AS243: The Big Picture, with Sean Carroll

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 243. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Alright, this is, uh, oh man, I'm so excited to give you guys this. My guest, who you already know from the episode title, is Sean Carroll. I am so excited to have him. Really, I think you'll hear it in the interview as well, but I'm just so interested in everything that he studies. I mean, everything, every big question Sean Carroll has an interesting answer too, and that's why I was so happy to have him on. So I'm going to go to that, and then I'll give you a few thoughts afterwards. So thanks Joining me right now, I am very happy to say, is Dr. Sean Carroll, of course, physicist at Caltech. Sean, how are you this fine evening?

0:01:32 Sean: Very good, good to be here, oh,

0:01:33 Thomas: As you've probably been able to tell from my emails, I'm really excited to talk to you. I'll just get out of the way very quickly and say that I'm a huge fan of you. I've watched I don't know how many hours of talks and debates and all that online, and it is just an honor to speak to you, thank you so much for coming on.

0:01:50 Sean: Thank you very much, it's, you know, it was my pleasure, it is, if you're going to go to all the effort to write a book about something, then, you kind of like talking about it, by definition, like, it'd be really weird to write book and go, yeah, no, I don't want to talk about that stuff, so, exactly, yes,

0:02:01 Thomas: Absolutely, yeah, that would be bad business. I think, and uh, Absolutely, speaking of the book, I've got it right in front of me, I pre-ordered it some months ago, it's called The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. I highly recommend everyone check that out. Uh, just to start off and give people a general idea, what, uh, what was your, I guess, thesis going into this book and your purpose of writing it?

0:02:24 Sean: Well, I guess if there's any one thesis, it would be that, there's only one universe, there is not sort of separate universes when we talk about what human beings are and what elementary particles are, there are just, those are just different ways of dividing up the universe, And all the different ways we have of talking about it should be compatible with each other, consistent. So even though no one in the world, including me, is an expert on everything I talk about in the book, from physics to philosophy to biology to neuroscience, they do have to be compatible. With each other. And the idea was to sort of show how that compatibility could actually play out.

0:03:01 Thomas: Interesting. Well, one thing that I noticed, and I'm just getting over a cold, sorry for my voice for everybody, but one thing I did notice reading it is that I was shocked to find how much philosophy there was in it. And, oh, go ahead, if you want to talk about that.

0:03:14 Sean: Yeah. I mean, I think that this is part of the set of questions where physics and science and philosophy work together. I'm very quick to say that most science, as it is practiced, doesn't need philosophy at all. But if you want to calculate the spectrum of a certain molecule molecule that is giving off radiation, you don't call in a philosopher for help. But these kinds of questions, you know, how do different levels talk to each other? What are the foundations? Why is there a universe at all? You know, these kind of why questions. Absolutely, philosophy has a huge role to play.

0:03:52 Thomas: Yeah, because in recent years, people like, you know, Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking, and, I think, even Neil deGrasse Tyson have been quoted as saying some very unflattering things about philosophy. Do you think they're mistaken in that? How do you account for that difference in attitude, if it is a difference?

0:04:11 Sean: Yeah, I mean, I think we disagree. I really think that those three people you mentioned and other people are saying what they're saying for different reasons. But again, most scientists don't need to use philosophy. And I think that a lot of scientists have the point of view that if philosophy is useful at all, then it needs to be useful for science. And it hasn't been useful for them, therefore it's not useful. And I don't think that's something I would agree with. It's been, number one, I don't think that that's the reason why philosophy exists. I think there are reasons to do philosophy other than whether it's useful for science or not. And number two, Two, it certainly has been useful for me and for other physicists.

0:04:51 Thomas: Right, right. I like what Dennett said about finding the right questions to ask, or knowing when you're not sure what the right question is, that's what philosophy is best for. What do you think about that?

0:05:03 Sean: Yeah, I say some things like that in one of my earlier books. Like in this particular book, in the big picture, I actually don't dwell on the debate about whether philosophy is useful or not. I just presume that it is and move forward. And from Eternity to Here, which is about the arrow of time, I point out some things. Like philosophers are really, really good at telling you why your theory isn't quite sensible and consistent. They're much less good at telling you what a better theory would be.

0:05:14 Thomas: Right. On the topic of philosophy, what do you you think about the philosophy of science, particularly when it comes to stuff like quantum physics and these things that are so weird for people like me, everyday people, to try to grasp onto? Do you think that they help shape how we should look at it, or are they reading too much into it sometimes?

0:05:51 Sean: Well, I think the best philosophers of physics right now understand the foundational and interpretive questions of quantum mechanics way better than the best physicists do. Physicists don't need to understand that. That's not their thing. They use quantum mechanics to calculate things. And philosophers in the modern era have been very, very good about sort of understanding what are the questions that need to be solved, which is something that physicists often just like to skate over. We still don't know the answer yet. My own prejudices for quantum mechanics lean in the direction of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is not that popular among philosophers. It's probably more popular among physicists actually.

0:06:25 Thomas: I was going to ask you about that.

0:06:33 Thomas: Could you give an estimate of maybe how popular that is among your colleagues? Is it a minority view or is it the majority view, do you think?

0:06:41 Sean: I really can't, not because I want to avoid it, but because it depends wildly on which sort of subfield of physicists you talk to.

0:06:42 Thomas: Oh, okay. Plus, it depends on which quantum universe we're in.

0:06:50 Sean: So there you are, but I only have access to the one that I can talk to So, yeah, I mean, if you talk to cosmologists or particle physicists, I think that many worlds would be very popular If you talk to people who actually work on quantum information, they are often more interested in these what are called epistemic models of quantum mechanics, where the wave function of the universe isn't the universe itself. It's just a way of packaging our knowledge about the universe, and they're kind of coy about what the universe actually is, which is frustrating for a cosmologist. And philosophers often like things like Bohmian mechanics, which are descendants of the early hidden variables interpretations.

0:06:53 Thomas: Okay. Well, you've touched on it. Would you mind going a little more into what exactly the many worlds hypothesis is? A little more detail for people who might not be familiar?

0:07:43 Sean: Sure. I'll start at the worst place to start because it does make a bridge between a popular conception and the real thing, which is that in many worlds, when you do a quantum mechanical measurement, like let's say is the electron over here or over there, when When you make that measurement, the universe splits into a universe where the electron is over here and you saw it over here, and another universe where the electron was over there and you just saw it there.

0:08:11 Sean: This sounds certainly crazy on the face of it, but there's a better way to think about what many worlds really says. You're not adding in all of those universes. Quantum mechanics itself just lets you describe superpositions. This is the fundamental nature of quantum mechanics. If you have an electron, it can be in a superposition of over here and over there. If it's spinning, it could be in superposition spinning clockwise and spinning counterclockwise. So if you believe the entire world is governed by the rules of quantum mechanics, then there's no question that the possibility exists to have a superposition of you having seen the electron over here and you having seeing the electron over there.

0:08:58 Sean: And the many worlds version of quantum mechanics just says that all that exists is the wave function of the universe, the quantum state of the universe, and the single, smooth, reversible evolution equation that tells you how it changes over time, the Schrodinger equation. Every other interpretation of quantum mechanics adds new things. It either adds new rules for how the wave function evolves, or it adds new variables, or it adds something. But many worlds is the most minimal approach to quantum mechanics in terms of the ingredients you put in, and then it predicts the existence of all these universes.

0:09:38 Thomas: Okay. Yeah, because that is a little counterintuitive, as I'm sure you've found when you try to explain it to people. But so, do you literally mean, or does that interpretation literally mean there are all these universes, or that we just find ourselves in the one we're in no matter what, and they don't necessarily exist, or how does that work?

0:09:59 Sean: Yeah, well, the many worlds philosophy would be, yes, they all exist because they are predicted by quantum mechanics. Now, if you say, well, I don't like that prediction, it makes me unhappy, and the universe should do things that make me happy, then you can try to change the rules of quantum mechanics to get rid of those universes, and people often do that.

0:10:04 Thomas: Hmm.

0:10:16 Thomas: Okay, well, I'll give that a try, but probably later. I'll wait till later. On my own time. But so like, but literally like that actual mass and all the, everything that comes with a universe, space, time, all this stuff really exists somewhere. Where does it come from? I mean, is it created or is it already there?

0:10:20 Sean: Okay.

0:10:35 Sean: Well, it was always there.

0:10:37 Thomas: It was always there.

0:10:38 Sean: It was always There. What you should think of is the universe is just being sliced into thinner and thinner slices. We started out with a very thick universe, and it just sort of differentiates as time goes on. There's no new stuff or new places or new mass or new energy coming into existence.

0:10:54 Thomas: So, hmm. Okay. I guess that makes sense. So how does this apply on the macro scale? I means, is this just when we're trying to measure or observe one of these things that you're talking about, or is it all the way right up from the smallest little thing to the biggest thing where all these universes are split off?

0:11:11 Sean: Well, the nice thing about many worlds, one of the many nice things about it is that there's absolutely nothing special about the act of observation. You don't need, you know, conscious observers. You don't need a special macroscopic classical world. You don't need different ways the wave function evolves. It's just absolutely the same rules of the game all the way down. The difference is that microscopic things easily find themselves in quantum superpositions. Macroscopic things do not for the very simple reason that macroscopic thing keep bumping into things. And this is the phenomenon of entanglement, quantum entanglement, where two things are connected in their quantum states. Once things are entangled, then the individual subsets, like if the two particles are entangled with each other, each individual particle isn't really in a superposition in the standard way.

0:11:19 Thomas: Well,

0:12:05 Sean: The whole system is. So if you have a macroscopic thing like a cat, like Schrodinger's cat, which is purportedly in a superposition of alive and dead, it's really not because the cat is breathing or not breathing or at least interacting with the photons and the air in in its box and so forth. So that very, very quickly branches the wave function of the universe. So whenever what we call decoherence happens, whenever the system you're thinking about interacts and becomes entangled with the rest of the world, the wave function of the universe branches.

0:12:38 Thomas: Thanks so much for trying to explain that. It's very hard, of course, for people like me to understand, but it makes it sound a little less crazy when you go into it.

0:12:48 Sean: Well, it's very, very far away from our conventional everyday lives, right? So there's no, it shouldn't be surprising that it's hard to understand. It would be very, very surprising if you go like, oh yeah, that's what it should have been all along. I mean, that would be really weird.

0:12:51 Thomas: Right, yeah. Yeah, that would be a particular kind of genius who knew that all along. So, getting back to the book for a little bit, why don't you talk about poetic naturalism? That seems to be a big theme of this book, poetic naturalist. Why the poetic part, and can you talk a little bit about that concept?

0:13:02 Sean: Yeah.

0:13:17 Sean: Sure. You know, naturalism is easy. Naturalism is the idea there's only one universe, the natural world. There's no separate spiritual realm. There're no sort of special realm of the mind or consciousness. It's just the physical world. And poetic I add on because among naturalists, there are disagreements. And I think it's good that there are disagreement. We need disagreements to sort of keep our ideas healthy and vibrant and not all the questions that naturalism raises are anywhere near settled. So one part of the spectrum of naturalists might be sort of the most hardcore, austere forms of naturalism, which say that the only thing that really exists is the most fundamental version of reality, the quantum wave function of the universe or the very particles, the electrons and photons and so forth that make up you and me.

0:14:10 Sean: Everything else is an illusion. So tables and chairs are illusions. Conscious thought is an illusion. All that is just sort of baggage that we could try to get rid of. Morality is just an illusion. I don't believe that. I like tables and chairs. I think that they can qualify as real, and I think that if you believe in tables and chairs as things that are real, then morality and consciousness also qualify as real for very, very similar reasons. They're good ways of talking about the world at some macroscopic level. On the other end of the spectrum, there are people who aren't quite satisfied with the most austere versions of naturalism, so they want to add something to it, really something over and above the ordinary physical world. They want to add maybe mental properties.

0:14:55 Sean: Even if there's only one world, maybe there are different properties or feelings that we assign sort of – that we think of as being part of conscious perceptions that actually play a role in how the world is. Or there are objective moral rules that go hand in hand with the physical configuration of stuff in the world. I don't believe that either. I think that's sort of blinking at the last minute and not quite buying into the naturalistic program. So poetic naturalism is in between. The poetic means – it emphasizes the fact that there's only one world, but there are many ways of talking about the natural world, and there are any useful ways of taking that have a claim to describing reality. Reality. So our macroscopic description of the world in terms of tables and chairs and planets and stars talks about real things and real knowledge.

0:15:44 Sean: And likewise, our descriptions of human beings as having consciousness and having free will and the ability to make choices also describe real things. And choosing what stories to tell about the universe, what languages and vocabularies to use is the poetic part of poetic naturalism.

0:16:01 Thomas: So, a couple questions on that. I think that tends to be bit of a misconception that sometimes religious people have of people who subscribe to naturalism, where the next thing you hear is, oh, okay, well, then we're just this, or love is just chemicals. And is it really true that someone who believes in naturalism needs to reduce it to these things? I mean, it seems like that's a bit of a misconception on the part of religious people who are trying to an easy argument against naturalism.

0:16:36 Sean: Yeah, I don't like the word just that that you mentioned there. But I also, yeah, I don't like the word reduction or reductionism that much either. I used to be more cheerful about being a reductionist. But I'm not an anti-reductionist either. I just think that starting to talk that particular language gets people confused very quickly. And I don't think it's just me. I had this discussion with Barry Lower, who is a wonderful philosopher of science at Rutgers. He said, oh, I get it, you're a physicalist, non-reductionist. And I said, am I really? Because I don't really think that, you know, I'm perfectly happy to say that there is some level of description of the universe, the fundamental physics level, which is by itself complete. You know, it could perfectly describe the universe without sort of leaving anything out.

0:16:38 Thomas: Right.

0:17:27 Sean: But it's not the last word on the universe. It's not the only way we can talk about the universe, there are other ways of talking about it that also capture some element of reality, and they better be consistent with each other. And we agreed that no one really knows what it means to be an anti-reductionist physicalist, so we're not going to talk about that anymore.

0:17:48 Thomas: Yeah, well, it isn't sort of like I think you said in the book, you know, if you try to... if you're going to talk about weather maybe, for example, trying to analyze the position of every single water molecule in the in the atmosphere, maybe you could do it that way if you had some sort of impossible supercomputer, but there may be easier ways of doing it. It doesn't really mean one's right and the other's wrong, right? Is that sort sort of what you're saying?

0:18:12 Sean: Yeah, it is, and it's a weird thing because I don't think this concept is that hard, but I think that people seem to want to you misunderstand it because they want to make the argument that if you are a naturalist or even a physicalist, a particular flavor of naturalist who doesn't think there's anything beyond the physical world, which – so I'm a physical list as well. If you're a physicalistic, you must think that – if you think that we're just atoms and molecules, it implies that the right way to talk about us is as just a collection of atoms and particles. And now, of course, that is not necessarily following from the statement that we are atoms and molecules. I make the joke sometimes when I give talks about this stuff. If you go on a date with somebody and they say, "Tell me about yourself," you don't start listing your atoms and molecules.

0:18:20 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Right.

0:19:07 Sean: Maybe Caltech students do where I'm a researcher. But out in the real world, there are better ways of talking about human beings. And that's completely compatible with being a naturalist or a physicalist.

0:19:18 Thomas: Right, don't yeah, want to predict human behavior by just using Newton's laws, you know. I'm walking this way, so I guess I'll continue walking that way unless some other force acts on me. But right,

0:19:29 Sean: I mean we obey Newton's laws or we obey Schrodinger's equation, whatever, but that doesn't stop us from saying that I'm a person deciding where to go to have dinner. I mean that's absolutely compatible and it seems just really unnecessarily contentious to sort of not get that.

0:19:44 Thomas: Right, and I do think in debates sometimes religious people can be unnecessarily contentious to not get that. But now I want to go on the other side of that, because I thought I heard you say, let me know if I got this wrong, but I thought I heard you say that you didn't go so far as to say that objective moral values or that sort of thing could exist. Did I hear you right?

0:20:03 Sean: That's right. I am not a believer in objective moral values because they're not out there. I mean the universe exists. The universe doesn't care what you're doing. The universe just obeys Schrotinger. Equation. And we got to suck it up and just accept that.

0:20:07 Thomas: Interesting.

0:20:21 Thomas: Right. Okay. Well, I suppose there's a, could be a number of semantic issues happening, but I always think of it, and let me know if you disagree, I think of it is like something like chess. I mean, the objective laws of chess aren't something that physically exists, but once you have a system with certain rules, you can come up with objective moves that are better than others. You could come up essentially the equivalent of objective moral values. And similarly, taking that over to humans, I mean once you accept that we want certain things and we are biologically a certain way, then it's like a game where you could could calculate eventually somehow objectively the best course of action. And in that way, you could have something like moral, you know, objective moral values. What do you think about that idea?

0:21:09 Sean: If you agree on what is morally best, then you can certainly use reason and rationality to try to attain it. But the first step in agreeing on what objectively morally best is a doozy. It is not something that will ever be reducible to the physical behavior of matter in the universe.

0:21:18 Thomas: Right, right, right.

0:21:29 Thomas: Well, okay. I mean, you're right. Implicit in that analogy is you do have to accept the game of chess and that you want to win. But, right?

0:21:34 Sean: Right. That's right. Exactly. And about medicine, right? They say, like, you think that medicine is objective or, you know, people want to be healthy and there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to it. But again, if you take as your goal a certain kind of being healthy, then that's certainly true. And this is, you know, I say this in the book and it's really nothing that David Hume didn't say hundreds of years ago.

0:21:40 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, sure.

0:21:58 Sean: It's the same move over and over again by people who want to be naturalists but found objective moral values. At some point, you're either saying, here's what the world is, here's what the world is, here's what the world is. And then I think by the end, as Hume points out, they're saying, here's what we ought to do, here is what we ought to do, here is what we do. And it's because somewhere in between, there is like a hidden footnote that said, of course we all agree that this would be better than that. And not only is it sort of not OK, logically, to make that move and pretend you didn't, but once you take that footnote out up into the air and examine it, no, we never do agree on this. This, people disagree. And that's not going to go away. And they're not wrong in the same sense that someone who thinks the universe is 6,000 years old is wrong.

0:22:22 Thomas: Right.

0:22:47 Thomas: But don't you think we can be more honest about the nature of that disagreement? Because I think that this is something that gets exploited by particularly Christians who will say, well, if you're an atheist, you can't have any moral values of any kind. We all can just kill each other and do whatever. It doesn't matter. But I mean, there's not that big of a range of disagreement on well-being and what we want. There might be tons of disagreement on particular particular actions. And, you know, is this going to result in a better, you know, universe or a better world for us or not? But there's not that. I mean, we are, in the end, I think, isn't it somewhat bound by biology? I mean we're all biologically close enough to where the same certain things make us happy or keep us alive, keep us out of pain.

0:23:35 Thomas: You know, we have so much in common that I think, while I agree that the is-ought is not fundamentally just easily easily solvable, we can be realistic about the level of disagreement we could even have on the aughts, right?

0:23:49 Sean: Yes, and you're almost there. You're really close. You're going to get there. As soon as you just sort of realize that almost all the words you could say there make perfect sense without claiming that there's anything thing objective about those moral values that we share, then you'll be fine. So the better chess analogy is there are rules to chess. So let's ask, are the rules of chess objectively determined? Well, no. Someone made them up, right?

0:23:54 Thomas: Help me out, help me out.

0:24:20 Sean: I mean, it was clearly invented by a human being. But are they arbitrary? Would they be just as good if they were different? No, because we play the the game of chess with certain goals in mind. You want to have a good game, you want to be fair, you want it to be interesting, and so forth. Now, someone might not like chess. Someone might not be interested. They're not making a mistake. They might want to play checkers or basketball or something. They are not wrong, but given that we want to the game kind of like chess, these rules are good. That's how morality works. Given real human beings who really, like you say, do have a tremendous amount of overlap in their moral inclinations and judgments and aspirations, we can set about the task of figuring out how to be good people in the world. There's no reason whatsoever to fool ourselves and pat ourselves on the back by saying, and this had to be that way, just like the measurement of the mass of the electron is a certain objective value.

0:24:20 Thomas: Right, yeah. Oh, no, not at all. It is, of course, dependent on us. If we were reptiles who spit out a bunch of eggs and then we didn't really care particularly which one survived, I mean, our morality would be vastly different. Friend.

0:25:31 Sean: But that's the definition of not being objective. It's subjective to us.

0:25:34 Thomas: No, but I think I added the, maybe I didn't say it correctly, but I added what I think is critical is saying once you have the game of chess, like once you get that part, a computer can analyze a game and tell you what's the better way to go. You're right, of course, that you have to have that starting point. I absolutely agree.

0:25:51 Sean: Yeah. And all I'm saying is that that starting point is like the most important step and it is not objective and like pretending like, OK, of course, we all agree on this. That is a huge, huge mistake with real consequences.

0:26:05 Thomas: But do you think that's better? Because I think what can be sometimes more damaging is when, you know, atheists like like you or I, say, yeah, no, there is no objective morality. The way that religious people turn that around, I think that's incredibly dangerous too. It appeals to a lot of religious people when you say, well, if you give up God, then there's no objective moral values. Anything goes. I just think there's kind of danger on both sides of that.

0:26:30 Sean: Right. But you realize that what you're doing is admitting that you have a cognitive bias in favor of pretending there's objective morality because you really want it to be true. That's a good reason to be skeptical of the claim. It would be nice if there was objective – I used to think there was. I used to be someone who really thought that that could be just as scientifically founded as anything else. But it's just wishful thinking and letting it go I think is just very, very helpful in terms of –

0:26:58 Thomas: I think I may have, once again, maybe I didn't say it quite right. I don't mean to pretend something's true that isn't, of course. I just mean in the way we talk about it. I mean, in the way, that's why I said just as much as there are objective moves in chess, there could be objective morality. Again, once we have the starting point. And I agree, I take your point that that's the most contentious part, is the starting point, so I get that.

0:27:21 Sean: So in the book, I talk about – my favorite philosopher on these issues these days is Sharon Street who is a philosopher at NYU and she labels the point of view that I hold that I think she also holds, Humean constructivism when it comes to morality because they're constructed. They're not objective. And Hume, as opposed to Kant, for example, Kant would have said that morals are constructed, but every rational person would construct the same ones. Whereas Hume being much better at accepting reality than any other philosopher who ever lived would say, yeah, some people are going to construct different ones. Mostly we'll get along, but some people will be different. So Street points out there could be a morally coherent Caligula. There could be someone who was just a dangerous psychopath and had absolutely consistent moral principles that the rest of us thought was abhorrent.

0:27:22 Thomas: Yep.

0:28:13 Sean: That person is not making a mistake in the sense that people who think that two plus two equals five are making a mistakes. We should admit that. We should say the best we can do if we try to talk them out of it and we fail is lock them up, prevent them from doing harm.

0:28:28 Thomas: I totally agree with that. And this is, again, a reason why I'm such a big fan of yours, because I really like that you have such a grasp of the philosophy behind all this, and it really makes for such an interesting read to hear a breadth of philosophical examples and all that. So, I do appreciate that because, seriously, a lot of, you know, as you know as we already talked about, I mean, a lot of physicists brush off all of philosophy a little too easily, I think. But anyway, yeah.

0:28:56 Sean: Well, I mean, just to agree with you there, the irony is that you can't not do philosophy. Like, no human being fails to do philosophy, they just do it well, or they do it badly, you know, they do it knowingly, or they do it sort of by accident. And, you know, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in the grand design, you start off saying philosophy is dead. And then like the same page, they're doing philosophy, right?

0:29:10 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:29:21 Sean: You know, it's kind of hilarious. So why not try to do philosophy the best we can?

0:29:26 Thomas: I couldn't agree more.

0:29:46 Thomas: All right. Well, very fascinating stuff for part one. Now, there's more. There's a part two. And I think there's reason to be excited because in part two, we get into his debate with William Lane Craig, which I know is a fan favorite, certainly a favorite of mine. And asked him some questions about that. So look forward to that. And of course, patrons at patreon.com/atheist will have access to that right away.

0:30:11 Thomas: I wanted to give a few follow-up thoughts on the question specifically about morality. I didn't bring up Sam Harris by name, but I think we kind of talked around his theories and other people like him. And I think maybe I didn't make my analogy quite right. One thing is, at least when I'm speaking with someone who I know to be an absolute genius, in my opinion, perhaps I rush a little too much to try to get what I'm saying out without properly doing it justice, I think, because I just was so mindful that I didn't want to be taking up a genius's time. But anyway, I, I didn't quite say it right because I think Sean was saying I thought the rules of chess were objective, when what I really meant the whole time is that given the rules of chess, if we could agree on the rules chess similarly to how we would agree on our goals for well-being, from there the strategy would be objective.

0:31:07 Thomas: I don't think there's anyone in the world, including Sean Carroll, I think, who would say that Chess strategy is not objective. You can't, I mean, that would be absurd. You wouldn't say, you wouldn't go to a grandmaster and say, well, sure, you're good, but it's just because your strategy is, you know, people think your strategy's good subjectively. We all have agreed that you're the best grandmaster.

No, once you have the rules, everything from there is objective, and that's why we can design computer programs and build, you now, Watson or whatever to be able to beat everybody at chess by now, because Because the moves are obje- the strategy is objective. Once you agree on the rules. So I think maybe, since I rushed through that, I think at one point if he said, Oh, we agree on the rules because we want a certain game or whatever, but the the rules aren't objective, and I think I didn't quite in real time identify the miscommunication that might have been happening.

Now I also think we, he disagrees with me, and I'd be inclined to take, if I were a betting man, I would bet that he's right and I'm not because it's Sean Carroll, but we do still have a disagreement, because I think the part where we agree on the rules of chess and we agree on what we want to accomplish in life, the analogy being our well-being or the things, our goals in life or the well-being of everybody in particular, I think that's easier to agree on than Sean made it out to be. So I don't think it's a question of one guy's playing chess, one guy is playing Parcheesi, one guy's playing checkers.

0:32:46 Thomas: I think it is more like, okay, we mostly agree on chess, but some people think, you know, the king can move two moves at a time and some people don't recognize en passant is a good, you, know, it's little stuff, very little stuff that does affect the game, certainly, and now it's getting a little abstract to talk about the game. But it does, sure it does affect moral decisions, but I don't think it affects them all as much as maybe Sean makes out.

So that would be where, I mean, I still am not quite convinced. However... What he did say that I do agree with, and that did make me question what I was saying, well, everything he said did because he disagreed with me, but what he said that there could be a moral Caligula who, you know, has a different view of morality and therefore is kind of evil and we don't want that person to be around, when he said THAT, I thought, oh yeah, that does make sense, and particularly when he said, that person isn't making an error. They're not really, and I do agree. So that's where I think it does come down to semantics, as I said, and my concern is when we just say flat out, oh yeah, there's no objective moral values, we give so much fuel to religious people because that is the number one, in my experience, the number one objection that thoughtful religious people will try to hit you with.

Oh, well, then anything goes. There's no objective morality. And I take Sean's point that that doesn't mean we can just pretend there is. Of course, I'm not ever saying we should pretend something exists that doesn't.

But all I was trying to say, or I would have said if I've had infinite time with him, is just that I think we should be careful how we present it, because I do think given once we agree from the outset, or if we can come close enough to agreeing on the rules,

0:34:41 Thomas: To agreeing on our moral objectives, which I think most people can, and actually we could even gauge that empirically, we could maybe come up with a survey or something to see how many people people value what things in life, and we could see, like, are we 96% compatible? Are we 50% compatible? I think we'd be very highly compatible. Given that starting point, then it is fair to say there are objectively better moves. Given we agree, and that seems uncontroversial to me, I just, I guess I didn't explain it right, or maybe I'm still missing something, so feel free free to comment what you think on all this. But given the starting point, given the rules of chess, you agree on that. From there, it's objective.

0:35:27 Thomas: Now, I suppose his argument would be, well, since not everyone agrees, you can't really say it is objective. If the rules are changing for one person, if you're still playing chess and another person is playing checkers, there isn't an objective move. And you know what? Even as I'm saying it, I'm doubting it. Maybe that is true. Maybe it is true that the differences are too much, but I just think we're bound by biology. And we could actually rephrase it and say, given a definition of well-being for everybody, given that there's objectively better things to do and objectively less good things to do. And it's not because of the universe. You can't detect them somehow, except by reason, of course, and maybe empirical data feeding that and all that.

That. But given a conception of the well-being of the group as a goal, then yes. And I think the reason I'm laboring so much to try to formulate that is, once again, I do think we give away so much the other side, to theists, arguing that once you give up God, you have no morality or anything. And what Sean said made perfect sense, that it shouldn't be be that scary to us, because if there is this moral Caligula, we would just, I mean, we would just outnumber that person, and we would agree that we need to lock that person up. And I think that religious people make it much scarier than it should be.

0:37:05 Thomas: That isn't actually that scary of a thought. All right, so that does it for part one. The morality thing was probably the only disagreement in part one, but there's another little disagreement in part 2, among so many things. Part 2 is actually a little longer, I just wanted a nice clean cut because the very beginning of the next part we will be talking about the debate with William Lane Craig. This will of course happen on Thursday for my non-patrons and right away for my patrons. Thank you so much for being patrons. Quick note for people on Patreon, it seems as though, I don't know if it's Apple or iTunes or whatever, has decided to screw me over again with changing something, I dunno, people are having a hard time with the premium feed. So if you are unable to access your premium feed, that's a special RSS feed that I made, took some labor by the way, that I make for patrons, that you should be able to get right in your podcast app app.

0:38:01 Thomas: I sent out instructions to whatever email you registered on Patreon with. If you're having problems with that, feel free to contact me any way you want. Email, Patreon message. I should be able to help you get it resolved. I will warn you that I'm better with iPhone because that's what I have. So if you have an iPhone, I know I can get it solved because I've done it myself. I've tested it myself. If you don't have an iPhone, I will do my best to help with that. But it should still work. I think the feed may need to be deleted and re-added, and then I'll have to confirm the username and password. So contact me and enjoy your part two with Sean Carroll earlier than everybody else. And everybody else, I will see you on Thursday. Thank you so much for listening.