Title: The Big Picture Pdf On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself
Praise for The Big PictureIncluded on Brain Picking’s “The Greatest Science Books of 2016” ListIncluded on NPR Science Friday’s “The Best Science Books of 2016” List“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.”—Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey“With profound intelligence and lucid, unpretentious language, Sean Carroll beautifully articulates the worldview suggested by contemporary naturalism. 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.”—Carlo Rovelli, author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics"Vivid...impressive....Splendidly informative."—The New York Times Book Review“Never hectoring, always tolerant, the author presents a seductively attractive picture of a universe whose ultimate laws lie within our grasp....[Carroll] gives us a highly enjoyable and lucid tour through a wide range of topics....Even if you don’t agree with what he says, you are unlikely to be enraged by such an urbane and engaging lecturer; more likely, you will be enthralled.”—The Wall Street Journal“A nuanced inquiry into ‘how our desire to matter fits in with the nature of reality at its deepest levels,’ in which Carroll offers an assuring dose of what he calls ‘existential therapy’ reconciling the various and often seemingly contradictory dimensions of our experience.”—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings“[The Big Picture is] a tour de force that offers a comprehensive snapshot of the human situation in our infinitely strange universe, and it does this with highly accessible language and engaging storytelling.”—Salon“Sean Carroll’s holistic vision accommodates the sciences and the humanities and has a high probability of provoking readers into clarifying their own views about the complex relations among science, religion, and morality.”—The Times Literary Supplement“The Big Picture impresses. Carroll is a lively and sympathetic author who writes as well about biology and philosophy as he does about his own field of physics.”—Financial Times“Carroll is the perfect guide on this wondrous journey of discovery. A brilliantly lucid exposition of profound philosophical and scientific issues in a language accessible to lay readers.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"Carroll presents a means through which people can better understand themselves, their universe, and their conceptions of a meaningful life.”—Publishers Weekly“Guides us through several centuries’ worth of scientific discoveries to show how they have shaped our understanding and indeed how the laws of nature are linked to the most fundamental human questions of life, death, and our place in the cosmos.”—Library Journal“Intensely insightful.”—Scientific American“With its delightful blend of evocative love paens and four-dimensional integrals, The Big Picture offers a uniquely physical vision of life's meaning. This is poetry.”—Physics Today“[Carroll] sets out to show how various phenomena, including thought, choice, consciousness, and value, hang together with the scientific account of reality that has been developed in physics in the past 100 years. He attempts to do all this without relying on specialized jargon from philosophy and physics and succeeds spectacularly in achieving both aims.”—Science“True to the grand scope of its title....Anyone who enjoys asking big questions will find a lot to consider.”—Booklist“Language philosophy, quantum mechanics, general relativity—they’re all in The Big Picture. Sean Carroll is a fantastically erudite and entertaining writer.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Pulitzer Prize–winner The Sixth Extinction “From the big bang to the meaning of human existence, The Big Picture is exactly that—a magisterial, yet deeply fascinating, grand tour through the issues that really matter. 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.”—Neil Shubin, author of Your Inner Fish “In this timely exploration of the universe and its mysteries—both physical and metaphysical—Sean Carroll illuminates the world around us with clarity, beauty and, ultimately, with much needed wisdom.”—Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and author of The Poisoner’s Handbook “Sean Carroll is a leading theoretical cosmologist with the added ability to write about his subject with unusual clarity, flare, and wit.”—Alan Lightman, author of The Accidental Universe and Einstein’s Dreams “Until now you might have gotten away believing modern physics is about things either too small or too far away to care much about. But no more. Sean Carroll’s new book reveals how physicists’ quest to better understand the fundamental laws of nature has led to astonishing insights into life, the universe, and everything. Above all, a courageous book, and an overdue one.”—Sabine Hossenfelder, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies“Instead of feeling humbled and insignificant when gazing upward on a clear starry night, Carroll takes us by the hand and shows us how fantastic the inanimate physical universe is and how special each animate human can be. It is lucid, spirited, and penetrating.”—Michael S. Gazzaniga, author of Who's in Charge? and Tales from Both Sides of the Brain“Sean Carroll’s lucid The Big Picture reveals how the universe works and our place in it. Carroll, a philosophically sophisticated physicist, discusses consciousness without gimmicks, and deftly shows how current physics is so solid that it rules out ESP forever.”—Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature SEAN CARROLL is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in 1993 from Harvard University. Recently, Carroll has worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, and the emergence of complexity. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and the Royal Society of London. His most recent award, in 2014, was from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Carroll has appeared on The Colbert Report (twice), PBS’s NOVA, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, and he frequently serves as a science consultant for film and television. He has been interviewed by various NPR shows, Scientific American, Wired, and The New York Times. 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, including one in New York City in 2014 with Eben Alexander.
“Vivid...impressive....Splendidly informative.”—The New York Times
“Succeeds spectacularly.”—Science
“A tour de force.”—Salon
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? Do human purpose and meaning fit into a scientific worldview?
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. O. Wilson for years to come.
An Excellent Book (With An Error) The Big Picture by Sean Carroll is an excellent book for anyone who wants a concise, understandable, and we'll written overview of modern science, with an emphasis on quantum mechanics and the philosophy of Poetic Naturalism. In this review I will focus on the philosophical side of his work and particularly his treatment of issues related to consciousness.As Carroll puts it, "Naturalism” claims that there is just one world, the natural world... (while) “Poetic” reminds us that there is more than one way of talking about the world . He describes these different ways of talking about the world as an "interconnected series of models appropriate at different levels". From this perspective, physics, chemistry, biology, and even psychology and sociology are simply different but useful ways of talking about the same world.From a scientific perspective, the most fundamental way of talking about the world is quantum field theory and, more specifically, the Core Theory, a term coined by Nobel Laueate Frank Wilczek. The Core Theory may be viewed as quantum field theory within a "domain of applicability" that includes most of the universe in which we live but excludes certain phenomena (e.g. dark matter, the big bang and black holes). Though the Core Theory is not the elusive Theory of Everything, it has been validated by so much data from so many experiments that it may be as close as we ever get to scientific certainty. As Carroll puts it, "We can be confident that the Core Theory, accounting for the substances and processes we experience in our everyday life, is correct. A thousand years from now we will have learned a lot more about the fundamental nature of physics, but we will still use the Core Theory to talk about this particular layer of reality". That is an audacious claim, but Carroll supports that claim with rigorous scientific reasoning.Carroll views higher level or "coarse grained theories" such as chemistry and biology as "emergent" and describes them as "... speaking different languages, but offering compatible descriptions of the same underlying phenomena in their respective domains of applicability". For example, chemistry and biology are emergent models of the universe, compatible with each other and the Core Theory, but with unique utilities in their particular domain of applicability. He briefly mentions supervenience, the view that emergent theories exist in an ontological hierarchy where higher level theories rest on more fundamental theories. For example, there could be no change at the level of biology without there being a change in the underlying chemistry. Similarly, there could be no change at the level of chemistry absent a change in the more fundamental physics. All of the models are interconnected and interdependent. Though each model has its own unique utility and coherence, that utility and coherence ultimately rests on a consistency with other more fundamental models.Unfortunately, Carroll's treatment of how different emergent models relate to each other alternates between autonomous or semiautonomous utility on the one hand and consistency with more fundamental models on the other. Though he warns readers not to begin a sentence in one model and end it in another, by moving between these two criteria for the validity of those models, he committs a very similar error. He frequently refers to consistency or compatibility among different models as essential, but also writes, "Within their respective domains of applicability, each theory is autonomous—complete and self-contained, neither relying on the other". This is just one example of where he suggests that the soundness of a model can be evaluated by its utility and internal coherence, and without reference to consistency with more fundamental models. In my opinion, when this level of credence is given to utility, one has entered a slippery slope that can lead to invalid ontological conclusions. Now, the criteria of utility does have its own domain of applicability, namely when the theory does not make ontological claims. For example, there are languages or ways of talking about everything from hair styling to stamp collecting that do not make claims about fundamental reality. Even Newtonian physics has its utility within its particular domain of applicability. In these areas, utility is a perfectly reasonable criteria. But when it comes to any model that claims to reflect, at some level, an underlying reality, utility by itself is an inadequate criteria.Another example is theism, a world view that Carroll does an excellent job demonstrating why it is not only unnecessary but a way of looking at the world but one that is ultimately inconsistent with the Core Theory. But if one evaluates the validity of theism, and particularly the theism embodied in major world religions such as Jewdaism, Christianity, and Islam, from the perspective of their utility, one is headed for an ontological train wreck. Who can deny the comfort (i.e. utility) that faith in a loving god and a blissful after life has given millions if not billions of people? But does that mean that such a world view is real in the same sense that the Core Theory is real? Of course not.The same logic applies to the role of consciousness in human behavior. Though there may be personal or social utility in the belief that conscious intent is responsible for human behavior, such a position is inconsistent with everything we know from cognitive science and everything we know about how the world works according to the Core Theory. Behavior emerges from complex brain activity, not inner experiences. The fact that our brain is responsible for both behavior and consciousness, at approximately the same time, gives rise to the illusion that conscious intent causes behavior. It is no more reasonable to claim that consciousness is responsible for behavior than to claim that a god is responsible for behavior or that a roosters crowing causes the sun to rise.Carroll tries to get around this by claiming that consciousness is just another way of talking about brain activity and the deeper layers of chemistry and physics. Unfortunately, reducing consciousness to a way of talking about experience fails to solve the Hard Problem. Consciousness is more than just a way of talking about brain states. It is dependent for its existence and form on those states, but is not identical to them. I do not claim to know what consciousness is, but whatever it is, it is more than words.Thus, poetic naturalism fails as a satisfactory philosophy of mind on two counts. First, it fails to give an adequate understanding of inner experience and secondly, it provides credence to the idea that consciousness is responsible for behavior. The first failure is understandable; the Hard Problem is hard for a reason and no one has yet come up with a satisfactory solution to it. As David Chalmers has said, that may take a hundred years. But Carroll should have seen the second failure coming. By allowing for the claim that consciousness can be responsible for behavior, he is opening the door for a new element in the Core Theory, an element he has argued persuasively does not exist. If it existed, this new element or property, somehow related to connsciousness, would make David Chalmers a very happy camper, but for the Sean Carroll who describes the Core Theory with such reverence, not so much.In conclusion, The Big Picture is an excellent book on the current status of science and his portrait of Poetic Natualism as a unifying philosophy. For those reasons, I highly recommend it to interested lay readers. However, I also urge those readers to be very careful in analyzing his treatment of consciousness. I believe he made a significant error in that analysis, though the error could very easily be my own.
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