The Big Picture

On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

[Amazon Link]
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With just over a month to go, it's safe to say this book will easily make my top ten list for 2018 non-fiction. The author, Sean Carroll, is on the research physics faculty at Caltech (but don't hold that against him). When he writes about physics, you can pretty much take it to the bank: he may be dumbing it down a bit, but he's not leading you astray.

His goal here is to apply the insights of science to (see the title) the "big questions". He describes his approach as "poetic naturalism" (a philosophical realm apparently inhabited by one adherent, Sean Carroll, but that's okay). The "naturalism" part is meant to eschew philosophical explanations that appeal to anything beyond the physical world of atoms and forces, as described by what Carroll calls the "Core Theory", a mostly-complete description of how everything is made up of bosons, fermions, and the sorta-well-known interactions between them. Carroll asserts, and I don't doubt it, that our observations do not reveal anything in everyday macroscopic reality that can't be explained, at bottom, by the Core Theory. (It's known to break down in extreme situations, and may not describe possible forces or particles that might be found in the future, but Carroll explains that such caveats are irrelevant to our common experience.)

So: no supernatural beings, no eternal souls, no ESP, no magic, no no Nanette.

Except Carroll does something extraordinary here: he doesn't dismiss various forms of supernaturalism out of hand: he engages the best arguments for them, takes them seriously, argues against them fairly and convincingly, without a whiff of condescension or arrogance.

He's also extremely honest about what he (by which I mean, science) doesn't know, at least not yet. And also honestly admits that nothing is certain. For example: we can't prove that the world, and the observable universe, wasn't created 6000 years ago, with all its galaxies and fossils. Or for that matter, created fifteen minutes ago, including you and all your phony memories. Or that we aren't brains in a vat, or part of a large computer simulation, or….

But that's not the way to bet. Carroll takes a uniquely Bayesian view to such issues, calling the probabilities Bayes described as "credences": we don't hold any beliefs with 100% certainty, but we might have a 99.999…% credence. String out as many 9s as you feel comfortable with.

So that's naturalism. What's the "poetic" part? It tells us that there's "more than one way to talk about the world". Specifically (page 20):

  1. There are many ways of talking about the world.
  2. All good ways of talking must be consistent with one another and with the world.
  3. Our purposes in the moment determine the best way of talking.

A good example of Carroll's approach is found in his (again, relentlessly fair) discussion of "free will", a bugaboo of mine.

There's a sense in which you do have free will. There's also a sense in which you don't. Which sense is the "right" one is an issue you're welcome to decide for yourself (if you think you have the ability to make decisions).

Heh. Carroll can't deny that, reduced to basics, there's nothing magical going on in our bodies beyond the deterministic (or, with quantum mechanics, probabilistic) interactions between atoms, microscopically manifested as firing neurons, biochemical pathways, proteins yanking on each other, etc., everything working itself up to me typing away at this keyboard.

But, Carroll notes, that's not a lot of help when you look into your closet in the morning and try to decide which shirt to wear. Try saying: "Well, I'll just stand here and let the atoms in my body do whatever they were deterministically going to do anyway."

Wait as long as you need to before you're convinced that that the atoms in your body aren't gonna get that shirt-picking job done for you. Or go to work bare-chested. Your call.

But that's just one example, the book really is the "Big Picture", covering most of the contentious questions of existence. If at times it seems that Carroll's discussion is at the level of late night college dorm room arguments, well… that's pretty much the level beyond which many philosophical discussions have failed to progress in centuries.

Some quibbles:

  • Carroll has a chapter on the "is-ought" dichotomy, and the impossibility of jumping between them. But (see above) his poetic-naturalism tenets use ought-words like "good" and "best" without (as near as I can tell) strong justification. "Good", by what standard, and why should I buy that standard and not some other?

  • I sometimes worry about the power of language to mislead us down false paths in search of Truth. This is especially applicable in purporting to answer the Big Questions; are human-invented grunts and their squiggly representations on the page really the best tools to do that? Especially when we know languages are replete with ambiguity and imprecision?

    I mean, every logical fallacy ever committed was committed with language.

  • Probably related: Carroll assumes the universe is completely understandable by human minds. But what if it's not?

    I've said this before, but: I have a dog.

    A very smart dog.

    But I won't try to teach him calculus. It's pretty clear that would be a waste of time. He wouldn't understand.

    And (worse) my dog wouldn't even understand that he's failing to understand. He would be unaware that he's missing fundamental pieces of knowledge.

    Human brains are (generously) only about 20 times bigger than dog brains. Is that big enough to completely understand reality?

    I'm not sure about that. And I'd say "It's something to think about", except I'm not sure that we have adequate brain power to even do that.

But (all in all) I highly recommend this book if the topics seem interesting to you at all. The book is full of insight and wit, very accessible to (say) a bright high schooler or STEM-capable undergrad. (Grad-level stuff is relegated to an appendix.)


Last Modified 2024-01-24 3:16 PM EDT

The Phony Campaign

2018-11-25 Update

[phony baloney]

Our candidate roster expands by two this week, with Paul Ryan (a returnee) and John Hickenlooper, both hitting the 3% nomination-probability threshold.

A Democrat, Hickenlooper is currently governor of Colorado. He was term-limited, so he'll be looking for a new job in January.

Neither Ryan nor Hickenlooper are showing unusual phoniness in this week's tablulation:

Candidate NomProb Change
Since
11/18
Phony
Results
Change
Since
11/18
Donald Trump 71% unch 2,420,000 -2,570,000
Beto O'Rourke 15% +1% 1,090,000 -80,000
Nikki Haley 5% -1% 1,030,000 -130,000
Hillary Clinton 4% +1% 920,000 +187,000
Kamala Harris 17% +1% 554,000 +25,000
Joe Biden 7% unch 239,000 -34,000
Bernie Sanders 7% unch 223,000 -16,000
Paul Ryan 3% --- 203,000 ---
Mike Pence 8% +1% 186,000 -148,000
Elizabeth Warren 10% -1% 179,000 -27,000
Kirsten Gillibrand 4% unch 165,000 +15,000
Sherrod Brown 3% unch 151,000 +14,000
Amy Klobuchar 4% unch 98,700 -400
Cory Booker 3% unch 66,000 -4,600
John Hickenlooper 3% --- 64,000 ---
John Kasich 4% +1% 41,200 -2,100

Standard disclaimer: Google result counts are bogus.

But let's look at the latest phony news about our candidates:

  • Is America really ready for a President Hickenlooper? If elected, he would only be the second US president with a four-syllable last name. And, frankly, "Hickenlooper" is a way goofier name than "Eisenhower". (Ref: Words With K in Them Are Funny.)

    (But, namewise, I don't see any US politician rivalling a recent president of Madagascar, Hery Rajaonarimampianina. That's a good way to keep your name out of the headlines: make it too long to fit.)

    Whew, we got off-subject there. Getting back to it, a recent Denver Post article reported: Gov. Hickenlooper jet-sets across the globe on private planes paid for by others, new ethics complaint alleges. The complaint was generated by "Public Trust Institute" (PTI), run by Frank McNulty, a former Republican legislator in Colorado.

    This will raise the eyebrows of conspiracy theorists:

    Some events, such as the Bilderberg Meetings in Turin, Italy — a gathering of high-powered corporate executives and political leaders from around the world — are so exclusive and secret that “neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s) nor of any other participant may be revealed,” according to the group’s website.

    Much of the event is paid for by its sponsors, which in 2018 included Fiat Chrysler, PTI’s complaint shows.

    PTI also alleges that Hickenlooper accepted a chauffeured Maserati limousine and other amenities at the June 2018 meetings — he was caught on camera at the airport saying he had “no official statement” about why he was there, but said he paid for the trip himself — including transportation via private jet that PTI estimates to have cost as much as $10,000.

    “Bilderberg is a luxurious, corporately paid event to discuss international affairs amongst global business and political leaders,” the complaint says. “This is precisely the type of event [Colorado ethics rule] Amendment 41 is intended to restrict.”

    Who does Hickenlooper think he is, Hillary Clinton?

  • On Monday last, CNN "Editor-at-large" Chris Cillizza captured The 42 most eye-popping lines from Donald Trump's 'Fox News Sunday' interview. Apparently he gets paid for that. The p-word appears in item 33:

    33. "The news about me is largely phony. It's false. Even sometimes they'll say, 'Sources say.' There is no source, in many cases -- in cases there is."

    Cillizza rebuts:

    Again, this is about Donald Trump not liking the news. Not about the news being "largely phony." And the idea that mainstream media organizations make up sources is beyond ridiculous.

    Yeah, probably. But how would we know? It's not as if CNN's hunger for scoops doesn't cause it to mislead its viewers.

  • At Spectator USA, Freddy Gray looks at Beto:

    Unlike Obama in 2008, however, the Beto hype of 2018 feels labored, even needy — a desperate crush for progressives who have lost faith in the democratic progress. Women and gay men compete to express their lust for him, as if he were in a boy band. After Beto posted a video of himself cooking a meal, social media went berserk. ‘Beto O’Rourke is cutting up flank steak over on Instagram in case anyone asks how it is I got pregnant,’ tweeted a man called Evan Ross Katz. Most other responses are too filthy for these pages; all seem contrived.

    O’Rourke is more than a bit phony, too — all hat and no cattle, as Texans say. Take the name Beto. It’s an Hispanic abbreviation of Robert, though O’Rourke is of Irish descent. A Ted Cruz campaign jingle mocked him for it: ‘I remember reading stories, liberal Robert wanted to fit in / So he changed his name to Beto and hid it with a grin.’ A curious irony there: Ted’s real name, Rafael, is Hispanic, but he too wanted to fit in.

    At least he isn't a Bilderberger, like Hickenlooper!

  • And I wouldn't say Democrats are getting desperate, but … Vanity Fair answers a question nobody is asking: Why Sherrod Brown May Have an Edge on Warren and Sanders.

    Brown, who is potentially looking to challenge the president directly in 2020, refuses to be typecast—or to cede blue-collar politics to Republicans. “Populism and patriotism are not racist, they are not anti-Semitic. They don’t push some people down in order to lift some people up. They don’t appeal to the darker side of human nature,” Brown tells me. “We should not yield the hallowed ground of patriotism to extremists. We see that in Columbus, and we see that especially in the White House. You don’t practice a form of phony populism where you turn people against one another.”

    Can you still call yourself a populist without railing against shadowy elites conspiring to rig the game against the little people? Can you win the nomination in today's Democratic Party without at least pretending to do that?

  • And maybe we can slide a belated Michael Ramirez Thanksgiving cartoon in here:


Last Modified 2018-12-20 7:23 AM EDT