projector, in the latter case, pixels on a screen controlled by a computer program.

    The ‘physical reality’ of QM is no different to the above cases: you are simply interpreting the pure information presented by the wave functions.

    Ben:

    “That is not how emergence happens in any other system. There is no transfer of extra information. Nothing in the emergent phenomena is outside the laws of physics.”

    Did I say any laws of physics are violated? No. I just said that when moving between different levels of abstraction, something is learned (new information comes to light).

    Take the famous thought experiment of ‘Mary’s room’ from philosophy. The idea is that Mary has been locked in a dark room all her life and has never before seen the colour ‘red’, but knows all the physical facts about seeing red ( learning all the facts of neuroscience from study etc.). So the question is; when she actually *sees* red for the first time, does she learn something new?

    My answer is yes, because new information has been revealed – the new ‘info’ that gets revealed is the rule connecting the two different levels of abstraction (the difference between the physical facts about seeing red, and actually seeing it – which is the difference between viewing information at two different levels of abstraction).

    My above answer to ‘Mary’s room’ is sufficient to prove that consciousness experience really is a fundamental mode of explanation in itself and can’t just be reduced to physics. Again, this doesn’t mean that consciousness involves any violation of ordinary laws of physics. It (probably) doesn’t.

    Look, I’m going to leave it here.

    The fact of the matter is, trying to force-fit everything into a ‘physical’ mode of explanation simply isn’t a useful way to view the world.

    Scientists don’t spend all their time trying to force-fit what they are doing into descriptions of particles, forces and fields – it would take forever and (a) they’d never get much work done, (b) they’d be unable to operate in practical reality.

    So as far as the acid test of ‘practical usefulness’ is concerned , my tripartite model of 3 different fundamental modes of explanation (physical, mental, mathematical) wins hands down over the standard physics view.

    See ya.

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