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

Neuroscience has given us great insights into how our brains work. But there is still room for purely humanistic disciplines to help us think through our thoughts and emotions, not to mention the meaning of our lives. Mari Ruti is a professor of English literature, with expertise in critical theory, gender studies, and psychoanalysis, especially the work of French theorist Jacques Lacan. We talk about the psychological drive that is motivated by what Lacan calls "lack," which is related to "desire." We use this as a way to think about such essential human experiences as mourning, creativity, and love. (We don't talk about love enough here on the podcast.) Support Mindscape on Patreon. Mari Ruti received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of critical theory and gender and sexuality studies at the University of Toronto. She is the co-editor of the Psychoanalytic Horizons book series for Bloomsbury. U Toronto web page Amazon.com author page Semantic scholar Wikipedia Twitter

The arrow of time — all the ways in which the past differs from the future — is a fascinating subject because it connects everyday phenomena (memory, aging, cause and effect) to deep questions in physics and philosophy. At its heart is the fact that entropy increases over time, which in turn can be traced to special conditions in the early universe. David Wallace is one of the world's leading philosophers working on the foundations of physics, including space and time as well as quantum mechanics. We talk about how increasing entropy gives rise to the arrow of time, and what it is about the early universe that makes this happen. Then we cannot help but connecting this story to features of the Many-Worlds (Everett) interpretation of quantum mechanics. Support Mindscape on Patreon. David Wallace received a D.Phil. in Physics and a D.Phil. in Philosophy from Oxford University. He is currently W.A. Mellon Professor of Philosophy of Science, with joint appointments in the Philosophy Department and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum Theory According to the Everett Interpretation. Among his honors are the Lakatos Award for outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science. His most recent book is Philosophy of Physics: A Very Short Introduction. Web site PhilPeople profile Google Scholar publications Amazon.com author page

Natural selection has done a pretty good job at creating a wide variety of living species, but we humans can't help but wonder whether we could do better. Using existing genomes as a starting point, biologists are getting increasingly skilled at designing organisms of our own imagination. But to do that, we need a better understanding of what different genes in our DNA actually do. Elizabeth Strychalski and collaborators recently announced the construction of a synthetic microbial organism that self-reproduces just like a normal unicellular creature. This work will help us understand the roles of genes in reproduction, one step on the road to making DNA molecules and artificial cells that will perform a variety of medical and biological tasks. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Elizabeth Strychalski received her Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University. She is the founder and current leader of the Cellular Engineering Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. She serves on the steering group for the Build-A-Cell collaboration. NIST web page Google Scholar publications Talk on Controlling Biology with Complexity "Genetic requirements for cell division in a genomically minimal cell," Pelletier et al.

How can data be biased? Isn't it supposed to be an objective reflection of the real world? We all know that these are somewhat naive rhetorical questions, since data can easily inherit bias from the people who collect and analyze it, just as an algorithm can make biased suggestions if it's trained on biased datasets. A better question is, how do biases creep in, and what can we do about them? Catherine D'Ignazio is an MIT professor who has studied how biases creep into our data and algorithms, and even into the expression of values that purport to protect objective analysis. We discuss examples of these processes and how to use data to make things better. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Catherine D'Ignazio received a Master of Fine Arts from Maine College of Art and a Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab. She is currently an assistant professor of Urban Science and Planning and Director of the Data+Feminism Lab at MIT. She is the co-author, with Lauren F. Klein, of the book Data Feminism. Web site MIT web page Google Scholar publications Data + Feminism Lab Wikipedia Twitter

It's not easy, figuring out the fundamental laws of physics. It's even harder when your chosen methodology is to essentially start from scratch, positing a simple underlying system and a simple set of rules for it, and hope that everything we know about the world somehow pops out. That's the project being undertaken by Stephen Wolfram and his collaborators, who are working with a kind of discrete system called "hypergraphs." We talk about what the basic ideas are, why one would choose this particular angle of attack on fundamental physics, and how ideas like quantum mechanics and general relativity might emerge from this simple framework. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Stephen Wolfram received his Ph.D. in physics from Caltech. He is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, and the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language. Among his awards are a MacArthur Fellowship. Among his books is A New Kind of Science. He recently launched the Wolfram Physics Project. Web site Wolfram Research Talk on Computation and Fundamental Physics Amazon.com author page Wikipedia Twitter

Welcome to the July 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable size — 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! Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Religion is an important part of the lives of billions of people around the world, but what religious belief actually amounts to can vary considerably from person to person. Some believe in an anthropomorphic, judgmental God; others conceive of God as more transcendent and conceptual; some are animists who attribute spiritual essence to creatures and objects; and many more. I talk with writer and religious scholar Reza Aslan about his view of religion as a vocabulary constructed by human beings to express a connection with something beyond the physical world — why one might think that, and what it implies about how we should go about living our lives. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Reza Aslan received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of numerous books, including No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam; Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth; and God: A Human History. He has also worked in television, producing and writing documentaries, and serving as a consulting producer for the drama series The Leftovers. He recently started a podcast, Metaphysical Milkshake, with actor Rainn Wilson. Web site UCR web page Amazon.com author page Wikipedia Twitter IMDb profile page

Depending on who you listen to, quantum computers are either the biggest technological change coming down the road or just another overhyped bubble. Today we're talking with a good person to listen to: John Preskill, one of the leaders in modern quantum information science. We talk about what a quantum computer is and promising technologies for actually building them. John emphasizes that quantum computers are tailor-made for simulating the behavior of quantum systems like molecules and materials; whether they will lead to breakthroughs in cryptography or optimization problems is less clear. Then we relate the idea of quantum information back to gravity and the emergence of spacetime. (If you want to build and run your own quantum algorithm, try the IBM Quantum Experience.) Support Mindscape on Patreon. John Preskill received his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University. He is currently the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech and the Davis Leadership Chair at the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, as well as an Amazon Scholar at Amazon Web Services. Before moving into quantum information, he was a leading researcher in quantum field theory and black holes. He is the winner of multiple bets with Stephen Hawking. Caltech Theory Group web page Caltech IQIM web page Google Scholar publications Blog posts at Quantum Frontiers Wikipedia Twitter

It's all well and good to talk abstractly about morality and justice, but at some point you have to sit down and figure out what to do about people who break the rules. In our modern legal system, mostly that involves incarceration, especially for so-called "street crimes." Here in the US, we've taken that strategy to extremes, leading the world in the number of incarcerated people per capita. How do we decide who goes to prison, and how should we decide? I talk with criminologist Charis Kubrin on how the justice system distinguishes guilt from innocence. We discuss one interesting issue at length: the use of rap lyrics written by defendants as evidence of guilt. What role should artistic creations play in deciding someone's culpability of a crime? Support Mindscape on Patreon. Charis Kubrin received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. She is currently a professor of Criminology and Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She is co-author of the textbook Introduction to Criminal Justice: a Sociological Perspective. Among her awards are the Ruth Shonie Cavan Award and the Coramae Richey Mann Award from the American Society of Criminology, and the W.E.B. DuBois Award and the Paul Tappan Award from the Western Society of Criminology. Web page Google Scholar publications Wikipedia Twitter

Any system in which politicians represent geographical districts with boundaries chosen by the politicians themselves is vulnerable to gerrymandering: carving up districts to increase the amount of seats that a given party is expected to win. But even fairly-drawn boundaries can end up quite complex, so how do we know that a given map is unfairly skewed? Math comes to the rescue. We can ask whether the likely outcome of a given map is very unusual within the set of all possible reasonable maps. That's a hard math problem, however — the set of all possible maps is pretty big — so we have to be clever to solve it. I talk with geometer Jordan Ellenberg about how ideas like random walks and Markov chains help us judge the fairness of political boundaries. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Jordan Ellenberg received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1998. He is currently the John D. MacArthur professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin. He competed in the International Mathematical Olympiad three times, winning a gold medal twice. Among his awards are the MAA Euler Book Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of How Not to Be Wrong and the novel The Grasshopper King. His new book is Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else. Web site Wisconsin web page Google Scholar publications Amazon author page Wikipedia Twitter

Welcome to the June 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable size — 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! Support Mindscape on Patreon.

You observe a phenomenon, and come up with an explanation for it. That's true for scientists, but also for literally every person. (Why won't my car start? I bet it's out of gas.) But there are literally an infinite number of possible explanations for every phenomenon we observe. How do we invent ones we think are promising, and then decide between them once invented? Simon DeDeo (in collaboration with Zachary Wojtowicz) has proposed a way to connect explanatory values ("simplicity," "fitting the data," etc) to specific mathematical expressions in Bayesian reasoning. We talk about what makes explanations good, and how they can get out of control, leading to conspiracy theories or general crackpottery, from QAnon to flat earthers. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Simon DeDeo received his Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton University. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Web site Carnegie Mellon web page "From Probability to Consilience: How Explanatory Values Implement Bayesian Reasoning," Wojtowicz and DeDeo Axiom of Chance blog Google Scholar publications

The challenge to a theoretical physicist pushing beyond our best current theories is that there are too many ways to go. What parts of the existing paradigm do you keep, which do you discard, and why make those choices? Among today's theorists, Lee Smolin is unusually reflective about what principles should guide us in the construction of new theories. And he is happy to suggest radical revisions to well-established ideas, in areas from the nature of time to the workings of quantum mechanics. We talk about time, the universe, the role of philosophy, a new picture of spacetime, and the future of physics. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Lee Smolin received his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University. He is currently on the faculty of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, where he was a founding member. Among his awards are the Majorana Prize, the Klopsteg Memorial Award, and the Buchalter Cosmology Prize. He is the author of several books, most recently Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum. Web site Perimeter Institute page Google Scholar publications Amazon author page Wikipedia

Democracy posits the radical idea that political power and legitimacy should ultimately be found in all of the people, rather than a small group of experts or for that matter arbitrarily-chosen hereditary dynasties. Nevertheless, a good case can be made that the bottom-up and experimental nature of democracy actually makes for better problem-solving in the political arena than other systems. Political theorist Henry Farrell (in collaboration with statistician Cosma Shalizi) has made exactly that case. We discuss the general idea of solving social problems, and compare different kinds of macro-institutions — markets, hierarchies, and democracies — to ask whether democracies aren't merely politically just, but also an efficient way of generating good ideas. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Henry Farrell received his Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University. He is currently the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He was the 2019 recipient of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics & Technology. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and co-leader of the Moral Economy of Technology initiative at Stanford University. He is a co-founder of Crooked Timber blog, as well as the Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post. Web site Johns Hopkins web page "Pursuing Cognitive Democracy," Farrell & Shalizi Crooked Timber posts Washington Post columns Wikipedia Twitter

For as much as people talk about food, a good case can be made that we don't give it the attention or respect it actually deserves. Food is central to human life, and how we go about the process of creating and consuming it — from agriculture to distribution to cooking to dining — touches the most mundane aspects of our daily routines as well as large-scale questions of geopolitics and culture. Rachel Laudan is a historian of science whose masterful book, Cuisine and Empire, traces the development of the major world cuisines and how they intersect with politics, religion, and war. We talk about all this, and Rachel gives her pitch for granting more respect to "middling cuisine" around the world. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Rachel Laudan received a Ph. D. in History and Philosophy of Science from University College London. She retired from academia after teaching at Carnegie-Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, Virginia Tech, and the University of Hawaii. Among her awards are the Jane Grigson/Julia Child prize of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and the IACP Cookbook Award for Best Book in Culinary History. Web site Blog Amazon author page Wikipedia Twitter

Welcome to the May 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable size — 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! Support Mindscape on Patreon.

"A way that math can make the world a better place is by making it a more interesting place to be a conscious being." So says mathematician Emily Riehl near the start of this episode, and it's a good summary of what's to come. Emily works in realms of topology and category theory that are far away from practical applications, or even to some non-practical areas of theoretical physics. But they help us think about what is possible and how everything fits together, and what's more interesting than that? We talk about what topology is, the specific example of homotopy — how things deform into other things — and how thinking about that leads us into groups, rings, groupoids, and ultimately to category theory, the most abstract of them all. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Emily Riehl received a Ph.D in mathematics from the University of Chicago. She is currently an associate professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University. Among her honors are the JHU President's Frontier Award and the Joan & Joseph Birman Research Prize. She is author of Categorical Homotopy Theory, and co-author of the upcoming Elements of ∞-Category Theory. She competed on the United States women's national Australian rules football team, where she served as vice-captain. Johns Hopkins web page Google Scholar publications Quanta profile Wikipedia Twitter

The world has gone through a tough time with the COVID-19 pandemic. Every catastrophic event is unique, but there are certain commonalities to how such crises play out in our modern interconnected world. Historian Niall Ferguson wrote a book from a couple of years ago, The Square and the Tower, that considered how an interplay between networks and hierarchies has shaped the history of the world. This analysis is directly relevant to how we deal with large-scale catastrophes, which is the subject of his new book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. We talk about global culture as a complex system, and what it means for our ability to respond to crisis. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Niall Ferguson received his D.Phil. degree from the University of Oxford. He is currently the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of numerous book, several of which have been adapted into television documentaries, and has helped found several different companies. He won an international Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money, and has previously been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. Web site Hoover Institution web page Amazon author page Wikipedia Twitter

I've been a professional physicist since the 1980's, and not once over the course of my career has a particle-physics experiment produced a completely surprising new result. We've discovered particles (top quark, Higgs boson) and even phenomena (neutrino masses), but nothing we hadn't either predicted or could easily accommodate within the Standard Model of particle physics. That might have changed just this month, with possible confirmations of two "anomalies" in particle-physics measurements involving muons. They might be new physics, or they might just go away. I talk about what it might mean, and (more importantly) how we should feel about the likelihood that these results really do imply physics beyond the Standard Model. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Here are some relevant references for the first result, from LHCb at CERN, that B-mesons are seemingly decaying at different rates into electrons and muons: arxiv paper CERN Courier Scientific American Resonaances And here are some references for the other result, from the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab, on the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon: arxiv paper Fermilab article Lattice QCD calculation Quanta Ars Technica Resonaances Moving the g-2 ring from Brookhaven to Fermilab

Mom, apple pie, and rationality — all things that are unquestionably good, right? But rationality, as much as we might value it, is easier to aspire to than to achieve. And there are more than a few hot takes on the market suggesting that we shouldn't even want to be rational — that it's inefficient or maladaptive. Julia Galef is here to both stand up for the value of being rational, and to explain how we can better achieve it. She distinguishes between the "soldier mindset," where we believe what we're told about the world and march toward a goal, and the "scout mindset," where we're open-minded about what's out there and always asking questions. She makes a compelling case that all things considered, it's better to be a scout. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Julia Galef received a BA in statistics from Columbia University. She is currently a writer and host of the Rationally Speaking podcast. She was a co-founder and president of the Center for Applied Rationality. Her new book is The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't. Web site Rationally Speaking podcast New York magazine profile Wikipedia Twitter

Welcome to the April 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable size — 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! Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Telling a story seems like the most natural, human thing in the world. We all do it, all the time. And who amongst us doesn't think we could be a fairly competent novelist, if we just bothered to take the time? But storytelling is a craft like any other, with its own secret techniques and best practices. Charlie Jane Anders is a multiple-award-winning novelist and story writer, but also someone who has thought carefully about all the ingredients of a good story, from plot and conflict to characters and relationships. This will be a useful conversation for anyone who tells stories, reads novels, or watches movies. Maybe you'll be inspired to finally write that novel. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Charlie Jane Anders studied English and Asian literature at Cambridge University. She is the author of over 100 published works of short fiction and several novels, including the new Young Adult book Victories Greater Than Death. She was co-founder of the website io9, a blog about science and science fiction. She is a frequent event organizer, including the monthly Writers With Drinks. Among her accolades are Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and Crawford awards. She is the co-host, with Annalee Newitz, of the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast. Later this year she will publish Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories. Web site Wikipedia Amazon author page Twitter

In a world flooded with information, everybody necessarily makes choices about what we pay attention to. This basic fact can be manipulated in any number of ways, from advertisers micro-targeting specific groups to repressive governments flooding social media with misinformation, or for that matter well-meaning people passing along news from sketchy sources. Zeynep Tufekci is a sociologist who studies the flow of information and its impact on society, especially through social media. She has provided insightful analyses of protest movements, online privacy, and the Covid-19 pandemic. We talk about how technology has been shaping the information space we all inhabit. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Zeynep Tufekci received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas-Austin. She is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and will be a Visiting Professor at the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University. She is the author of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she publishes the Insight newsletter on Substack. Web site UNC web page Insight @ Substack Google Scholar publications New York Times profile Wikipedia Twitter

"Time" and "the brain" are two of those things that are somewhat mysterious, but it would be hard for us to live without. So just imagine how much fun it is to bring them together. Dean Buonomano is one of the leading neuroscientists studying how our brains perceive time, which is part of the bigger issue of how we construct models of the physical world around us. We talk about how the brain tells time very differently than the clocks that we're used to, using different neuronal mechanisms for different timescales. This brings us to a very interesting conversation about the nature of time itself — Dean is a presentist, who believes that only the current moment qualifies as "real," but we don't hold that against him. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Dean Buonomano received his Ph.D. from the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Texas Medical School, Houston. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at UCLA. His lab studies how the brain perceives time and constructs models of the external physical world. He is the author of Brain Bugs: How the Brain's Flaws Shape our Lives and Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time. Lab web site UCLA web page Google Scholar publications Amazon.com author page Wikipedia Twitter

Imagine two people with exactly the same innate abilities, but one is born into a wealthy family and the other is born into poverty. Or two people born into similar circumstances, but one is paralyzed in a freak accident in childhood while the other grows up in perfect health. Is this fair? We live in a society that values some kind of "equality" — "All men are created equal" — without ever quite specifying what we mean. Elizabeth Anderson is a leading philosopher of equality, and we talk about what really matters about this notion. This leads to down-to-earth issues about employment and the work ethic, and how it all ties into modern capitalism. We end up agreeing that a leisure society would be great, but at the moment there's plenty of work to be done. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Elizabeth Anderson received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University. She is currently the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Among her honors are the MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was named by Prospect magazine as one of the top 50 thinkers of the Covid-19 era. Web site University of Michigan web page New Yorker profile Amazon.com author page Google Scholar publications Wikipedia

You might think that human beings, exhausted by competing for resources and rewards in the real world, would take it easy and stick to cooperation in their spare time. But no; we are fascinated by competition, and invent games and sports to create artificial competition just for fun. These competitions turn out to be wonderful laboratories for exploring concepts like optimization, resource allocation, strategy, and human psychology. Today's guest, Daryl Morey, is a world leader in thinking analytically about sports, as well as the relationship between impersonal data and the vagaries of human behavior. He's currently an executive in charge of the Philadelphia 76ers, but I promise you don't need to be a fan of the Sixers or of basketball or of sports in general to enjoy this wide-ranging conversation. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Daryl Morey received a bachelor's in computer science from Northwestern University, and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He served as general manager for the Houston Rockets from 2007 to 2020, and since November 2020 has been the President for Basketball Operations for the Philadelphia 76ers. He is founder and co-chair of the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. He was voted NBA Executive of the Year in 2018. Philadelphia 76ers Basketball-Reference page Wikipedia Twitter

Welcome to the March 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). With an expanding number of questions, it's become a bit impractical for me to try to rush through and answer them all. So instead, this time I have picked out certain questions to tackle, and grouped some together if they were related. I tried to pick questions on the basis of whether or not I had anything interesting to say in response, but that will of course be in the ear of the listener. Support Mindscape on Patreon.

On a spectrum of philosophical topics, one might be tempted to put mathematics and morality on opposite ends. Math is one of the most pristine and rigorously-developed areas of human thought, while morality is notoriously contentious and resistant to consensus. But the more you dig into the depths, the more alike these two fields appear to be. Justin Clarke-Doane argues that they are very much alike indeed, especially when it comes to questions of "reality" and "objectivity" — but that they aren't quite exactly analogous. We get a little bit into the weeds, but this is a case where close attention will pay off. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Justin Clarke-Doane received his Ph.D. in philosophy from New York University. He is currently Associate Professor of philosophy at Columbia University, as well as an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham and Adjunct Research Associate at Monash University. His book Morality and Mathematics was published in 2020. Web site Columbia web page Google Scholar publications Interview at What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? Heyman Center event

The internet has made it so much easier for people to talk to each other, in a literal sense. But it hasn't necessarily made it easier to have rewarding, productive, good-faith conversations. Here I talk with sociologist Rod Graham about what kinds of conversations the internet does enable, and should enable, and how we can work to make them better. We discuss both how social media are used for nefarious purposes, from cyberbullying to driving extremism, but also how they can be mobilized for more lofty goals. We also get into some of the lost nuances in conventional discussions of race, including how many minorities are more culturally conservative than an oversimplified narrative would lead us to believe, and the tricky relationship between online discourse and social cohesion. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Roderick Graham received his Ph.D. in sociology from the City University of New York. He is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Old Dominion University, and serves as the coordinator of the university's Cybercriminology Bachelor's program. He is the author of The Digital Practices of African-Americans. Web site Old Dominion web page Google Scholar publications Articles on Medium YouTube channel Twitter

In our postmodern world, studying the classics of ancient Greece and Rome can seem quaint at best, downright repressive at worst. (We are talking about works by dead white men, after all.) Do we still have things to learn from classical philosophy, drama, and poetry? Shadi Bartsch offers a vigorous affirmative to this question in two new books coming from different directions. First, she has newly translated the Aeneid, Vergil's epic poem about the founding myth of Rome, bringing its themes into conversation with the modern era. Second, in the upcoming Plato Goes to China, she explores how a non-Western society interprets classic works of Western philosophy, and what that tells us about each culture. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer received her Ph.D. in Classics from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, and multiple teaching awards. She has served as the Editor-in-Chief of Classical Philology, and is the Founding Director of the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. She is developing an upcoming podcast. Web site University of Chicago web page Wikipedia Twitter Amazon author page Washington Post Op-Ed

Welcome to the February 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). This month is in what has been the conventional format, where I just try my best to answer every question. But it's growing a bit unwieldy, so going forward I might just try to pick my favorite questions and answer them in greater detail. We shall see. Support Mindscape on Patreon.

A common argument against free will is that human behavior is not freely chosen, but rather determined by a number of factors. So what are those factors, anyway? There's no one better equipped to answer this question than Robert Sapolsky, a leading psychoneurobiologist who has studied human behavior from a variety of angles. In this conversation we follow the path Sapolsky sets out in his bestselling book Behave, where he examines the influences on our behavior from a variety of timescales, from the very short (signals from the amygdala) to the quite ancient (genetic factors tracing back tens of thousands of years and more). It's a dizzying tour that helps us understand the complexity of human action. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Robert Sapolsky received his Ph.D. in neuroendocrinology from Rockefeller University. He is currently the John and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biology, Neurology, and Neurosurgery at Stanford University. His awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the McGovern Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Wonderfest's Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. Stanford web page Wikipedia Robert Sapolsky Rocks (fan page) Amazon author page YouTube lectures on Human Behavioral Biology IMDb

It's a truism that what we see about the world is a small fraction of all that exists. At the simplest level of physics and biology, our senses are drastically limited; we only see a narrow spectrum of electromagnetic waves, and we only hear a narrow band of sound. We don't feel neutrinos or dark matter at all, even as they pass through our bodies, and we can't perceive microscopic objects. While science can help us overcome some of these limitations, they do shape how we think about the world. Ziya Tong takes this idea and expands it to include the parts of our social and moral worlds that are effectively invisible to us — from where our food comes from to how we decide how wealth is allocated in society. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Ziya Tong received a B.A. in psychology and sociology from the University of British Columbia, and an M.A. in communications from McGill University. She has served as host, writer, director, producer, and reporter from a number of science programs, most notably Daily Planet on Discovery Canada. She is a Trustee of the World Wildlife Fund, and served on the Board of WWF Canada. Her book The Reality Bubble: How Science Reveals the Hidden Truths that Shape Our World was published in 2019. Web site IMDb page WWF page Wikipedia Amazon author page Twitter

Here is a special bonus punishment treat for Mindscape listeners: an interview of me, by David Zierler of the American Institute of Physics's Oral History project. This is a fantastic project that collects interviews with influential physicists of all ages, and apparently sometimes less-influential physicists. So if you'd like to hear my (academic) life story boiled down to a mere four hours, here you go! Support Mindscape on Patreon. It's well worth checking out the AIP Oral History Project website, which has over 1000 fascinating interviews with physicists from different decades. The transcript of this particular interview can be found there. Thanks to David and the AIP for letting us include this as a bonus podcast episode.

As a semi-outsider, it's fun for me to watch as a new era dawns in biology: one that adds ideas from physics, big data, computer science, and information theory to the usual biological toolkit. One of the big areas of study in this burgeoning field is the relationship between the basic bioinformatic building blocks (genes and proteins) to the macroscopic organism that eventually results. That relationship is not a simple one, as we're discovering. Standard metaphors notwithstanding, an organism is not a machine based on genetic blueprints. I talk with biologist and information scientist Michael Levin about how information and physical constraints come together to make organisms and selves. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Michael Levin received his Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard University. He is currently Distinguished Professor and Vannevar Bush Chair in the Biology department at Tufts University, and serves as director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. His work on left-right asymmetric body structures is on Nature's list of 100 Milestones of Developmental Biology of the Century. Tufts web site Allen Center web page Google Scholar publications Twitter

The possible existence of technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations — not just alien microbes, but cultures as advanced (or much more) than our own — is one of the most provocative questions in modern science. So provocative that it's difficult to talk about the idea in a rational, dispassionate way; there are those who loudly insist that the probability of advanced alien cultures existing is essentially one, even without direct evidence, and others are so exhausted by overblown claims in popular media that they want to squelch any such talk. Astronomer Avi Loeb thinks we should be taking this possibility seriously, so much so that he suggested that the recent interstellar interloper `Oumuamua might be a spaceship built by aliens. That got him in a lot of trouble. We talk about the trouble, about `Oumuamua, and the attitude scientists should take toward provocative ideas. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Abraham (Avi) Loeb received his Ph.D. in plasma physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently the Frank B. Baird Jr. professor of science at Harvard University. He served as the Chair of Harvard's Astronomy department from 2011-2020. He is Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Founding Director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative. He is chair of the Advisory Committee for the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative. His new book is Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. Harvard Astronomy web page Center for Astrophysics web page Wikipedia

What is the world made of? How does it behave? These questions, aimed at the most basic level of reality, are the subject of fundamental physics. What counts as fundamental is somewhat contestable, but it includes our best understanding of matter and energy, space and time, and dynamical laws, as well as complex emergent structures and the sweep of the cosmos. Few people are better positioned to talk about fundamental physics than Frank Wilczek, a Nobel Laureate who has made significant contributions to our understanding of the strong interactions, dark matter, black holes, and condensed matter, as well as proposing the existence of time crystals. We talk about what we currently know about fundamental physics, but also the directions in which it is heading, for better and for worse. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Frank Wilczek received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. He is currently the Herman Feshbach professor of physics at the MIT; Founding Director of the T. D. Lee Institute and Chief Scientist at Wilczek Quantum Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Distinguished Professor at Arizona State University; and Professor at Stockholm University. Among his numerous awards are the MacArthur Fellowship, the Nobel Prize in Physics (2004, for asymptotic freedom), membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality. Web site MIT web page Google Scholar publications Nobel biography Profile in Quanta magazine Wikipedia Twitter

The first full week of 2021 has been action-packed for those of us in the United States of America, for reasons you're probably aware of, including a riotous mob storming the US Capitol. The situation has spurred me to take the unusual step of doing a solo podcast in response to current events. But never fear, I'm not actually trying to analyze current events for their own sakes. Rather, I'm using them as a jumping-off point for a more general discussion of how democracy is supposed to work and how we can make it better. We've talked about related topics recently with Cornel West and David Stasavage, but there are things I wanted to say in my own voice that fit well here. Politics is important everywhere, and it's a crucial responsibility for those of us who live in societies that aspire to be participatory and democratic. We have to think these things through, and that's what this podcast is all about. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Apologies to Alexis de Toqueville, who wrote an important book whose name I stole, and who is mentioned nowhere in this episode.

We all know stereotypes about people from different countries; but we also recognize that there really are broad cultural differences between people who grow up in different societies. This raises a challenge when most psychological research is performed on a narrow and unrepresentative slice of the world's population — a subset that has accurately been labeled as WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). Joseph Henrich has argued that focusing on this group has led to systematic biases in how we think about human psychology. In his new book, he proposes a surprising theory for how WEIRD people got that way, based on the Church insisting on the elimination of marriage to relatives. It's an audacious idea that nudges us to rethink how the WEIRD world came to be. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Joseph Henrich received his Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA. He is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Among his awards are a Fulbright scholarship, a Presidential Early Career Award, the Killam Research Prize, and the Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize. His trade books include The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smart, and the new The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Personal web site Lab web site Harvard web page Wikipedia Amazon author page Twitter

Welcome to the third annual Mindscape Holiday Message! Just a chance for me to be a little more chatty and informal than usual, although as it turned out this isn't all that different from a conventional solo episode. With the difference that what I'm talking about — a phenomenon called "cosmic birefringence" — has played a big part in my personal scientific career, so I get to be a bit autobiographical. Every photon has a direction of polarization, which generally remains fixed as the photon travels through space. Birefringence is an effect by which the polarization rotates rather than staying fixed. It can happen in materials, but generally not in outer space. But there are exotic physics ideas that could cause such a rotation, including the dynamical dark energy candidate known as quintessence. People have put limits on such cosmic birefringence for a while now, but recently there was a claim that there might be a nonzero amount of birefringence visible in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background! Still very tentative, but if this hint turns into real evidence, it would big extremely big news for our understanding of physics and cosmology, possibly helping us pinpoint the nature of dark energy. Show notes, links, transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/12/21/holiday-message-2020-the-screwy-universe/

Many characteristics go into making human beings special — brain size, opposable thumbs, etc. Surely one of the most important is language, and in particular the ability to learn new sounds and use them for communication. Many other species communicate through sound, but only a very few — humans, elephants, bats, cetaceans, and a handful of bird species — learn new sounds in order to do so. Erich Jarvis has been shedding enormous light on the process of vocal learning, by studying birds and comparing them to humans. He argues that there is a particular mental circuit in the brains of parrots (for example) responsible for vocal learning, and that it corresponds to similar circuits in the human brain. This has implications for the development of intelligence and other important human characteristics. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Erich Jarvis received his Ph.D. in Animal Behavior and Molecular Neurobehavior from Rockefeller University. He is currently a professor in the Laboratory of Neurogenetics of Language at Rockefeller and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Among his many awards are the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation, an American Philosophical Society Award, a Packard Foundation fellowship, an NIH Director's Pioneer award, Northwestern University's Distinguished Role Model in Science award, and the Summit Award from the American Society for Association Executives. Web site Rockefeller web page Google Scholar publications Wikipedia Talk on vocal learning and the brain Twitter

Getting into the swing of things here with monthly Ask Me Anything episodes. If you missed the explanation last month, there is a Patreon page for people who wish to support Mindscape with a small donation per episode. Benefits include a warm feeling, social status, access to ad-free versions of the podcast, and the ability to ask questions once per month, which I answer over the course of a hilariously long podcast. Thanks to the generosity of Patreon supporters, we are now making the fruits of these monthly adventures available on the regular podcast feed. Here is the December 2020 edition. Note that there won't be a January 2021 edition, as I take a break from podcasting for the holidays. Have a good one everybody! Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Those of us living in democracies tend to take the idea for granted. We forget what an audacious, radical idea it is to put government power into the hands of literally all of the citizens of a country. Where did such an idea come from, and where is it going? Political scientist David Stasavage has written an ambitious history of democracy worldwide, in which he makes a number of unconventional points. The roots of democracy go much further back than we often think; the idea wasn't invented in Athens, but can be found in a large number of ancient societies. And the resurgence of democracy in Europe wasn't because that continent was especially advanced, but precisely the opposite. These insights have implications for what the future of democracy has in store. Support Mindscape on Patreon. David Stasavage received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. He is currently Dean for the Social Sciences and the Julius Silver Professor in the Department of Politics at New York University and an Affiliated Professor in NYU's School of Law. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent book is The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today. Web site NYU web page Google Scholar publications Talk on the history of taxation and fairness Amazon author page Twitter

Aristotle conceived of the world in terms of teleological "final causes"; Darwin, or so the story goes, erased purpose and meaning from the world, replacing them with a bloodless scientific algorithm. But should we abandon all talk of meanings and purposes, or instead conceptualize them as emergent rather than fundamental? Philosophers (and former Mindscape guests) Alex Rosenberg and Daniel Dennett recently had an exchange on just this subject, and today we're going to hear from a working scientist. David Haig is a geneticist and evolutionary biologist who argues that it's perfectly sensible to perceive meaning as arising through the course of evolution, even if evolution itself is purposeless. Support Mindscape on Patreon. David Haig received his Ph.D. in biology from Macquarie University. He is currently the George Putnam Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. His research focuses on evolutionary aspects of cooperation, competition, and kinship, including the kinship theory of genomic imprinting. His new book is From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life. Web site Google Scholar publications Wikipedia Amazon author page Talk on cooperative behavior

Time! It doesn't stop, psychological effects of being under lockdown notwithstanding. How we experience time depends on our situation, but time itself just marches forward. Unless, of course, it's possible to travel to the past, as countless science-fiction scenarios have depicted. But does that really make sense? Couldn't we then change the past, even so dramatically that our own existence would never have happened? In this solo podcast I talk about both the physics and fiction of time travel. I point out that it might be allowed by the laws of physics, and explain how that would work, but that we really don't know. And I try to make sense of some of the less-sensible depictions of cinematic time travel. Coming up with a logical theory that could account for Back to the Future isn't easy, but podcasting isn't for the squeamish. Support Mindscape on Patreon. But wait, there's more! I was contacted by Janna Levin, who we fondly remember from Episode 27. Janna moonlights as Chair and Director of Sciences at Pioneer Works, an institution dedicated to bringing together creative people in art and science. Like the rest of us, they've been looking for ways to offer more online content in these pandemic times, so we thought about ways to collaborate. Here's what they came up with: artist Azikiwe Mohammed has created an animated video backdrop to this podcast episode. The visuals are trippy, colorful, and inspired by (without trying to directly illustrate) what I talk about in the episode. You can check out a brief write-up at the Pioneer Works site, or view the video directly below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHy1j4LiyGQ

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.

Emotions are at the same time utterly central to who we are — where would we be without them? — and also seemingly peripheral to the "real" work our brains do, understanding the world and acting within it. Why do we have emotions, anyway? Are they hardwired into the brain? Lisa Feldman Barrett is one of the world's leading experts in the psychology of emotions, and she emphasizes that they are more constructed and less hard-wired than you might think. How we feel and express emotions can vary from culture to culture or even person to person. It's better to think of emotions of a link between affective response and our behaviors. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Lisa Feldman Barrett received her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Waterloo. She is currently the University Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University. She also holds research appointments at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)/Harvard Medical School in the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Program and at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging in the Department of Radiology. Among her many honors are the Award for Distinguished Service in Psychological Science from the American Psychological Association, the Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Psychological Science, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, and her latest book is Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. Web site Lab web page Northeastern web page Google Scholar profile Amazon author page Talk on How the Brain Creates Emotions Wikipedia Twitter

Imagine you were locked in a sealed room, with no way to access the outside world but a few screens showing a view of what's outside. Seems scary and limited, but that's essentially the situation that our brains find themselves in — locked in our skulls, with only the limited information from a few unreliable sensory modalities to tell them what's going on inside. Neuroscientist David Eagleman has long been interested in how the brain processes that sensory input, and also how we might train it to learn completely new ways of accessing the outside world, with important ramifications for virtual reality and novel brain/computer interface techniques. Support Mindscape on Patreon. David Eagleman received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Baylor College of Medicine. He is currently the CEO of Neosensory, a company that builds sensory-augmentation devices, as well as an adjunct professor at Stanford. His research has involved time perception, synesthesia, and sensory substitution. He is the founder and director of the Center for Science and Law. He is a bestselling author of both fiction and nonfiction. He was the writer and host of the TV show The Brain with David Eagleman, and writer of the Netflix documentary The Creative Brain. His most recent book is Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain. Web site Stanford web page Google Scholar publications Neosensory Talk on The Livewired Brain Amazon author page The Brain with David Eagleman (PBS) Wikipedia Twitter

This episode is published on November 2, 2020, the day before an historic election in the United States. An election that comes amidst growing worries about the future of democratic governance, as well as explicit claims that democracy is intrinsically unfair, inefficient, or ill-suited to the modern world. What better time to take a step back and think about the foundations of democracy? Cornel West is a well-known philosopher and public intellectual who has written extensively about race and class in America. He is also deeply interested in democracy, both in theory and in practice. We talk about what makes democracy worth fighting for, the different traditions that inform it, and the kinds of engagement it demands of its citizens. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Cornel West received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University. He is currently Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University as well as Professor Emeritus at Princeton. He is the author of numerous books, including Race Matters and Democracy Matters. He is a frequent guest on the Bill Maher Show, CNN, C-Span, and Democracy Now, appeared in the Matrix trilogy, and has produced three spoken-word albums. He is the co-host, with Tricia Rose, of the Tight Rope podcast. Web site Harvard web page IndieBound author page Talk on Race, Democracy, and the Humanities Wikipedia Twitter

Erwin Schrödinger's famous book What Is Life? highlighted the connections between physics, and thermodynamics in particular, and the nature of living beings. But the exact connections between living organisms and the flow of heat and entropy remains a topic of ongoing research. Jeremy England is a leader in this field, deriving connections between thermodynamic relations and the processes of life. He is also an ordained rabbi who finds resonances between modern science and passages in the Hebrew Bible. We talk about it all, from entropy fluctuation theorems to how scientists should approach religion. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Jeremy England received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. He is currently Senior Director in the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning group at GlaxoSmithKline. He has been a Rhodes scholar, a Hertz fellow, and was named one of Forbes's "30 Under 30 Rising Stars of Science." His new book is Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things. Web site Google Scholar publications Talk on Non-Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics and Life Amazon author page Wikipedia Twitter