YouSaid · the spoken record

Sean Carroll

lines on the record: 200
first: 2024-04-22
most recent: 2024-04-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think that Nobel Prize has enormous problems. I think it's probably a net good for the world because it brings attention to good science. I think it's probably a net negative for science because it makes people want to win the Nobel Prize.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They deserve the Nobel Prize and general relativity clearly deserve the Nobel Prize. Not only were they brilliant, but they were experimentally verified. Like everything you want.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tragedy. He should have gotten maybe four Nobel Prizes, honestly. That certainly should have gotten. The photoelectric effect was 100% worth the Nobel Prize and people don't quite get this. Who cares about the photoelectric effect? That's like this very minor effect. The point is his explanation for the photoelectric effect invented something called the photon. That's what the Nobel Prize. Max Planck gets credit for this in 1900, explaining black body radiation by saying that when a little electron is jiggling in an object at some temperature gives off radiation in discrete chunks rather than continuously. He didn't quite say that's because radiation is discrete chunks, right? It's like having a coffee maker that makes one cup of coffee at a time. It doesn't mean that liquid comes in one cup quanta, right? Just that you are dispensing it like that. It was Einstein in 1905 who said light is quanta and that was a radical thing. So that clearly was not a mistake. But also special relativity clearly.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put it this way when I teach courses, there's no more satisfying subject to teach than general relativity. And the reason why is because it starts from very clear, precisely articulated assumptions, and it goes so far, right? And, you know, when I give my talk, you can find it online. I'm probably not going to give it again. The book, one of the biggest ideas talk, right, was building up from you don't know any mathrophysics. And hour later, you know Einstein's equation for general relativity. And the punchline is the equation is much smarter than Albert Einstein because Albert Einstein did not know about the Big Bang. He didn't know about gravitational waves. He didn't know about black holes, but his equation did. And that's, I mean, that's a miraculous aspect of science more generally.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being honest, right? Like trying to be honest about where people are, but if you actually want to move a conversation forward, forget about whether you like or don't like somebody, explain the disagreement, explain the agreement. But you're absolutely right. I completely agree. Like as a society, we are not very good at disagreeing. We instantly go to the insults.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will complicate the question even more because there's some people I don't respect or like and I once wrote a blog post. I think it was called The Grid of Disputation. And I had a two by two grid. And it's, are you someone I agree with or disagree with? Are you someone who I respect or don't, right? And all four quadrants are very populated. So what that means is there are people who I like and I disagree with and there are people who agree with me and I have no respect for it at all. The embarrassing allies quadrant, that was everyone's favorite.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's all they really mean, right? At a very basic level, people will accuse atheists of being arrogant. And I'm like, you think God exists and loves you? And you're telling me that I'm arrogant. I think that all of this is to say just advice. When you disagree with somebody, try to specify the substantive disagreement. Try not to psychologize them, right? You know, try to say, oh, you're saying this because of this. Maybe it's true. Maybe you're right. If you had an actual response to what they were saying, that would be much more interesting.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's interesting because when people. React against you by saying you are being arrogant about this. 99.999% of the time, all they mean is I disagree.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, very happy to talk about politics. You know, I try to be clear on, you know, what is professional expertise, what is just me babbling, what is my level of credence in different things, where you're allowed to disagree, whether if you disagree, you're just wrong. And people can disagree with that also. But I do think, you know, and I'm happy to go out on a limb a little bit. I'm happy to say, look, I don't know, but here's my guess, right? I just did a whole solo podcast, which was exactly that. And it's interesting, like, some people are like, oh, this was great. And there's a whole bunch of people like, why are you talking about this thing that you are not the world's expert in?”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the hard questions, I don't know, like, I don't actually answer personal questions very much. The most personal I will get are questions like, what do you think of Baltimore? That much I can talk about, or how are your cats doing? Happy talk about the cats in infinite detail. But, you know, very personal questions I don't get into.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rarely, but occasionally people will ask me a super insightful philosophy question in exactly that way. And I try to be, you know, I try to recognize that a lot of times it's the opposite where it's like, okay, you're clearly confused and I'm going to try to explain how the question you should have asked.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm willing to do it, but I'm a little reluctant because I don't actually like giving advice. But I'm happy to talk about those topics. I want to give several hours of talking and I want to try to say things that I haven't said before and keep it interesting. Keep it rolling. If you don't like this question, wait for the next one.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very clear attempts to ask an interesting question that honestly just I don't have an answer to. I read this science fiction novel, what do you think about it? I'm like, well, I haven't read it, so I can't help you there. What's your favorite color? You know, I can tell you what it is, but it's not that interesting. And so I try to make it a mix. I try to like, it's not all physics questions, not all philosophy questions. I will talk about food or movies or politics or religion if that's what people want to. I keep suggesting that people ask me for relationship advice, but they never do. Yeah, I don't think I've heard.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great one. Again, it's evolved over time. So the Ask Me Anything episodes were first, when I started doing them, they were only for Patreon subscribers to both listen to and to ask the questions. But then I actually asked my Patreon subscribers, would you like me to release them publicly? And they overwhelmingly voted yes. So I do that. So the Patreon supporters ask the questions. Everyone can listen. And also at some point, I really used to try to answer every question, but now there's just too many, so I have to pick, and that's fraught with peril. And my personal standard for picking questions to answer is, what are the ones I think I have interesting answers to give for, right? So that both means if it's kind of the same old question about special relativity that I've gotten 100 times before, I'm not going to answer it because you can just Google that. It's easier.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, on both counts. Some people have so many things to talk about that you don't know where to start or finish, right? Others have a message. And one of the things I discovered over the course of these years is the correlation with H. Like there are brilliant people, and I try very hard on the podcast to sort of get all sorts of people, right? Different ages and things like that. And bless their hearts, the most brilliant young people are not as practiced at wandering past their literal research, right? They are less mastery over the field as a whole, much less how to talk about it. Whereas certain older people, just like have their patent answers, and that's kind of boring, right? So you want somewhere in between, the ideal person who has a broad enough scope that they can wander outside their specific papers they've written, but they're”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. That's right. And look, sometimes if I'm interviewing a theoretical physicist, I can just go in and we're interviewing an economist or historian. I have to do a lot of work.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outline to start and then try to make it more of a real conversation. I'm helped by the fact that it is not my day job. So I strictly limit myself to one day of my life per podcast episode on average. Some days take more. And that includes not just doing the research, but inviting the guest, recording it, editing it, publishing it. So I need to be very, very efficient at that, yeah.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, these are great questions, and I've sort of struggled and changed my techniques over the years. It's over five-year-old podcast, might be approaching six years old now. I started out over preparing when I first started. I had a journey that I was going to go down. Many of the people I talked to were academics or thinkers who write books. So they have a story to tell. I could just say, okay, give me your lecture. And then an hour later stop, right? So the mistake is to sort of anticipate what the lecture would be and to ask the leading questions that”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I try. I mean, look, these three books, the biggest ideas books are absolutely an experiment They're going to appeal to a smaller audience than other books will. But that audience should love them. My 16-year-old self would have been so happy to get these books. I can't tell you.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you know, I'm not trying to be cutting edge. In other words, I'm not trying to speculate in these books. Obviously, in other books, I've been very free about speculating, but the point of these books is to say things that 500 years from now will still be true. And so there are some things we know about complexity and emergence, and I want to focus on those. And I will mention, I'm happy to say this is something that needs to be speculated about, but I won't pretend to be telling you what one is the right one.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. There's a lot of equations. Book two is goes further in those directions than book one did. So it's more cool stuff. It's also more mind-bending. It's more of a challenge. Book three that I'm writing right now is called Complexity and Emergence”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Qanta and Fields, which is actually mostly about quantum field theory and particle physics that's coming out in May, and that is I'm letting people in on things that no other book lets them in on. So I hope it's worth it. It's a challenge because there's a lot of equations.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, get behind a computer. And my way of doing it, so my wife, Jennifer, is a science writer. But it's interesting because our techniques are entirely different. She will think about something, but then she will free write. She'll just sit at a computer and write. Like, I think this, I think this. And then that will be... Vastly compressed, edited, rewritten, or whatever into the final thing happens. I will just sit there silently thinking for a very long time, and then I will write what is almost the final draft. So a lot of it happens. There might be some scribbles for an outline or something like that, but a lot of it is in my brain before it's on the page.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. No, I get that. Yeah, I do. And yeah, it's just like everyone has their foibles or whatever. So I'm not able to do that. Therefore, I have to just figure it out on the fly.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't. I'm really terrible at that. My strategy for finding time is just to ignore interruptions and emails. But it's a different time every day. Some days it never happens. Some weeks it never happens.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there's an instrumentalist view here. You have to first decide what your goals are, and then science can help you achieve those goals. If your goals are horrible, science has no problem helping you achieve them. Science is happy to help out.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We just talked about one, right? Science can't tell you right from wrong. You need science to implement your ideas about right and wrong. If you are functioning on the basis of an incorrect view of how the world works, you might very well think you're doing right but actually be doing wrong. But all the science in the world won't tell you which action is right and which action is wrong”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very plothead question, Lex. But the answer is yes. I think that there's no, I think that we're part of the physical world and the natural world. Physicalism would have been just as good a word to use as naturalism, maybe even a more accurate word, but it's a little bit more off putting. So I did want to snappier, more attractive label than physicalism.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. That will absolutely be helpful in explaining why certain people have certain moral beliefs. It won't justify those beliefs as right or wrong.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think that's what it is. I think that what we mean by aesthetics or morality are we're attaching categories, properties to things that happen in the physical world. And there is always going to be some subjectivity to our attachment and how we do that, and that's okay. And the faster we recognize that and deal with it, the better off we'll be.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's doing double duty a little bit, so that's why it's confusing. The more obvious respectable duty is doing is that tables are real, even though you know that it's really a quantum field theory wave function, right? Tables are still real. There are a different way of talking about the underlying deeper reality of it. The other duty it's doing is that we move beyond purely descriptive vocabularies for discussing the universe onto normative and prescriptive and judgmental ways of talking about the universe. This painting is beautiful, that one is ugly, this action is more right, that one is morally wrong. These are also ways of talking about the universe. They are not fixed by the phenomena. They are not determined by our observations. They cannot be ruled out by a crucial experiment. But they're still valid. They might not be universal. They might be subjective, but they're not arbitrary, and they do have”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something is maintained there. There is a different story that we can tell about the world. And that story in the Newtonian regime, if you want to fly a rocket to the moon, you don't use general relativity. Use Newtonian mechanics. That story works perfectly well. The poetic aspect of the story is that there are many ways of talking about the natural world. And as long as those ways latch on to something real and causally efficacious about the functioning of the world, then we attribute some reality and truth to them.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Naturalism is just the idea that all that exists is the natural world. There's no supernatural world. You can have arguments about what that means, but I would claim that the argument should be about what the word supernatural means, not the word natural. The natural world is the world that we learn about by doing science. The poetic part means that you shouldn't be too I want to say fundamentalist about what the natural world is. As we went from Newtonian spacetime to Einsteinian spacetime,”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think that was completely an illusion. I think it was a very, very reasonable illusion to be under. There are illusions. There are substantive claims about the world that go beyond predictions that we can make and verify, which later turned out to be wrong. And the existence of God was one of them. If those people at that time had abandoned their belief in God and replaced it with a mechanistic universe, they would have done just as well at understanding things, right? Again, because there are so many things they didn't understand, it was very reasonable for them to have that belief. It wasn't that they were dummies or anything like that. But that is, you know, as we understand the universe better and better, some things stick with us, some things get replaced.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years ago. But the prediction is the same. Why? Because that prediction, independent of what we thought the fundamental ontology was, the prediction pointed to something true about our understanding of reality, to call it an illusion is just wrong, I think. We might not know what the best, most comprehensive way of stating it is, but it's still true.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this part of that idea that is perfectly respectable and part of it that is perfectly nonsensical. And I'm not even going to try to steal man the nonsensical part. The real part to me is what is called structural realism. So we don't know what the world is at a deep fundamental level, right? Let's put ourselves in the minds of people living 200 years ago. They didn't know about quantum mechanics. They didn't know about relativity. That doesn't mean they were wrong about the universe that they understood. They had Newton's laws, right? They could predict what time the sun was going to rise perfectly well. In the progress of science, the words that would be used to give the most fundamental description of how you were predicting the sun would rise changed because now you have curved spacetime and things like that, right? And you didn't have any of those words.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That humans are flying In terms of counterfactuals in the future, absolutely, imagination is crucially important. But that's not an illusion. That's just a...”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But your understanding of the world in a way that gives you power over it and influence over it is decreased rather than increased by believing in that oasis. Is not true about consciousness or this”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I almost never use the word illusion. Illusion means that there's something that you think you're perceiving. It has no causal efficacy. If you walk up to where the oasis is supposed to be, you'll say, you are wrong about it being there. That's different than something being emergent or non-fundamental, but also real. Like this table is real, even though I know it's made of atoms. That doesn't remove the realness from the table. I think the consciousness and free will and things like that are just as real in tables and chairs.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will say, I don't have any problem explaining what it's like to be you or what you experience when you see red. It's a certain way of talking about the atoms and the neurons, etc., that make up you. Just like the hardness or the brownness of this table, these are words that we attach to certain underlying configurations of ordinary physical matter, likewise sadness and redness or whatever are words that we attach to you to describe what you're doing. It comes to consciousness in general. I'm very quick to say I do not claim to have any special insight on how consciousness works other than I see no reason to change the laws of physics to account for it.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And therefore, this is an old argument, of course, but then therefore is supposed to be I need something that is not contained within physics to account for that. And I'm just going to call it mind. We don't know what it is yet. We're going to call it mind. And it has to be separate from physics. And then there's two ways to go. If you buy that much, you can either say, okay, I'm going to be a dualist. I'm going to believe that there's matter and mind and they are separate from each other and they are interacting somehow. Or that's a little bit complicated and sketchy as far as physics is going to go. So I'm going to believe in mind, but I'm going to put it prior to matter. I'm going to believe that mind comes first and that consciousness is the fundamental aspect of reality and everything else, including matter and physics, comes from it. That would be at least as simple as physics comes first, right? Now, the physicalist, such as myself,”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the argument for it is supposed to be that there is something fundamentally uncapturable about conscious awareness by physical behavior of atoms and molecules. So the panpsychist will say, look, you can tell me maybe someday through advances of neuroscience and what have you, exactly what happens in your brain and how that translates into thought and speech and action. What you can't tell me is what it is like to be me. You can't tell me what I am experiencing when I see something that is red or thy taste something that is sweet. You can tell me what neurons fire, but you can't tell me what I'm experiencing. That first person inner subjective experience is simply not capturable by physics.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had David Falmer's, who was one of the world's great philosophers, and he is panpsychism curious. He doesn't commit to anything, but he's certainly willing to entertain it. Philip Goff, who I've had, who is a great guy, but he is devoted. In fact, he is almost single-handedly responsible for the upsurge of interest in panpsychism in the popular imagination.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can see stars in the sky. So now a whole new mode of reasoning opens up where you see something far away. And rather than saying, look up table, I see this, I react. You can say, okay, I see that thing. What if I did this? What if I did that? What if I did something different? And that's the birth of imagination eventually.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone has their own favorite little feature, but that is why I said there's an argument to be made. I did a podcast episode on it with Adam Bully. It develops slowly. I did different podcasts. Sorry to keep mentioning podcast episodes I did, but Malcolm McIver, who is an engineer at Northwestern, has a theory about one of the major stages in evolution is when fish first climbed onto land. And I mean, of course, that is a major stage of evolution. But in particular, there's a cognitive shift because when you're a fish swimming under the water, the attenuation length of light in water is not that long. You can't see kilometers away. You can see meters away. And you're moving at meters per second. So all of the evolutionary optimization is make all of your decisions on a time scale of less than a second. When you see something new, you have to make a rapid fire decision what to do about it. As soon as you climb onto land, you can essentially see forever.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An argument to be made that literally what separates human beings from other species on Earth is our ability to imagine counterfactual hypothetical futures.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have information really being gathered and utilized by subsystems of the universe. And then arguably there's any number of stages past that. I mean, one of the most obvious ones to me is we talk about simulation theory, but you and I run simulations in our heads. They're just not that good, but we imagine different hypothetical futures, right? Bacteria don't do that. So that's the kind of information processing that is a form of complexity. And so I would like to understand all these stages and how they fit together.”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A whole nother step where subsystems of the universe start burning fuel. Are not different in configurational complexity? They're both spheres with density high at the middle and getting less as you go out. But there's something fundamentally different because the star only survives as long as it has fuel, right? I mean, then it turns into a brown dwarf or a white dwarf or whatever. But as a star, as a main sequence star, it is an out-of-equilibrium system. But it's more or less static, right? Like if I spill the coffee mug and it falls in the process of falling inside of equilibrium, but it's also changing all the time, a specific kind of system is where it looks sort of macroscopically stationary, like a star, but underneath the hood, it's burning fuel to be the band in order to maintain that stability. So as stars form, that's a different kind of complexity that comes to be. Then there's another kind of complexity that comes to be, roughly speaking at the origin of life, because that's where”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it comes in stages, right? So I think that if you go from the, again, a physicist, so biologists studying evolution will talk about how complexity evolves all the time. The complexity of the genome, the complexity of our physiology, right? But they take for granted that life already existed and entropy is increasing and so forth. I want to go back to the beginning and say the early universe was simple and low entropy. And entropy increases with time and the universe sort of differentiates and becomes more complex. But that statement, which is indisputably true, has different meanings because complexity has different meanings. So sort of the most basic primal version of complexity is what you might think of as configurational complexity. That's what Kamalgrov gets at. How much information do you need to specify the configuration of the system?”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're working on various things. The glib thing that I'm trying to work on right now with a student is complexogenesis. How does complexity come to be if all the universe is doing is moving from low entropy to high entropy?”
2024-04-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source