Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

David Deutsch is one of the most creative scientific thinkers working today, who has as a goal to understand and explain the natural world as best we can. He was a pioneer in quantum computing, and has long been an advocate of the Everett interpretation of quantum theory. He is also the inventor of constructor theory, a new way of conceptualizing physics and science more broadly. But he also has a strong interest in philosophy and epistemology, championing a Popperian explanation-based approach over a rival Bayesian epistemology. We talk about all of these things and more, including his recent work on the Popper-Miller theorem, which specifies limitations on inductive approaches to knowledge and probability.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/10/16/253-david-deutsch-on-science-complexity-and-explanation/

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David Deutsch received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Oxford. He is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at Oxford. He is a pioneer in quantum computation as well as initiating constructor theory. His books include The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. Among his awards including the Dirac Prize, the Dirac Medal, the Edge of Computation Science Prize, the Isaac Newton Medal, the Breakthrough Physics Prize, and a Royal Society Fellowship.

• Web site
• Oxford web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Amazon author page
• Wikipedia
• TED talk: After Billions of Years of Monotony, the Universe is Waking Up

Welcome to the October 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

Blog post with questions and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/10/09/ama-october-2023/

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Our planet and its environment are in bad shape, in all sorts of ways. Those of us who want to improve the situation face a dilemma. On the one hand, we have to be forceful and clear-headed about how the bad the situation actually is. On the other, we don't want to give the impression that things are so bad that it's hopeless. That could -- and, empirically, does -- give people the impression that there's no point in working to make things better. Hannah Ritchie is an environmental researcher at Our World in Data who wants to thread this needle: things are bad, but there are ways we can work to make them better.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/10/02/252-hannah-ritchie-on-keeping-hope-for-the-planet-alive/

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Hannah Ritchie received her Ph.D. in geosciences from the University of Edinburgh. She is currently Senior Researcher and the Head of Research at Our World in Data, and a researcher at the Oxford Martin Programme in Global Development at the University of Oxford. Her upcoming book is Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet.

• Web site
• Oxford web page
• Google scholar publications
• Substack
• Wikipedia

Biological organisms are paradigmatic emergent systems. That atoms of which they are made mindlessly obey the local laws of physics; even cells and organs do their individual jobs without explicitly understanding the larger whole of which they are a part. And yet the system as a whole functions beautifully, with apparent purpose and function. How do the small parts come together to form the greater whole? I talk with biophysicist Rosemary Braun about what we're learning about collective behavior within organisms from the modern era of huge biological datasets, especially crucial aspects like timekeeping (with bonus implications for dealing with jet lag).

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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/09/25/251-rosemary-braun-on-uncovering-patterns-in-biological-complexity/

Rosemary Braun received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an M.P.H. in biostatistics from Johns Hopkins. She is currently an associate professor of molecular biosciences, applied math, and physics at Northwestern University and external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.

• Lab web page
• Northwestern faculty page
• Google Scholar publications

The modern world inundates us with both information and misinformation. What are the forces that conspire to make misinformation so prevalent? Can we combat the flow of misinformation, perhaps by legal restrictions? Would that even be a good idea? How can individuals help distinguish between true and false claims as they come in? What are the biases that we are all subject to? I talk to political scientist Brendan Nyhan about how information and misinformation spread, and what we can do as individuals and as a society to increase the amount of truth we all believe.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/09/18/250-brendan-nyhan-on-navigating-the-information-ecosystem/

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Brendan Nyhan received his Ph.D. in political science from Duke University. He is currently James O. Freedman professor of government at Dartmouth College. Among his awards are an Emerging Scholar award from the American Political Science Association, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• Web site
• Dartmouth web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Wikipedia

The study of cognition and sentience would be greatly abetted by the discovery of intelligent alien beings, who presumably developed independently of life here on Earth. But we do have more than one data point to consider: certain vertebrates (including humans) are quite intelligent, but so are certain cephalopods (including octopuses), even though the last common ancestor of the two groups was a simple organism hundreds of millions of years ago that didn't have much of a nervous system at all. Peter Godfrey-Smith has put a great amount of effort into trying to figure out what we can learn about the nature of thinking by studying how it is done in these animals with very different brains and nervous systems.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/09/11/249-peter-godfrey-smith-on-sentience-and-octopus-minds/

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Peter Godfrey-Smith received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego. He is currently professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. Among his books are Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness and Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind.

• Web site
• University of Sydney web page
• Google Scholar publications
• PhilPeople profile
• Wikipedia
• Amazon author page

Here are some of the papers mentioned in this episode:

• Crook (2021), Octopus pain
• Gibbons et al. (2022), Bee pain
• Gutnick et al. (2011), Octopus arm behavior

Welcome to the September 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

Blog post with questions and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/09/04/ama-september-2023/

And you can now pre-order The Biggest Ideas in the Universe Vol. 2: Quanta and Fields!

Over the last year, AI large-language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have demonstrated a remarkable ability to carry on human-like conversations in a variety of different concepts. But the way these LLMs "learn" is very different from how human beings learn, and the same can be said for how they "reason." It's reasonable to ask, do these AI programs really understand the world they are talking about? Do they possess a common-sense picture of reality, or can they just string together words in convincing ways without any underlying understanding? Computer scientist Yejin Choi is a leader in trying to understand the sense in which AIs are actually intelligent, and why in some ways they're still shockingly stupid.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/08/28/248-yejin-choi-on-ai-and-common-sense/

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Yejin Choi received a Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University. She is currently the Wissner-Slivka Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington and also a senior research director at AI2 overseeing the project Mosaic. Among her awards are a MacArthur fellowship and a fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

• University of Washington web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Wikipedia

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/08/21/247-samuel-bowles-on-economics-cooperation-and-inequality/

Economics, much like thermodynamics, is a story of collective behavior arising from the interactions of many individual constituents. The big difference is that in economics, the constituents are themselves complicated human beings with their own goals and limitations. We can still make progress by positing some simple but plausible axioms governing human behavior, and proving theorems about what those axioms imply, such as the famous supply-and-demand curves. The trick is picking the right axioms that actually do apply to any given situation. Samuel Bowles is a highly regarded economist who has helped understand the emergence of political hierarchy and economic inequality, often drawing on wide-ranging ideas from game theory and evolutionary biology. We talk about how people evolved to cooperate, and why nevertheless inequality seems to be ubiquitous.

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Samuel Bowles received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He has taught at Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the University of Siena, and he is currently Director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Leontief Prize, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is one of the developers of the CORE Econ project.

• Web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Wikipedia
• Amazon author page

You might remember the somewhat bizarre worries that swept through certain circles back in 2012, based on the end of the world being predicted by the Maya calendar. The world didn't end, which is unsurprising because the Maya hadn't predicted that, and for that matter they had no way of doing so. But there is very interesting archeology behind our understanding of how the Maya developed their calendar, as well as other aspects of their language and scientific understanding. Mayanist David Stuart takes us on a tour of what we know and what we're still discovering.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/08/14/246-david-stuart-on-time-and-science-in-maya-civilization/

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David Stuart received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Vanderbilt University. He is currently professor of Art History and Director of the Mesoamerica Center at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the youngest-ever recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. Among his books is The Order of Days: Unlocking the Secrets of the Ancient Maya.

• Web site
• University of Texas web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Wikipedia

Welcome to the August 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

Blog post with questions and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/08/07/ama-august-2023/

Physics is in crisis, what else is new? That's what we hear in certain corners, anyway, usually pointed at "fundamental" physics of particles and fields. (Condensed matter and biophysics etc. are just fine.) In this solo podcast I ruminate on the unusual situation fundamental physics finds itself in, where we have a theoretical understanding that fits almost all the data, but which nobody believes to be the final answer. I talk about how we got here, and argue that it's not really a "crisis" in any real sense. But there are ways I think the academic community could handle the problem better, especially by making more space for respectable but minority approaches to deep puzzles.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-solo-the-crisis-in-physics/

Support Mindscape on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll

Is metaphysics like physics, but cooler? Or is it a relic of an outdated, pre-empirical way of thinking about the world? Closer to the former than the latter. Rather than building specific quantitative theories about the world, metaphysics aims to get a handle on the basic logical structures that help us think about it. I talk with philosopher Katie Elliott on how metaphysics helps us think about questions like counterfactuals, possible worlds, time travel, mathematical equivalence, and whether everything happens for a reason.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/24/244-katie-elliott-on-metaphysics-chance-and-time/

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Katrina (Katie) Elliott received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. After being an assistant professor of philosophy at UCLA, she is now on the faculty at Brandeis. Her research covers topics in metaphysics and the philosophy of science, including explanation, chances, and the logic of time travel.

• Web page
• Brandeis web page
• PhilPeople profile

The Earth's atmosphere is good for some things, like providing something to breathe. But it does get in the way of astronomers, who have been successful at launching orbiting telescopes into space. But gravity and the ground are also useful for certain things, like walking around. The Moon, fortunately, provides gravity and a solid surface without any complications of a thick atmosphere -- perfect for astronomical instruments. Building telescopes and other kinds of scientific instruments on the Moon is an expensive and risky endeavor, but the time may have finally arrived. I talk with astrophysicist Joseph Silk about the case for doing astronomy from the Moon, and what special challenges and opportunities are involved.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/17/243-joseph-silk-on-science-on-the-moon/

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Joseph Silk received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard University. After serving on the faculty at UC Berkeley and Oxford, he is currently Professor of Physics at the Institut d'astrophysique de Paris, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, and Homewood Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Astronomical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his awards are the Balzan Prize, the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship, and the Gruber Prize in cosmology. His new book is Back to the Moon: The Next Giant Leap for Humankind.

• Johns Hopkins web page
• Google Scholar publications
• AIP Oral History interview
• Wikipedia

Complexity scientists have been able to make an impressive amount of progress despite the fact that there is not universal agreement about what "complexity" actually is. We know it when we see it, perhaps, but there are a number of aspects to the phenomenon, and different researchers will naturally focus on their favorites. Today's guest, David Krakauer, is president of the Santa Fe Institute and a longtime researcher in complexity. He points the finger at the concept of agency. A ball rolling down a hill just mindlessly obeys equations of motion, but a complex system gathers information and uses it to adapt. We talk about what that means and how to think about the current state of complexity science.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/10/242-david-krakauer-on-complexity-agency-and-information/

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David Krakauer received his D.Phil. in evolutionary biology from Oxford University. He is currently President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. Previously he was at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he was the founding director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and the Co-director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation. He was included in Wired magazine's list of "50 People Who Will Change the World."

• Web site
• Santa Fe Institute web page
• Wikipedia
• Google Scholar

Welcome to the July 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic.

We're experimenting with a new benefit for Patreon supporters: short video (or audio-only) reflections by me on the podcast that just happened. If you've been wondering whether to join up, this could be the time.

Blog post with questions and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/03/ama-july-2023/

Last year's Nobel Prize for experimental tests of Bell's Theorem was the first Nobel in the foundations of quantum mechanics since Max Born in 1954. Quantum foundations is enjoying a bit of a resurgence, inspired in part by improving quantum technology but also by a realization that understanding quantum mechanics might help with other problems in physics (and be important in its own right). Tim Maudlin is a leading philosopher of physics and also a skeptic of the Everett interpretation. We discuss the logic behind hidden-variable approaches such as Bohmian mechanics, and also the broader question of the importance of the foundations of physics.

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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/06/26/241-tim-maudlin-on-locality-hidden-variables-and-quantum-foundations/

Tim Maudlin received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently a professor of philosophy at New York University. He is a member of the Academie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences and the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi). He has been a Guggenheim Fellow. He is the founder and director of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics in Croatia.

• Web site
• NYU web page
• Google Scholar publications
• PhilPeople profile
• Amazon author page
• Wikipedia
• Contribute to the John Bell Institute!

It's somewhat amazing that cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole, can make any progress at all. But it has, especially so in recent decades. Partly that's because nature has been kind to us in some ways: the universe is quite a simple place on large scales and at early times. Another reason is a leap forward in the data we have collected, and in the growing use of a powerful tool: computer simulations. I talk with cosmologist Andrew Pontzen on what we know about the universe, and how simulations have helped us figure it out. We also touch on hot topics in cosmology (early galaxies discovered by JWST) as well as philosophical issues (are simulations data or theory?).

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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/06/19/240-andrew-pontz…and-the-universe/

Andrew Pontzen received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Cambridge. He is currently Professor of Cosmology at University College London. In addition to his research in cosmology, he frequently writes popular articles and appears in science documentaries. His new book is The Universe in a Box: Simulations and the Quest to Code the Cosmos.

• Web site
• UCL web page
• Publications at arxiv.org
• Twitter

There is an image, especially in Western cultures, of the rugged, authentic, self-made individual choosing how to navigate the intricacies of the social world. But there is no mystical soul within us, manifesting as the immutable essence of self. What we think of as our "self" is shaped by our environment and our genes, and most of all by our interactions with other people. Psychologist Brian Lowery argues for a strong version of this thesis, positing that our sense of self is largely a social construct. We talk about the implications of this idea, and what it means for shifting notions of personal identity.

Post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/06/12/239-brian-lowery-on-the-social-self/

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Brian Lowery received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California Los Angeles. He is currently Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. His new book is Selfless: The Social Creation of "You."

• Web page
• Wikipedia
• Amazon author page
• Twitter

Welcome to the June 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

Post with questions and full transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/06/05/ama-june-2023/

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Modern computers are somewhat more secure against being hacked - either by an inanimate virus or a human interloper - than they used to be. But as our lives are increasingly intertwined with computers, the dangers that hacking poses are enormously greater. Why don't we just build unhackable computers? Scott Shapiro, who is a law professor and philosopher, explains why that's essentially impossible. On a philosophical level, computers rely on an essential equivalence between "data" and "code," which is vulnerable to exploitation. And on a psychological level, human beings will always be the weakest link in the chain of security.

Web page with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/05/29/238-scott-shapiro-on-the-technology-and-philosophy-of-hacking/

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Scott Shapiro received a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia. He is currently the Charles F Southmayd Prof of Law and Philosophy at Yale University. He is the Director of the Yale Center for Law and Philosophy and also Director of the Yale Cybersecurity Lab. He is the Co-Editor of Legal Theory, and Co-Editor for philosophy of Law at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. His new book is Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks.

• Yale web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Wikipedia
• Twitter

The modern world is large and interconnected, and there are a lot of systems that might be important to how it functions but about which most people are barely aware. One of these is the offshore wealth management network, which wealthy individuals can use both legitimately (to invest and plan their money) and less legitimately (to avoid taxation or hide questionable practices generally). Brooke Harrington is a sociologist who has studied offshore wealth management, including by training to be one. In a recent paper, she and colleagues analyze networks of offshore wealth managers as a complex system, uncovering power-law behavior and interesting nation-dependent network structures.

Web site with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/05/22/237-brooke-harrington-on-offshore-wealth-as-a-complex-system/

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Brooke Harrington received her Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. She is currently a professor of sociology at Dartmouth College. Among her awards are the IPM Outstanding Book Award from the American Sociological Association. She is the author of Capital Without Borders: Wealth Management and the One Percent.

• Web site
• Dartmouth web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Amazon author page
• Wikipedia
• Twitter

Is there a multiverse, and if so, how should we think of ourselves within it? In many modern cosmological models, the universe includes more than one realm, with possibly different laws of physics, and these realms may or may not include intelligent observers. There is a longstanding puzzle about how, in such a scenario, we should calculate what we, as presumably intelligent observers ourselves, should expect to see. Today's guest, Thomas Hertog, is a physicist and longstanding collaborator of Stephen Hawking. They worked together (often with James Hartle) to address these questions, and the work is still ongoing.

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Thomas Hertog received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge. He is currently a professor of theoretical physics at KU Leuven. His new book is On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory.

• KU Leuven web page
• Wikipedia
• Google Scholar publications

Welcome to the May 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number — based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good — and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

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What is the mind, and what does it try to do? An overly simplified materialist view might be that the mind emerges from physical processes in the brain. But you can be a materialist and still recognize that there is more to the mind than just the brain: the rest of our bodies play a role, and arguably we should count physical artifacts that contribute to our memory and cognition as part of "the mind." Or so argues today's guest, philosopher/cognitive scientist Andy Clark. As to what the mind does, it tries to predict what happens next. This simple idea provides a powerful lens through which to interpret all the different things our minds do, including the idea that "perception is controlled hallucination."

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Andy Clark received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Sussex. He is currently Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at Sussex. He was Director of the Philosophy/Neuroscience/Psychology Program at Washington University in St Louis, and Director of the Cogntive Science Program at Indiana University. His new book is The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality.

• Sussex web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Wikipedia
• New Yorker profile

Eukaryotic cells manage to pull off a number of remarkable feats. One is packing quite a long DNA molecule, with potentially billions of base pairs, into a tiny central nucleus. A key role is played by histones, proteins that provide scaffolding for DNA to wrap around. Histones also appear in archaea (one of the other domains of life), but until recently there wasn't evidence for them in bacteria (the final of the three domains). Todays guest, Tobias Warnecke, is an author on a recent paper that claims to provide such evidence. We discuss this new result, as well as background questions of how cells evolved and what their current structure can teach us about their histories.

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Tobias Warnecke received his Ph.D. in biology from the University of Bath. He is currently a Programme Leader and MRC Investigator at the London Institute of Medical Sciences. He is a co-author on A. Hochner et al. (2023), "Histone-Organized Chromatin in Bacteria."

• Web page
• Lab web site
• Google Scholar publications
• Twitter

Here at the Mindscape Podcast, we are firmly pro-reason. But what does that mean, fundamentally and in practice? How did humanity come into the idea of not just doing things, but doing things for reasons? In this episode we talk with cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier about these issues. He is the co-author (with Dan Sperber) of The Enigma of Reason, about how the notion of reason came to be, and more recently author of Not Born Yesterday, about who we trust and what we believe. He argues that our main shortcoming is not being insufficiently skeptical of radical claims, but of being too skeptical of claims that don't fit our views.

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Hugo Mercier received a Ph.D. in cognitive sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is currently a Permanent CNRS Research Scientist at the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris. Among his awards are the Prime d'excellence from the CNRS.

• Web site
• Google Scholar publications
• Amazon author page
• Twitter

If you knew exactly when every person was going to die, or require medical care, you could make a killing buying and selling insurance. Nobody knows these things, of course -- the future is hard to predict -- but some people know something about the future that other people don't. This sets up adverse selection: the ability of one party to leverage information another party doesn't have, in order to gain an economic advantage. Economist Amy Finkelstein is an expert in this phenomenon, as well as the usefulness of empirical studies in economic research.

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Amy Finkelstein received her Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently John & Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics at MIT. She is the co-director and research associate of the Public Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the co-Scientific Director of J-PAL North America. Among her awards are a MacArthur Fellowship and the John Bates Clark Medal. Her recent book, with co-authors Liran Einav and Ray Fisman, is Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It.

• Web page
• Wikipedia
• Google Scholar publications

Welcome to the April 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number — based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good — and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

Human beings are small compared to the universe, but we're very important to ourselves. Humanism can be thought of as the idea that human beings are themselves the source of meaningfulness and mattering in our lives, rather than those being granted to us by some higher power. In today's episode, Sarah Bakewell discusses the origin and evolution of this dramatic idea. Humanism turns out to be a complex thing; there are religious humanists and atheistic anti-humanists. Her new book is Humanly Possible: 700 Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope.

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Sarah Bakewell did postgraduate work in philosophy and artificial intelligence before becoming a full-time author. Among her previous books are How to Live: a life of Montaigne, and At the Existentialist Cafe. She has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle award in biography, as well as the Windham-Campbell Prize in non-fiction.

• Web site
• Wikipedia
• Amazon author page
• Twitter

Welcome to another episode of Sean Carroll's Mindscape. Today, we're joined by Raphaël Millière, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Columbia University. We'll be exploring the fascinating topic of how artificial intelligence thinks and processes information. As AI becomes increasingly prevalent in our daily lives, it's important to understand the mechanisms behind its decision-making processes. What are the algorithms and models that underpin AI, and how do they differ from human thought processes? How do machines learn from data, and what are the limitations of this learning? These are just some of the questions we'll be exploring in this episode. Raphaël will be sharing insights from his work in cognitive science, and discussing the latest developments in this rapidly evolving field. So join us as we dive into the mind of artificial intelligence and explore how it thinks.

[The above introduction was artificially generated by ChatGPT.]

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Raphaël Millière received a DPhil in philosophy from the University of Oxford. He is currently a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at the Center for Science and Society, and a Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at Columbia University. He also writes and organizes events aimed at a broader audience, including a recent workshop on The Challenge of Compositionality for Artificial Intelligence.

• Web site
• Columbia web page
• PhilPeople profile
• Google Scholar publications
• Twitter

Every time our brain does some thinking, there are associated physical processes. In particular, electric currents and charged particles jump between neurons, creating associated electromagnetic fields. These fields can in principle be detected with proper technology, opening the possibility for reading your mind. That technology is currently primitive, but rapidly advancing, and it's not too early to start thinking about legal and ethical consequences when governments and corporations have access to your thoughts. Nita Farahany is a law professor and bioethicist who discusses these issues in her new book, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology.

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Nita Farahany received a J.D. and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Duke University. She is currently the Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law & Philosophy at Duke, as well as Founding Director of the Duke Initiative for Science & Society. She has served on a number of government commissions, including the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She is a Fellow of the American Law Institute and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was awarded the Duke Law School Distinguished Teaching Award.

• Web site
• Duke web page
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Welcome to the March 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number — based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good — and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

God is dead, as Nietzsche's madman memorably reminded us. So what are we going to do about it? If there is no powerful force out there to guide us and give meaning to our lives, how are we supposed to live? Do we have to come up with meaning and purpose ourselves? Apparently so, and how to pull it off was a major question addressed by the existentialist movement. Skye Cleary turns to Simone de Beauvoir, in particular, for thoughts on how to construct an authentic life. Her recent book is How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment.

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Skye Cleary received a Ph.D. and an MBA from Macquarie University. She is an author and philosopher and also teaches at Columbia University and the City College of New York. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Aeon, The Times Literary Supplement, TED-Ed, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other outlets. She won the 2017 New Philosopher Writers' Award and was a 2021 MacDowell Fellow.

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Most of us strive to be good, moral people. When we are doing that striving, what is happening in our brains? Some of our moral inclinations seem pretty automatic and subconscious. Other times we have to sit down and deploy our full cognitive faculties to reason through a tricky moral dilemma. I talk with psychologist Molly Crockett about where our moral intuitions come from, how they can sometimes serve as cover for bad behaviors, and how morality shapes our self-image.

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Molly J. Crockett received her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge. She is currently Associate Professor of Psychology and University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.

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Cities are incredibly important to modern life, and their importance is only growing. As Geoffrey West points out, the world is adding urban areas equivalent to the population of San Francisco once every four days. How those areas get designed and structured is a complicated interplay between top-down planning and the collective choices of millions of inhabitants. As the world is changing and urbanization increases, it will be crucial to imagine how cities might serve our needs even better. Johanna Hoffman is an urbanist who harnesses imagination to make cities more sustainable and equitable.

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Johanna Hoffman received an MLA in landscape architecture and environmental planning from UC Berkeley. She is the co-founder and Director of Planning at urban futures firm Design for Adaptation. She has won fellowships from the European Futures Observatory and the Berggruen Institute, and served as Artist in Residence at the Buckminster Fuller Institute. Her new book is Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Navigate Change, Foster Resilience, and Co-Create the Cities We Need.

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Welcome to the February 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number — based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good — and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

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The big news this month is the successful awarding of the first ever Mindscape Big Picture Scholarship. Congratulations to Lyat Melese and Rehman Hassan! We continue to collection donations for next year's scholarship contest.

Human beings have developed wondrous capacities to take in information about the world, mull it over, think about a suite of future implications, and decide on a course of action based on those deliberations. These abilities developed over evolutionary history for a variety of reasons and under a number of different pressures. But one crucially important aspect of their development is their social function. According to Michael Tomasello, we developed agency and cognition and even morality in order to better communicate and cooperate with our fellow humans.

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Michael Tomasello received a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Georgia. He is currently the James Bonk Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience and Director of the Developmental Psychology Program at Duke University. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his awards are the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, the Wiley Prize in Psychology, and the Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science. His newest book is The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans.

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So you have some information — how are you going to share it with and present it to the rest of the world? There has been a long history of organizing and displaying information without putting too much thought into it, but Edward Tufte has done an enormous amount to change that. Beginning with The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and continuing to his new book Seeing With Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth, Tufte's works have shaped how we think about charts, graphs, and other forms of presenting data. We talk about information, design, and how thinking about data reflects how we think about the world.

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Edward Tufte received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. He has been a professor of public affairs at Princeton and of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale, where he is currently emeritus professor. He is the founder and owner of Graphics Press, and his books have sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide. He is an active artist and sculptor, as well as a touring lecturer.

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There are few human impulses more primal than the desire for explanations. We have expectations concerning what happens, and when what we experience differs from those expectations, we want to know the reason why. There are obvious philosophy questions here: What is an explanation? Do explanations bottom out, or go forever? But there are also psychology questions: What precisely is it that we seek when we demand an explanation? What makes us satisfied with one? Tania Lombrozo is a psychologist who is also conversant with the philosophical side of things. She offers some pretty convincing explanations for why we value explanation so highly.

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Tania Lombrozo received her Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University. She is currently a professor of psychology at Princeton. Among her awards are the Gittier Award from the American Psychological Foundation, an Early Investigator Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Stanton Prize from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.

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Quantum gravity research is inspired by experiment — all of the experimental data that supports quantum mechanics, and supports general relativity — but it's only inspiration, not detailed guidance. So it's easy to "do research on quantum gravity" and get lost in a world of toy models and mathematical abstraction. Today's guest, Andrew Strominger, is a leading researcher in string theory and quantum gravity, and one who has always kept his eyes on the prize: connecting to the real world. We talk about the development of string theory, the puzzle of a positive cosmological constant, and how black holes and string theory can teach us about each other.

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Andrew Strominger received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently the Gwill E. York Professor of Physics at Harvard University. Among his awards are the Dirac Medal, the Klein Medal, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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One of the most powerful of all human capacities is the ability to imagine ourselves in hypothetical situations at different times. We can remember the past, but also conjure up possible futures that haven't yet happened. This simple ability underlies our capability to organize socially and make contracts with other people. Today's guest, psychologist Adam Bulley, argues that it's the primary feature that makes us recognizably human, as he argues in the new book The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight (with Thomas Suddendorf and Jonathan Redshaw).

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Adam Bulley received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Queensland. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Brain and Mind Centre and School of Psychology, The University of Sydney, and the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

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Welcome to that beloved Mindscape annual tradition, the Holiday Message. An opportunity for a quicker and less-well-thought-out solo episode to round off another year. Ironically, this year the theme is the importance of slowing down and thinking things out really well! Illustrated by two things that have been on my mind: a couple of internet/tech kerfuffles (Elon Musk buying Twitter, Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX), and the distinction between foundations of physics and "regular" physics. See if you can dimly perceive the thread that ties them together.

Life is rich with moments of uncertainty, where we're not exactly sure what's going to happen next. We often find ourselves in situations where we have to choose between different kinds of uncertainty; maybe one option is very likely to have a "pretty good" outcome, while another has some probability for "great" and some for "truly awful." In such circumstances, what's the rational way to choose? Is it rational to go to great lengths to avoid choices where the worst outcome is very bad? Lara Buchak argues that it is, thereby expanding and generalizing the usual rules of rational choice in conditions of risk.

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Lara Buchak received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University. She is currently a professor of philosophy at Princeton. Her research interests include decision theory, social choice theory, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. She was the inaugural winner of the Alvin Plantinga Prize of the American Philosophical Association. Her book Risk and Rationality proposes a new way of dealing with risk in rational-choice theory.

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Welcome to the December 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number — based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good — and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

Remember that I take a holiday break at the end of the year, so the next AMA will be at the beginning of February.

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It's easy enough to proclaim that we are curious creatures, but what does that really mean? What kinds of curiosity are there? And how does curiosity arise in our brains? Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett are a philosopher and neuroscientist, respectively (as well as twins), whose new book Curious Minds: The Power of Connection explores these questions through an interdisciplinary lens. We break down the different ways that curiosity can manifest — collecting and creating loose knowledge networks, digging deeply to create a tight knowledge network, and creatively leaping to make unexpected connections.

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Perry Zurn received a Ph.D. in philosophy from DePaul University. He is currently an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University. He is the co-founder of the Trans Philosophy Project and the associated Thinking Trans // Trans Thinking Conference. Among his previous works is Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry.

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Dani Bassett received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge. They are currently the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical & Systems Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry, as well as an external professor of the Santa Fe Institute. Among their awards are the Macarthur Fellowship, the Lagrange Prize in Complex Systems Science (2017), and the Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science.

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Stephen Hawking's discoveries of black hole radiation, entropy, and the information-loss problem have both taught us an enormous amount about the relationship between quantum mechanics and gravity, and also left us with some knotty puzzles. One major insight is the holographic principle: the information describing a black hole can be thought of as living on the event horizon (the two-dimensional boundary of the hole), rather than distributed throughout its volume, as normal physics would lead us to expect. Raphael Bousso has made important contributions to our understanding of holography and its implications. We talk about the modern point of view of how gravity relates to quantum mechanics.

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Raphael Bousso received his Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge University, where his advisor was Stephen Hawking. He is currently a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. He has made pioneering contributions to our understanding of black hole information, the holographic principle, the string theory landscape, and multiverse cosmology.

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Why do people voluntarily hand over authority to a government? Under what conditions should they do so? These questions are both timeless and extremely timely, as modern democratic governments struggle with stability and legitimacy. They also bring questions from moral and political philosophy into conversations with empirically-minded social science. Margaret Levi is a leading political scientist who has focused on political economy and the nature of trust in government and other institutions. We talk about what democracy means, its current state, and how we can make it better.

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Margaret Levi received her Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. She is currently Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. She is also co-director of the Stanford Ethics, Society and Technology Hub, and the Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies at the University of Washington. She is the winner of the 2019 Johan Skytte Prize and the 2020 Falling Walls Breakthrough. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Association of Political and Social Sciences. She served as president of the American Political Science Association from 2004 to 2005. In 2014 she received the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science, in 2017 gave the Elinor Ostrom Memorial Lecture, and in 2018 received an honorary doctorate from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

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Welcome to the November 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number — based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good — and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

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People have a complicated relationship to mathematics. We all use it in our everyday lives, from calculating a tip at a restaurant to estimating the probability of some future event. But many people find the subject intimidating, if not off-putting. John Allen Paulos has long been working to make mathematics more approachable and encourage people to become more numerate. We talk about how people think about math, what kinds of math they should know, and the role of stories and narrative to make math come alive.

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John Allen Paulos received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is currently a professor of mathematics at Temple University. He s a bestselling author, and frequent contributor to publications such as ABCNews.com, the Guardian, and Scientific American. Among his awards are the Science Communication award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Mathematics Communication Award from the Joint Policy Board of Mathematics. His new book is Who's Counting? Uniting Numbers and Narratives with Stories from Pop Culture, Puzzles, Politics, and More.

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