Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | December 2022
Вставка
- Опубліковано 4 гру 2022
- Patreon: / seanmcarroll
Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: www.preposterousuniverse.com/...
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.
Mindscape Podcast playlist: • Mindscape Podcast
Sean Carroll channel: / seancarroll
#podcast #ideas #science #philosophy #culture - Наука та технологія
I wish there were more people as well spoken and honest as Sean weighing on complicated topics on the internet.
Lol
I’ve been reading and listening to Sean for some years now. Every time I do so I learn something and feel better/smarter for the time I have invested in that reading and listening. Thanks for everything, Sean!
👍
@@ChrisMinorOfficial 😑🙏
Thanks again Prof. Sean, for taking over 3 hours of your valuable time, to answer such a wide variety of questions from all of us, with patience, consideration and wisdom.
Thank you for this service to Humanity. ^.^
I am so grateful for this channel! Thank you so much Sean Carroll and everyone that helped in any way to produce these!
Ohh, early Christmas again. Just love it. Thank you so much. 😊 Have no idea where or when you find time to sleep. But as long as you feel good and deliver this high quality physics material to the physics community, I guess we are all winners and thankful. 👍 Please keep on this splendid work.
I've been with this podcast since episode 1. My science journey has been narrated by Sean to a large extent - thank you
Question: is there a connection or a reason black holes can only grow (not withstanding Hawking radiation) with the fact that their temperature is so low and the balmy 2.7k of space via big bang after glow is still "energy" albeit only a little.
In other words, does the 2.7 plus vacuum energy slowly "feed" black holes (even when they are not feeding on other mattter like gas)?
Man this is so nail on the head for me! Thanks man, now I don't have to explain myself and my positions as often anymore lol, I can just send people this thing lol Love it! Thank you! I love your work! And your perspective and methodology are things I strive to incorporate into myself as well. Or at least they're part of my current paradigm that I am stress testing 🐱
its a blessing to hear your soothing confident voice...❤️
The fluctuations in football are actually what makes it so alluring, and yes even the decisive penalty kicks at the end of a draw.
There are surprises, and underdogs can win.......way more often than in basketball.
Regarding the question about whether a spinning black hole would need to expend energy to "drag" space-time, perhaps we can consider that an electromagnetic wave will propagate through empty space without necessitating an expenditure of energy to keep the electric and magnetic fields "waving"?
@6:55, occasional snarky is not only ok, but encouraged & well received & a good learning tool.
I really enjoyed your recent discussion with Sir Roger Penrose, thought provoking ideas .
It's very nice to see somebody that's cosmically aware conscience of who and what we really are thank you for not being some make-believe but actually truthful being thank you so much
And that the teacher and the students are all one in the same
1:46:42 (paraphrased) "I do what I want." 🤩
I like to hear your mind process thank you . Great explanations of topics thank you .
Thank you, Prof., for such a candid and exciting episode.
Sean Carroll, you are AWESOME! I have a socio-illogical statistical question that has been bothering me: How can this podcast episode have 101,000 views, but only 790 likes? (One of which that's mine) I feel like this ratio should be anomalous, but I tend to see levels of this kind of disparity more often than not for non-shameless-pop-culture media that has educational, informative, and valuable content. What is up with people?
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts! 😁👍
Sean we can all rise above negative thoughts and criticism and hate that we don't really need to make a session of it but just to become aware and let people know that you're aware and that you aren't that kind of a person thank you you're a beautiful person and don't dwell on what people think negatively about you and your ideas because the same as mine and I support you thank you !
sortition ist not neccesarily just for hot button issues. you can have sortition for the whole senat. i didn´t listend to the podcast you mentioned but i´m sure it must´ve come up there as well. it´s my favourite of all systems since it dratically cuts down corruption, and might even eliminate it completely depending on the details of the implementation. you treat senate duty like jury duty and you have to do it and are well paid to do it.
I rarely disagree with you Sean but my family watched Glass Onion over Christmas. We all felt that while it started very well and was amusing, the plot and motivations were quite weak and it really failed to deliver satisfaction in the end.
So that's 8 elements to subtract from your conjectured universal set. 🙂
Have a merry christmas and happy new year
Regarding the first story... In an interview I saw recently with Neil deGrasse Tyson he was pushed into discussing race, which he quickly admitted was something he had always avoided speaking about publicly; although he politely answered the questions posed to him. His approach to helping break down the barriers, for those that clearly need a little help, was simply to let his public/media work play out like anyone else in his position and essentially let those that would otherwise see a difference work out for themselves how and why their past 'bias' was wrong. I think there are a few minority groups that need to try an equally intelligent path to messaging the public and understand that a heavy handed approach to altering the attitude of what is probably an even smaller minority is likely increasing the number of intolerant people rather than reducing it.
What are your thoughts on the Poincare recurrence theorem? And what makes it seem untrue to you?
Zeus simultaneously sets off his two entangled eagles : one from the
Tulomaa River Delta and the other from the Blue Nile Rivulet to determine the Delfi Temple's building site superposition right in the middle of their incoming flights...
How does it happen to be...?!?
With my outmost/utmost respect and cordial greetings...
Seen, Shaun, Shawn, confusing! Can i just call you Carrol?
I wouldn't say reason is a slave of passions (that would mean the limbic system to overcome the neocortex which seems absurd). But there's an emotion intelligence . for instance, love is the deepest understanding even if we don't know how and why.
2:59:22 "The great filter". Thanks for taking my question! made my day i also think there is more likely no great filter and (intelligent) life is simply incredibly rare. but assuming there is one, i extend a bit here since i kept the question as short as possible. i would see a failed experiment more in the future, a few decades, maybe a century, basically before spreading meaningfully to other planets. and not even necessarely in conjuction with an accelerator. i'd also say, it's rather unlikely for the reason you stated, even with future generations of accelerators. it would be something that looks harmless, maybe not even high energy. we should also keep in mind, that just because we are overwhelmed by the size of the universe, doesn't make us unimportant, we are very special, or one could say, a disturbance. we are on the verge on being able to control, understand, manipulate or even create new biological live. the dangers are clear there. but the same can be said in the realm of physics. my theory is, an event that destroys the planet, the contagion would be restricted to the celestial object where the event happened.
Check out rare earth hypothesis on Wikipedia! Yeah the earth is very rare in that most of the universe gets exposed to supernovas which would obliterate complex life!
There's a ton of other filters such as the size and position of the Moon, tilt of the Earth, stability of the Sun, composition of the Earth and magnetic sphere! Stability of our solar system with gas giants farther away from the Sun than us!
But the main one has been our luck of being far from any supernovas for billions of years! Anyway I personally don't think there's any other civilizations in our universe I think we are one-off fluke
If you take about 10 or 15 different factors and the odds of each of them occurring together is one in a 1000 or 10000...
We're lucky that tiny black holes evaporate quickly. I think that would be one way physicists could destroy the earth if they made a small BH that grew. I worried about that until hearing they evaporate super fast.
@@mcpr5971 in Stephen Hawking we trust! i do wonder what would happen though. a nano black hole would probably fall immediately towards the center of the earth, gobling up matter on his way down. i guess the liquid core of earth would keep falling in, since nothing is orbiting there in the first place, until, with a bit of "luck" the solid part of earth builds some sort of stable shell/construction arround it.
edit: after some researching, like always it's more complicated. eg, even though earth is only spinning once a day, conservation of momentum dictates that the matter falling towards the black hole would start spinning close to the speed of light, since it can't spin faster, it will create a violent accretion disc spinning arround the black hole. it's going to to take some time (hours/weeks), but earth would partly be consumed, partly thrown into space and partly building disc of dust arround the black hole. hail Hawkings :-) this might quite possibly be a doomsday weapon. yes, it evaporates, but what if we can build something like a nuclear bomb, creating upon impact a big enough black hole to survive the fraction of a second to start falling towards the center of the earth and gobble up more than it evaporates.
@@mcpr5971 You wouldn't really have to worry about it in that case either, for two reasons. One is that our colliders *can't* make black holes, we just don't go anywhere near the right energy scales. The smallest possible black hole is of the plank mass. But maybe theory is wrong and somehow our colliders could make black holes. It still wouldn't matter, because the tiny black hole has such a small horizon that it won't interact much with other particles and won't grow at any noticeable rate.
Intelligence being incredibly rare still means there's a great filter, just in our past. It could be that life itself is incredibly rare, in that case the great filter would be the difficult of abiogenesis. It could be that life is common but complex, multi-cellular life is incredibly rare, in which case the great filter would be at *that* transition. Of course, it could also be that the great filter is in our future, and it seems that the's distinction that you're making here, you think it's in our past and thus we don't have to worry. I hope so!
My post is just a comment on the usage of the term "great filter", which applies to any of these possible explanations.
The statement "the flip of a coin has a binary outcome" is not generally considered problematic -- despite the 'complexity' if it sometimes landing in its edge.
I think if you consider in general that "life is better than not life" or something similar to this, and if you consider at least that a universe which cannot create life or technology and which is only capable of generic tasks (those of less complexity than biochemical processes) that A) the number of possible tasks increases exponentially the more complex kinds of life you allow into the world and B) the more points of value, valuability and potentially valuable ecological or information services become available. If then you become a life-value pragmatist later - not every living being has value qua living - then this position becomes explicitly untenable for the prior reasons. That is to say if not every life had some kind of intrinsic value in the greater theory of the value of life, then entirely non-living situations might sometimes be equally valuable to any living situations and so why not have no life?
So how do you reconcile this? Would you hold onto pragmatism and discard the general conclusion life is better than not life? Perhaps sometimes not life isn't much better than life, such as in states where only terrible deaths are possible. But these seem to be the outskirts of all possible situations. Or would you conclude, and this seems more tenable to me, that all forms of life carry some kind of vector of potential value qua living and qua the organism and therefore that all life at least kind of matters and of course finally that every life at least kind of matters?
If we end up at that conclusion, then isn't the next great question "how do we ensure every possible life matters the most it can?"
try to think of the simulation as a function rather than a process, this is this, but has to be this in order to become this, just as the human body, easy to tie down to emotions, niches or ego bitterness, but the body is also technological and part of the universal expansion.
2:27:00 re carnivores, agree with your position and reasoning, but would claim the “crucial difference” is the ability to care for oneself and others, not the ability to fear death. Even rudimentary care, like an insect cleaning its wings (or a cat cleaning its kittens) is a special type of complexity, way more special than mechanically growing wings or bearing kittens.
1:40:00 The interior " *maximal* " 3- volume of a black hole is actually well defined.
It's a time dependent , slice independent/ generally covariant quantity ( the interior of a black hole - the "trapped region" - is not static, even if the exterior is - classically ).
The quantitative calculation was initially done by Christodoulou and Rovelli for the Schwarzschild black hole ( 2014 ) and then other theorists continued with numerical calculations for the rotating and charged black holes.
So, the interior spatial volume is growing bigger as time goes by, and interestingly, this continues for a long time even after Hawking evaporation starts shrinking the area of the horizon as estimations have shown in subsequent papers.
This is a great example of how to pick something simple apart and make it way over complicated. You can do this with anything. You could break down tying your shoe into a 200 step process. That's what we have here.
Hi Sean my name is Robert and I'll get right to the point that universe will slow to a stand still,no more expansion, with galaxy’s and planets,ect.will go on spinning and orbiting . What do you think ?
Does time have to be observed?
Audrey II
"Little Shop of Horrors" is about an awkward young man named Seymour who raises an exotic plant that he names Audrey II after the woman he secretly loves. But the plant turns out to not only be carnivorous but also from outer space and with plans to take over the world.
I have to laugh about the discussion about biological reproductive processes. Gametogenesis in Angiosperm in a plant physiology class was an eye opener to a previously simplistic Catholic view of procreation!
Poor Audrey II ...What a little shop of horrors!!!Audrey is Not only carnivorous! Audrey is Not only from outer space! Audrey has Synergid Cells, ANTIpodal cells and Degenerative Megaspores involved in her reproductive cycle.
🐍Heaven forbid, don’t feed her Seymour!!🌺
Dear Sean, I’m an early, 2nd episode of “The greatest Ideas”, follower. I’m not a patreon so I know it’s unlikely you will read this and less likely you will respond because you discriminate between those who can & do support you and those who can’t afford & don’t support you, which is completely okay by me and wouldn’t want it any other way but I must disagree in many,not all, things you had to say on the politicalization of the “trans” ideology. You came down on the non-progressive side for initiating the politicalization. You went quickly on to how it was about denying rights, harassment, bullying and physical harm. None of which is acceptable and never has acceptable to any well-intentioned, informed individual. And it never was about bathrooms. It was about changing rooms, open locker rooms and communal showers that progressives insisted on and President Obama instituted. It was then and only the the “right” politicized the debate.
Yes, I do feel better now and I you rethink and carefully choose you words in the future, because you sometime fall into trap of tribal thinking. We use to call it groupthink.
Sincerely,
Bill Carey
Around 19:30, I think you made an improper move by overlaying devious or disease on something extremely rare. The cases of intersex are extraordinarily rare. Why would you add “devious” or “disease” as though that’s what the other side of the non-bigoted and honest interlocutors are doing. They are not calling intersex “devious” or a “disease.” What they say is it’s extremely rare. There’s nothing wrong with that language, but you snuck this in.
I really do like your work. You’re insanely brilliant. But I think that was a casuistic move on your part.
About the first question, on a purely objective level I think it's clear that the correct statement is that sex is basically binary and being intersex is a deformity. But it's important to keep in mind here that you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who isn't deformed in some minor way, for example I myself am colorblind. The problem arises when politically motivated people try to make the move from that to some kind of value judgment about people. Also, the analogy with humans being bipedal is perfect, because that is also a true statement but it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to be accommodating and think about things like wheelchair accessibility.
On voting please just include more parties and drop the win all votes in a state policy.. I know it’s not easy but the feeling your vote is wasted because the opposition wins even your vote
Being born left handed is not a deformities. Being born without a right arm is.
self-perception is one of the most misleading points to go off, how could you possibly have an accurate self-perception given all personal bias (ex.. confirmation bias )
If I was a patron I'd ask: What if there's not just three spatial dimensions, but an infinite number (or a very large number) plus one of time? Might that explain the many shapes in string theory?
He discusses this i one of his videos of Biggest Ideas in the Universe. In any system above 3 dimensions orbits are not stable. Stars and Galaxies and solar Systems can't form because the things orbit around each other. It is simply unviable. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime#Privileged_character_of_3.2B1_spacetime
@@vykintasmorkvenas6839 what made u think this person thought he was the only one?
@@vykintasmorkvenas6839 People are interested in perspectives - in this case, Sean's.
It’s such a wonderful thing having Sean pop up with a new mindscape!!
This dude is hallucinating
I just wanted to clarify a bit because I felt your explanation of gender dysphoria was not quite hitting the mark.
Gender dysphoria is specifically the distress one feels when there is a mismatch between one's gender identity and some aspect of their gender expression. So for instance a trans woman might be distressed because they have not transitioned yet and so what they see in the mirror does not match what they internally perceive their gender identity to be. In simple terms a trans woman doesn't like looking like a man. The antonym of gender dysphoria is gender euphoria which is just when they match. All people, cis or trans, like when their gender expression matches how they they think it should be. Both come in many different forms, different aspects of our expression that can trigger these feelings, voice, cloths, hair, body, name, what words people use to describe you, ect. Chronic dysphoria can lead to depression and things like that. (source I am a trans lady)
Sometimes you read the original philosopher because no one actually knows what the hell he's talking about, including the original philosopher.
Thank you for your work
To those who think mathematics is invented:
Are you trying to argue that aliens will have different mathematics to us? That they wouldn't know 1+1=2?
It really is that simple. They would use different symbols and perhaps have a different format but the underlying mathatics would be the same. Thus, mathematics is discovered.
This issue is so people can listen to themselves talk and lecture others. It’s exhausting. “Most” people have only ever met someone that was either a boy or a girl, and when they say people are either men or women, of course this has been their experience!! We all know of the very small percentage of us that fall somewhere in the middle, BUT nobody is referring to this slight percentage! People are referring to the vast majority with which they have interacted! As in most things in life we stick to the middle or the norms in our conversational language.
All of this fancy language and intellectual tap dancing to twist yourself into a pretzel to make sense of this adds to the noise of society which is already super noisy.!😱 our bandwidth if full! Just an opinion.
Does ‘should’ exist outside language? My answer: no.
As far as data profiles go, I am certainly interested in the gametes of who I want to date. I want children
Though I usually enquire by simply saying 'sex'.
Being able to have kids is very 'human scale'.
I can call you a name as well - excellent. I like your lectures a lot (although i disagree that Life isn't a localized diminution of entropy, to be possible it needs an each time more entropic environment - peanuts). Keep on the good work.
the best player in the world has just missed 2 penalties from open-play @ the world cup. i think the coin flipping after game argument is closer to describing your concept of high-scoring basketball :)
In our western democracy every citizen deserves and is guaranteed full rights, regardless of individual opinions..
@@vykintasmorkvenas6839
nice Propaganda... 🙄
@@vykintasmorkvenas6839 "dangerous to others" in whose opinion? I may think the Republican party is dangerous to others but they are citizens, too, and I wouldn't deny them their constitutional rights.
@@vykintasmorkvenas6839
a government that spends 8 years bombing their own civilians HAS no right to exist.
just an opinion
just like yours
@@vykintasmorkvenas6839 "-Watson, I'll trouble you for the net!"
@@vykintasmorkvenas6839 ..rights 'regardless of opinions'.
Tbh I love the snark and I love how you directly talk about many things most avoid from the same perspective I’d come from. I’m always looking to be a bit more scientifically educated about the first subject you tackle. I think it’s well established that homosexuality is a natural adaptation that helps many different species on earth to survive. It’s also well established that many diff species of animals engage in many different behaviors that could be viewed as homosexual. When we examine animals it seems being gay is like having eyes or arms it’s so beneficial to the pursuit of staying alive that almost every species evolves in that direction
Love you dude. Wish there were more voices like yours in the world. I have two questions for you. One science and one more of a personal opinion thing.
I hope this question hasn’t been asked and I missed it. If anyone knows please direct me if so.
Can you theoretically sharpen a pencil to a point that is microscopic and invisible? Could you theoretically stab a person many times with a microscopic spike of the hardest substance plausible from 1,000 feet away say you’re on a building and they are on a stage? Is it plausible for a killer to use a microscopic weapon in plain view because it is invisible? Can I make an object that has a tip that is invisible to the human eye but can be felt by human touch?
2) What is your opinion of Noam Chomsky. Have you ever met or spoken, debated? I think I heard you mention him in an adversarial way.
So why animals cry, scream, and run away? They are clearly afraid. Also they clearly suffer the confinement and bad treatment in the meat business. No matter how different we humans are from them, they are clearly sentient and moral beings.
When did he say animals can't feel fear or suffer??
@@WayFinder42 don't have the time to watch it all again just to find it for you. People who eat animals have to live in this cognitive dissonance of denying their sentience. That said, Ireally like Sean Carroll, don't get me wrong. Have you listened to the whole podcast and missed the part where he talks about the animals?
Boop
What's wrong with Einstein's famous formula? She claims that the speed of light cannot be overcome because as the speed increases, the mass of the object that we accelerate to the speed of light also increases. But this is absurd! The mass cannot be "almost infinite". Firstly, the question immediately arises with the collapse of the mass, especially for a mass that tends to infinity. In addition, everyone forgets about time dilation in these arguments. In fact, the mass that we accelerate needs more and more energy each time because the time for the accelerated object slows down more and more. And when you reach the speed at which time for the object to stop, you need an infinite amount of energy. And the mass turns out to have nothing to do with it. It will always be the same. If you want, it will be what position you personally will take in relation to the mass. And this takes us on such a road... In which the superposition and the wave function become pale shadows.
This is one of the reasons why gravity is not a force. Are you ready to discuss it? I think science has brought itself to a dead end.
I agree with most everything you're saying in the beginning, expect when it comes to your pronunciation of the term "gamete"...
Jk
If you want to create a world with less suffering, you don't eat animals. Simple as that. It's not only about life per se. Even if all animals would reincarnate, and they would know it, in the current world they still suffer when they are prepared for meal (= killed). Unless you fix that, the only way to reduce suffering is not to eat animals.
What about stray dogs? India is suffering from millions per city forever barking biting. Many people feed them but no-one helps control their numbers..is culling justified?
"G'meet"!? Really!? Please tell me this is some weird idiosyncratic pronunciation. It's actually "Gam-meet", right?
ASK ME ANYTHING
It's not about definitions and who's right. It's about whether or not the government will oppress a group of people. Why should trans people be oppressed?
The average number of legs for human beings is less than 2... just sayin...
19:10 i think therein lie a lot of the problems with this topic. according to oxford dictionary normal is: conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected.
what´s the problem with beeing not normal, statistically trans people aren´t normal, what´s the problem with that? nobody said you you have to scale your respect for people to their normalcy. people have equal rights no matter what. everything that´s not in the rough center of the bell curve is not normal, so what? i could never understand what peoples problem with beeing not normal is, who´d wanna be normal to begin with?
Thanks for having the courage to take on some difficult questions.
I'm
I enjoy mindscape, but the "circle of morality" opinion at around 2:28:00 is pure nonsense! Continuing the food theme, it is classic "having cake and eating it".
I agree with a lot said about the gender debate. However, I think you might be understimating the moddy waters of how psychology and biology is connected. Because it is not very well understood, and that is probably what should actually be discussed :)
muddy hehe*
I appreciate your thoughtful response on the subject of the complexity of human sexuality, though I do not think gender dysphoria a "disease" (I'm guessing you misspoke?).
Transwomen are Transwomen not women.
Terrible 1st :30min
Love your physics topics but why is there a trend for youtube physicists to claim a higher knowledge and a moral authority on other topics and issues (typically politics)?
Politics is for everyone, definitionally in a democracy. Also, it's valuable to hear takes from intelligent people from all walks of life in many different areas besides politics. That's sort of the theme of mindscape, Sean talks to experts in all fields, not just physics (though normal a science)
@@seionne85 absolutely agree. Sean definitely doesn't claim a higher knowledge of those topics based on his expertise in physics. He does have a higher than average knowledge of philosophy and politics because he has devoted many years to educating himself in those areas, and he is always the first person to let you know when he is speaking on a topic in which he is not an expert.
prolly because people like Sean lean more towards Reason and Less Ideology...
Yea it's often cringe. But then what would I gripe about in the comments? Ranked-choice voting would help break up the political duopoly, achieve much better representation than the current system and it's simple enough! Get educated, Sean!
The viability of third political parties is paramount for our future. The toxicity we have *depends* on there being only two. We'll continue off this cliff until the political duopoly is broken up. Ranked-choice doesn't prevent people from picking only one if they want... Thanks Sean.
While I appreciate the viewpoint, I just cannot get behind trans women competing against biological women in most sports. It's been pretty obvious there's certain advantages that no amount of hormone therapy can take away from those trans women especially in high school sports.
I also don't know if I can allow my daughter to get dressed/undressed in same locker room as she males, it creeps me out to think of a trans waiving their ding-dongs around in front of a bunch of underage biological young women, it just rubs me the wrong way and they definitely shouldn't have to see that without and kind of choice in the matter...would you want to see that? (put yourself in their shoes)
17:45 for all the claims of others pushing agendas it sure does sound like you're pushing an agenda.
For those who continue to believe that sex is binary-at least learn to mind your own business.
👍
How scientific!
@@Bandit19990
why, what's going to happen??? #CultureWarStereotypes 👎
@@Bandit19990
"Always two steps away from pedophilia."
🤪Fox News Viewers🤦♂
@@Bandit19990
you don't have to be Murikkkan to Think like one... 🤫
Not a patreon but would love to know what you think the impact that ChatGPT open AI will have on eduction? @seancarroll
Quantum fluctuations - the modern physicists' god of the gaps.