Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | November 2020
As you have likely heard me mention before, I have an account on Patreon, where people can sign up to donate a dollar or two per episode of Mindscape. In return they get two tangible (if minor) benefits. First, they get to listen to the podcast without any ads. Second, once per month I do an Ask Me Anything episode, where patrons are allowed to ask any question they like, and I do my best to answer as many as I can.
Patreon supporters have kindly agreed to let these monthly AMA episodes be released to the general public (though they maintain the right actually ask the questions). I announced that I’d be doing this a while back, but with the cost structure I had with my podcast host it turned out to be prohibitively expensive for me. But now we’ve got that all figured out! So now, and hopefully going forward, these AMAs will be part of the regular podcast feed. They will be released sometime in the middle of each month, not as part of the usual Monday weekly series, so they won’t get numbers of their own.
Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: www.preposterousuniverse.com/...
Patreon: / seanmcarroll
Mindscape Podcast playlist: • Mindscape Podcast
#podcast #ideas #science #philosophy #culture
Thanks a lot Sean and Patreon subs for opening this up for everyone! Really appreciate it :D
I appreciate the patrons saying to make this freely available.
I pay one dollar a month. Just do it.
"These are the kinds of things; you've gotta do the experiment. I don't know. Set it up!" 🤣🤣🤣🤣 Now I know how Lenny messed up his shoulder - physicist fight club. 😂
chaos is an order that we are far from visualize its nature in our current mind condition, 'the world' keeps always learning, new ways of thinking and new views are continuously being replaced. The fact that are so many unsolved problems (and even more yet to come through evolution processes), indicates that new thoughts arises out of the very nature of fighting for fixing them and through our will to survive arises the curiosity to learn more and more about what lies beyond our ever growing knoledge.
Some of my favorite bedtime stories
At 54:10 Sean says "electromagnetism is _invented_ by Maxwell back in the 1850s..." LOL
Very nice video thx you professor. I enjoy listening to these videos as I go to bed, and go asleep on them. Very nice content and relax to listen to. Thx you
You probably dont care but if you're bored like me atm you can stream all the latest movies and series on Instaflixxer. Been streaming with my girlfriend for the last months :)
@Lochlan Elliot yup, have been using InstaFlixxer for years myself :)
Thank you for sharing this!
Excellent! Thanks! Learned a lot!
Thanks for answering my fairly dumb question. It was probably a waste of your time but for what it's worth it gave me hearty laugh. Love the podcast and your book "Something Deeply Hidden."
What was your question?
23:40 "it's really kind of a matter of degree" you win the internet for one month. congratulations.
Please keep making videos like this, much appreciated! I learned a lot by listening to your videos.
Does anyone else just love his voice?
Big time calming! Could listen all day
the joy of hearing sean, blissful
he's a simpsons character.
Yes, and I think I understand why (personally, I mean, I don't mean to speak for all his fans or whatever). Sean has come into popular intellectual culture at a time where irrationality and anger move very fast, like red word tsunamis just quaking human communication, all the time. The presidency has been of that character obviously lately, and our difficulty in coping with new social tech has made for a "comments section" of a society sort of dynamic. Everything about Mindscape/Sean is the antithesis to that experience, without skimping on any of the profound importance of the conversations being had. I think he has spoken to it being mostly an accident of his personal makeup, but to me Sean speaks in a way that I imagine the optimal ethical way of communicating right now really is: He speaks as an ambassador to good faith thinking and reasonable, patient, "flesh and blood" human discussion. He does not claim authority on anything he doesn't feel he's demonstrated to be an authority on, he has no qualms about becoming as much of a learner/listener as we are with his guests if a moment calls for it, and I don't know man. The world is a very noisy place right now and it strikes me as very ugly. Sean is a brilliant, gentle soul in the corner of a very crowded room, and I'm always so happy to stroll away from the storm and listen to him have open human idea exchange with someone else. The information is fascinating or we wouldn't be here, but I think there is something to the "how" of his output more than the "what" that he probably isn't even that aware of.
Absolutely
Can you please interview Douglas Hofstadter? I love both of you. There is also the Sir Roger Penrose connection via Hofstadter's book, "Godel, Escher Bach"....
you comeback!! Thanks!!!!
My favourite, look forward to your videos with a passion!
very easy to listen to your arguments... ty
Wow ! Wonderful !!
Absolutely fantastic video. Thanks a lot Prof.Carroll.
What does it mean for the 4-velocity vector to have a magnitude squared of C^2?
I am wondering to whom the aliens would come down and announce their presence. Are you waiting for them to contact you specifically? That seems very unlikely even if they are here.
With the many worlds theory, bits are wrong, but as einstein claimed that what can happen will happen. He was onto this many worlds type of theory, except its more like many paths along time instead of worlds.
I have a question- are you related to John Raymond Carroll from long Island???
Herbert, I hope you will focus on the additional uses and value of Optimus instead of the replacement of human labor. People feel that work is part of their identity and robots can add to it or take it away.
Loved this. Put this on, do mindless tasks. Some of the interviews are hit or miss depending on the interviewee, but I could listen to you for hours! You mentioned comfort eating, makes you so relatable!
36:50 So I googled Philosophical Devices and a pdf version came up as first hit. Im not sure if Im supposed to read this. It's hard to be a modern human 😕
I saw him speak years ago in Brooklyn as part of an Atheist meetup group event. I wanted to ask him a 42 question but time ran out. Every time he shows up on something we’re watching or listening to my friends cut me off with “we know you saw him we know”.
How do you get stains out of silk?
Sir (sean carrol) what makes us sucess? Hardworking or mind. Combination of mind and hardworking.
for the record, it's fantastic to have someone, with mild authority, say "there is no afterlife" out loud, we are so prgramed to "respect religious beliefs" that we have wound up having to pretend they are okay, before he got caught be naughty, david silverman was a breath od fresh air, to go on stage in debate and shout "there is no god" and back it up was amazing. there are people who believe stupid things who are perfectly respectable, but religion in particular has been such a ball and chain on this planet.
Happy birthday in all the other years? All the other universes!
So articulate and nice
Perhaps dark matter isn't a particle, but instead is a cloud of a particle's super position. This cloud of probability might be causing quantum gravity we detect as dark matter...
Ha, that's good, it makes my brain ache, thanks.
So why doesn't the Earth have extra gravity too?
Lol way too many mentions of guns being held to heads in this episode!! Hope you weren't trying to tell us something 😬🔫
@Victor Alejandro Wiener As a condensed matter physicist, yes, supercurrent does eventually decay! (Google term is "tilted washboard potential.") But what makes it so "super" is that it has to decay via quantum tunneling, and is therefore exponentially slow.
When we are not looking does a particle or atom create gravity in their super-position probable locations?
He apparently only answers question made in his patreon page, so -> $ Answering your question by a fan of pop science , that is not known. It is apparently a question that shows that GR is not a definitive theory. I think I heard it from Sabine Hossenfelder. She has a great KZhead channel, too.
@@PrimatoFortunato Ok thx
Good question.
This is unsolved and we would need a theory of quantum gravity to answer it as the gravitational force of a single particle is too small for us to measure.
wow thanks.
Is that they will hire you as long as your ideas and projections are within the confines that they’ve laid out.
I have a question: Is the sub-atomic universe as vast as the Universe? I mean, infinite everywhere?
What's in the box!!??
is time at a different speed in open space than in a galaxy, like the space between galaxies
Time is different depending on mass/acceleration. See General Relativity.
Almost zero difference though.
It's irrelevant whether someone 'deserves' to die, if they're _actively_ causing the deaths of others, then killing them is perfectly OK.
So if you kill someone who is actively causing the death of others, I can kill you?
How is Ariel going ?
If I join patreon and donate to Sean's podcast will I be able to hear all the past ask me anything episodes since he has been doing it?
Good question ! As it would involve more work and he seem a 'nice guy' I think so, maybe he only keeps a year, anyway it's a good deal go to preposterousuniverse.com and search FAQ's
I know this is a dumb question. Since I’m am quantum can I go through my entire existence without ever branching?
Not sure what you mean "since I'm quantum," but the answer is no. The universe branches countless times every second and you branch along with it.
2:12:19 Sean is essentially saying that every possible outcome of an election will happen in some branches of the wavefunction. How is this consistent with his position that human decisions are classical and don't involve branching???
Update: kzhead.info/sun/pNmKZ72hgF-LpZs/bejne.html
Pretty sure that's not what he is saying
How can we explain our existence without a creator?
How can you explain a creator?
@@bozo5632Couldn't answer the question either?
@@BoltRM I can't explain our (cosmic) existence with or without a creator, and neither can you, and neither can otangelo. But while this is not a problem for me in my materialist worldview, it's a lifelong problem for anyone who believes they must have The Answer. (To this and all questions. I suspect real narcissism underlies a lot of apparent piety.)
@@bozo5632 To me, existence is no more far out than the idea of a "creator". Equally incredible.
@@BoltRM Imho the idea of a creator isn't far out at all, imho it's actually primitive and unimaginative. It's a caveman idea. I would just rule it out because it looks so obviously made up. Which comes first, faith in monotheism, or the unshakable view that there must must must have been a creator?
hello Sean - has anyone explored the possibility of correlation between collapse of the wave function and whether any of the terms in the Schrödinger equation are rational or irrational numbers? not sure if that's a valid question thought - but if everything are quanta/discrete units then there might be some connection between quantum interpretation of reality and irrational vs rational numbers - but that's pure speculation on my side - just wondering whether there's been any research along those lines - thx
why should there be a correlation between wave function collapse and the use of rational or irrational numbers used to describe events prior to collapse ?
@@marktill1197 i am not saying there should be correlation, i am asking whether there's been any research into this, if the Planck scale is the smallest scale there possibly is - then why is physics at Planck scale described by mathematics which contains infinite number of irrational (and rational) numbers between any two arbitrary small numbers - this might sound as sci-fi - but maybe the irrational numbers do not really exist in the universe - maybe irrational numbers exists only as math concepts - when you ask me - i tend more to think that we are living in a simulation, because it seems that the only way how to understand the universe is to create a simulation of the universe - that's what might have happened in the past - that something/someone has created a simulation of the universe in order to understand the universe - and that's what might happen in the future (general AI + 'infinitely' powerful quantum computing), if we are indeed living in a simulation - than the entanglement/collapse of the wave function might be due to the fact that only rational numbers would be involved in the computation (finite number of operations/computations - the product and sum of two rational numbers is always rational)
Love the show. But I was surprised at 46mins when Professor Carroll replied with a No to the question ' does everything travel at the speed of light through space-time'. I have seen this detailed a few times and it explains time dilation, if something moves very fast through the dimensions of distance then it correspondingly travels slower through the time dimension, and at the speed of C through the dimensions of distance it has no speed left to travel through time and so experience's no time..as per a photon. Sabine Hossenfeld has a yet video on this although it is titled travel through time at the speed of light.. but she runs through the equations which show that everything is moving through spacetime at C. There are other videos too.
Here's a question: Is it possible that there could be some kind of unknown particles locked up in spacetime itself that interacts with mass causing spacetime to warp and thus resulting in gravity? I know there is some, as of yet undiscovered, relationship between spacetime and mass that causes the spacetime to warp resulting in gravity and perhaps it could be some kind of unknown particle or energy hidden in spacetime we can't detect.
Hello Sean and hello to all other listeners. Please, can someone try to answer my question? Let’s suppose the Big Bang happened. How fast do we estimate the expansion was after the Big Bang? I was thinking about the speed of expansion of the current universe and the actual acceleration of the expansion. Was the expansion of the Big Bang faster than that of a current universe? And if so, can we suppose that the universes expansion was decelerating sometime in the past? And finally, can some parts of the universe retract from us so fast, that the light from these parts would never reach us, without violating the axiom that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light?
there are no certainties in this game.
1:27:16 Well that would make him perfect for loop quantum gravity! Bada-diiish!
Was just about to comment this too :)
Hmmm you dipped a toe in politics and the result is me re-examining what right, wrong and justice are. That's unusual.
They are talking about seeing “Unidentified Aerial phenomenon” Just secret human made crafts, with secret technology 😂 Wait I’m still going Faulty invisibility hologram software Looks like 2 crafts “Mother ship” ✨🛑probably just some rich guys toy they are seeing bro! Soul DFS....
Ask you this: How much don’t you know?
@@robthomas592 - Which means we obviously know very little, a concession you won’t hear from the scientific community.
I thought you had tenure
Is light visible from behind?
Cat person...makes sense.
Leave, please?
Dude but the tic tax is crazy. What’s yer theory of what it really is then?
This is probably the only thing I've disagreed with him on. I believe Aliens are still kind of a taboo subjects in the scientific community, so he probably gave that answer so he won't get dogged on for believing that we might have already been visited.
It could be disinfo. Easily.
@@jengleheimerschmitt7941 I did see it. I was not impressed. I didn't find it difficult to dismiss. There wasn't much to dismiss tbh; just testimony, and testimony is well known to be terrible evidence. Testimony from the Pentagon even more so. IDK what he saw. IDK if he saw anything at all. The video is unclear and not convincing. It looks like an ordinary airplane. And the premise seems ridiculous - that ET keeps buzzing the same Naval exercises area, chock full of sensors, and this video is the best evidence they got? Hard to believe. It could very easily be disinfo, and there's no evidence that it isn't. If either a guy is wrong or its aliens, well, I doubt it's aliens. I think it's convincing to people who (for various reasons) don't need to be convinced.
@@jengleheimerschmitt7941 The premise I disliked was: they said there were regular UAP sightings over a long-ish period of time. (Weeks? Months? I don't remember.) IDK what the deception might be, but possibilities abound. My pet theory is that the leaks and non-confirmation confirmations were put in place to facilitate justifying and creating and funding a whole new branch of the armed services, Space Force, price tag mumble mumble... And especially to make it politically easier for Congress to do it. And to avoid discussion or even mentioning its purpose, which is to be able to win an offensive nuclear war against China. (Or theoretically any other country.) Also/or, but probably just as a fringe benefit, it might make some potential adversaries fear that the USA has developed new UAP-type technology. Another might be: USA knows foreign powers can observe some testing of new technology, so leaking this story carefully and with verisimilitude might influence foreign observers, either to suspect it's really aliens and point some of their spy gear at space instead of San Diego, or to take the UAP'S reported flight characteristics seriously and suspect the USA has developed ultra super 24th century technologies. Normal disinfo. Or it could be something else. IDK what secret things the military and intelligence services do in secret. All for no cost, no risk. No problem. Or else it's ET in hard-to-believe space-watercraft making hard-to-believe appearances where only the Navy can see them. There are other mundane possibilities too besides disinfo. Maybe the flight control guys just thought Fravor needed pranking.
@@jengleheimerschmitt7941 It wasn't just Fravor - the Navy leaked a few videos and bits of info, and then took the peculiar step of "confirming" it without committing to anything. How often does the military volunteer info like that? For a purpose, surely. And perhaps well timed for Space Force or some other project. Would they really leak info about unknown vehicles of inexplicable technology? Wouldn't that be the toppest secret of all time? (Not to fool the public or prevent panic, but to keep ahead of the Reds in investigating the UAPs.) Right? Isn't that an obvious problem? The videos and speech appear to show very different UAP phenomena. That's weird. Some skeptics have proposed mundane explanations for the video. One guy I saw on YT pretty convincingly put it down to internal optics of the cameras. One video looks just like an aircraft going over the horizon. Only the audio makes it interesting. USA spends billions per year on propaganda; that audio could be dubbed in for a nickel. Another video (the triangles) looks like helicopters, maybe drones, or maybe VTOLs moving around above the cameraman, maybe just taking off normally. The triangles are surely artifacts of the optics. Again only the audio makes it seem unusual. But I don't need to provide a good explanation. I only need to ask how likely it is that the Pentagon might lie about national defense or funding versus how likely it is that the Navy is really and inexplicably releasing real footage of real UFOs that are really visiting the 7th fleet. 50,000 : 1? Fifty trillion to one?
Do you ever consider you're intuitively fooling your mind in regards to the paranormal? If you had, I wouldn't expect you to say because you offer too much reason. I like Pagan and Native American stuff.
Omg.. I hope you get visited..
Sean corrected all the facts from listeners, except for the Trump hater.
Oh my gosh, Lex Fridman needs to understand the answer at 6:16. This is *extremely* important to me for some reason. He makes me cringe each time he brings it up and I have to turn off his otherwise excellent videos. I feel for him, because when I was 15 to 25 years old, I was sure that we must be being “visited” as well. That was a couple decades ago and since then I learned to apply basic logic to life in general, not just my work. He is going to cringe so hard on all this later in life, it's a bit embarrassing for all of us. :/ Thanks for making these sessions public and all that you do Mr. Carroll! edit: I just realized the reason that this is important to me.. we need to arrest magical thinking before it destroys our civilization/species.
Yes, on the one hand we have several acknowledged, credible, detailed incidents, where highly trained personnel operating advanced technology on land, sea and in the air observe these objects directly, and with different instruments, often from multiple positions simultaneously. So on the one hand we have coastal radar, Navy warships, AWACS, and intercept aircraft all seeing the same thing, with various different types of radar, targeting pods, and eye-balls, from different positions at different altitudes etc. And on the other we have Sean Carroll saying "lens flare". I have huge respect for Sean Carroll, and I'm not saying it's aliens, but do you really think a captain of a Navy warship, or a fleet commander, or USAF base commander gets spooked by lens flare, or a weather balloon? And sends out jets to intercept? You don't think they have highly skilled technical/scientific people working there? You don't think experienced pilots with thousands of hours of combat and reconnaissance training can tell the difference between an object flying around and lens flare? The evidence in these cases is not at all as "vague" as Carroll suggests, or thinks it is. Again, I'm not saying it's aliens, I don't know what it is, but these things are 100% real. And sure, 99.9% of "sightings" are complete bunk, most of them pretty obviously so. But that doesn't discredit the ones that are credible beyond doubt. I agree the alien explanation is far-fetched, but let's go there anyway. Maybe they aren't trying to hide, but they are not trying to make contact either, just minding their own business, not making a huge effort to stay hidden, but not wanting contact either. Who knows? Maybe some species of animal in a remote part of the planet are having this same discussion, when one of them tells of a human that stood in the distance with a camera. And the other animals go; "well I haven't seen one of these humans, so they don't exist. And why aren't they contacting us if they are not hiding? If you could just see them standing there, they were clearly not hiding". Maybe posing the question if these are aliens, or some unknown beings, is less absurd than you think. And why would what we think of as logical behavior or motivation even apply to aliens? Does the "logic", motivation, and perception of early homo erectus apply to us? We can be here all day exchanging all sort of arguments and principles. And again, I do agree that with our current understanding of things that aliens is an unlikely explanation, but that doesn't change the fact that *something* is actually flying around, whatever it is.
@@miltonpopper4181 I WANT TO BELIEVE. I really do. Show me some specific evidence, and I will be more than happy to look at it. I spent years looking at this stuff and always found alternative explanations that pass Occam's razor much better than "must be aliens."
@@miltonpopper4181 I don't normally read long paragraph answers, however, I one thousand percent agree with your statement. It all seem too improbable, especially with the people who have come forward.
😮。、😊
Anti particles & Anti waves theory. For all waves. There is a anti wave counterpart. What’s a Black hole from this point of view? Imagine to us it’s a collapsed point in space time infinite etc! -0 =in our universe But Inverted It’s a Big Bang of particles infinitely condensed at the 0 point / supersymmetry. What’s anti here for us is here 0 there for them and so on so forth. So a black hole is bang bang & further explained why it’s a expanding universe!? Expanding because the other end (verse) it’s absorbing all matter in its gravity. That’s interuniversal energy conservation. Can you theoretically Imagine the symmetry in waves and anti wave (verse) interactions / particles anti particles / and black holes. And symmetry in universes. Time flows are inverted so the same flow. For all!? Possible or never :)
You could reach so many more people if you would just set up a camera in the room with you.
😊😅😮😮😅😊😮い、あけぬか
First
To speak about the "beginning of time" sounds counter-intuitive. A dog chasing it's tail in infinity, unless infinity isn't real? Time was around before and after the big-bang as is space. Think "bigger".
That was nice of you to talk the hate filled democrat off the ledge. You should leave that one out. Saying trump enabled extremist while lefties burned down democrat cities is disingenuous.