{TEXTBOOK} the Big Picture: on the Origins of Life, Meaning, And

THE BIG PICTURE: ON THE ORIGINS OF LIFE, MEANING, AND THE UNIVERSE ITSELF PDF, EPUB, EBOOK

Among people who acknowledge the scientific basis of reality, there is often a conviction-usually left implicit-that all of that philosophical stuff like freedom, morality, and purpose should ultimately be pretty easy to figure out. We're collections of atoms, and we should be nice to one another. How hard can it really be? It can be really hard. Being nice to one another is a good start, but it doesn't get us very far. What happens when different people have incompatible conceptions of niceness? Giving peace a chance sounds like a swell idea, but in the real world, there are different actors with different interests, and conflicts will inevitably arise. The absence of a supernatural guiding force doesn't mean we can't meaningfully talk about right and wrong, but it doesn't mean we instantly know one from the other, either. Meaning in life can't be reduced to simplistic mottos. In some number of years I will be dead; some memory of my time here on Earth may linger, but I won't be around to savor it. With that in mind, what kind of life is worth living? How should we balance family and career, fortune and pleasure, action and contemplation? The universe is large, and I am a tiny part of it, constructed of the same particles and forces as everything else: by itself, that tells us precisely nothing about how to answer such questions. We're going to have to be both smart and courageous as we work to get this right. Do they disassemble you one atom at a time, zip those atoms elsewhere, and then reassemble them? Or do they send only a blueprint of you, the information contained in your arrangement of atoms, and then reconstruct you from existing matter in the environment to which you are traveling? Most often the ship's crew talks as if your actual atoms travel through space, but then how do we explain "The Enemy Within"? That's the episode, you'll remember, in which a transporter malfunction causes two copies of Captain Kirk to be beamed aboard the Enterprise. It's hard to see how two copies of a person could be made out of one person-sized collection of atoms. Fortunately for viewers of the show, the two copies of Kirk weren't precisely identical. One copy was the normal good Kirk, and the other was evil. Even better, the evil one quickly got scratched on the face by Yeoman Rand, so it wasn't hard to tell the two apart. But what if they had been identical? We would then be faced with a puzzle about the nature of personal identity, popularized by philosopher Derek Parfit. Imagine a transporter machine that could disassemble a single individual and reconstruct multiple exact copies of them out of different atoms. Which one, if any, would be the "real" one? If there were just a single copy, most of us would have no trouble accepting them as the original person. Using different atoms doesn't really matter; in actual human bodies, our atoms are lost and replaced all the time. Or what if one copy were made of new atoms, while the original you remained intact-but the original suffered a tragic death a few seconds after the duplicate was made. Would the duplicate count as the same person? Thorny issues like free will, the direction of time, and the source of morality are clarified with elegance and insight. The Big Picture shows how the scientific worldview enriches our understanding of the universe and ourselves. A reliable account of our knowledge of the universe, it is also a serene meditation on our need for meaning. This is a book that should be read by everybody. Weaving the threads of astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and philosophy into a seamless narrative tapestry, Sean Carroll enthralls us with what we've figured out in the universe and humbles us with what we don't yet understand. Yet in the end, it's the meaning of it all that feeds your soul of curiosity. Home 1 Books 2. Add to Wishlist. Sign in to Purchase Instantly. Members save with free shipping everyday! See details. Overview The instant New York Times bestseller about humanity's place in the universe—and how we understand it. Show More. Related Searches. Billy's Picture Book. Billly's Picture Book contains Terry Bisson's collection of thirteen off-kilter tales about an eager lad The tales are like Zen parables, with an odd, View Product. I first critiqued Ken Wilber on his misunderstanding of evolution back in , right after I first critiqued Ken Wilber on his misunderstanding of evolution back in , right after his book A Brief History of Everything was published. It has now been 18 years and if anything Wilber has become even more firmly entrenched Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage. 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Hidden Picture Books For Toddlers. Get your toddler's minds pumped up with this hidden picture books made specifically for their Get your toddler's minds pumped up with this hidden picture books made specifically for their age. So they must have been preternatural miracles, with no miracle maker. Dawkins et al. Dawkins even goes as far as to say that if you teach children biblical creation it is tantamount to child abuse. One serious scientist. On creation. On AnswersinGenesis. Publication List. My family. Cryocooled Sapphire Oscillator at N. Cryocooled Sapphire Oscillator at K. Apostles and prophets. Eternal salvation. Holy Ghost baptism. Lordship salvation. Particular election. Study the Word. Water baptism. English tracts. Chinese tracts. Japanese tracts. Korean tracts. Spanish tracts. Portuguese tracts. He clearly states his religion , which he attempts to justify in the book. Rate this:. Share this:. Like this: Like Loading Post to Cancel. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. It elevates storytelling as a more effective means of communication than a mere offering of raw data, facts and theories. He provides common ground in which all can strive to work toward a better world. View 1 comment. Mar 07, Stuart rated it did not like it Shelves: technology-science. There is very little evidence, based on the initial dozen chapters, that Sean Carroll really is a theoretical physicist at Cal Tech. While he most likely is, this book is just an unlistenable mess that I started skipping through after a few chapters, and then gave up on about halfway through. Apr 24, Peter Pete Mcloughlin rated it it was amazing Shelves: complexity , general-history , biology , general-science , astronomy , philosophy , chemistry , european-history , intellectual-history , world-history. I probably would have given this a five star rating but I am very familiar with Dr. Carroll from Youtube and the Great courses and his other books. I like the book a lot but I have seen this stuff before in other places. The only reason I am withholding the five is that I wanted to see something new. I would recommend this book who doesn't know Dr. Carroll from the interwebs and I think he is a good writer and I like his grand work here but I think i like his earlier works better. Still I like t I probably would have given this a five star rating but I am very familiar with Dr. Still I like this synthesis of science and philosophy a lot and I think he gets his picture right. February 7, , Upon doing a much more careful listening on Audible I have gotten a lot better appreciation for this book and Carroll's understanding of poetic naturalism. I might fight him on his interpretation of consciousness and the status of philosophical zombies but as for the rest of his vision of poetic naturalism I find it satisfying and beautiful and more importantly probably the closest to the truth. Very enjoyable on a close reading. Here is Carroll talking about his book at Google. Sep 07, Michael Huang rated it it was amazing. Naturalism is the view there is a nature and it follows discoverable laws. Poetic refers to the fact you can have multiple compatible laws describing the same thing at different levels of detail. Which one is most useful is up to you. You have the poetic license to make such a choice. I remember Karl Popper was said to be the favorite philosopher of scientists and engineers. Carroll offers himself up as a serious contender for that title. Of course, a lot of the basic tenets are not necessarily new, but Carroll offers a latest iteration of update and interpretation. His analysis is sharp and to the point. Case in point, a lot of people jumped on the notion of fine-tuning to immediately re-embrace theism. Carroll will show you that the theism explains precisely nothing about the fine-tuning. In fact, you are just suffering from confirmation bias. When you read a typical philosophical work, there are almost always passages that get you more and more confused, even though ever so subtly. But voila, at the end of long passage, the conclusion is extraordinarily proved beyond reasonable doubt. And you are left none the wiser. It is when the philosophers use concrete examples when the ambiguity is minimized. This is the time when their non-clear thinking is exposed and can thus be debunked. John Searle produced the Chinese room analogy. This is an unmitigated good thing for all involved. The meaning of life or how to live your life are issues that come up a lot in philosophical writing. I was following Sean Carroll's blog for a long time - he is a great professional and clearly has a gift of explaining complicated things in a simple way. This book, however, was a bit too simplistic. Not the ideas themselves, something else - the attempt to cover everything? The lukewarm philosophy? Still, highly admire the author, and can only recommend his blog I was following Sean Carroll's blog for a long time - he is a great professional and clearly has a gift of explaining complicated things in a simple way. Still, highly admire the author, and can only recommend his blog Oct 03, Gendou rated it it was amazing Shelves: non-fiction , philosophy , physics , science , quantum-physics , skepticism. Carroll introduces a philosophical idea he calls "poetic naturalism" in which the ontology includes objects which are useful in talking about the world at a given scale or levels of detail. For example, we can talk about people when it's useful to do so, and not worry that people are just made up of atoms and without getting distracted by questions like which is the last atom that's part of "me" on the tip of my finger. The book takes the reader from the beginning of science with Newton's laws of Carroll introduces a philosophical idea he calls "poetic naturalism" in which the ontology includes objects which are useful in talking about the world at a given scale or levels of detail. The book takes the reader from the beginning of science with Newton's laws of motion up to modern day quantum field theory. This is structured like a survey of physics so as not to let any novice readers get lost. He does a great job of explaining why psychic powers can't be real, why "qualia" and "philosophical zombies" are dumb, etc. He introduces a cool analogy of a "planet of belief" which represents all the things a person believes. Every person has a different "planet of belief", and they can be stable or unstable, etc. He smacks down the idea that science, like religion, requires "faith". He tackles the hard and soft problems of consciousness. He says the soft problem is really hard, and the hard problem is a misunderstanding. There's a whole lot of talk about god in this book. I'm not sure why. He does say its important because so many people believe in god. The topic is approached with a lot of caution which seems to me an attempt to avoid turning away theists. That's nice, but I felt like he was treating religious ideas with kid gloves and that's not too fun for me to read. It's also boring. I want to hear that space stuff! Here are some claims in the book which I consider mistakes. He invokes the MWI and says the ensemble multiverse is deterministic. But this doesn't work because you don't do quantum mechanics using the ensemble. You use the same maths using MWI to make the same non-deterministic predictions about what's likely to happen when you make a measurement. A theory is deterministic, by my reading, if there's an unique prediction when evolution forwards in time given fully specified initial conditions. This is true for Newtonian mechanics, and untrue for Quantum Mechanics. If you look at MWI as providing an unique solution evolving forwards in time, you do so at the cost of all predictive power, because we have no way to tell which path down the infinity of branching universes our reality has taken. Actually, there is. The word "supernatural" generally means a force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature. So it's unscientific by definition! But even if we grant the most charitable definition of "supernatural" as being merely inconsistent with known laws of physics, we still have a problem. Scientific theories must be falsifiable. A supernatural claim is one of an exception which has been found to the laws of physics. If this exception is explained by some new hypothesis, we must test that hypothesis. If found true, this new hypothesis is added into what we mean by "the laws of physics". So a supernatural claim, when unsupported, shouldn't be believed at all, and is rightly rejected by anyone practicing the process called science. This process can be gradual or rapid, depending on the nature of the evidence, but at no time is any natural explanation "supernatural", and at no point is any "supernatural" explanation necessary much less allowed in scientific discourse! His point here is that we should remain skeptical about unknowns, and not assume the way the universe looks here matches how it looks elsewhere, or even assume there is an elsewhere! This is subtly incorrect. We actually do have some knowledge about that which lies outside our observable universe! If spacetime were curved such that the size of the universe were finite and on the order of the observable universe, we'd expect an enormously positive value for the curvature of the universe. Which we don't see. Also, if the universe relatively close to but outside the horizon of our observable universe were significantly anisotropic, we'd notice the impact of this anisotropy on objects close to but inside the horizon. The isotropy of the observable universe is very precisely known. So, he's made an overly naive claim because it ignores important lines of evidence about what lies outside the horizon of our observable universe, where that evidence can be gathered from right here within the horizon. May 23, Jose Moa rated it it was amazing Shelves: essay , science , cosmology. With regard to the existence of theuniverse applies the Ockams Razor concluding tha the universe exist by itself,and about the fine tuning he claims that in the inflactionary process were created several regions no casually conected with different phisical laws and constants and we are living in the one fitted for us. As for the finality or purpose of the universe it is a useless ask. The inteligence is a emergent phenomenon caused by million years of darvinian evolution,perhaps a evolutionary accident. In this situation the human life is finite and short and we must make the best of it,there is not any sort of life after death and we must face this fact with bravery and maturity. Thhe moral is a mix of evolutionary behavior and a human construction in search of the comon well. All this, and more are the thesis of a very apropiated tittled book "The big Picture ", because gives a rationalist cosmic vision and explanation at all levels of our universe,and in my opinion he success. A recomendable book for everibody that would like have a global vision of our existential landscape. Jan 21, David Msomba rated it it was amazing Shelves: science , favorites , philosophy , atheism-humanism. Long or short, our moments are brief against the expanse of eternity. While we still don't have a unified equation of explaining the universe,Sean Caroll did a great job of combining numerous subjects of science, mathematics,philosophy and psychology to bring a perspective of the big picture and bring forward of how we could explain the universe without with the need of supernatural agent. We have come so far,studying and understanding the universe Highly recommended Definitely a masterpiece Jul 14, Ross rated it liked it. Quite interesting philosophical discussion of what we know, what we can know, and what we can't know. The author is a professor of physics and begins with a review of the history of what we have learned about the laws of physics He then launches into a discussion of philosophical belief systems contrasting those of theism and atheism. He describes his belief in a system termed "poetic naturalism. In other word Quite interesting philosophical discussion of what we know, what we can know, and what we can't know. In other words, "what you see is what you get. He discusses the fact that we can't really know, or prove, which system of belief is actually true. It is just a question of what is most likely given what we can see and measure. Some people believe the universe started last Thursday; maybe but not likely. Same with souls and spirits. What a waste! I picked up this big book because I love science! I surrender! Look, I have no problem with atheism! It is a perfectly reasonable way of looking at the world, particularly from a physicist. But whether you are pontificating abo What a waste! But whether you are pontificating about religion or atheism, after awhile it becomes condescending! It is like, "Okay, I get it! The universe functions fine by itself! Now to the science of how! The philosophy lesson coninues! May 09, Whitney rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorite-nonfiction , science. I finally have a term to sum up my own personal philosophy toward life which was certainly deepened and expanded by reading this book : poetic naturalism. Aug 30, Katie rated it really liked it Shelves: philosophy , science. I bought this at an airport bookstore, mostly because I admired the audacity of someone who would write a book about life, meaning, and the universe and slap it all on the cover. I'm pretty much the audience for this book. I like science but have zero formal training in it; I like books that are overly ambitious in their scope. I also went into this book without realizing it already having essentially the same philosophical and religious views as the author. That made for a somewhat satisfying I bought this at an airport bookstore, mostly because I admired the audacity of someone who would write a book about life, meaning, and the universe and slap it all on the cover. That made for a somewhat satisfying read, if never a particularly challenging one. Carroll is a decent writer - nothing spectacular, but always clear and approachable. He's one of the rare science writers I've come across that shows a regular respect for historical thinkers who were clever but also wrong. He's also quite good at deploying analogies to explain difficult concepts I especially liked this discussion of time and entropy. That said, I'd imagine this book is a bit of mixed bag for actual, trained scientists. It's relatively light on hard science and if you're not already on board with Hugh Everett's multi-world explanation of quantum mechanics, this is certainly not going to convince you. But that's okay. That's not really what this book is trying to do. It's fitting that the books' last chapter is called "Existential Therapy" - Carroll's book is really designed as a philosophical statement, as a gentle "it'll all be okay" to people who look at quantum mechanics with existential dread. I was already pretty much on board before I started reading it, so I can't say how effective it'd be at convincing non-believers. But it's still an interesting, engaging book, filled with clever analogies and a broader, humanistic view of the world. Oct 27, Hamid rated it it was amazing Shelves: science , favorites , philosophy. Sean Carroll speaks of a new idea called poetic naturalism. Naturalism comes down to three things: 1. There is only one world, the natural world. The world evolves according to unbroken patterns, the laws of nature. The only reliable way of learning about the world is by observing i Sean Carroll speaks of a new idea called poetic naturalism. The only reliable way of learning about the world is by observing it. Essentially, naturalism is the idea that the world revealed to us by scientific investigation is the one true world. The poetic aspect comes to the fore when we start talking about that world. It can also be summarized in three points: 1. There are many ways of talking about the world. All good ways of talking must be consistent with one another and with the world. Our purposes in the moment determine the best way of talking. A poetic naturalist for example will agree that both Captain Kirk and the Ship of Theseus are simply ways of talking about certain collections of atoms stretching through space and time. Here's some quotes from the book: - To understand time, it helps to start with space. In reality, as far as the laws of physics are concerned, all directions in space are created equal. Time works the same way. In reality, both directions of time are created equal. In another camp are the Bayesians, for whom probabilities are simply expressions of your states of belief in cases of ignorance or uncertainty. For a Bayesian, saying there is a 50 percent chance of the coin coming up heads is merely to state that you have zero reason to favor one outcome over another. If you were offered to bet on the outcome of the coin flip, you would be indifferent to choosing heads or tails. The Bayesian will then helpfully explain that this is the only thing you could possibly mean by such a statement, since we never observe infinite numbers of trials, and we often speak about probabilities for things that happen only once, like elections or sporting events. The frequentist would then object that the Bayesian is introducing an unnecessary element of subjectivity and personal ignorance into what should be an objective conversation about how the world behaves, and they would be off. And when it comes to understanding the fundamental architecture of reality, none of us has complete information. It can simply be. Then there is conservation of information. The universe evolves by marching from one moment to the next in a way that depends only on its present state. It neither aims toward future goals nor relies on its previous history. The universe is specific and contingent, the argument goes; it could easily have been otherwise. So there must be something that explains the universe, and then something that explains that thing, and so on through the chain of reasons. To avoid diving down a rabbit hole of infinite regress, we need to invoke a necessary being— one that must exist and could not have been otherwise, and therefore requires no explanation. And that being is God. They prefer to lay all the options on the table, then try to figure out what our credences should be in each of them. Maybe there is an ultimate explanation; maybe there is an infinite chain of explanations; maybe there is no final explanation at all. Why it exists the particular way it does, rather than some other way, is worth exploring. Feb 19, Donna rated it really liked it Shelves: non-fiction. This is nonfiction science. It was very science-y which is not my thing, but I liked this one. If every physics teacher could be like this author, more kids would leave high school having enjoyed science, as a whole. Some of this was completely over my head, but not once did the author ever make me feel like I was in the weeds. He took his time and described everything so well. This author posed a lot of "big picture" questions, but instead of letting the reader ponder them, he stepped in and g This is nonfiction science. This author posed a lot of "big picture" questions, but instead of letting the reader ponder them, he stepped in and gave you answers. That approach worked with this book, but sometimes I wanted to ponder some of the questions. Mar 18, Gary Beauregard Bottomley rated it it was amazing. All popular science books should take a clue from this book. There is no 'one scientific method' there are just many different possible ways we determine our justified true beliefs. This author is never afraid at talking above the listener. He's perfectly comfortable at using the appropriate terms that our needed, and he takes a stand on many of the issues within the Philosophy of Science. As the author says, science before Galileo thought in terms of causes and purpose teleology , and afterward All popular science books should take a clue from this book. As the author says, science before Galileo thought in terms of causes and purpose teleology , and afterwards started thinking in terms of patterns and laws rules. I would say the book is essentially divided into two parts. The first part lays the foundation for the nature of science and introduces the listener to the nature of being, the study of ontology, and the foundations that are created which we use in order to explain. He'll actually get into some deep discussions on possible building blocks for the universe monads, dyads, substance, forms, The importance of emergent properties because of the different regimes that are created by our "domains of appropriate applicability". Anti-realist v realist, the entailing of different theories by other theories, Bayesian statistics and why it's so necessary to understand what it is, and most of the other standard topics from the philosophy of science. There's multiple ways to understand the world. Sometimes we have to get at the particular before we can understand the whole or the universal, and other times we must understand the whole before we can get at the particular. The judgement we use by subsuming the particular under a universal rule gives us the bridge from reason to understanding. I saw the second half of the book as a refutation for all of the classical arguments for the existence of God. He doesn't frame them that way but uses the argument as a departure point in order to educate the listener on how to think about the world and ourselves such that we are a part of nature not apart from nature and how everything that can be explained understood can be thought of in 'poetic natural' terms. Look, he's an incredibly gifted writer, but I think he could have done a better job on his 'fine tuning' counter-argument. But his refutation on the prime mover argument, that 'nothing is not a state of being' was superb. Science is always underdetermined. The scientific facts that we have can be explained by multiple theories. Just read any issue of Scientific American and you'll see an article on a new scientific phenomena such as Dark Energy and you'll see a statement such as that there are three different explanations for the phenomena under consideration e. It quickly shows that science will be underdetermined. I mention this because I think that the graveyard is full of scientist who makes such a claim as he does in the book that the "bending of a spoon by mental telepathy is not possible because our current theory would never allow it". It is wrong to make that statement. There can always be a different ontology that will entail the current one but allow us to realize different perspectives. I really like the book a lot. He merges the nature of science with understanding science as nature. I saw the bibliography on this book before it came out. I slowed down reading popular science books because most of the ideas in popular science books I read I have read elsewhere. Even in this book it mostly consisted of things I've read elsewhere. But, he does something that I wish all pop science books would do, he understands the issues in the Philosophy of Science and he knows how to relate that to the science that is being told. Feb 08, P. Wilson rated it liked it. This a good book if you're looking for a reasonably clear synopsis of modern physics. It also has an excellent section on scientific reasoning, including a useful description of Bayesian probability and abduction as distinct from deduction and induction. It is marred, however, by the what I would call the author's evangelical atheism. His alternative, "poetic naturalism," is best described by one reviewer as "not even wrong. He too easily dismisses the sticky question of "consciousness" by saying it's just the way we have of talking about cognitive processes that make it seem as if we have a non-physical soul. My question: if consciousness is so easy to dismiss, could you please explain electricity? It seems to be an emergent phenomenon that is physical, but undefinable. Poetic naturalism is also invoked to describe the unproven, and unprovable, idea of the "multiverse. Moreover, in a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Steven Weinberg, one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, argues that it might be time to reconsider the whole idea of quantum mechanics based on its shortcomings. The last part of the book, in which Carroll argues for an ethics based on "poetic naturalism," reads like a New Age poster written by a California surfer dude. His "Ten Commandments" are trite, to say the least. Carroll does skim across a lot of interesting philosophical territory, but to me his coverage seems Wikipedia deep. Carroll's book is ambitious, and ultimately it's impressive because he achieves--at least as far as I can determine--what he set out to do. The big picture is the nature of reality explained by contemporary science. He describes how the universe works in every scale from the cosmic to the quantum and how the current understanding of such elemental foundations make clear concepts like the arrow of time and entropy and unite in our heads as consciousness and language and even notions of morality. I Carroll's book is ambitious, and ultimately it's impressive because he achieves--at least as far as I can determine--what he set out to do. Intended for the layperson, like me, some of his book is necessarily spent explaining how to think about the science and the phenomena he describes. Many of these ideas are head-splittingly knotty. The diagrams and charts are helpful, sometimes even clarifying a text too difficult for my knowledge and experience to grasp. Working forward and downward from the Big Bang and cosmic scale to the mysteries of quantum mechanics he details existence as we know it today. Sometimes it was like trying to understand magic. Existence may be a human perception, but Carroll still had to explain how consciousness is a physical process defined by the activity and motion of quantum particles and how ultimately all of it affects such philosophical ideas as determinism, causality, and free will. This was a difficult read for someone like me who doesn't have a background in science. But I rode this beautiful, muscular animal of a book, clinging to it, refusing to be bucked off. And by the time Carroll got to consciousness I felt like I knew how to ride a little bit. I may not have tamed the complete picture of reality, but I learned a lot, and I learned I want to read more. At some point in life, we all end up wondering about our place in the cosmos. For a lot of human history, it was thought we were at the center of all action, and that the universe was way smaller than it actually is. Plus, it probably was somewhat reassuring, making more vivid the idea that we were somehow special in the big scheme of things. What's not to find at At some point in life, we all end up wondering about our place in the cosmos. What's not to find attractive about this picture? Alas, we now know better, and Sean Carroll's The Big Picture attempts to show just how much of a dramatic change our knowledge about the world has been subject to. Carroll's book is not only a decent survey of what philosopher Wilfrid Sellars calls the contemporary "scientific image" of the world, but is also a defense of a metaphysical stance called naturalism. Although there's no consensus on what the term exactly means, the basic idea here is that objective reality is nothing but that revealed to us by the sciences -- or, to put it in Carroll's terms, the basic idea is that there's only one world: the natural world as revealed by the sciences. Naturalism can come in different forms, the most famous of which probably being the reductionistic one. Roughly speaking, reductionistic naturalism claims that the only real things are those revealed by fundamental physics, and that everything else that is studied by special sciences also known as "higher level phenomena" can be reduced to fundamental physics without loss. Aware of this variety of forms naturalism can take, Carroll is careful to specify just what kind of naturalism he subscribes to, which he's labeled poetic naturalism. The "poetic" qualifier is motivated by the idea that there are different ways to talk about the world, many of which are useful given certain purposes. This qualifier is not as innocent as it might seem at first, for Carroll uses it to differentiate himself from the redutionistic brand of naturalism. By emphasizing that there are different useful ways of talking about the world, Carroll wants to say that so called higher level entities and phenomena are derived categories that deserve to be called real. To put it in more prosaic terms, just because in fundamental physics there are no such things as "chairs" or even "time" or "causes" it doesn't thereby follow that these things don't really exist -- they do exist insofar these terms are useful descriptions of our macroscopic reality. Where reductionistic naturalism seeks to eliminate high level phenomena studied by the special sciences, poetic naturalism tries to reserve some space for them in the big picture. The other motivation for describing this variety of naturalism as "poetic" is that, even though our current scientific worldview reveals us an impersonal, careless universe, there's still room for meaning and purpose for human life. More specifically, Carroll argues that there's plenty of place for morality and meaning in life even though these things aren't part of reality in the same sense that, e. In other words, life can be meaningful and there can be moral progress even in the absence of objective, mind-independent standards to ground either meaning or morality. As it should be clear by now, this book is ambitious. So, how does Carroll go about defending poetic naturalism? He proceeds by showing us what the contemporary scientific image reveals to us about the natural world. To keep it terribly short, Carroll argues that our current scientific picture shows that the universe is causally closed, self-contained and that we have every reason to believe that everything in it can be accounted for without resorting to any outside entity or phenomena. Of course, we can't be absolutely certain about our scientific worldview. But then again, as Carroll goes on to argue, knowledge needs no absolute certainties. The tremendous successes, in terms of predictive and explanatory powers, of our contemporary well-established scientific theories have utterly displaced the old Cartesian idea that knowledge requires certainty provided by unshakable foundations. Granted, we are fallible beings and we could always be wrong. However, mere possibility of being wrong should not be taken as identical to "we're probably wrong". With this problem in mind, Carroll explains that our claims of knowledge should be based on Bayesian reasoning: we should update our credences i. So, for instance, if you believe that you can bend spoons with the power or sheer thought, repeatedly trying and failing to bend spoons through sheer thought should make you decrease your credence that you can actually do that, and this process will eventually make your credence so low that you simply give up believing it's really possible to bend spoons with the power of the mind. As this example illustrates, another important aspect of Bayesian reasoning is that everyone has their priors -- i. While this might be a problem, as Carroll himself acknowledges, the important thing to note is that if people engaged in a truth-seeking enterprise are really honest and open-minded, Bayesian reasoning assures that these people will tend to converge to the same set of beliefs even if they start with very different priors. With this Bayesian toolkit at hand, Carroll shows us how our contemporary scientific image ends up enormously increasing our credence in naturalism. In the process he makes clear how metaphysical claims can be subject to empirical scrutiny, and it's precisely this possibility that allows us to build a solid case in favor of naturalism. To illustrate, consider the existence of God. Determining whether God exists is a metaphysical matter, but there are many ways one could either try empirically supporting or weakening the thesis that God exists. The fine-tuning argument for God's existence, for example, crucially depends on empirical input. And since that is the case, assessing our available evidence and trying to figure out what naturalism and theism, for instance, predict about it in the end will make us increase our credence in one of those thesis while simultaneously decrease our credence in the other in the same proportion. Many philosophers will easily agree with what I have just said, but will go on to say that there is at least one other way to assess the plausibility of metaphysical theses: a priori reflection. Indeed, the traditional philosophical approach is, to a great extent, to advance a priori arguments and thought experiments and test them against our intuitions. This is what epistemologists would call "rationalism". Carroll explicitly eschews the idea that we can know about objective reality by pure thought by claiming this is not a reliable methodology. He doesn't provide much support for this claim, though, and so I would completely understand if someone with a good epistemology background complained about it. Moreover, he doesn't address contemporary rationalism, which is more sophisticated than its "classical" variety. However, Carroll hints at how an argument to support such a view can be developed by mentioning cases of metaphysical principles e. So, summing up, Carroll believes that some sort of empiricism is the best way to know about objective reality, and this belief is partly based on the view that rationalism's methodology isn't reliable. This is important because it helps motivate naturalism: if our best way to know about the objective reality is in the end through scientific means, then given our best scientific worldview it seems that naturalism is probably true. Someone might complain that this is not right, because science subscribes to methodological naturalism, according to which scientific explanations should not posit supernatural entities or phenomena, and so basing naturalism in science is in the end question-begging. Not so fast, says Carroll. He argues that science is actually committed to methodological empiricism , according to which our we acquire knowledge about the world throuh empirical means. Thus, naturalism is a conclusion supported by what we have come to know through methodological empiricism, not some sort of dogmatic assumption embraced by science. None of the above is to say that absolutely everything about our scientific knowledge is evidence in favor of naturalism. One of the most satisfying features of the book is that Carroll is pretty honest about naturalism's shortcomings and about how some of what we know are more probable under theism than under naturalism such as, e. We don't need to have every piece of evidence being more likely under naturalism in order to subscribe to it; rather what is needed to stick with naturalism is that our total available evidence renders naturalism more probable than its competitors, and that is just what the book tries successfully, I submit to show. Now, I have said before that Carroll differentiates himself from reductionists by emphasizing that there are different useful ways of talking about the world, and that what is described by these ways of talking deserve to be called real. FREE READER ↠ DOC The Big Picture On the Origins of Life Meaning and the Universe Itself º UKSOLPRO

Many possible answers have been put forward, and partisans of one view or another have occasionally disagreed with each other. But for a long time, there has been a shared view that there is some meaning, out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered and acknowledged. There is a point to all this; things happen for a reason. This conviction has served as the ground beneath our feet, as the foundation on which we've constructed all the principles by which we live our lives. Gradually, our confidence in this view has begun to erode. As we understand the world better, the idea that it has a transcendent purpose seems increasingly untenable. The old picture has been replaced by a wondrous new one-one that is breathtaking and exhilarating in many ways, challenging and vexing in others. It is a view in which the world stubbornly refuses to give us any direct answers about the bigger questions of purpose and meaning. The problem is that we haven't quite admitted to ourselves that this transition has taken place, nor fully accepted its far- reaching implications. The issues are well-known. Over the course of the last two centuries, Darwin has upended our view of life, Nietzsche's madman bemoaned the death of God, existentialists have searched for authenticity in the face of absurdity, and modern atheists have been granted a seat at society's table. And yet, many continue on as if nothing has changed; others revel in the new order, but placidly believe that adjusting our perspective is just a matter of replacing a few old homilies with a few new ones. The truth is that the ground has disappeared beneath us, and we are just beginning to work up the courage to look down. Fortunately, not everything in the air immediately plummets to its death. Wile E. Coyote would have been fine if he had been equipped with one of those ACME-brand jet packs, so that he could fly around under his own volition. It's time to get to work building our conceptual jet packs. What is the fundamental nature of reality? Philosophers call this the question of ontology-the study of the basic structure of the world, the ingredients and relationships of which the universe is ultimately composed. It can be contrasted with epistemology, which is how we obtain knowledge about the world. Ontology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of reality; we also talk about "an" ontology, referring to a specific idea about what that nature actually is. The number of approaches to ontology alive in the world today is somewhat overwhelming. There is the basic question of whether reality exists at all. A realist says, "Of course it does"; but there are also idealists, who think that capital-M Mind is all that truly exists, and the so-called real world is just a series of thoughts inside that Mind. Among realists, we have monists, who think that the world is a single thing, and dualists, who believe in two distinct realms such as "matter" and "spirit". Even people who agree that there is only one type of thing might disagree about whether there are fundamentally different kinds of properties such as mental properties and physical properties that those things can have. And even people who agree that there is only one kind of thing, and that the world is purely physical, might diverge when it comes to asking which aspects of that world are "real" versus "illusory. Is consciousness? Is morality? Whether or not you believe in God-whether you are a theist or an atheist-is part of your ontology, but far from the whole story. It is associated with certain beliefs, often including belief in God, although the definition of "God" can differ substantially within religion's broad scope. Religion can also be a cultural force, a set of institutions, a way of life, a historical legacy, a collection of practices and principles. It's much more, and much messier, than a checklist of doctrines. A counterpart to religion would be humanism, a collection of beliefs and practices that is as varied and malleable as religion is. The broader ontology typically associated with atheism is naturalism-there is only one world, the natural world, exhibiting patterns we call the "laws of nature," and which is discoverable by the methods of science and empirical investigation. There is no separate realm of the supernatural, spiritual, or divine; nor is there any cosmic teleology or transcendent purpose inherent in the nature of the universe or in human life. Purpose and meaning in life arise through fundamentally human acts of creation, rather than being derived from anything outside ourselves. Naturalism is a philosophy of unity and patterns, describing all of reality as a seamless web. Naturalism has a long and distinguished pedigree. We find traces of it in Buddhism, in the atomists of ancient Greece and Rome, and in Confucianism. Hundreds of years after the death of Confucius, a Chinese thinker named Wang Chong was a vocal naturalist, campaigning against the belief in ghosts and spirits that had become popular in his day. But it is really only in the last few centuries that the evidence in favor of naturalism has become hard to resist. Fortunately we don't need to be rigorous or comprehensive about listing the possibilities. But we do need to think hard about ontology. It's at the heart of our Wile E. Coyote problem. The last five hundred or so years of human intellectual progress have completely upended how we think about the world at a fundamental level. Our everyday experience suggests that there are large numbers of truly different kinds of stuff out there. People, spiders, rocks, oceans, tables, fire, air, stars-these all seem dramatically different from one another, deserving of independent entries in our list of basic ingredients of reality. Our "folk ontology" is pluralistic, full of myriad distinct categories. And that's not even counting notions that seem more abstract but are arguably equally "real," from numbers to our goals and dreams to our principles of right and wrong. As our knowledge grows, we have moved by fits and starts in the direction of a simpler, more unified ontology. It's an ancient impulse. In the sixth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus suggested that water is a primary principle from which all else is derived, while across the world, Hindu philosophers put forward Brahman as the single ultimate reality. The development of science has accelerated and codified the trend. Galileo observed that Jupiter has moons, implying that it is a gravitating body just like the Earth. Isaac Newton showed that the force of gravity is universal, underlying both the motion of the planets and the way that apples fall from trees. John Dalton demonstrated how different chemical compounds could be thought of as combinations of basic building blocks called atoms. Charles Darwin established the unity of life from common ancestors. James Clerk Maxwell and other physicists brought together such disparate phenomena as lightning, radiation, and magnets under the single rubric of "electromagnetism. Albert Einstein unified space and time, joining together matter and energy along the way. Particle physics has taught us that every atom in the periodic table of the elements is an arrangement of just three basic particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Every object you have ever seen or bumped into in your life is made of just those three particles. We're left with a very different view of reality from where we started. At a fundamental level, there aren't separate "living things" and "nonliving things," "things here on Earth" and "things up in the sky," "matter" and "spirit. How far will this process of unification and simplification go? It's impossible to say for sure. But we have a reasonable guess, based on our progress thus far: it will go all the way. We will ultimately understand the world as a single, unified reality, not caused or sustained or influenced by anything outside itself. That's a big deal. When we look into the eyes of another person, it doesn't seem like what we're seeing is simply a collection of atoms, some sort of immensely complicated chemical reaction. We often feel connected to the universe in some way that transcends the merely physical, whether it's a sense of awe when we contemplate the sea or sky, a trancelike reverie during meditation or prayer, or the feeling of love when we're close to someone we care about. The difference between a living being and an inanimate object seems much more profound than the way certain molecules are arranged. Just looking around, the idea that everything we see and feel can somehow be explained by impersonal laws governing the motion of matter and energy seems preposterous. It's a bit of a leap, in the face of all of our commonsense experience, to think that life can simply start up out of non-life, or that our experience of consciousness needs no more ingredients than atoms obeying the laws of physics. Of equal importance, appeals to transcendent purpose or a higher power seem to provide answers to questions to some of the pressing "Why? Why am I here? Why anything at all? Naturalism, by contrast, simply says: those aren't the right questions to ask. It's a lot to swallow, and not a view that anyone should accept unquestioningly. Naturalism isn't an obvious, default way to think about the world. The case in its favor has built up gradually over the years, a consequence of our relentless quest to improve our understanding of how things work at a deep level, but there is still work to be done. We don't know how the universe began, or if it's the only universe. We don't know the ultimate, complete laws of physics. We don't know how life began, or how consciousness arose. And we certainly haven't agreed on the best way to live in the world as good human beings. The naturalist needs to make the case that, even without actually having these answers yet, their worldview is still by far the most likely framework in which we will eventually find them. That's what we're here to do. For many people, those attitudes are adopted rather informally from the surrounding culture, rather than arising out of rigorous personal reflection. Each new generation of people doesn't invent the rules of living from scratch; we inherit ideas and values that have evolved over vast stretches of time. At the moment, the dominant image of the world remains one in which human life is cosmically special and significant, something more than mere matter in motion. We need to do better at reconciling how we talk about life's meaning with what we know about the scientific image of our universe. Among people who acknowledge the scientific basis of reality, there is often a conviction-usually left implicit-that all of that philosophical stuff like freedom, morality, and purpose should ultimately be pretty easy to figure out. We're collections of atoms, and we should be nice to one another. How hard can it really be? It can be really hard. Being nice to one another is a good start, but it doesn't get us very far. Why am I here? Why anything at all? Click here for Part 3 of this review. Dr John G. Hartnett is an Australian physicist and cosmologist, and a Christian with a biblical creationist worldview. He received a B. Hons and Ph. Now he is retired. He has published more than papers in scientific journals, book chapters and conference proceedings. Why bother to study anything systematically if the answers are all in black and white already? Every bit of data points this way, without exception. Like Like. Christians are under no delusion that the origin of life was miraculous. The naturalist on the other hand needs the miracles but without the miracle Maker. So he begs the question. He says: there is no God so somehow life must have arisen by chance. But all evidence points away from that. Every bit of data does not point to a naturalistic origin as you suggest. Observational data is not unbiased. It does not interpret itself. All data must be interpreted within a pre-existing framework a worldview to make sense of it. Atheists and naturalists like Carroll have hold to a Godless framework and interpret all data accordingly. No Christians suggest that they understand the mechanics of miracles; that would be ludicrous to say so for, by definition, miracles occur where a suspension of natural law was needed. That includes all supernatural events. Please give just one example of actual data that suggests a miracle is required to cause any observed phenomenon. Methodological naturalism does NOT preclude God. It only requires that untestable entities like the supernatural do not feature in the model. I doubt they give it much thought. Time was when the rising and setting of the sun had a magical explanation. This and many other things are part of a naturalistic model that we now take for granted. But because the science of abiogenesis is inconclusive at the moment, some insist on filling the gap with magic. Again I doubt they think about it much. The origin of the universe and the origin of life are two examples that need a miracle. But because no naturalist says so does not invalidate the claim. They believe such events occurred without supernatural help. So they must have been preternatural miracles, with no miracle maker. Dawkins et al. Dawkins even goes as far as to say that if you teach children biblical creation it is tantamount to child abuse. One serious scientist. On creation. On AnswersinGenesis. Publication List. My family. Cryocooled Sapphire Oscillator at N. Cryocooled Sapphire Oscillator at K. The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself by Sean Carroll

The old picture has been replaced by a wondrous new one-one that is breathtaking and exhilarating in many ways, challenging and vexing in others. It is a view in which the world stubbornly refuses to give us any direct answers about the bigger questions of purpose and meaning. The problem is that we haven't quite admitted to ourselves that this transition has taken place, nor fully accepted its far-reaching implications. The issues are well- known. Over the course of the last two centuries, Darwin has upended our view of life, Nietzsche's madman bemoaned the death of God, existentialists have searched for authenticity in the face of absurdity, and modern atheists have been granted a seat at society's table. And yet, many continue on as if nothing has changed; others revel in the new order, but placidly believe that adjusting our perspective is just a matter of replacing a few old homilies with a few new ones. The truth is that the ground has disappeared beneath us, and we are just beginning to work up the courage to look down. Fortunately, not everything in the air immediately plummets to its death. Wile E. Coyote would have been fine if he had been equipped with one of those ACME-brand jet packs, so that he could fly around under his own volition. It's time to get to work building our conceptual jet packs. What is the fundamental nature of reality? Philosophers call this the question of ontology- the study of the basic structure of the world, the ingredients and relationships of which the universe is ultimately composed. It can be contrasted with epistemology, which is how we obtain knowledge about the world. Ontology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of reality; we also talk about "an" ontology, referring to a specific idea about what that nature actually is. The number of approaches to ontology alive in the world today is somewhat overwhelming. There is the basic question of whether reality exists at all. A realist says, "Of course it does"; but there are also idealists, who think that capital-M Mind is all that truly exists, and the so-called real world is just a series of thoughts inside that Mind. Among realists, we have monists, who think that the world is a single thing, and dualists, who believe in two distinct realms such as "matter" and "spirit". Even people who agree that there is only one type of thing might disagree about whether there are fundamentally different kinds of properties such as mental properties and physical properties that those things can have. And even people who agree that there is only one kind of thing, and that the world is purely physical, might diverge when it comes to asking which aspects of that world are "real" versus "illusory. Is consciousness? Is morality? Whether or not you believe in God-whether you are a theist or an atheist-is part of your ontology, but far from the whole story. It is associated with certain beliefs, often including belief in God, although the definition of "God" can differ substantially within religion's broad scope. Religion can also be a cultural force, a set of institutions, a way of life, a historical legacy, a collection of practices and principles. It's much more, and much messier, than a checklist of doctrines. A counterpart to religion would be humanism, a collection of beliefs and practices that is as varied and malleable as religion is. The broader ontology typically associated with atheism is naturalism-there is only one world, the natural world, exhibiting patterns we call the "laws of nature," and which is discoverable by the methods of science and empirical investigation. There is no separate realm of the supernatural, spiritual, or divine; nor is there any cosmic teleology or transcendent purpose inherent in the nature of the universe or in human life. Purpose and meaning in life arise through fundamentally human acts of creation, rather than being derived from anything outside ourselves. Naturalism is a philosophy of unity and patterns, describing all of reality as a seamless web. Naturalism has a long and distinguished pedigree. We find traces of it in Buddhism, in the atomists of ancient Greece and Rome, and in Confucianism. Hundreds of years after the death of Confucius, a Chinese thinker named Wang Chong was a vocal naturalist, campaigning against the belief in ghosts and spirits that had become popular in his day. But it is really only in the last few centuries that the evidence in favor of naturalism has become hard to resist. Fortunately we don't need to be rigorous or comprehensive about listing the possibilities. But we do need to think hard about ontology. It's at the heart of our Wile E. Coyote problem. The last five hundred or so years of human intellectual progress have completely upended how we think about the world at a fundamental level. Our everyday experience suggests that there are large numbers of truly different kinds of stuff out there. People, spiders, rocks, oceans, tables, fire, air, stars-these all seem dramatically different from one another, deserving of independent entries in our list of basic ingredients of reality. Our "folk ontology" is pluralistic, full of myriad distinct categories. And that's not even counting notions that seem more abstract but are arguably equally "real," from numbers to our goals and dreams to our principles of right and wrong. As our knowledge grows, we have moved by fits and starts in the direction of a simpler, more unified ontology. It's an ancient impulse. In the sixth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus suggested that water is a primary principle from which all else is derived, while across the world, Hindu philosophers put forward Brahman as the single ultimate reality. The development of science has accelerated and codified the trend. Galileo observed that Jupiter has moons, implying that it is a gravitating body just like the Earth. Isaac Newton showed that the force of gravity is universal, underlying both the motion of the planets and the way that apples fall from trees. John Dalton demonstrated how different chemical compounds could be thought of as combinations of basic building blocks called atoms. Charles Darwin established the unity of life from common ancestors. James Clerk Maxwell and other physicists brought together such disparate phenomena as lightning, radiation, and magnets under the single rubric of "electromagnetism. Albert Einstein unified space and time, joining together matter and energy along the way. Particle physics has taught us that every atom in the periodic table of the elements is an arrangement of just three basic particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Every object you have ever seen or bumped into in your life is made of just those three particles. We're left with a very different view of reality from where we started. At a fundamental level, there aren't separate "living things" and "nonliving things," "things here on Earth" and "things up in the sky," "matter" and "spirit. How far will this process of unification and simplification go? It's impossible to say for sure. But we have a reasonable guess, based on our progress thus far: it will go all the way. We will ultimately understand the world as a single, unified reality, not caused or sustained or influenced by anything outside itself. That's a big deal. Hons and Ph. Now he is retired. He has published more than papers in scientific journals, book chapters and conference proceedings. Why bother to study anything systematically if the answers are all in black and white already? Every bit of data points this way, without exception. Like Like. Christians are under no delusion that the origin of life was miraculous. The naturalist on the other hand needs the miracles but without the miracle Maker. So he begs the question. He says: there is no God so somehow life must have arisen by chance. But all evidence points away from that. Every bit of data does not point to a naturalistic origin as you suggest. Observational data is not unbiased. It does not interpret itself. All data must be interpreted within a pre-existing framework a worldview to make sense of it. Atheists and naturalists like Carroll have hold to a Godless framework and interpret all data accordingly. No Christians suggest that they understand the mechanics of miracles; that would be ludicrous to say so for, by definition, miracles occur where a suspension of natural law was needed. That includes all supernatural events. Please give just one example of actual data that suggests a miracle is required to cause any observed phenomenon. Methodological naturalism does NOT preclude God. It only requires that untestable entities like the supernatural do not feature in the model. I doubt they give it much thought. Time was when the rising and setting of the sun had a magical explanation. This and many other things are part of a naturalistic model that we now take for granted. But because the science of abiogenesis is inconclusive at the moment, some insist on filling the gap with magic. Again I doubt they think about it much. The origin of the universe and the origin of life are two examples that need a miracle. But because no naturalist says so does not invalidate the claim. They believe such events occurred without supernatural help. So they must have been preternatural miracles, with no miracle maker. Morality is how individuals modify their behaviour to make social cooperation possible. It has a genetic base with a culturally learned overlay. For those of us for whom evolutionary theory is not just another way of talking, this means there is an objective basis for morality that can be understood using scientific method. That does not mean science can give us a complete and authoritative theory of morality that can be tested in a laboratory. It means we should question all moral concepts, including modern ones, and try to understand their consequences on the basis of evidence as much as possible. It is like going out to dinner with a group of friends. We think about what we want for our individual selves, talk to others about their desires and how we can work together, and reason about how to make it happen. I suppose he picked up his moral relativism from his academic dinner mates. An expert in physics is not necessarily an expert in philosophy or morality. In this case I often felt I was reading a guy who has read the same books I have. But he failed to pick up the message that there is no room for subjectivism in science. Ideas and language have consequences. For example, if biology is just a way of talking, the benefits of immunization are simply a social construction. If you do not like this kind of thinking, then do not use the language that leads there. After all, it is just another way of talking. Although there is much of value here, I find it difficult to recommend a book that sells out the very integrity of science. He is a good writer, and I would happily read a book that sticks to his field of expertise. However, I will take my naturalism without the poor excuse for poetry, thank you very much. View all 10 comments. Dec 30, Andrej Karpathy rated it liked it. I love Sean Carroll, but I can't bring myself to finish this book. This is not some kind of cool science book. It's a little too much too long too high-level philosophy, re-iterating the same things over and over again, and just overall meh. Someone else less familiar with physics might like it. That said, I had to skip over a bunch of it because the book is primarily a work of philosophy and history, and a concatenation of the first 2 paragraphs of popular science articles on topics of physics. The part I actually loved was the Appendix, where he discusses the Core Theory in quite a lot of detail. Dec 06, Book Riot Community added it. Sean Carroll is a cosmologist and physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and his previous books dealt with that subject. What Carroll attempts to do is give the big picture of our existence, and he does a fine job. He combines science, philosophy, religion, psychology and other subjects, to show why no one explanation works. There can be no general theory of everything. So, explanations of the unseen world quantum mechanics do not explain everyday human behavior. This book is for anyone who asks why. Feb 19, Mark rated it really liked it. Can meaning and purpose be found and explained within a non- theistic vs. Sean Carroll argues that not only is it possible, but the only reasonable perspective. He creates a new paradigm, which he calls poetic naturalism to explain how he joins science, philosophy, and a naturalistic worldview with one that also allows for wonder, mystery, joy, purpose, and meaning in life. Poetic naturalism contends that we have different ways of talking about r Can meaning and purpose be found and explained within a non-theistic vs. Poetic naturalism contends that we have different ways of talking about reality depending on scope and context. We use different vocabularies when we talk about stuff at the quantum level than we do at the level of a complete human organism. We use different vocabularies when we move on to the universe and the cosmos. Poetic naturalism borrows the language of poetry to tell different stories at each different level. Each story makes sense and is meaningful within proper contexts. The problem that often occurs in discourse about naturalism, science, worldviews, philosophy, and life is that words used in one domain don't mean the same thing when used in another. Carroll argues that even though at the atomic level, discussion of meaning and purpose makes no sense, at increasingly more macro levels meaning and purpose become increasingly emergent. We can talk about purpose of simple organisms; we can talk about purpose of more complex ones; and we can finally talk about purpose at the human level. We use the same word, yet at each level the semantics are different. In this book Carroll provides evidence and argument against any kind of outside force or influence being involved in the universe as we currently observe and know. He provides comprehensive arguments against commonly used theistic arguments in favor of Creationism of any kind - this includes the "watchmaker" argument, intelligent design, and more. This book is for the mainstream public, but I think understanding it is easier if the reader is already familiar with physics, quantum physics, astrophysics, cosmology, higher mathematics, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and religion. I think it is important for theists to examine the arguments and reasoning found in this book. They may discover that what they've assumed about arguments for theism aren't nearly as strong as they've thought. Or that non-theists possibly can't have meaning, purpose, ethics, or morals is a myth; and conversely that belief in God is required for ethics and morals. They may also discover that what they've been taught about science and naturalism looks quite a bit different than what it actually looks like within today's scientific theories. For naturalists Carroll provides avenues for more nuanced dialogue about science and how it shapes their worldview. It elevates storytelling as a more effective means of communication than a mere offering of raw data, facts and theories. He provides common ground in which all can strive to work toward a better world. View 1 comment. Mar 07, Stuart rated it did not like it Shelves: technology-science. There is very little evidence, based on the initial dozen chapters, that Sean Carroll really is a theoretical physicist at Cal Tech. While he most likely is, this book is just an unlistenable mess that I started skipping through after a few chapters, and then gave up on about halfway through. Apr 24, Peter Pete Mcloughlin rated it it was amazing Shelves: complexity , general-history , biology , general-science , astronomy , philosophy , chemistry , european-history , intellectual-history , world-history. I probably would have given this a five star rating but I am very familiar with Dr. Carroll from Youtube and the Great courses and his other books. I like the book a lot but I have seen this stuff before in other places. The only reason I am withholding the five is that I wanted to see something new. I would recommend this book who doesn't know Dr. Carroll from the interwebs and I think he is a good writer and I like his grand work here but I think i like his earlier works better. Still I like t I probably would have given this a five star rating but I am very familiar with Dr. Still I like this synthesis of science and philosophy a lot and I think he gets his picture right. February 7, , Upon doing a much more careful listening on Audible I have gotten a lot better appreciation for this book and Carroll's understanding of poetic naturalism. I might fight him on his interpretation of consciousness and the status of philosophical zombies but as for the rest of his vision of poetic naturalism I find it satisfying and beautiful and more importantly probably the closest to the truth. Very enjoyable on a close reading. Here is Carroll talking about his book at Google. Sep 07, Michael Huang rated it it was amazing. Naturalism is the view there is a nature and it follows discoverable laws. Poetic refers to the fact you can have multiple compatible laws describing the same thing at different levels of detail. Which one is most useful is up to you. You have the poetic license to make such a choice. I remember Karl Popper was said to be the favorite philosopher of scientists and engineers. Carroll offers himself up as a serious contender for that title. Of course, a lot of the basic tenets are not necessarily new, but Carroll offers a latest iteration of update and interpretation. His analysis is sharp and to the point. Case in point, a lot of people jumped on the notion of fine-tuning to immediately re-embrace theism. Carroll will show you that the theism explains precisely nothing about the fine-tuning. In fact, you are just suffering from confirmation bias. When you read a typical philosophical work, there are almost always passages that get you more and more confused, even though ever so subtly. But voila, at the end of long passage, the conclusion is extraordinarily proved beyond reasonable doubt. And you are left none the wiser. It is when the philosophers use concrete examples when the ambiguity is minimized. This is the time when their non-clear thinking is exposed and can thus be debunked. John Searle produced the Chinese room analogy. This is an unmitigated good thing for all involved. The meaning of life or how to live your life are issues that come up a lot in philosophical writing. I was following Sean Carroll's blog for a long time - he is a great professional and clearly has a gift of explaining complicated things in a simple way. This book, however, was a bit too simplistic. Not the ideas themselves, something else - the attempt to cover everything? The lukewarm philosophy? Still, highly admire the author, and can only recommend his blog I was following Sean Carroll's blog for a long time - he is a great professional and clearly has a gift of explaining complicated things in a simple way. Still, highly admire the author, and can only recommend his blog Oct 03, Gendou rated it it was amazing Shelves: non-fiction , philosophy , physics , science , quantum-physics , skepticism. Carroll introduces a philosophical idea he calls "poetic naturalism" in which the ontology includes objects which are useful in talking about the world at a given scale or levels of detail. For example, we can talk about people when it's useful to do so, and not worry that people are just made up of atoms and without getting distracted by questions like which is the last atom that's part of "me" on the tip of my finger. The book takes the reader from the beginning of science with Newton's laws of Carroll introduces a philosophical idea he calls "poetic naturalism" in which the ontology includes objects which are useful in talking about the world at a given scale or levels of detail. The book takes the reader from the beginning of science with Newton's laws of motion up to modern day quantum field theory. This is structured like a survey of physics so as not to let any novice readers get lost. He does a great job of explaining why psychic powers can't be real, why "qualia" and "philosophical zombies" are dumb, etc. He introduces a cool analogy of a "planet of belief" which represents all the things a person believes. Every person has a different "planet of belief", and they can be stable or unstable, etc. He smacks down the idea that science, like religion, requires "faith". He tackles the hard and soft problems of consciousness. He says the soft problem is really hard, and the hard problem is a misunderstanding. There's a whole lot of talk about god in this book. I'm not sure why. He does say its important because so many people believe in god. The topic is approached with a lot of caution which seems to me an attempt to avoid turning away theists. That's nice, but I felt like he was treating religious ideas with kid gloves and that's not too fun for me to read. It's also boring. I want to hear that space stuff! Here are some claims in the book which I consider mistakes. He invokes the MWI and says the ensemble multiverse is deterministic. But this doesn't work because you don't do quantum mechanics using the ensemble. You use the same maths using MWI to make the same non-deterministic predictions about what's likely to happen when you make a measurement. A theory is deterministic, by my reading, if there's an unique prediction when evolution forwards in time given fully specified initial conditions. This is true for Newtonian mechanics, and untrue for Quantum Mechanics. If you look at MWI as providing an unique solution evolving forwards in time, you do so at the cost of all predictive power, because we have no way to tell which path down the infinity of branching universes our reality has taken. Actually, there is. The word "supernatural" generally means a force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature. So it's unscientific by definition! But even if we grant the most charitable definition of "supernatural" as being merely inconsistent with known laws of physics, we still have a problem. Scientific theories must be falsifiable. A supernatural claim is one of an exception which has been found to the laws of physics. If this exception is explained by some new hypothesis, we must test that hypothesis. If found true, this new hypothesis is added into what we mean by "the laws of physics". So a supernatural claim, when unsupported, shouldn't be believed at all, and is rightly rejected by anyone practicing the process called science. This process can be gradual or rapid, depending on the nature of the evidence, but at no time is any natural explanation "supernatural", and at no point is any "supernatural" explanation necessary much less allowed in scientific discourse! His point here is that we should remain skeptical about unknowns, and not assume the way the universe looks here matches how it looks elsewhere, or even assume there is an elsewhere! This is subtly incorrect. We actually do have some knowledge about that which lies outside our observable universe! If spacetime were curved such that the size of the universe were finite and on the order of the observable universe, we'd expect an enormously positive value for the curvature of the universe. Which we don't see. Also, if the universe relatively close to but outside the horizon of our observable universe were significantly anisotropic, we'd notice the impact of this anisotropy on objects close to but inside the horizon. The isotropy of the observable universe is very precisely known. So, he's made an overly naive claim because it ignores important lines of evidence about what lies outside the horizon of our observable universe, where that evidence can be gathered from right here within the horizon. May 23, Jose Moa rated it it was amazing Shelves: essay , science , cosmology. With regard to the existence of theuniverse applies the Ockams Razor concluding tha the universe exist by itself,and about the fine tuning he claims that in the inflactionary process were created several regions no casually conected with different phisical laws and constants and we are living in the one fitted for us. As for the finality or purpose of the universe it is a useless ask. The inteligence is a emergent phenomenon caused by million years of darvinian evolution,perhaps a evolutionary accident. In this situation the human life is finite and short and we must make the best of it,there is not any sort of life after death and we must face this fact with bravery and maturity. Thhe moral is a mix of evolutionary behavior and a human construction in search of the comon well. All this, and more are the thesis of a very apropiated tittled book "The big Picture ", because gives a rationalist cosmic vision and explanation at all levels of our universe,and in my opinion he success. A recomendable book for everibody that would like have a global vision of our existential landscape. Jan 21, David Msomba rated it it was amazing Shelves: science , favorites , philosophy , atheism-humanism. Long or short, our moments are brief against the expanse of eternity. While we still don't have a unified equation of explaining the universe,Sean Caroll did a great job of combining numerous subjects of science, mathematics,philosophy and psychology to bring a perspective of the big picture and bring forward of how we could explain the universe without with the need of supernatural agent. We have come so far,studying and understanding the universe Highly recommended Definitely a masterpiece Jul 14, Ross rated it liked it. Quite interesting philosophical discussion of what we know, what we can know, and what we can't know. The author is a professor of physics and begins with a review of the history of what we have learned about the laws of physics He then launches into a discussion of philosophical belief systems contrasting those of theism and atheism. He describes his belief in a system termed "poetic naturalism. In other word Quite interesting philosophical discussion of what we know, what we can know, and what we can't know. In other words, "what you see is what you get. He discusses the fact that we can't really know, or prove, which system of belief is actually true. It is just a question of what is most likely given what we can see and measure. Some people believe the universe started last Thursday; maybe but not likely. Same with souls and spirits. What a waste! I picked up this big book because I love science! I surrender! Look, I have no problem with atheism! It is a perfectly reasonable way of looking at the world, particularly from a physicist. But whether you are pontificating abo What a waste! But whether you are pontificating about religion or atheism, after awhile it becomes condescending! It is like, "Okay, I get it! The universe functions fine by itself! Now to the science of how! The philosophy lesson coninues! May 09, Whitney rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorite-nonfiction , science. I finally have a term to sum up my own personal philosophy toward life which was certainly deepened and expanded by reading this book : poetic naturalism. Aug 30, Katie rated it really liked it Shelves: philosophy , science. I bought this at an airport bookstore, mostly because I admired the audacity of someone who would write a book about life, meaning, and the universe and slap it all on the cover. I'm pretty much the audience for this book. I like science but have zero formal training in it; I like books that are overly ambitious in their scope. I also went into this book without realizing it already having essentially the same philosophical and religious views as the author. That made for a somewhat satisfying I bought this at an airport bookstore, mostly because I admired the audacity of someone who would write a book about life, meaning, and the universe and slap it all on the cover. That made for a somewhat satisfying read, if never a particularly challenging one. Carroll is a decent writer - nothing spectacular, but always clear and approachable. He's one of the rare science writers I've come across that shows a regular respect for historical thinkers who were clever but also wrong. He's also quite good at deploying analogies to explain difficult concepts I especially liked this discussion of time and entropy. That said, I'd imagine this book is a bit of mixed bag for actual, trained scientists. It's relatively light on hard science and if you're not already on board with Hugh Everett's multi-world explanation of quantum mechanics, this is certainly not going to convince you. But that's okay. That's not really what this book is trying to do. It's fitting that the books' last chapter is called "Existential Therapy" - Carroll's book is really designed as a philosophical statement, as a gentle "it'll all be okay" to people who look at quantum mechanics with existential dread. I was already pretty much on board before I started reading it, so I can't say how effective it'd be at convincing non-believers. But it's still an interesting, engaging book, filled with clever analogies and a broader, humanistic view of the world. Oct 27, Hamid rated it it was amazing Shelves: science , favorites , philosophy. Sean Carroll speaks of a new idea called poetic naturalism. Naturalism comes down to three things: 1. There is only one world, the natural world. The world evolves according to unbroken patterns, the laws of nature. The only reliable way of learning about the world is by observing i Sean Carroll speaks of a new idea called poetic naturalism. The only reliable way of learning about the world is by observing it. Essentially, naturalism is the idea that the world revealed to us by scientific investigation is the one true world. The poetic aspect comes to the fore when we start talking about that world. It can also be summarized in three points: 1. There are many ways of talking about the world. All good ways of talking must be consistent with one another and with the world. Our purposes in the moment determine the best way of talking. A poetic naturalist for example will agree that both Captain Kirk and the Ship of Theseus are simply ways of talking about certain collections of atoms stretching through space and time. Here's some quotes from the book: - To understand time, it helps to start with space. In reality, as far as the laws of physics are concerned, all directions in space are created equal. Time works the same way. In reality, both directions of time are created equal. In another camp are the Bayesians, for whom probabilities are simply expressions of your states of belief in cases of ignorance or uncertainty. For a Bayesian, saying there is a 50 percent chance of the coin coming up heads is merely to state that you have zero reason to favor one outcome over another. If you were offered to bet on the outcome of the coin flip, you would be indifferent to choosing heads or tails. The Bayesian will then helpfully explain that this is the only thing you could possibly mean by such a statement, since we never observe infinite numbers of trials, and we often speak about probabilities for things that happen only once, like elections or sporting events. The frequentist would then object that the Bayesian is introducing an unnecessary element of subjectivity and personal ignorance into what should be an objective conversation about how the world behaves, and they would be off. And when it comes to understanding the fundamental architecture of reality, none of us has complete information. It can simply be. Then there is conservation of information. The universe evolves by marching from one moment to the next in a way that depends only on its present state. It neither aims toward future goals nor relies on its previous history. The universe is specific and contingent, the argument goes; it could easily have been otherwise. So there must be something that explains the universe, and then something that explains that thing, and so on through the chain of reasons. To avoid diving down a rabbit hole of infinite regress, we need to invoke a necessary being— one that must exist and could not have been otherwise, and therefore requires no explanation. And that being is God. They prefer to lay all the options on the table, then try to figure out what our credences should be in each of them. Maybe there is an ultimate explanation; maybe there is an infinite chain of explanations; maybe there is no final explanation at all. Why it exists the particular way it does, rather than some other way, is worth exploring. Feb 19, Donna rated it really liked it Shelves: non-fiction. This is nonfiction science. It was very science-y which is not my thing, but I liked this one. If every physics teacher could be like this author, more kids would leave high school having enjoyed science, as a whole. Some of this was completely over my head, but not once did the author ever make me feel like I was in the weeds. He took his time and described everything so well. This author posed a lot of "big picture" questions, but instead of letting the reader ponder them, he stepped in and g This is nonfiction science. This author posed a lot of "big picture" questions, but instead of letting the reader ponder them, he stepped in and gave you answers. That approach worked with this book, but sometimes I wanted to ponder some of the questions. Mar 18, Gary Beauregard Bottomley rated it it was amazing. All popular science books should take a clue from this book. There is no 'one scientific method' there are just many different possible ways we determine our justified true beliefs. This author is never afraid at talking above the listener. He's perfectly comfortable at using the appropriate terms that our needed, and he takes a stand on many of the issues within the Philosophy of Science. As the author says, science before Galileo thought in terms of causes and purpose teleology , and afterward All popular science books should take a clue from this book. As the author says, science before Galileo thought in terms of causes and purpose teleology , and afterwards started thinking in terms of patterns and laws rules. I would say the book is essentially divided into two parts. The first part lays the foundation for the nature of science and introduces the listener to the nature of being, the study of ontology, and the foundations that are created which we use in order to explain. He'll actually get into some deep discussions on possible building blocks for the universe monads, dyads, substance, forms, The importance of emergent properties because of the different regimes that are created by our "domains of appropriate applicability". Anti-realist v realist, the entailing of different theories by other theories, Bayesian statistics and why it's so necessary to understand what it is, and most of the other standard topics from the philosophy of science. There's multiple ways to understand the world. Sometimes we have to get at the particular before we can understand the whole or the universal, and other times we must understand the whole before we can get at the particular. The judgement we use by subsuming the particular under a universal rule gives us the bridge from reason to understanding. I saw the second half of the book as a refutation for all of the classical arguments for the existence of God. He doesn't frame them that way but uses the argument as a departure point in order to educate the listener on how to think about the world and ourselves such that we are a part of nature not apart from nature and how everything that can be explained understood can be thought of in 'poetic natural' terms. Look, he's an incredibly gifted writer, but I think he could have done a better job on his 'fine tuning' counter-argument. But his refutation on the prime mover argument, that 'nothing is not a state of being' was superb. Science is always underdetermined. The scientific facts that we have can be explained by multiple theories. Just read any issue of Scientific American and you'll see an article on a new scientific phenomena such as Dark Energy and you'll see a statement such as that there are three different explanations for the phenomena under consideration e. It quickly shows that science will be underdetermined. I mention this because I think that the graveyard is full of scientist who makes such a claim as he does in the book that the "bending of a spoon by mental telepathy is not possible because our current theory would never allow it". It is wrong to make that statement. There can always be a different ontology that will entail the current one but allow us to realize different perspectives. I really like the book a lot. He merges the nature of science with understanding science as nature. I saw the bibliography on this book before it came out. I slowed down reading popular science books because most of the ideas in popular science books I read I have read elsewhere. Even in this book it mostly consisted of things I've read elsewhere. But, he does something that I wish all pop science books would do, he understands the issues in the Philosophy of Science and he knows how to relate that to the science that is being told. Feb 08, P. Wilson rated it liked it. This a good book if you're looking for a reasonably clear synopsis of modern physics. It also has an excellent section on scientific reasoning, including a useful description of Bayesian probability and abduction as distinct from deduction and induction. It is marred, however, by the what I would call the author's evangelical atheism. His alternative, "poetic naturalism," is best described by one reviewer as "not even wrong. He too easily dismisses the sticky question of "consciousness" by saying it's just the way we have of talking about cognitive processes that make it seem as if we have a non-physical soul. My question: if consciousness is so easy to dismiss, could you please explain electricity? It seems to be an emergent phenomenon that is physical, but undefinable. Poetic naturalism is also invoked to describe the unproven, and unprovable, idea of the "multiverse. Moreover, in a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Steven Weinberg, one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, argues that it might be time to reconsider the whole idea of quantum mechanics based on its shortcomings. The last part of the book, in which Carroll argues for an ethics based on "poetic naturalism," reads like a New Age poster written by a California surfer dude. His "Ten Commandments" are trite, to say the least. Carroll does skim across a lot of interesting philosophical territory, but to me his coverage seems Wikipedia deep. Carroll's book is ambitious, and ultimately it's impressive because he achieves--at least as far as I can determine- -what he set out to do. The big picture is the nature of reality explained by contemporary science. He describes how the universe works in every scale from the cosmic to the quantum and how the current understanding of such elemental foundations make clear concepts like the arrow of time and entropy and unite in our heads as consciousness and language and even notions of morality. I Carroll's book is ambitious, and ultimately it's impressive because he achieves--at least as far as I can determine--what he set out to do. Intended for the layperson, like me, some of his book is necessarily spent explaining how to think about the science and the phenomena he describes. Many of these ideas are head-splittingly knotty. The diagrams and charts are helpful, sometimes even clarifying a text too difficult for my knowledge and experience to grasp. Working forward and downward from the Big Bang and cosmic scale to the mysteries of quantum mechanics he details existence as we know it today. Sometimes it was like trying to understand magic. Existence may be a human perception, but Carroll still had to explain how consciousness is a physical process defined by the activity and motion of quantum particles and how ultimately all of it affects such philosophical ideas as determinism, causality, and free will. This was a difficult read for someone like me who doesn't have a background in science. But I rode this beautiful, muscular animal of a book, clinging to it, refusing to be bucked off. And by the time Carroll got to consciousness I felt like I knew how to ride a little bit. I may not have tamed the complete picture of reality, but I learned a lot, and I learned I want to read more.

The Big Picture – Sean Carroll

In The Big Picture , Sean Carroll ties together the fundamental laws of physics governing the workings of the cosmos with the everyday human experience we all share. The book takes us on a breathtaking journey from the origin of the universe, through the evolution of life and consciousness, to the eternal question of what it all really means. Now available for purchase: Amazon. Blending science and philosophy, Sean Carroll gives us a humane perspective on the universe and our place in it. As gripping as it is important, The Big Picture can change the way you think about the world. Already internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on Higgs bosons and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions. Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void? In short chapters filled with intriguing historical anecdotes, personal asides, and rigorous exposition, readers learn the difference between how the world works at the quantum level, the cosmic level, and the human level--and then how each connects to the other. Carroll's presentation of the principles that have guided the scientific revolution from Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness, and the universe is dazzlingly unique. Carroll shows how an avalanche of discoveries in the past few hundred years has changed our world and what really matters to us. Our lives are dwarfed like never before by the immensity of space and time, but they are redeemed by our capacity to comprehend it and give it meaning. The Big Picture is an unprecedented scientific worldview, a tour de force that will sit on shelves alongside the works of Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett, and E. Wilson for years to come. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in from Harvard University. Recently, Carroll has worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, and the emergence of complexity. He has given a TED talk on the multiverse that has more than one million views, and he has participated in a number of well-attended public debates concerning material in his new book. The Fundamental Nature of Reality 2. Poetic Naturalism 3. The World Moves By Itself 4. Reasons Why 6. Our Universe 7. Memories and Causes. Morality is how individuals modify their behaviour to make social cooperation possible. It has a genetic base with a culturally learned overlay. For those of us for whom evolutionary theory is not just another way of talking, this means there is an objective basis for morality that can be understood using scientific method. That does not mean science can give us a complete and authoritative theory of morality that can be tested in a laboratory. It means we should question all moral concepts, including modern ones, and try to understand their consequences on the basis of evidence as much as possible. It is like going out to dinner with a group of friends. We think about what we want for our individual selves, talk to others about their desires and how we can work together, and reason about how to make it happen. I suppose he picked up his moral relativism from his academic dinner mates. An expert in physics is not necessarily an expert in philosophy or morality. In this case I often felt I was reading a guy who has read the same books I have. But he failed to pick up the message that there is no room for subjectivism in science. Ideas and language have consequences. For example, if biology is just a way of talking, the benefits of immunization are simply a social construction. If you do not like this kind of thinking, then do not use the language that leads there. After all, it is just another way of talking. Although there is much of value here, I find it difficult to recommend a book that sells out the very integrity of science. He is a good writer, and I would happily read a book that sticks to his field of expertise. However, I will take my naturalism without the poor excuse for poetry, thank you very much. View all 10 comments. Dec 30, Andrej Karpathy rated it liked it. I love Sean Carroll, but I can't bring myself to finish this book. This is not some kind of cool science book. It's a little too much too long too high-level philosophy, re-iterating the same things over and over again, and just overall meh. Someone else less familiar with physics might like it. That said, I had to skip over a bunch of it because the book is primarily a work of philosophy and history, and a concatenation of the first 2 paragraphs of popular science articles on topics of physics. The part I actually loved was the Appendix, where he discusses the Core Theory in quite a lot of detail. Dec 06, Book Riot Community added it. Sean Carroll is a cosmologist and physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and his previous books dealt with that subject. What Carroll attempts to do is give the big picture of our existence, and he does a fine job. He combines science, philosophy, religion, psychology and other subjects, to show why no one explanation works. There can be no general theory of everything. So, explanations of the unseen world quantum mechanics do not explain everyday human behavior. This book is for anyone who asks why. Feb 19, Mark rated it really liked it. Can meaning and purpose be found and explained within a non-theistic vs. Sean Carroll argues that not only is it possible, but the only reasonable perspective. He creates a new paradigm, which he calls poetic naturalism to explain how he joins science, philosophy, and a naturalistic worldview with one that also allows for wonder, mystery, joy, purpose, and meaning in life. Poetic naturalism contends that we have different ways of talking about r Can meaning and purpose be found and explained within a non-theistic vs. Poetic naturalism contends that we have different ways of talking about reality depending on scope and context. We use different vocabularies when we talk about stuff at the quantum level than we do at the level of a complete human organism. We use different vocabularies when we move on to the universe and the cosmos. Poetic naturalism borrows the language of poetry to tell different stories at each different level. Each story makes sense and is meaningful within proper contexts. The problem that often occurs in discourse about naturalism, science, worldviews, philosophy, and life is that words used in one domain don't mean the same thing when used in another. Carroll argues that even though at the atomic level, discussion of meaning and purpose makes no sense, at increasingly more macro levels meaning and purpose become increasingly emergent. We can talk about purpose of simple organisms; we can talk about purpose of more complex ones; and we can finally talk about purpose at the human level. We use the same word, yet at each level the semantics are different. In this book Carroll provides evidence and argument against any kind of outside force or influence being involved in the universe as we currently observe and know. He provides comprehensive arguments against commonly used theistic arguments in favor of Creationism of any kind - this includes the "watchmaker" argument, intelligent design, and more. This book is for the mainstream public, but I think understanding it is easier if the reader is already familiar with physics, quantum physics, astrophysics, cosmology, higher mathematics, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and religion. I think it is important for theists to examine the arguments and reasoning found in this book. They may discover that what they've assumed about arguments for theism aren't nearly as strong as they've thought. Or that non-theists possibly can't have meaning, purpose, ethics, or morals is a myth; and conversely that belief in God is required for ethics and morals. They may also discover that what they've been taught about science and naturalism looks quite a bit different than what it actually looks like within today's scientific theories. For naturalists Carroll provides avenues for more nuanced dialogue about science and how it shapes their worldview. It elevates storytelling as a more effective means of communication than a mere offering of raw data, facts and theories. He provides common ground in which all can strive to work toward a better world. View 1 comment. Mar 07, Stuart rated it did not like it Shelves: technology-science. There is very little evidence, based on the initial dozen chapters, that Sean Carroll really is a theoretical physicist at Cal Tech. While he most likely is, this book is just an unlistenable mess that I started skipping through after a few chapters, and then gave up on about halfway through. Apr 24, Peter Pete Mcloughlin rated it it was amazing Shelves: complexity , general-history , biology , general-science , astronomy , philosophy , chemistry , european-history , intellectual-history , world-history. I probably would have given this a five star rating but I am very familiar with Dr. Carroll from Youtube and the Great courses and his other books. I like the book a lot but I have seen this stuff before in other places. The only reason I am withholding the five is that I wanted to see something new. I would recommend this book who doesn't know Dr. Carroll from the interwebs and I think he is a good writer and I like his grand work here but I think i like his earlier works better. Still I like t I probably would have given this a five star rating but I am very familiar with Dr. Still I like this synthesis of science and philosophy a lot and I think he gets his picture right. February 7, , Upon doing a much more careful listening on Audible I have gotten a lot better appreciation for this book and Carroll's understanding of poetic naturalism. I might fight him on his interpretation of consciousness and the status of philosophical zombies but as for the rest of his vision of poetic naturalism I find it satisfying and beautiful and more importantly probably the closest to the truth. Very enjoyable on a close reading. Here is Carroll talking about his book at Google. Sep 07, Michael Huang rated it it was amazing. Naturalism is the view there is a nature and it follows discoverable laws. Poetic refers to the fact you can have multiple compatible laws describing the same thing at different levels of detail. Which one is most useful is up to you. You have the poetic license to make such a choice. I remember Karl Popper was said to be the favorite philosopher of scientists and engineers. Carroll offers himself up as a serious contender for that title. Of course, a lot of the basic tenets are not necessarily new, but Carroll offers a latest iteration of update and interpretation. His analysis is sharp and to the point. Case in point, a lot of people jumped on the notion of fine-tuning to immediately re-embrace theism. Carroll will show you that the theism explains precisely nothing about the fine-tuning. In fact, you are just suffering from confirmation bias. When you read a typical philosophical work, there are almost always passages that get you more and more confused, even though ever so subtly. But voila, at the end of long passage, the conclusion is extraordinarily proved beyond reasonable doubt. And you are left none the wiser. It is when the philosophers use concrete examples when the ambiguity is minimized. This is the time when their non-clear thinking is exposed and can thus be debunked. John Searle produced the Chinese room analogy. This is an unmitigated good thing for all involved. The meaning of life or how to live your life are issues that come up a lot in philosophical writing. I was following Sean Carroll's blog for a long time - he is a great professional and clearly has a gift of explaining complicated things in a simple way. This book, however, was a bit too simplistic. Not the ideas themselves, something else - the attempt to cover everything? The lukewarm philosophy? Still, highly admire the author, and can only recommend his blog I was following Sean Carroll's blog for a long time - he is a great professional and clearly has a gift of explaining complicated things in a simple way. Still, highly admire the author, and can only recommend his blog Oct 03, Gendou rated it it was amazing Shelves: non-fiction , philosophy , physics , science , quantum-physics , skepticism. Carroll introduces a philosophical idea he calls "poetic naturalism" in which the ontology includes objects which are useful in talking about the world at a given scale or levels of detail. For example, we can talk about people when it's useful to do so, and not worry that people are just made up of atoms and without getting distracted by questions like which is the last atom that's part of "me" on the tip of my finger. The book takes the reader from the beginning of science with Newton's laws of Carroll introduces a philosophical idea he calls "poetic naturalism" in which the ontology includes objects which are useful in talking about the world at a given scale or levels of detail. The book takes the reader from the beginning of science with Newton's laws of motion up to modern day quantum field theory. This is structured like a survey of physics so as not to let any novice readers get lost. He does a great job of explaining why psychic powers can't be real, why "qualia" and "philosophical zombies" are dumb, etc. He introduces a cool analogy of a "planet of belief" which represents all the things a person believes. Every person has a different "planet of belief", and they can be stable or unstable, etc. He smacks down the idea that science, like religion, requires "faith". He tackles the hard and soft problems of consciousness. He says the soft problem is really hard, and the hard problem is a misunderstanding. There's a whole lot of talk about god in this book. I'm not sure why. He does say its important because so many people believe in god. The topic is approached with a lot of caution which seems to me an attempt to avoid turning away theists. That's nice, but I felt like he was treating religious ideas with kid gloves and that's not too fun for me to read. It's also boring. I want to hear that space stuff! Here are some claims in the book which I consider mistakes. He invokes the MWI and says the ensemble multiverse is deterministic. But this doesn't work because you don't do quantum mechanics using the ensemble. You use the same maths using MWI to make the same non-deterministic predictions about what's likely to happen when you make a measurement. A theory is deterministic, by my reading, if there's an unique prediction when evolution forwards in time given fully specified initial conditions. This is true for Newtonian mechanics, and untrue for Quantum Mechanics. If you look at MWI as providing an unique solution evolving forwards in time, you do so at the cost of all predictive power, because we have no way to tell which path down the infinity of branching universes our reality has taken. Actually, there is. The word "supernatural" generally means a force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature. So it's unscientific by definition! But even if we grant the most charitable definition of "supernatural" as being merely inconsistent with known laws of physics, we still have a problem. Scientific theories must be falsifiable. A supernatural claim is one of an exception which has been found to the laws of physics. If this exception is explained by some new hypothesis, we must test that hypothesis. If found true, this new hypothesis is added into what we mean by "the laws of physics". So a supernatural claim, when unsupported, shouldn't be believed at all, and is rightly rejected by anyone practicing the process called science. This process can be gradual or rapid, depending on the nature of the evidence, but at no time is any natural explanation "supernatural", and at no point is any "supernatural" explanation necessary much less allowed in scientific discourse! His point here is that we should remain skeptical about unknowns, and not assume the way the universe looks here matches how it looks elsewhere, or even assume there is an elsewhere! This is subtly incorrect. We actually do have some knowledge about that which lies outside our observable universe! If spacetime were curved such that the size of the universe were finite and on the order of the observable universe, we'd expect an enormously positive value for the curvature of the universe. Which we don't see. Also, if the universe relatively close to but outside the horizon of our observable universe were significantly anisotropic, we'd notice the impact of this anisotropy on objects close to but inside the horizon. The isotropy of the observable universe is very precisely known. So, he's made an overly naive claim because it ignores important lines of evidence about what lies outside the horizon of our observable universe, where that evidence can be gathered from right here within the horizon. May 23, Jose Moa rated it it was amazing Shelves: essay , science , cosmology. With regard to the existence of theuniverse applies the Ockams Razor concluding tha the universe exist by itself,and about the fine tuning he claims that in the inflactionary process were created several regions no casually conected with different phisical laws and constants and we are living in the one fitted for us. As for the finality or purpose of the universe it is a useless ask. The inteligence is a emergent phenomenon caused by million years of darvinian evolution,perhaps a evolutionary accident. In this situation the human life is finite and short and we must make the best of it,there is not any sort of life after death and we must face this fact with bravery and maturity. Thhe moral is a mix of evolutionary behavior and a human construction in search of the comon well. All this, and more are the thesis of a very apropiated tittled book "The big Picture ", because gives a rationalist cosmic vision and explanation at all levels of our universe,and in my opinion he success. A recomendable book for everibody that would like have a global vision of our existential landscape. Jan 21, David Msomba rated it it was amazing Shelves: science , favorites , philosophy , atheism-humanism. Long or short, our moments are brief against the expanse of eternity. While we still don't have a unified equation of explaining the universe,Sean Caroll did a great job of combining numerous subjects of science, mathematics,philosophy and psychology to bring a perspective of the big picture and bring forward of how we could explain the universe without with the need of supernatural agent. We have come so far,studying and understanding the universe Highly recommended Definitely a masterpiece Jul 14, Ross rated it liked it. Quite interesting philosophical discussion of what we know, what we can know, and what we can't know. The author is a professor of physics and begins with a review of the history of what we have learned about the laws of physics He then launches into a discussion of philosophical belief systems contrasting those of theism and atheism. He describes his belief in a system termed "poetic naturalism. In other word Quite interesting philosophical discussion of what we know, what we can know, and what we can't know. In other words, "what you see is what you get. He discusses the fact that we can't really know, or prove, which system of belief is actually true. It is just a question of what is most likely given what we can see and measure. Some people believe the universe started last Thursday; maybe but not likely. Same with souls and spirits. What a waste! I picked up this big book because I love science! I surrender! Look, I have no problem with atheism! It is a perfectly reasonable way of looking at the world, particularly from a physicist. But whether you are pontificating abo What a waste! But whether you are pontificating about religion or atheism, after awhile it becomes condescending! It is like, "Okay, I get it! The universe functions fine by itself! Now to the science of how! The philosophy lesson coninues! May 09, Whitney rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorite-nonfiction , science. I finally have a term to sum up my own personal philosophy toward life which was certainly deepened and expanded by reading this book : poetic naturalism. Aug 30, Katie rated it really liked it Shelves: philosophy , science. I bought this at an airport bookstore, mostly because I admired the audacity of someone who would write a book about life, meaning, and the universe and slap it all on the cover. I'm pretty much the audience for this book. I like science but have zero formal training in it; I like books that are overly ambitious in their scope. I also went into this book without realizing it already having essentially the same philosophical and religious views as the author. That made for a somewhat satisfying I bought this at an airport bookstore, mostly because I admired the audacity of someone who would write a book about life, meaning, and the universe and slap it all on the cover. That made for a somewhat satisfying read, if never a particularly challenging one. Carroll is a decent writer - nothing spectacular, but always clear and approachable. He's one of the rare science writers I've come across that shows a regular respect for historical thinkers who were clever but also wrong. He's also quite good at deploying analogies to explain difficult concepts I especially liked this discussion of time and entropy. That said, I'd imagine this book is a bit of mixed bag for actual, trained scientists. It's relatively light on hard science and if you're not already on board with Hugh Everett's multi- world explanation of quantum mechanics, this is certainly not going to convince you. But that's okay. That's not really what this book is trying to do. It's fitting that the books' last chapter is called "Existential Therapy" - Carroll's book is really designed as a philosophical statement, as a gentle "it'll all be okay" to people who look at quantum mechanics with existential dread. I was already pretty much on board before I started reading it, so I can't say how effective it'd be at convincing non-believers. But it's still an interesting, engaging book, filled with clever analogies and a broader, humanistic view of the world. Oct 27, Hamid rated it it was amazing Shelves: science , favorites , philosophy. Sean Carroll speaks of a new idea called poetic naturalism. Naturalism comes down to three things: 1. There is only one world, the natural world. The world evolves according to unbroken patterns, the laws of nature. The only reliable way of learning about the world is by observing i Sean Carroll speaks of a new idea called poetic naturalism. The only reliable way of learning about the world is by observing it. Essentially, naturalism is the idea that the world revealed to us by scientific investigation is the one true world. The poetic aspect comes to the fore when we start talking about that world. It can also be summarized in three points: 1. There are many ways of talking about the world. All good ways of talking must be consistent with one another and with the world. Our purposes in the moment determine the best way of talking. A poetic naturalist for example will agree that both Captain Kirk and the Ship of Theseus are simply ways of talking about certain collections of atoms stretching through space and time. Here's some quotes from the book: - To understand time, it helps to start with space. In reality, as far as the laws of physics are concerned, all directions in space are created equal. Time works the same way. In reality, both directions of time are created equal. In another camp are the Bayesians, for whom probabilities are simply expressions of your states of belief in cases of ignorance or uncertainty. For a Bayesian, saying there is a 50 percent chance of the coin coming up heads is merely to state that you have zero reason to favor one outcome over another. If you were offered to bet on the outcome of the coin flip, you would be indifferent to choosing heads or tails. The Bayesian will then helpfully explain that this is the only thing you could possibly mean by such a statement, since we never observe infinite numbers of trials, and we often speak about probabilities for things that happen only once, like elections or sporting events. The frequentist would then object that the Bayesian is introducing an unnecessary element of subjectivity and personal ignorance into what should be an objective conversation about how the world behaves, and they would be off. And when it comes to understanding the fundamental architecture of reality, none of us has complete information. It can simply be. Then there is conservation of information. The universe evolves by marching from one moment to the next in a way that depends only on its present state. It neither aims toward future goals nor relies on its previous history. The universe is specific and contingent, the argument goes; it could easily have been otherwise. So there must be something that explains the universe, and then something that explains that thing, and so on through the chain of reasons. To avoid diving down a rabbit hole of infinite regress, we need to invoke a necessary being— one that must exist and could not have been otherwise, and therefore requires no explanation. And that being is God. They prefer to lay all the options on the table, then try to figure out what our credences should be in each of them. Maybe there is an ultimate explanation; maybe there is an infinite chain of explanations; maybe there is no final explanation at all. Why it exists the particular way it does, rather than some other way, is worth exploring. Feb 19, Donna rated it really liked it Shelves: non-fiction. This is nonfiction science. It was very science-y which is not my thing, but I liked this one. If every physics teacher could be like this author, more kids would leave high school having enjoyed science, as a whole. Some of this was completely over my head, but not once did the author ever make me feel like I was in the weeds. He took his time and described everything so well. This author posed a lot of "big picture" questions, but instead of letting the reader ponder them, he stepped in and g This is nonfiction science. This author posed a lot of "big picture" questions, but instead of letting the reader ponder them, he stepped in and gave you answers. That approach worked with this book, but sometimes I wanted to ponder some of the questions. Mar 18, Gary Beauregard Bottomley rated it it was amazing. All popular science books should take a clue from this book. There is no 'one scientific method' there are just many different possible ways we determine our justified true beliefs. This author is never afraid at talking above the listener. He's perfectly comfortable at using the appropriate terms that our needed, and he takes a stand on many of the issues within the Philosophy of Science. As the author says, science before Galileo thought in terms of causes and purpose teleology , and afterward All popular science books should take a clue from this book. As the author says, science before Galileo thought in terms of causes and purpose teleology , and afterwards started thinking in terms of patterns and laws rules. I would say the book is essentially divided into two parts. The first part lays the foundation for the nature of science and introduces the listener to the nature of being, the study of ontology, and the foundations that are created which we use in order to explain. He'll actually get into some deep discussions on possible building blocks for the universe monads, dyads, substance, forms, The importance of emergent properties because of the different regimes that are created by our "domains of appropriate applicability". Anti-realist v realist, the entailing of different theories by other theories, Bayesian statistics and why it's so necessary to understand what it is, and most of the other standard topics from the philosophy of science. There's multiple ways to understand the world. Sometimes we have to get at the particular before we can understand the whole or the universal, and other times we must understand the whole before we can get at the particular. The judgement we use by subsuming the particular under a universal rule gives us the bridge from reason to understanding. I saw the second half of the book as a refutation for all of the classical arguments for the existence of God. He doesn't frame them that way but uses the argument as a departure point in order to educate the listener on how to think about the world and ourselves such that we are a part of nature not apart from nature and how everything that can be explained understood can be thought of in 'poetic natural' terms. Look, he's an incredibly gifted writer, but I think he could have done a better job on his 'fine tuning' counter-argument. But his refutation on the prime mover argument, that 'nothing is not a state of being' was superb. Science is always underdetermined. The scientific facts that we have can be explained by multiple theories. Just read any issue of Scientific American and you'll see an article on a new scientific phenomena such as Dark Energy and you'll see a statement such as that there are three different explanations for the phenomena under consideration e. It quickly shows that science will be underdetermined. I mention this because I think that the graveyard is full of scientist who makes such a claim as he does in the book that the "bending of a spoon by mental telepathy is not possible because our current theory would never allow it". It is wrong to make that statement. There can always be a different ontology that will entail the current one but allow us to realize different perspectives. I really like the book a lot. He merges the nature of science with understanding science as nature. I saw the bibliography on this book before it came out. I slowed down reading popular science books because most of the ideas in popular science books I read I have read elsewhere. Even in this book it mostly consisted of things I've read elsewhere. But, he does something that I wish all pop science books would do, he understands the issues in the Philosophy of Science and he knows how to relate that to the science that is being told. Feb 08, P. Wilson rated it liked it. This a good book if you're looking for a reasonably clear synopsis of modern physics. It also has an excellent section on scientific reasoning, including a useful description of Bayesian probability and abduction as distinct from deduction and induction. It is marred, however, by the what I would call the author's evangelical atheism. His alternative, "poetic naturalism," is best described by one reviewer as "not even wrong. He too easily dismisses the sticky question of "consciousness" by saying it's just the way we have of talking about cognitive processes that make it seem as if we have a non-physical soul. My question: if consciousness is so easy to dismiss, could you please explain electricity? It seems to be an emergent phenomenon that is physical, but undefinable. Poetic naturalism is also invoked to describe the unproven, and unprovable, idea of the "multiverse. Moreover, in a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Steven Weinberg, one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, argues that it might be time to reconsider the whole idea of quantum mechanics based on its shortcomings. The last part of the book, in which Carroll argues for an ethics based on "poetic naturalism," reads like a New Age poster written by a California surfer dude. His "Ten Commandments" are trite, to say the least. Carroll does skim across a lot of interesting philosophical territory, but to me his coverage seems Wikipedia deep. Carroll's book is ambitious, and ultimately it's impressive because he achieves--at least as far as I can determine- -what he set out to do. The big picture is the nature of reality explained by contemporary science. He describes how the universe works in every scale from the cosmic to the quantum and how the current understanding of such elemental foundations make clear concepts like the arrow of time and entropy and unite in our heads as consciousness and language and even notions of morality. I Carroll's book is ambitious, and ultimately it's impressive because he achieves--at least as far as I can determine--what he set out to do. Intended for the layperson, like me, some of his book is necessarily spent explaining how to think about the science and the phenomena he describes. Many of these ideas are head-splittingly knotty. The diagrams and charts are helpful, sometimes even clarifying a text too difficult for my knowledge and experience to grasp. Working forward and downward from the Big Bang and cosmic scale to the mysteries of quantum mechanics he details existence as we know it today. Sometimes it was like trying to understand magic. Existence may be a human perception, but Carroll still had to explain how consciousness is a physical process defined by the activity and motion of quantum particles and how ultimately all of it affects such philosophical ideas as determinism, causality, and free will. This was a difficult read for someone like me who doesn't have a background in science. But I rode this beautiful, muscular animal of a book, clinging to it, refusing to be bucked off. And by the time Carroll got to consciousness I felt like I knew how to ride a little bit. I may not have tamed the complete picture of reality, but I learned a lot, and I learned I want to read more. Our lives are dwarfed like never before by the immensity of space and time, but they are redeemed by our capacity to comprehend it and give it meaning. The Big Picture is an unprecedented scientific worldview, a tour de force that will sit on shelves alongside the works of Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett, and E. Wilson for years to come. Specifications Publisher Penguin Publishing Group. Write a review See all reviews Write a review. Average Rating: 5. August 23, See more. Written by a librarything. May 13, Average Rating: 4. May 4, Reviewed by pomo58 pomo Average Rating: 3. April 16, Ask a question Ask a question If you would like to share feedback with us about pricing, delivery or other customer service issues, please contact customer service directly. Your question required. Additional details. Send me an email when my question is answered. Please enter a valid email address. I agree to the Terms and Conditions. Cancel Submit. Pricing policy About our prices. 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