AMA | May 2026

Introduction

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AMA Introduction

1:55Hello, everyone, and welcome to the May 2026 Ask Me Anything edition of the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I am recording this intro after I recorded the rest of the AMA on Saturday, May 2nd of 2026. And I mention that because tonight is game seven in the first round series of the NBA playoffs between my beloved Philadelphia 76ers and the hated Boston Celtics.

2:26And I mention this because there's really nothing else on my mind right now. I'm actually working on my book while I'm not doing this, the AMA, but really in the back of my mind, it's basketball that is taking up most of my mental space. And this is the intro to the AMA, so I can talk about whatever I want. I know that a lot of people are not especially fascinated by this topic, so you can skip ahead to the AMA itself because I might as well explain where my mental space is at.

Sports Fandom

2:54And I've talked about before how I admit that sports fandom is largely irrational or at least irrational. It's not irrational in the sense that you're making a mistake to root for one team over another, but it's non-rational in the sense that there's no real moral calculus or ethical considerations that go into choosing which team to root for. It depends on where you were born, right? I think this is very harmless and, in fact, fine, right? I'd much rather have people self-identify as fans of a certain team and put a lot of their emotional energy into rooting for that team than other much more harmful ways to make irrational choices about how to live your lives.

3:39So I'm all in favor of this. And I grew up outside Philadelphia. All of my sports fandom is still Philadelphia-based, and basketball was always my sport of choice. It's going back to 1976 when the Philadelphia 76ers purchased Julius Irving because the upstart American Basketball Association was folding, and some of their teams were being brought into the NBA, the more long-lasting National Basketball Association.

4:10And some of those teams couldn't afford the fee to go in, so the New Jersey—no, they were at the time the New York Nets. Then they were the New Jersey Nets. Now they're the Brooklyn Nets. At the time, the New York Nets couldn't afford to keep their best player, Julius Irving. And the Philadelphia 76ers, my hometown team, purchased him and immediately became NBA championship contenders. Not long after, just a few years earlier, they set the record for the worst record in a season in the history of the NBA.

4:42So it was an impressive turnaround. That year, 1976-77, they did not win. They came close. They made it to the NBA finals. They played against Bill Walton and the Portland Trailblazers. And that set up several years of frustration because Julius Irving, Dr. J., my childhood hero, was good enough to drag them to the NBA finals several times. They went in that year. They went again in 1980. 80—phew, I forget. I forget how many years.

5:12At least four or five times they went to the NBA finals with Dr. J. But they didn't win until in 1983—actually, 1982—they were able to acquire Moses Malone, the center, from Houston, who was the league MVP at the time. And he led them to one of the best teams' seasons in history in the 82-83 Philadelphia 76ers. They easily cruised to the NBA championship. And that was—you know, it felt good after all those years of frustration.

5:42And so I—but I grew up with, you know, the Sixers being super-duper competitive and the Celtics, the Boston Celtics, were their hated rivals. And I use hate and things like that in a very casual, sports-like way. I don't hate the Boston Celtics. In fact, I have enormous respect for them as a franchise. I really, really didn't like Larry Bird personally when we were rooting against him. But now, with the passage of time, I have, again, enormous respect for his game and his achievements and the organization as a whole.

6:16But that year that the Sixers won the NBA title, they didn't actually meet the Celtics in the playoffs. They usually meet the Celtics. The Sixers versus the Celtics is the single most frequent NBA playoff matchup. The Sixers have played the Celtics more often than any other two teams have played each other in the history of the NBA. And it's a storied rivalry going back to Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell and the whole thing. And to be super honest, the Celtics usually come out on top.

6:48Dr. J's Sixers beat the Celtics a couple times. The Celtics beat them a couple times. The last time that the Philadelphia 76ers beat the Boston Celtics in the NBA playoffs was 1982, when I was still in junior high school, I guess, or for the beginning of high school. Yeah, high school, I suppose. So that's a long time. Since then, the Sixers have made it back to the playoffs and either done well or met the Celtics and done badly. The Celtics have just beaten them over and over again in the playoffs and especially the last few years, you know, since I'm going to take pity on you all because I know you don't care about this.

Philadelphia 76ers

7:28I could literally talk about this for hours and you don't want to hear it. But there's extra drama because several years ago, the Sixers fired their general manager and coach and hired Sam Hinckley, who was an analytics-based way of thinking about basketball that he brought. And he basically got rid of all their good players. And you think, oh, that's not very good to get rid of your good players. But he did it intentionally so that they could be bad and get good draft picks.

8:00And they did. It worked. This was later dubbed the process, as in trust the process, by I think it was a player on the team, Tony Roten, who first said trust the process. But it was taken up by Sixers fans, including the rights to Ricky Sanchez podcasters, and spread very widely. And the crown jewel of their drafting success was Joel Embiid, their center, who took as his nickname the process. So trusting the process became also putting trust in Joel Embiid.

8:32And I swear that I've never seen a basketball player have worse luck with injuries than Joel Embiid. I've seen players just get so injured they couldn't play anymore. That happens. Various players just never panned out because they had too many injury problems. But with Embiid, he keeps coming back and playing and then getting injured in weird ways. He's had teammates fracture his cheekbone in his face. He's had Bell's palsy. This year, just to rub it in, he had an emergency appendectomy during the last week of the regular season.

9:09He had his appendix out. Again, you can't blame him for things like this. But it has absolutely prevented them from going far in the playoffs because he's their best player. But this year, they are meeting the Celtics in the first round. And Embiid had an appendectomy. And he came back 17 days after having surgery to get his appendix removed. Far ahead of schedule. He played pretty mediocrely in the first game that he returned.

9:39And by then, once they lost that game, they were down 3-1 in a best-of-seven series. And the odds are not good for you in the NBA when you're down 3-1 and are trying to win a four game, try to get to four games, four wins before the other team. But the last two games, Embiid has been playing great. And the Sixers have pretty easily handled the Celtics. And now it's 3-3, and this is game seven, and titanic repercussions for the happiness or sadness of all of Philadelphia sports fandom that's going to happen tonight.

10:14So I say this, again, because it's what is on my mind. Again, I could talk for hours. There's a lot of human interest stories going on here. But the point is that it's fun, that it's quite enjoyable, that I'm glad that sports are out there. I teased people on Blue Sky the other day. I said I should do a solo podcast episode on why basketball is the best sport. And, of course, people are like, no, it's not. You know, let me tell you why it's really cricket or whatever. And it's all in good fun. I don't actually think that there's any objective sense in which basketball is the best sport. I do think I could come up with arguments that it is or that it isn't, blah, blah, blah.

10:49Let's all just have fun and enjoy the games. And also, we need to crush the Celtics tonight. I hope that happens. If it didn't happen by the time you're listening to this, don't talk to me about it. I will not be in any mood.

Patreon Supporters

11:01But meanwhile, we're going to do the AMA. Thanks, as always, to the Patreon supporters of Mindscape for making this possible. You could become a Patreon supporter of Mindscape. Just go to patreon.com slash Sean M. Carroll. Let me actually check. I never remember if my middle initial is there in the Patreon listing. Where is it? Yeah. I don't know whether it's there. Yes. Patreon.com slash Sean M. Carroll. The middle initial is there. And you can sign up. Right now, it's a dollar per podcast episode.

11:34We're going to change it to $5 a month at some point. We haven't quite done that yet. But still, for, you know, typically, what, six hours per month, at least, of podcast goodness, $5 per six hours is not so bad, I think. And if you don't want to, you don't want to. That's fine. But if you do sign up for the Patreon, then you get to ask the AMA questions. You get to ask a priority question once in your life that I will definitely try to answer because I can't answer all the questions that are asked. There are too many of them.

12:04And you get reflection episodes for me talking for five minutes after every regular podcast where I talk about how I thought the podcast went, what we learned, things like that, as well as the joy of being a member of something, being part of something, much like being the fan of a favorite sports franchise, even if it always breaks your heart. So with that, let's go.

Antimatter Detection

12:43Alex says, if there were an isolated region in space that consisted only of antimatter, would we be able to detect the fact that it is antimatter?

12:53So I'm going to answer the question. No, we would not be able to. But it's really close to a slightly more subtle question that is very interesting. And I think I know the answer to it. But I'm going to have to be a little bit less confident in that. Just so everyone knows, there are no isolated regions in space that might be antimatter. Space is pretty empty, but it's not completely empty. Even in between the galaxies, there is an intergalactic and intercluster medium. There's a tiny density of particles which would keep bumping into any macroscopically large

13:28amount of antimatter and annihilate and give off gamma rays and x-rays. And we would know about it very clearly. So not to mention the fact that 14 billion years ago, near the Big Bang, everything was touching everything else. So there was no way for anything to keep isolated. So this is not a realistic question, but it's a good thought experiment question. If, like you say, if Alex says there were an isolated region of space and we could just look at it, so we're seeing photons come from it, realistically, no, we could not tell whether

14:01it was matter or antimatter. It's just a relabeling, roughly speaking. If you just, you know, they would, the people who were living in the galaxies that were made of antimatter would call what we call antimatter. They would call antimatter and vice versa. And the reason why, and furthermore, if there were only, if there was a universe that was only made of antimatter and it had, what can I say? Yeah.

14:31So if it was completely made of antimatter, even if they knew all the laws of physics, they wouldn't be able to say, like, they're made of antimatter rather than matter. So the tiny little footnote here, which makes it a little bit interesting, is there is in the standard model of particle physics something called CP violation. CP are two symmetries, or at least two transformations you can do on the underlying particles and fields of the standard model. C says switch all particles with antiparticles.

15:03And P says change the parity. That is the orientation of the axes. So you change right-handed things with left-handed things. So instead of a right-hand rule, if you did a parity transformation, you'd be talking about a left-hand rule. And that's important because parity is violated in various weak interaction processes. And indeed, CP together is sort of the closest you could come to really trying to replace all matter with antimatter. Because I know that that's just C, but C is not a very good symmetry, but CP is.

15:38So it's sort of better to relabel, if you like, CP is the honest exchange of matter with antimatter. But CP is also violated just a little bit. And so there's a loophole, which I think is true. I've never really thought this through. That's why I'm answering it first, because it's an intriguing question. If there were a semi-isolated region of space, isolated in the sense that there was no matter being exchanged back and forth, and we were able to not only look at it, but like send

16:10them a signal and ask them questions, which we could do with photons, because photons are the same for matter or antimatter. So photons don't annihilate or anything like that, just because there's no antiphotons other than photons themselves. Let's put it that way. So if we were able to talk with them by sending signals back and forth, could we decide without touching each other or sending matter back and forth that we were made of the opposite of whatever? Like we would call it matter and they would call it matter, but maybe what we call matter

16:41is what they call antimatter. And I think there the answer is yes, because of CP violation. So basically what we could say is there are particle physics processes that happen at a certain rate that is different than the rate at which their CP conjugate processes happen. So for example, there is a kind of meson called the neutral k-on, which you can make in a certain way. And so we would not be able to use with our potentially antimatter friends words like protons

17:15and neutrons, right? Because we don't know whether they're what we call antiprotons and antineutrons. But what we could say is, you know, your atoms have nuclei that are made of charged particles and uncharged particles. So we call the charged particles protons, et cetera. And we could say, look, when we make a certain kind of k-on with a certain kind of collision of protons and neutrons, it makes certain kinds of other particles. OK, and the CP violation says that there is a long-lived version of the neutral k-on and

17:50a short-lived version. And in the long-lived version, it can decay. It's neutral. So it needs to decay into a total number of particles with zero charge. And the k-on decays into a pion, an electron, and a neutrino with appropriate antiness where it needs to be. So in particular, for the k-long, it can decay into a negatively charged pion, a positively charged electron, which is what we call the positron, and then an electron neutrino.

18:25Or it can decay into a positively charged pion, the negatively charged electron, the real electron, and an antineutrino. And because of CP violation, those seem very, very similar. Those seem almost symmetric, right? Pi minus E plus nu or pi plus E minus nu bar in particle physics lingo. But because of CP violation, the decays into the positron version happen slightly more often than decays into the electron version. So what we could tell our friends in the other galaxy far away is that in our universe, the low-mass

19:03charged particles that make chemistry happen and so forth that we call electrons are the ones that appear in the less frequent decay of the long-lived version of the neutral k-on. And that is sort of an experimentally believable thing. You don't need to touch anything. You don't need to say, like, here's my electron. Does it annihilate with yours or not? You can just send that information. And then you can say, is the same thing true with your version of the electron? And they would be able to tell whether they are made of what we call antimatter or not.

19:37Like I said, I think all that's true. I've never—I'm not—I'm only like a hack particle physicist. I'm not an expert particle physicist, so if anyone wants to check me on that, that would be perfectly allowed.

Anthropic Reasoning

19:50David Kudeverdian says, if I'm not mistaken, you take the fact that we are not Boltzmann brains as a good anthropic reason to think that our universe doesn't allow many Boltzmann brains, even in the future. Could you please give an example of bad anthropic reasoning and highlight the key differences compared to good anthropic reasoning, using the example above as an instance of good anthropic reasoning? So that's not exactly what I would say, just to be super-duper careful, because the beginning of your statement is the fact that we are not Boltzmann brains.

20:21We could be Boltzmann brains. That is to say, whatever you want to say, you are absolutely sure of and convinced about us, like maybe you think you exist and the room you're in exists and so forth, and all of your memories are what your memories appear to be, in an eternal universe with random fluctuations, things like that, configurations like you, even if it's not just a brain, like your whole body is there, the whole room you're in, you know, whatever you're looking at right now, say that that's all real.

20:52Maybe the whole solar system is real. Maybe the whole Milky Way galaxy is real. It doesn't matter. In an eternally, randomly fluctuating universe, it is overwhelmingly likely that that configuration randomly fluctuated into existence. And the impression that you have that there was a Big Bang 14 billion years ago randomly fluctuated into existence in your brain. So you can't say on the basis of data that you're not a Boltzmann brain, unless you do bad anthropic reasoning.

21:23So the reason why I, the way that I get out of the Boltzmann brain problem is I say, if Boltzmann brains do dominate or Boltzmann fluctuations more broadly, even bigger fluctuations than just brains, if those dominate the set of conditions in the universe that are given by any macroscopic specification, then we are cognitively unstable. Then we have no reason to trust any conclusions we have about the universe.

21:53And it's not that that scenario is therefore false, but it's that we should put almost zero credence on it. Because the options are, we put a high credence on it and we are not allowed to do anything, to say anything about the universe, to trust anything we believe. It's just no way to go through life. Or we can say, no, I'm going to reason as if I am not a Boltzmann fluctuation, but I am the thermodynamically sensible observer that I think that I am. And how can I justify that? By having large credence on cosmological models in which that would be true, right?

22:26In other words, it's a long-winded and philosophically careful way of getting to the conclusion that we should build cosmologies which are not dominated by Boltzmann brains, okay? That's the way that I would say it. So it's not quite an anthropic thing. It's a you-need-cognitive-stability kind of thing, which is not quite the same thing. Now, most astronomers, you want to know, what's an example of bad anthropic reasoning? Here's an example of bad anthropic reasoning. In a Boltzmann fluctuation-dominated universe, most observers would be brains or would be

23:01minimal observers, whatever that is. People take the brain thing too seriously. Who cares about the brain thing? If you want to say, well, I need more than just a brain. I need this or that. Fine. I give you whatever you need. The point is you would be minimal. And the world that we see around us is in no sense minimal, where minimal means a minimum deviation from thermal equilibrium, okay? So in that universe, this is an example of bad anthropic reasoning, remember? So most observers would be minimal fluctuated observers.

23:31Therefore, if I lived in that universe, I would probably be a minimally fluctuated observer. I look around and see that I am not. Therefore, I have ruled out that scenario by taking data, okay? The reason why that's bad anthropic reasoning is it does not follow that just because most observers in that universe would be this kind of fluctuation, that you would be this kind of fluctuation, because you know things about yourself. In order to get to that conclusion, you have to forget everything you know and pretend you're

24:05a typical observer in the universe and then draw conclusions on that basis. I don't think that's allowed. I think that that's almost always what cosmologists do, and philosophers for that matter. They imagine that the way to do anthropic reasoning is to pretend that they are typical observers by closing their eyes and forgetting that they're not typical observers, and then opening their eyes and acting surprised when they see the reality of the world around them. I just think that's a mistake. So, Isaac Wilkins and I are, as I've mentioned, writing a paper, and it's going to be called

24:38Anthropics with Open Eyes, where you can actually take into account everything that you know, following ideas that Radford Neal came up with a long time ago. And the point is that the original argument I gave you does not rely—I never used in any way the sense that you're a typical observer in the universe, okay? You're typical within the set of observers that have exactly everything you know about the universe. So that's why I said, you tell me what you take as real.

25:10And within the set of people like that, you're typical, because you have no experimental evidence that you're not. And so that's good anthropic reasoning. If you treat yourself as typical within the set of observers just like you, that's fine. And there's plenty of other examples. The doomsday argument that says that humanity won't last much longer because it would be very, very unlikely for us to be in the early stages of humanity if we were typical human beings. We're not typical human beings.

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Rationality and Ideology

28:05I've noticed for quite some time that certain ideological groups, particularly some anti-feminist or reactionary communities, tend to weaponize rationality to give the appearance of logical rigor to what is essentially motivated reasoning. In doing so, they treat being rational as synonymous with being cold and unemotional and dismiss opposing views and justified public outcry as mere feelings. This is often captured by the now infamous line, are you offended? Yet these same groups frequently commit basic is-ought fallacies, for example, jumping from statistical averages to rigid prescriptions about social roles.

28:38Personally, I think the word rationality has taken on a somewhat negative connotation for me because of this kind of misuse. As someone committed to genuine scientific thinking, what is your view on this current trend of invoking supposed rationality? And do you believe that the scientific community has a responsibility to push back against it? So I want to, you know, I wouldn't phrase things at all in quite this way. I think that, you know, it's tempting to in heated debates over political or cultural or theological, for that matter, issues to attribute all of the good features to our side and all

29:13the bad features to the other side. Now, sometimes the other side really does have more bad features than our side does, but you have to be aware of the temptation to say that all of their facets are the bad ones and all of ours are the good ones. That's just really comforting to think that, but it's usually not as true as we take it to be. So I would be much, much more careful about, you know, complaining that they're completely irrational and have used all these words because they're just motivated, whereas we are perfectly

29:43reasonable. But having said that, I think that you do point to a very real thing that is happening. I mean, let's just forget about, you know, this or that ideological group. I think that an increasingly common tactic these days is to take something that most people think is a virtue, like being rational or having free speech or something like that, and weaponizing it. Weaponizing it by taking the act and, you know, perverting it in some way by not buying

30:21into some of the preconditions for that act to actually be the virtue that it is supposed to be. There's no better example of this than the infamous Harper's Letter. I don't know if you saw the Harper's Letter. You remember this from a few years ago. This was an open letter published in Harper's Magazine with a various set of distinguished signatories complaining about the leftist suppression of open inquiry, especially in universities and places like that.

30:56And there are absolutely really examples of suppression of open inquiry by leftists on campus and elsewhere. There are also absolutely examples of suppression of open inquiry by conservatives on campus and elsewhere. And by any, I would argue that by any reasonable fair accounting, the conservatives are much more dramatic at it. And we're seeing that right now. We're seeing it now that conservatives are in power. There are universities that are undoing tenure protections

31:29that are forbidding faculty members from discussing certain topics in their courses that are firing faculty members for political speech and a whole bunch of really, really dramatic things much worse than anything that was being complained about in places like the Harper Letter. And so there's this ability to sort of weaponize the claim like, well, you don't believe in free speech or something like that. When the other side really isn't interested in free speech, they're just using your sympathy for it

32:00against you. So I do think that something like rationality could be very much used in that way. But the response is just to be rational. The response is to be really rational, truly rational, not to give up on it, not to reject the terminology. You know, I remember once saying years and years ago, in response to something online or something like that, I said, you know, what matters is not equality of outcome. I think it was about men and women in science. And what I said was, what matters is

32:35not the equality of outcome, but the equality of opportunity, right? You don't, I don't care whether there is 50-50 representation of men and women in physics departments. What I care is that a young person who has certain talents in doing science and doing physics has the same opportunities to become a physicist as depending on whether they're a boy or a girl or whatever. Okay. And, but what I was, I was given crap for saying this because that phrase, you know, equality of opportunity, not

33:08equality of outcome is weaponized by people who actually don't even want equality of outcome, right? They, they claim that when you're trying to argue that sexism is bad and is all over the place in academia, that secretly or, or explicitly you want equality of outcome, and that's not what you should want. Fine. That's not what I want. But the point is we don't have equality of opportunity. I really just think that when the bad guys try to weaponize good ideas, we stick by the good ideas.

33:43We talk to each other as reasonably and honestly as possible. And we exemplify doing things in the right way. We don't give up on doing things the right way or start doing things the wrong way, or even give up on good ideas or vocabulary words just because they are being misused. We need to be open to the fact that some people might use good ideas or good concepts or whatever for bad reasons. That's fine. And we shouldn't allow people to take advantage of us. We shouldn't, you know,

34:16let them run over us by lying and cheating and stealing and whatever, but we shouldn't give up on the good ideas. We should, we should absolutely always be in favor of rationality, of fairness, of free speech, of open inquiry, of all of those good things that a good modern post-enlightenment liberal should care about. Alexandra Kojumtis, sorry, Alexandra, I butchered last name. Kojumtis says, has grappling with the complexities of the universe and its laws made you

34:52more anxious or more peaceful as a human being? How has a deep understanding of physics changed your daily contentment? I personally struggle with the idea of being on deterministic rails and just a small blip of the universe experiencing itself. Well, I have, it's a perfectly legitimate question, and it's a tricky one, and people will answer it differently. The facts of determinism, again, I truly don't care about determinism. Determinism is just not what matters. If the laws of physics were, had a truly stochastic element, like they do in objective collapse models of quantum mechanics,

35:28so what? That doesn't make me feel any better. Just that, that just means that, you know, the most compact description of physics involves some random numbers as well as some deterministic things. Like, that has zero effect on how I think about the world. I think that when people worry about determinism, really what they're worried about is the laws of physics, whether or not those laws are deterministic or stochastic. They're worried about the fact that there is a level of description on which we are impersonal, mechanistic pieces of the universe obeying some laws, okay? And that

36:00doesn't bother me even a little bit. Like, I know that. That's true. Whether it's deterministic or not, I don't know the microstate of the universe. I'm not Laplace's demon, as you might recall, so it just doesn't affect my life at all. We have a really good podcast episode coming up soon where I talk with someone who is really good at explaining the difference here. The real big issue is, of course, life after death or mortality, right? As I've argued before, a straightforward reading of what we

36:32understand about the laws of physics makes it very, very unlikely that there is anything like life after death. Death is truly the end of our conscious experience. And I think that's super profound. And I think that, you know, if anything, scientists and philosophers undersell the importance of that. We sort of let it seep into the public discourse, but we don't make a big deal out of it. And I kind of think we should make a big deal out of it. It's a big deal. And I struggle with it a little bit.

37:03Like, I don't like the idea that at some point I won't exist anymore, right? Like, I'm not in favor of that. I mean, maybe there's a point at which I would choose to finish my existence. That's perfectly okay. But I'm nowhere near there now. And I doubt I'll be near there when the time actually comes. So that is something to truly struggle with. In my experience, the people who think that there is life after death or heaven or reincarnation or whatever, struggle just as much. I don't see any systematic openness to the ending of our physical life here on earth, just because people think

37:38that there's a continuation afterward. So I think that, you know, I control what I can control. And the laws of physics and the existence of the soul after death are not things that I can control. So I'm going to deal with what's happening in the here and now.

Consciousness and Complexity

37:54Zach McKinney says, what is your view on the appropriate contribution of contemplative practices and psychonautic explorations, including but not limited to the psychedelic variety, to understanding the nature and metaphysics of consciousness? I agree that rigorous contemporary science is needed to elucidate the neurophysiological and informatic basis of consciousness. Nonetheless, given that any complete theory of consciousness must account for a wide variety of non-normative experience, to what extent do you believe ancient practices that reliably produce and interrogate altered states of consciousness can contribute to our understanding of the nature

38:26and origins of consciousness, respectively? So tiny correction, I don't think that non-normative is the word you're looking for there. Non-normative means not judgmental, right? Normative talk is prescriptive talk rather than descriptive talk. Norms are do we judge things to be right or wrong? I don't think that's quite what you mean in this particular context. But anyway, I think that there is some mild usefulness of psychedelics or various other practices that would

39:00lead to altered states of consciousness in the very straightforward sense that you could see what people do when they're in these states and you could collect data about how conscious they are, how their consciousness changes, etc. That's fine. I'm not quite sure how useful it is, but it's worth doing. I think there's huge potential applications of psychedelics and other practices to therapy, you know, not just psychological therapy, but physical, you know, medicinal therapy, like fixing

39:33diseases and things like that. So I'm all in for that. I'm all for that. I'm not sure that it helps us a lot with understanding the nature of consciousness. Probably what you mean is something more like, do I imagine that if I could access one of these states through drugs or other means that I would have some insight into the nature of consciousness because of that? And that I think, no, absolutely not at all. I know what's going on. I mean, I have certain things going on in my brain. I am changing

40:04those things going on in my brain, either through drugs or stimulation or even some internal practice, whatever. But I'm changing the physical things going on in my brain. And as a result of that, I change what I think I'm perceiving or something like that. I don't see why that gives me any insight into the nature of consciousness at all. I'm not quite sure what I would expect to discover by doing that. I don't think that we have, in particular, discovered anything super duper important about the nature of consciousness by people doing that. Again, that's not to say it

40:35might not help you live your life. But at a scientific level, I don't think it's telling us anything data-wise about what consciousness is. Schleyer says, does all the complexity and

Complexity and Awareness

40:46awareness on Earth mean that the universe is a complex and self-aware system? Or does one living planet among septillions of dead ones in empty space amount to a statistically insignificant blip with universal complexity rounded down to zero? Unsurprisingly, the answer is that depends on how you choose to quantify complexity. If I have a big system that is mostly simple, but there's a little tiny part of it that is super duper complex, do I judge complexity by the average

41:17amount of complexity or by the maximum amount of complexity of any subsystem? I think it's entirely okay, entirely legitimate to judge the complexity overall of a system by the maximum amount of complexity of any subsystem in it, right? But you can choose to do it whatever way you want. I mean, I think that the purpose for which you probably would be quantifying complexity is to talk about the appearance of new abilities or modalities or whatever you want to say, strategies for this

41:53physical system to exist in the universe. And I think that the relevant fact there is the peak complexity of any subsystem, not the average amount overall. Mark Wall says, having a consequentialist slash utilitarian slash hedonist stance like Peter Singer seems to require an immense amount of information to make the best ethical decisions within that framework. Do you think that it is a reasonable conclusion to say from that position that that makes science the most ethical pursuit,

42:24as it is a framework of gaining more information about the world? E.g., we found through scientific studies that cephalopods are sentient, so now we can make the world better by trying to not have them suffer. I wouldn't put it that way, no. I mean, I think that science is an important part of ethical pursuit more generally, but you know me. I am a pluralist. I think that there is no one thing that is the most ethical thing to do because if you pick any one thing you think is super ethical and everyone did that thing and didn't do anything else, I think that would be a super unethical

43:00result, right? I think the most ethical thing is that a lot of different people are pursuing lots of different things. We need not only science. We need education. We need government. We need health care. We need maintenance, as Stuart Brand would say, of the world around us in all sorts of ways. We need distraction and entertainment and sports and things like that. So these are all ethical in different ways. I don't think that there's a need or a sensibility to saying that one of them is the

43:30most ethical, but certainly, you know, again, the spirit of saying that doing science is important for a good ethical understanding of the world. In that sense, yes, I would that much I would totally agree with. Ken Wolf says, since you are a fan of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, are you familiar with the sequel, Death Comes to Pemberley, written by P.D. James? If so, what did you think or how do you feel in general about what is essentially fan fiction based on one of your favorite books? Well, I will tell you, I actually did read Death Comes to Pemberley, and I remember essentially nothing of it. So that

44:05should tell you what I thought about it. Like, it's fine. I'm very much in favor of fan fiction, okay? In fact, I would love it if fan fiction were much more popular. As a general rule, I think that we have professionalized artistic and creative pursuits too much, right? There is such a thing as spare time and leisure time and the part of your life that does not just go into your occupation. And a lot of that time in the modern world, we spend relaxing or spectating in some sense, watching sports and things

44:40like that. We don't spend enough of it creating, painting, making music, writing fiction, whatever it is. So I wish everyone would write fan fiction if that's what got them very excited. I don't think that that particular example. I think, you know, I don't know P.D. James's other work. It might be very, very good. Mystery writer. Death Comes to Pemberley is sort of a mystery novel take on a sequel to Pride and Prejudice. I do remember that Elizabeth Bennett, who was the star, of course, of Pride and

45:11Prejudice, didn't have a very big role in Death Comes to Pemberley. It was much more about Mr. Darcy, her now husband and his friends. But, you know, something about the sensibility is just different. You know, I mean, this is not an exact analogy, but let me suggest an analogy. When there is a song and you want to imagine a cover version of the song, a cover version is not quite like a fan fiction sequel, but it's similar in some ways, right? What kind of song lends itself to a good cover version?

45:43You know, the classic cover version success is Jimi Hendrix doing All Along the Watchtower, which was written by Bob Dylan. And so what's going on there? You have a wonderful song by an amazingly brilliant songwriter, Bob Dylan, who, to many people's ears, is not the best performer, not the best guitarist or singer or arranger or whatever. That's not where his strong suit is. He's good at it, but, you know, it's the songwriting and the wordsmithing that is really good at it. Whereas Jimi Hendrix can perform as well as anybody, right, playing the guitar. And he's also a super good

46:21singer and definitely a wonderful sort of blues-inflected arranger of music. And so he takes this underperformed song by Bob Dylan and turns it into a classic All Along the Watchtower. You wouldn't want to—I mean, there's no world-class cover version of, I don't know, Bohemian Rhapsody. Like, they already did it perfectly. Queen did the perfect version. I almost was going to say Stairway to Heaven. Stairway to Heaven was also done perfectly the

46:54first time by Led Zeppelin. But if any of you saw Hart do a cover version of Stairway to Heaven at the national—the United States gave some award to Led Zeppelin, right, the National Medal of Arts or something like that. I forget exactly what it was. But Anne and Nancy Wilson from Hart did a cover version of Stairway to Heaven that honestly was better than Led Zeppelin's version. And I say that because Led Zeppelin was in the audience and they were crying because it was so good, this version. So it's not—like I said, it's not a perfect example. But Jane Austen, you know, the equivalent

47:30here is there are people who are good at plots, right, like coming up with some complicated set of events happening in the book. And there are people whose best thing is, you know, the details of individual characters and their reactions and their thoughts and the words into which those things are put, okay? And Jane Austen is good at the latter, not the former. No one reads Jane Austen for the plots. You know it's going to end up with a happy ending, right? And if you're the kind of reader who is only interested in the plot, you're not going to like Jane Austen. It's

48:05how you get there. It's the journey. It's the delicious sentences and one character commenting on the other and the characters just thinking to themselves, you know, what are we going to do? And it's just so wonderfully insightful about how real people think, like real people struggle with themselves and go back and forth and say all sorts of crazy things to themselves. And that's what's enjoyable about Jane Austen, not the list of characters or their physical situation or whatever. And, you know, P.D. James, from my very, very meager evidence of having just read that one

48:39book, is no Jane Austen. When it comes to what Jane Austen is good at, it would be like Bob Dylan covering a Jimi Hendrix song, right? Like, who wants that? So, you know, it's not that either artist is not living up to what they're good at, but it's not that either artist is not really good at something. It's that we want to maximize what it is they're good at. And I'm not sure if this particular kind of sequel really does that. We shop for everything at home now. Why can't we shop for blinds at home too? That's why I love

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49:47no-charge, no-obligation consultation, head to 3dayblinds.com slash pod50 for our buy one, get one 50% off deal. That's the number 3, D-A-Y blinds.com slash pod50. Want $1,000 weight loss medication for $50? It all starts with Rowe's free GLP-1 insurance check. Just upload your insurance card to see if you have coverage, then relax. Over 200,000 people have qualified for a $50 copay through Rowe. Go to Rowe.co slash health. Half of patients have a $50 per

50:20month copay or less for medication, plus $145 monthly Rowe membership fee. Deductible cost may apply and final cost varies by insurance plan. For safety information about GLP-1 medications, including boxed warning, go to Rowe.co slash safety. Rx only. TK says, hypothetically, if an alien civilization were able to harness massive amounts of negative energy and open a wormhole nearby, would that cause a gravitational ripple that could be detected by LIGO? Well, you know, this is vastly underspecified question. You know, how far away are they? How big is the wormhole? Things like

50:57that. There's two things that sort of push in opposite directions here. One is, I think maybe this is your intuition, to make a wormhole, like a macroscopic wormhole, okay? You can't do it, by the way. That's the simple thing to guess, is that making wormholes is not possible. But we don't know that for sure. But we don't have a recipe for doing it, I guess, is the point. And maybe you can make a microscopic wormhole that is very, very tiny, and that would definitely not

51:28cause a gravitational ripple that could be detected by LIGO. But a macroscopic wormhole, the kind that a human being could safely pass through, I think your intuition that that would require an astronomically large amount of gravitational energies being pushed around. Yes, that is true. However, so anyway, I'm getting to the two things that push in different directions. That's the thing that pushes you in the direction that says, you know, maybe, maybe it would require

51:58so much energy and so much manipulation of the gravitational field to make this astrophysically big wormhole that it would require an astrophysically large amount of gravitational waves to be created. Of course, that doesn't tell you whether they're detectable or not, because if it's far enough away, it's too faint, right? I'm presuming that we're imagining a relatively nearby alien civilization doing this. But the other consideration is that giving off a lot of gravitational waves is a waste of energy, right? Those gravitational waves are not useful to the alien civilization that is

52:32making the wormhole. So if they're clever, and presumably they are, because they're an alien civilization making a wormhole, they would try to minimize the loss of energy into gravitational waves. And actually, that's not, that is something we know how to do. Anything that you do that is perfectly spherically symmetric gives off zero gravitational waves. If a star collapses in a perfectly spherically symmetric configuration, zero gravitational waves are given off. This is a theorem. This is an implication of Burkhoff's theorem of general relativity. Changing matter distribution,

53:08but keeping it spherically symmetric does not give off gravitational waves. The technical term is it's only the quadruple moment that gives off gravitational waves. So if your alien civilization wants to save energy or wants to go under the radar and not be detected, as it were, they could probably arrange their wormhole creation in such a way that it would not cause a lot of gravitational radiation. By the way, footnote there, in the original idea for Interstellar, remember the movie Interstellar

53:38came from an idea from Kip Thorne and Linda Obst. Kip being a former Mindscape guest and famous physicist and Linda being a Hollywood producer. And Kip was a big name. He was one of the people who made LIGO happen. He won the Nobel Prize for that. And in the original story, he wanted the detection of the wormhole to be from LIGO. So it wasn't the creation of the wormhole, but he had this idea that gravitational waves would pass through the wormhole and be detected by LIGO. And that would

54:11alert scientists here on Earth that something was going on. That didn't survive into the final movie, sadly. Bill McDonald says, here comes my single, short, timely, once in a lifetime, at least in this branch priority question. Remember, every Patreon supporter gets to ask one priority question in their lifetimes. And you're on the honor system here. By the way, they're like very, very rarely, but sometimes someone who is not a Patreon supporter tries to like join Patreon, just ask a priority

54:44question and then quit before they've paid any money. I'm not like really trying hard to enforce that. But we hope that people don't do that. And mostly they don't. I'm not certainly not accusing Bill of doing that. I'm just it came to mind because someone tried to do it anyway. So Bill's question is on Jeffrey Epstein. When does the failure to shun a wrongdoer become blameworthy? Well, unsurprisingly, I'm going to say that there are gradations here, right? Like failure to shun

55:15a wrongdoer means different things in different contexts. Like if someone is a wrongdoer, and you're not shunning them, but trying to help them sincerely improve their lives and become better, then that's praiseworthy. That's not blameworthy at all. I presume that's not what is going on in the Epstein question. When Jeffrey Epstein was convicted for the first time circa 2008, it wasn't a big deal. People forget this because, you know, you remember things in retrospect differently than they happened

55:46at the time. It was there were there were some news stories about it because he was a rich guy who went to jail. But it didn't really penetrate the public consciousness. If you go onto Google and do the Ngram search, which tells you how often different terms appear in the corpus of words being written, Jeffrey Epstein doesn't take off until around 2018. Really, he got like a bump in around 2016 when Donald Trump ran for president. But then a big bump because the Miami Herald did a big story on him in 2018. And that's when he super duper became infamous. And then he committed suicide not long

56:22after that. But in 2008, the first thing was, you know, if you were into following the shenanigans of rich financiers, you knew about it. But I think that the person on the street didn't know his name at that time. So there certainly were people both before and after 2008 who accepted money. Many scientific, many good scientists, many friends of mine took money from Jeffrey Epstein. The Santa Fe Institute took money from Jeffrey Epstein. Most of it, again, before 2008. So before he was known

56:57to be a sex offender or whatever, they did sort of like almost by mistake take a small donation after that and they gave it back right away. Is that blameworthy? I don't think so. I mean, I think you try to do your due diligence. Sometimes you slip a little bit and, you know, you give the money back and, okay, that's what it is. I think that after 2008, once he had done that, if people knew that he

57:27was that kind of wrongdoer and just said to themselves, you know, he's a wrongdoer, but I'd rather his tainted money go to good causes than bad causes and therefore convince themselves it was okay to take the money, I think that's a little blameworthy. I think that was a little self-dealing, self-serving in your rationality there, but it's not like the world's biggest problem. And if you just said, yeah, that was a mistake, I made a mistake, sorry, and you were

57:59legitimate about it, I would completely forgive a person who did something like that. Now, it's clear from the files that there were people who not only knew that he was a bad person, but kind of thought it was cool the way that he was a bad person. People like Larry Summers, you know, who we talked about, or Henry Rosofsky, who many of you don't know, but he was the provost of Harvard University when I was there, or Alan Dershowitz or whatever, Lawrence Krauss, people who, you know, were in on it.

58:33And I don't mean in on it in the sense of literally abusing children or whatever, but, you know, Lawrence Krauss asked Jeffrey Epstein for advice on how to fight against the charges against him of sexual harassment, and we know why he would do that. Larry Summers asked him for advice on trying to seduce a younger colleague, you know, who was a junior faculty member. You know, it's just like all this terrible, terrible stuff. And, and that's, you know, to me, passed a certain level

59:06where, and none of these people have, by the way, said, they're sorry. That's the thing, like the worst offenders are the ones who try to make excuses for it, the ones who like, took money and really shouldn't have. But like, it was just sort of some, you know, they did some psychology on themselves that convinced themselves it wasn't that bad. And then realized later, like, oh, no, actually, that was pretty horrible, and have sincerely apologized. Those I let them apologize. And I think that, yeah, let's move on. I'm not going to treat those people as pariahs in

59:38any sense. But it's the people who, like, thought that what was happening was actually what was happening in the general sense of the misogyny and the sexism and all that stuff, not necessarily the literal raping of children. But the whole skeeziness of the enterprise was there. And some people thought that that was a feature rather than a bug. And those people, I am, I'm very happy to blame them to find them blameworthy. Sandra Stuckey says, everyone seems to agree that generative AI is having a big impact on education,

1:00:11at least on the way students can and should be assessed, possibly how they learn. As someone who teaches university classes, is this something you notice yourself? If so, have you changed your teaching in any way? Well, I've 100% changed my evaluating. My teaching has changed in no way whatsoever. I don't know what the impact is on learning of AI. And so, in other words, it could be good or it could be bad. It's absolutely possible to take the work of struggling with

1:00:42difficult ideas and kind of farming that out to the AI to struggle with the difficult ideas for you rather than doing the thinking yourself. And I would absolutely expect that kind of thing to have a harmful impact on people's ability to learn. It's also absolutely possible that a good student could, in all good faith, just be struggling with some ideas, use an AI to help them understand the difficult ideas in a better way. And that helps them learn things. I'm 100% on board with

1:01:18that also. And I, as the teacher, as the professor, I don't know which it is that they're doing, right? And I sort of can't, it's up to them. I'm very much of the opinion that once you're in a university or a college, the student is mostly responsible for how they choose to approach the experience of being in college. They're responsible adults by that point. I think that the job of the professors is to give them all the advice and all the opportunities and all the insight and facts

1:01:53and knowledge that they can. But at the end of the day, it's only going to be as good as the student wanting to learn things, right? So anyway, I can't help it if the students want to farm out their learning to AI. I haven't noticed it that they do. I'm just saying that I don't really keep track of that. But it's very different when it comes to grading because, you know, many college students care very deeply about grades. You might have noticed, I don't know. As a professor, that always

1:02:23breaks your heart. You're like, please care about learning, not about grades. But they're not very sympathetic to that point of view. And so I've switched from mostly take-home assessments to mostly in-class assessments. You know, we do our exams in quantum mechanics in class now, whereas earlier they would have been take-home assignments. In the philosophy classes, you still have to write papers. In the seminar, it's mostly the paper that's going to give you your grade. But in a small seminar, I'm talking with the student and I know what they're doing. And there's no possible way

1:02:57they can be handing over to AI most of the work to write the paper. And I've seen zero evidence that any of them try to do that. In a large lecture class, then I'm also going to give in-class exams, short answers, where they talk about the concepts. And that's going to play a big role in addition to the paper. So that's all new. That's, you know, I've never given in-class exams before I came to Johns Hopkins. Not because Hopkins, but because of AI, precisely because of that. And, you know, it's not the biggest deal in the world. It's slightly annoying. But that's the world in which

1:03:30we live. You have to adapt in different ways. Scott says, can the matter-antimatter asymmetry

Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry

1:03:36be explained by simply postulating that the initial conditions of the universe were such that matter was dominant? Why assume a symmetric initial condition and work so hard to find a dynamical mechanism? Well, in a sense, yes, you can assume that there absolutely will be an initial condition that gives rise to our current condition without any shenanigans in between. You know that's true because you can just start with our current condition, use the laws of physics, and wind it backwards, right, to something. It's going to start somewhere. Now, there's a couple

1:04:10reasons why that's a little bit less popular than you might think. One is that in the standard model of particle physics—so forget about weird things having to do with, I don't know, grand unification or leptogenesis, which is a thing that can happen because neutrons, heavy neutrons, not the ones we know, but heavy neutrons can decay in ways that violate baryon and lepton number. There's different schemes that could cause a baryon asymmetry, and the question is, is that more work than just positing

1:04:46it? So the two things—number one, even in the standard model, so we have two things—baryon number, which is the number of baryons. Baryons are protons, neutrons, things like that. And then we have lepton number, so neutrinos and electrons and things like that, okay? They're both separately conserved, both baryon number and lepton number, at low energies, zero temperature in the standard model. But we've known since the 70s that at high temperatures there's an increasing probability for

1:05:22b plus l to be violated. That is to say, baryon number plus lepton number is violated, although b minus l is conserved. So the difference between the baryon and lepton number of the universe stays the same in the standard model, even at high temperatures. But the total number of both baryons and leptons can change. So there are processes that make you one new baryon and also one new lepton on average, okay? So if you started with an excess that was equal in both

1:05:55baryons and leptons, the standard model would get rid of that excess, and therefore you would not be left with an asymmetry today. It's easy enough to say, well, okay, I just want to start with an asymmetry in baryon number, not in lepton number, and then that would preserve some asymmetry at the end of the day. But the real reason this isn't popular is because it doesn't help you. Like for a lot of these puzzles, like the cosmological constant problem or the horizon problem of inflationary cosmology or whatever, you're totally allowed to just say, well, it just

1:06:31was like that. There's no explanation at all. I'm just going to say it's like that, okay? The hierarchy problem. It just is. And you might be right. I can't promise you that you're not right. The reason why we spend time thinking about mechanisms is that you might be wrong. And we know that we're not done when it comes to understanding the laws of physics or the origin of the universe. We know that we need to go beyond where we are now. And maybe these features, like the matter-antimatter asymmetry, are clues to how to go beyond what we know now. If you found a

1:07:05theory of grand unification that helped inflation happen and helped explain the baryon asymmetry and all those good things, that might be evidence that that theory is correct. You know, you can't still need to go check it because you can't just explain things we already know to be true. You have to explain some new things as well. But that's the kind of guidepost that we use when developing better theories. You never know for sure whether that guidepost will be useful, but we have to take what we can get. We shop for everything at home now. Why can't we shop for blinds at home too? That's why

1:07:39I love 3-Day Blinds. Instead of wandering around a store, 3-Day Blinds sends a professional design consultant straight to you. They bring all the samples, help you see what actually works in your space, take expert measurements, and even handle the installation. We've all bought something that looked great in a store and looked terrible once we got home. With 3-Day Blinds, you see everything in your actual light with your actual furniture before you commit. Plus, whether you're home or away, you

1:08:10can control your window treatments with the 3-Day Blinds app. So for a free, no-charge, no-obligation consultation, head to 3dayblinds.com slash pod50 for our buy one, get one 50% off deal. That's the number 3-Day Blinds.com slash pod50. I'm Jake Stauk, co-founder and CEO of Serval. We built Serval to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding, password resets, access to applications,

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Utilitarianism Discussion

1:09:30Mikkel Benidson says, thank you for the interesting discussion with Peter Singer. I learned a lot from your exchange, especially the parts on the foundations of utilitarianism. For example, the idea that utilitarianism does not seem to require an ontological commitment to something called utility, and Singer's meta-ethical distinction between moral realism and moral objectivism. Okay, I'm going to group a couple questions together. They have to do with the interview I did with Peter Singer recently. Mikkel Benidson says, thank you for the interesting

1:10:02discussion with Peter Singer. I learned a lot from your exchange, especially the parts on the foundations of utilitarianism. For example, the idea that utilitarianism does not seem to require an ontological commitment to something called utility, and Peter Singer's meta-ethical distinction between moral realism and moral objectivism. You've often been critical of utilitarianism. Did your conversation with Singer change your mind on any aspect of it? And then Terence says, regarding the most recent episode with Peter Singer, whenever utilitarian comes up, you raise the rebuttal, if I can paraphrase it, as doesn't utilitarianism apply we should sacrifice

1:10:35the happiness of one person if we can increase the happiness of five other people to a greater degree. In episode 207, Will McCaskill gave what I thought was a pretty convincing rebuttal to this, which I'm again paraphrasing as, society at large or net utility would be worse off if we lived in a world where we could make those kinds of sacrifices. I recall from that episode that you sounded pretty swayed by Will's argument too. Have you since changed your mind about it, or what did you think of Will's argument now in light of intervening discussions of utilitarianism? So let me give you the overall answer to both questions at once, which is basically like, why haven't you become convinced

1:11:07by utilitarianism? The conversations with McCaskill and Singer, I thought were both very useful and interesting and informative. And there were parts that did impress me in one way or another, but they did not impress me in the sense of moving me closer to utilitarianism. They impressed me in the sense of realizing that utilitarians are pretty willing to give up on some of the obvious conclusions of utilitarianism. I think that both Singer and McCaskill, you know, look, if utilitarianism means

1:11:41anything, it means that if you have a choice between two options, and one raises utility of the world and the other one raises it by less, you do the one that raises utility more, right? I think that's what utilitarianism needs to mean. You have different notions of utility, for sure, and you have different notions of how to measure it and how to add it together. That's where all the interesting philosophical discussion comes from. But the whole point of utilitarianism is that we need to be able to

1:12:17sacrifice some bad things in order for even better good things to happen. If you don't buy some version of that, then you're not really a utilitarian. And both McCaskill and Singer, I thought, were actually more reasonable as real human beings than they would be if they were honest utilitarians. That's what I was impressed by. You know, they both seemed – I'm trying to be fair. I think this is a positive feature of them as people, although not necessarily of utilitarianism, as a philosophy.

1:12:54I think that they were both very realistic about, you know, how real people wouldn't be able to do this, you know, and wouldn't be able to act like good utilitarians, and how society shouldn't necessarily do the thing that utilitarianism might predict that it would do because it would actually secretly make things worse. And what you end up in either version of that is with a stance that isn't all that utilitarian to me. It's closer to like, you know, there are things we just shouldn't do,

1:13:26right? And when you say there are things we just shouldn't do, that's not utilitarianism anymore. That's something closer to deontology or something. So I think that, you know, it's not that any of this made me think, oh, there is a number out there called utility that I can just add up. That's my objection, right? And if McCaskill says, you know, society at large, net utility would be worse off if we lived in a world where we could make those kinds of sacrifices, then he's just saying that utilitarianism doesn't work. I think that's what it means to me that there

1:14:02is not a number that we can just add up and then try to maximize that number that we have to take into account all sorts of things that are not necessarily quantifiable and trying to actually nudge people towards doing better things. I mean, maybe utilitarianism is a good kind of model to have in mind when we're individually wondering how to be good people, because, you know, it's nice to be honest about whether or not a certain action would actually make the world better off in some

1:14:34version of that quantification, but not think that that's an absolute moral commitment and to be more nuanced and rich in the ways that we set down the guidelines for good actions and bad actions. Again, I do try to emphasize I don't have a fully fleshed out defensible moral theory. You know, I think in certain cases, I know what it means to be doing good things and bad things by my own lights, but I'm not done. I'm not finished. I don't have an alternative to offer that I could 100%

1:15:09stand by. So I'm just sniping from the sidelines, which is easy for me to do. The hard work of moral philosophy is being left to others here. Nikola Ivanov says, in your discussion with Daniel Harlow, the one dimensional Hilbert space seems to come from treating the universe as a truly closed gravitational system. If that assumption is right, would your own view that reality is fundamentally a quantum state in Hilbert space have to be revised too? Or do you think your framework can still survive in a closed universe? So, you know, I think I said it in the interview. I'm not sure if

1:15:44it came through completely. I don't believe Daniel's argument. It's not that I think I can find a flaw in the argument. So for those of you who didn't listen to the episode, quantum mechanics tells a story about states of quantum systems being vectors in this space called Hilbert space. Usually I say this really big space called Hilbert space. But the whole point of what Daniel and others are saying is that there's certain reasonable calculations in quantum gravity that lead us to the conclusion that in a closed universe, the effective Hilbert space or the fundamental Hilbert space is one dimensional. There's really

1:16:20nothing that goes on. A one dimensional vector space doesn't have anything happening at all. And so what Daniel wants to do is take that seriously. He believes the arguments that gets him there. And he wants to say, okay, how can we live with that? And he has to invent an effective Hilbert space that is not the fundamental one and then talk about the relationship between them and a whole bunch of other things. And then, you know, so good for him for this is what you're supposed to try to do. You're supposed to try to take your ideas seriously. Sometimes they will lead you to good places that you just declare

1:16:51victory. Other times they lead you to apparent puzzles and you see whether or not you can deal with them and he's trying to deal with it. For me, I think if I came to the conclusion that I had some arguments that led to a one dimensional Hilbert space, I would just say, well, those arguments must be wrong. We don't live in a one dimensional Hilbert space. That's not good enough for the way that I think quantum mechanics works. So I'm going to try to find a flaw in the argument, not try to build extra structure on top of that one dimensional Hilbert space. So no, I don't think that my

1:17:25framework can survive in a one dimensional Hilbert space. But my way of reconciling that is to say, I suspect there's a mistake in the argument that says that quantum gravity in a closed universe is in a one dimensional Hilbert space. Murray Cantor says, I believe I heard you mention Wojciech-Zurek's proposed solution to the measurement problem. What is your opinion of the approach? So I'm not sure that I would put it in those words. I mean, Zurek has done, he's a wonderful physicist who has been an absolute leader in understanding decoherence and the emergence of

1:17:58classicality from quantum mechanics. And his work there is absolutely central. I think he deserves the Nobel Prize. It's something that I cite and use all the time. Now, I don't think it's a quote unquote solution to the measurement problem. After all, what would count as a solution to the measurement problem? I think that there's two things that you need to solve the measurement problem. The measurement problem in quantum mechanics is this slightly vaguely defined thing, but it's basically in the textbook version of quantum mechanics, there appears the word measurement or observation or

1:18:29something like that. You hear things like when you perform a measurement, the wave function collapses and the probability is given by the Born rule and things like that. So the measurement problem is just, what do you mean by all that? And how does it happen? And the two things you need to solve the measurement problem are first, you need a theory. That is to say, you need a well-defined physical theory of what is happening in quantum mechanics when a measurement occurs. This is exactly what the Copenhagen interpretation doesn't give you. And therefore, Copenhagen is not a theory that

1:19:02should be judged against other theories. It's a half theory that should be improved to a real theory. But once you have that theory, like many worlds, but also like pilot wave theories, objective collapse models, whatever, then you need to say, okay, in this theory, this is what happens when you and I think something like a quantum measurement is occurring. This is what that means in the context of that theory, okay? So Zurek isn't proposing a theory. He's just working in conventional quantum mechanics. And I think this is one of the places where the, and I don't mean this about Zurek himself,

1:19:37because he's thought more deeply about quantum mechanics than most people around. But there's a lot of physicists who just don't take seriously thinking about the foundations of quantum mechanics or even thinking about thinking carefully and rigorously and philosophically carefully about what happens in quantum mechanics. So there is a thing that you will hear, which is absolutely wrong. Let me tell you what it is. It's the claim that decoherence solves the measurement problem. So I don't think that Zurek has ever quite said that. Maybe he says it somewhere. Maybe he believes

1:20:11it. I know that he's not really a many worlds person, but I think that he's like a many worlds person in disguise, to be perfectly honest. He doesn't want to talk about many worlds or things like that, but his stuff is completely compatible with many worlds. So the point is that if I have something like Schrodinger's cat, so I have a quantum system that is in a superposition, the cat is awake in part of the wave function, the cat is asleep in the other part. And then decoherence happens. And this is what Zurek describes very, very carefully and rigorously. There is an environment, so there's a whole bunch of photons and so forth. They interact with the cat,

1:20:47and they interact with the cat differently, depending on whether the cat is awake or asleep. And this branches the wave function of the universe because you get the cat is entangled differently with the photons in the environment, depending on whether it's awake or asleep. And so the environment part of the wave function becomes perpendicular, orthogonal in the branch of the wave function where the cat's awake and the branch of the wave function where the cat's asleep. So they become non-interacting, those two parts. For those of you who know little quantum mechanics,

1:21:19this is a fancy way of saying there are pointer states. Cat being awake is a pointer state. Cat being asleep is a pointer state. And the density matrix of the cat subsystem diagonalizes in the pointer basis. And so when I say the jargon words, density matrix of the cat subsystem, what I mean is there are ways to talk about the state of the cat, even admitting that we're not keeping track of the state of the environment, even though they are entangled. So the full state of the universe needs

1:21:52complete information about both the cat and the environment. But maybe you don't have that. Maybe you don't have all the photons and all their states. So you say, what can I say just about the cat? And this idea of a density matrix is what you can say just about the cat. And what happens in decoherence, and this is brilliant and important and suggestive, is that the density matrix, which is a little matrix, when I say little, for the cat thought experiment, it's a two by two matrix, right?

1:22:23And the two, the rows and the columns represent cat being awake or cat being asleep. So that density matrix becomes diagonal. So there's only two entries. There's the awake, awake entry and the asleep, sleep entry. And it's a feature of density matrices that the diagonal elements are non-negative numbers that add up to one, non-negative real numbers that add up to one, okay? So that should be, that should set off bells in your head, because when you hear the phrase, a set of non-negative

1:22:56real numbers that add up to one, you should think probability. That is a probability distribution, right? It adds up to one, because something happens. They are non-negative, because the probability of anything happening is not a negative number. And if it's exclusive, so everything that possibly can happen is included in your set, then you're going to add up to one, because the probability of something happening is one. So therefore, so the unimpeachably true statement is the dynamics of quantum mechanics and decoherence make it the case that the diagonal elements of the

1:23:29density matrix act like a probability distribution. They have the mathematical properties of a probability distribution. All that's true. Now, the crazy false thing comes when people then say, that solves the measurement problem. You're done. These numbers in the density matrix are just the probabilities of the cat being awake or the cat being asleep. That's just the fact. Where did that come from? Just because these numbers have the mathematical properties of a probability doesn't

1:24:00mean that you can sort of magically say, therefore, one of them happens and the other one doesn't. You could say that as an extra assumption. You could put that in. You could invent a new theory that says that that's true. But that theory isn't just ordinary unitary quantum mechanics. You're doing something different to it. And if you tried to invent such a theory, when the density matrix diagonalizes the rest of the, of the, one of those probabilities becomes real and the other one

1:24:32doesn't, what happened to the other one? When did it disappear? How diagonal does it have to be? It's never exactly diagonal. It's only really, really, really close, right? You haven't solved the measurement problem at all because you don't have a theory. You've just made it clear why in a theory like, say, the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, it is okay to interpret those numbers as probabilities. Once you have a theory, you can do that. If you don't have a theory, you can't do that. Russell Wolfe says, recently you liked a post I made on Blue Sky. It was a cross between

1:25:08Mary had a little lamb and the monochrome Mary thought experiment, which had been reposted by Zach Wienersmith, former Mindscape guest. This got me wondering a bit about your experience on social media as a public figure. Do you notice when a post you come across online is from someone who follows you? Does that impact how you interact with it? So on the one hand, I'm not like a super public figure, right? Like I don't need to worry about things that people sometimes worry about, you know, about their privacy being violated or whatever, just because I'm online. You know,

1:25:42I don't have any stalkers that I know of. I have people who email me all the time who are slightly crackpotty, but I just delete those. It's not a social media problem, right? So I don't, I don't need to worry about those issues that much. I'm not going to be doxxed or whatever, or someone appearing at my front door. Do I notice when a post I come across online is from someone who follows me? Not really. Look, I'll be honest, my social media strategy is not very well thought out.

1:26:14It's, you know, I don't, I don't put a lot of effort into being on social media these days. You know, there was a time when I was blogging every day that I put a lot of effort into that. But since I started doing the podcast and, you know, some combination of social, of, of Twitter or blue sky and the podcast constitutes my entire social media strategy, the podcast I'm very thoughtful about, but the Twitter or blue sky stuff, I just am not. I'm just doing what I want. I'm just having

1:26:44fun. Okay. So I'm glad that I liked your post, but I'm, I'm sure I didn't notice that you were a follower. I'm pretty sure I didn't know. I forget what blue sky tells you about those things. I'm just not very cognizant or, or trying too hard about social media strategy. Um, I will say that, um, like occasionally I just said that I'm not a public figure, which is true, but like rarely, but it does sometimes happen when usually when I comment on a Philadelphia 76ers social media post

1:27:17on blue sky. So, you know, I follow, actually I don't follow. I have a, uh, a list on blue sky of accounts that are devoted to talking about the Sixers and I can sort of check in on the list if I want to see what's going on in the Sixers. And sometimes I will leave a comment or like something or whatever. And very, very occasionally someone will say, wait, are you that Sean Carroll talking about the Sixers here? And so that is the closest I come to being recognized, uh, out of context on social media. And that's fine. It's fun. And I say, yes, I'm that Sean Carroll. We, uh, we,

1:27:52we all care. There's many of us and we all care about things other than what it is we do for a day job. Edward Crump asks a priority question. Alex Vilenkin uses a universe from nothing analogy with a Coke machine where the can spontaneously appears outside bypassing the vendor shoot. It would seem that while the possibility of the event is non-zero, it is still very unlikely. I'm asking you to tunnel a number into existence. What is an order of magnitude number of likelihood when

1:28:24comparing both events? And yes, please describe the numerator and denominator. So I'm going to do something here that I don't think I've ever done before with a priority question. I'm going to give you back your priority question opportunity, uh, to Edward. You can ask another priority question, not because this is not a good one, because I don't understand what you're asking. You say, what is an order of magnitude number of likelihood when comparing both events? But I don't know what the two events are. You, you described one event when a Coke can, um, appears outside, uh, uh, a vending

1:28:56machine. What am I supposed to compare that to? What's the other event? Is, is, is it the universe from nothing? Um, I, I don't know. So the universe from nothing is just never, that's a phrase I never used. I don't think it makes sense. Um, maybe what you are referring to is baby universe creation from a preexisting universe, which is not from nothing. It's from a preexisting universe. Um, and I, I, I can't give you the numbers in either case there. Um, that would be a calculation that I

1:29:26would have to do. Um, and it wouldn't be very, very enlightening. I think that the answer would be that making a universe is much more likely than making a Coke can, uh, simply because the wonder of inflation is that I can make a very, very, very tiny universe to start and it can expand, uh,