Per Sean Carroll, the future is as solidly fixed as the past, so it may be pointless to urge everyone to read his book. But apparently that’s predetermined, too.
It’s impressive work, far more ambitious and thoughtful than other physics “popularizers.” People who know and love Carroll from his captivating cosmology and entropy lectures will be surprised that in “The Big Picture,” he feels free to jump from black holes to philosophy by way of innumerable intervening mysteries of science. It could easily have been silly stuff, or pure speculation, but it isn’t, although his rigor definitely slips towards the end.
The book has stirred up the usual backscatter of Jesus-wept reviews, but the fact that SC’s points are wide open to alert criticism, as well as not always persuasive, is no reason to one-star him, quite the opposite. Scientists who cultivate a popular following inevitably attract the snipers.
SC calls his philosophy “poetic naturalism.” That raises a tiny flag: “poetic” is a squishy term not much favored in science. He means, though, that the same unyielding reality can be explained in many different ways depending on perspective. Time and Space may be emergent qualities beyond the quantum level, consciousness on the human level – and who knows what on the cosmic scale? But it’s all realism. Perhaps naturalism needs no qualifier. (Want poetry? Read Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons, and in a couple hours you’ll be no smarter.)
Carroll says: Stick to Reality. It doesn’t have to be an election year for us to see that humans instinctively reject reality and prefer to stay safely within echo-filled parallel universes. But this is how, in a physics book, no less, we find a chapter on gender identity (“Who am I”). His point is, while facts are facts, A=A, how we relate to them is a matter of choice – a choice depending on usefulness. A man who thinks he is a woman can perhaps be accommodated; a man who thinks he is a unicorn, not so easily (unicorns don’t use bathrooms at all). As he says, the distinction between facts and human convention is crucial, though flagrantly violated in public discourse.
What is reality, though? SC diligently reminds us that there is no “truth” in science (although there is in logic) – yet you can’t just make stuff up. We try to get the prediction to match the data as closely as we can, and then we call it “reality.” (SC slips into the vernacular from time to time, as do we all: “The purpose of science is to find the truth.” But, say, Darwin is no more “the truth” than Genesis is – just more useful. Try faith-based dog breeding.) There’s a whole prejudicial vocabulary we ought to eschew.
So it’s odd that SC spends so much time arguing against the gods. His ending remarks cast some light on his own personal journey, but, really, we don’t expect a dentistry textbook to have a chapter repudiating the Tooth Fairy. All he needs to say is, “If your best answer to these fundamental physics problems is, “A god did it!” then you don’t belong in my class. Here we’re trying to do better.”
(That said, much of modern cosmological speculation veers towards the untestable and unmeasurable: all possible universes may exist; undetectable universes pop up and back out; pretty soon you’re back to “Hey, a god did it.”)
Surely the hardest point to grasp is the “Many-Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. SC is a confirmed Everettian and says you’d better go where the math (summed wave function) takes you. The universe doesn’t care if you like it or not, and admittedly MW is no weirder than much else. But the implications are unfathomable.
SC brilliantly discusses the origin and rise of life within the context of the 2nd Law/TD. “The purpose of life is to hydrogenate CO2.” Or more “poetically,” to turn sunlight into turds in the pursuit of entropy. Yet it’s still hard to explain how replicating DNA began, and why it gained such unexpected complexity. Is there not some extropian principle at work? SC has to work pretty hard to convince himself that there isn’t. (And why does it seem to have happened just once? Why just DNA-based? SC favors hydrothermal vents and never mentions space origins.)
Same with consciousness. SC dismisses the popular quantum consciousness theories, even Penrose’s, and he thinks panpsychia is silly (where’s the evidence?). Consciousness is just a phase transition that occurs when suitably complex machines get to ruminate on the past to estimate the future. But, since it is but crude “biologism” to reserve consciousness for DNA-based units, then we are now undergoing another phase shift into a global technosphere (nöosphere if you will), which, presumably, will soon decide that humans are more trouble than they are worth, and begin treating them like we treat bacteria. And then it will proceed on course to convert all matter into information processing, and then we are right back in panpsychia and the notion of the universe as a giant thinking machine.
The philosophers love their thought experiments, but how they crash and burn when they hit reality! In Ethics, SC begins with the “terrible” dilemma of Abraham and Isaac. Well, if Isaac calls 911 and says his Dad is about to “sacrifice” him, we all know exactly what to do with that old nut Abe. Nothing to agonize over here. As for the trolley problem, the dilemma du jour, military targeteers work it 24/7. You decide who needs killed, and who needs spared, in order to maximize the utility function for your tribal coalition. There are a lot of unknown variables, and you can be wrong. The Law of all DNA is plain: survive and reproduce. Alone or joint is a tactical decision. “Ethics” is just calculation of each organism’s utility function.
SC recognizes that interests may conflict, or may align, so there is never one “right” answer. Yet in human-speak, it’s “good” if it serves our purposes, “evil” if not. This is not the maligned “relative ethics,” but true relativistic ethics: the “right choice” is the one with the highest probability of serving a unit’s interests at a specified point and time. It will look different from different coordinates.
Also, every event was baked into the universe from the beginning, so there’s no point complaining. In Darwinian terms, losers whine about the past; winners take precautions for the future. Unless whining works! (But why worry, Sean, if it’s all fixed…)
Here’s where the flag goes up again, and one wonders if SC should have examined his point. Sure, all the cultural affectations and conventions (religion always being the easy pinata) are groan-worthy. But, they are as “real” as quarks and stars – they exist for a reason. So the smart DNA (Dawkins) rails against them; the smarter DNA (F de Waal) tries to explain them; and the truly clever DNA (preachers, politicians…) figures out how to package and sell them. Such collective memes serve someone’s interests, though not necessarily yours; they are natural attempts to gain leverage from the differential in human cognitive abilities. This differential ordering seems inevitable, since the emerging collective consciousness (global brain?) parallels the evolution of multicellular organisms. (But won’t such a global superorganism require great armies of subhuman drudges who do as they’re told in return for a diet of drivel? Just asking…)
And that’s how we get to Moses, one of the first to codify the collective’s subjugation of the individual.
Again, the warning flag: Perhaps reflecting some inner struggle, Carroll’s subtle goal seems to be to reconcile traditional, homespun worldviews with the stark, unyielding, largely incomprehensible universe science reveals. He might have been better off trash-canning everything pre-1905, and “sticking to reality.” SC is a superb explainer, especially of the inexplicable, but in the last section, his signal-to-noise ratio deteriorates markedly.
Happily Carroll has a good sense of humor – otherwise his Moses-emulation might have fallen flat. The “Ten Considerations,” the Carolian Decalogue, aren’t controversial to reasonable people; they border on platitudes. (A bad one slipped through: “What matters is what matters to humans.” He’s lucky other species don’t read.) He really only needs the last one, “Reality Guides Us!” That can be shortened to “Think!” – but that’s what commandments are designed to prevent.
The book ends with a dumb existentialist cliché, Camus’s “happy Sisyphus.” Carroll says, cheer up and roll that stone. But to complete his own thought-provoking discussion of zombies vs. consciousness: When Sisyphus makes that phase transition and figures out what’s going on, he ain’t happy no mo’…
This book’s a feast: something to argue over on every page.
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Explained in layman terms well written book
Shivani Kothari
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An Excellent Primer to Naturalism
Just finished Sean Carroll's book "The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself". The book describes what Sean Carroll call "Poetic Naturalism" which is his version of philosophical Naturalism. Naturalism as the author describes it is a worldview where "there is only one world, the natural world...there is no separate realm of the supernatural". The book then goes on to justify this position and attempts to explain the universe's origin, morality and meaning.This book essentially explains my worldview so I was very excited to read it. I've read one other excellent book on Naturalism by Richard Carrier so that is what I will compare it to. I will honestly say this book is incredibly digestible for a subject that delves into science and philosophy and THIS would be the book I would recommend to a beginner on the subject. Secondly this is a book I could give to a theist without any fear of them feeling insulted (compared to a book like "the God Delusion"). I would say Carrier's book "Sense and Goodness without God" is slightly more technical and more difficult to read.Two negatives on Sean's book is that I feel his chapters on the universe's origin left me wanting more. Chapter 25 Why Does the Universe Exist? is only 10 pgs. Chapter 36 jumps back into the subject when discussing fine tuning arguments but this is only 12 pgs. I'm used to reading entire books on the subject but luckily there is a nice recommendation for further reading in the back of the book. I also disagreed with Carroll on the Morality chapter in regards to objective morality but I'm biased by my early readings from Carrier.Overall this book is a gem that I will re-read and reference going forward and will recommend as a primer for anyone interested in Naturalism.
