Hello Chusana, your writing was excellent! I'm already familiar with the subtopics you mentioned, but the way you linked shaping our lives to the double-slit experiment was particularly fascinating. Physics was my favorite subject growing up—I actually topped my high school class in it, though that's not something to boast about😁. About a year ago, I started getting back into it, especially focusing on quantum gravity, which merges quantum theory and gravity. It’s an exciting field, as some believe the universe didn’t begin with the Big Bang but could be part of a cyclical process, with quantum gravity possibly proving that what we think was the Big Bang was actually the end of a previous universe.
I've been looking for books that make these complex ideas more accessible, and I came across 'Reality is Not What It Seems' by Carlo Rovelli. It was the best book I’ve read so far—it explains how knowledge has been passed down by scientists and philosophers over thousands of years to where we stand now in the world of science. Since this post was about how we can shape our world by looking inward, it made me think—learning new things shouldn't stop, right? I mean, you've written on this topic because of your curiosity and desire to learn. I think it’s important to balance both—embracing the unknown while continuously learning or did I simply misunderstand something here ?
Funny you mentioned excelling in physics because I was terrible at it in school! The subject always felt too abstract for me - and what a surprise to revisit the subject in my late 30s! Thank you for the recommendation on "Reality Is Not What It Seems" - love the approach of linking scientific thoughts from ancient Greek philosophers to modern quantum physics.
So yes, in essence, I'm all for never stop learning new things because a lot of what we 'claim' to know isn't certain nor permanent. I've come to realise over time that society often 'forces' us to act as if we're certain -- rewarding confidence over curiosity. And the fear that certainty can, sometimes, extinguish that "inner curious child" in many of us. We end up sticking to what's comfortable and stop learning. It's definitely a balance like you said - a forever dance between being curious in deep exploration mode but also find peace in being engulfed by the unknown.
Wow, this is the first time I've heard of this theory - that the Big bang might be cyclical 🤯 / Like nothing to everything and then everything collapsing into nothing. Rinse and repeat.
Carlo Rovelli is wonderful; his English translator is formidable. (For a first foray into his work, suggest to people 'Seven Brief Lessons on Physics', an exquisite appetizer.)
But after reading a slew of books on advanced theoretical physics, I've given up trying to understand everything about the Universe. I'm consoled by Feynman's words: "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."
PS. Relatedly, 'The Big Picture' (Sean Carroll) is the most deliciously rational book I know. You (and Chusana) may enjoy it. My brother's review trumps mine:
“We live in a reality that can be fruitfully talked about in many different ways. We have an extravagant assortment of theories, models, vocabularies, stories, whatever you prefer to call them. When we speak about a human being, we can describe them as a person with desires and tendencies and inner mental states; or we can describe them as a collection of biological cells interacting via electrochemical signals; or we can describe them as an agglomeration of elementary particles following the rules of the Core Theory [Quantum Field Theory].
…
The poetic-naturalist answer is that any of the stories we have stands or falls on its own terms as a description of reality.”
This book is Sean Carrol’s pitch for this philosophical approach: rigorous and serious in its testing of hypotheses of reality, but adamant at respecting all evidence-based theories in their “domain of applicability”. To throw away the idea of human decision-making because we are in a panic about what particle physics implies about free will would be incredibly silly, he believes, as we would lose a useful method of observing and discussing reality.
We also don’t need to seek nonmaterial explanations for these apparent incompatibilities—the behavior of ‘higher level’ systems (cells out of particles, consciousness out of cells, societies out of individuals) is just the emergent behavior of complex systems. We do not need to understand the component layer below a system in order to analyze and understand it.
All this is so much in line with my own thinking that I am not the target audience for this book. I’m baffled by the idea that consciousness requires anything more than the emergent properties of matter, and find all levels of reality very interesting to learn about without it giving my any anxieties about interpretations of other levels. (OK, quantum physics sometimes gives me anxiety at not understanding reality, but I’m okay again once I see a fat bird.)
But it’s all laid out quite clearly in a way that might actually convince a reasonable religious person that there is real value in this atheist philosophy, which is maybe the primary goal of the book. The book also makes an attempt to explain how good physics is at observing the world in an attempt to fight superstition, but I suspect that effort won’t work so well—we’re a superstitious people.
The end of the book condenses this all into a “meta-ethics”, lessons about how to find moral lessons, which is fine. He gets a little sloppy here, as he describes this as part of the “poetic naturalist” approach—but as he admits elsewhere, there is nothing stopping you having a concrete moral system (an ethics rather than a meta-ethics) as a poetic naturalist; you just need to recognize its non-universality, its basis on a particular set of principles. I’m just nitpicking, though; it wouldn’t make much sense for him to dive into his specific cultural and individual morals, and instead we get a meta-ethics approach that feels quite basic to me—but probably only because I already pretty much share it.
There is one significant place I depart from the author’s philosophy; he says “The construction of meaning is a fundamentally individual, subjective, creative enterprise, and an intimidating responsibility.” If this were the whole story, Sean Carrol would not have written a book, or quoted so many people in his book. We construct meaning collectively as well as individually, and it’s that collective part that has the most importance when we talk about how our philosophies affect the world. It is an intimidating responsibility, but much less intimidating if we stop imagining ourselves as Camus’s Sisyphus. Talk about your moral philosophies while cooking dinner with a friend, it’s not so terrifying and you’ll find your individual viewpoint is not the infallible tower it can seem like when you’re alone with no one to give you a new perspective.
Awesome post, thank you.
Schmactenberger was the one who broke my spell with his extremely depressed take on the meta-crisis here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kBoLVvoqVY
Hello Chusana, your writing was excellent! I'm already familiar with the subtopics you mentioned, but the way you linked shaping our lives to the double-slit experiment was particularly fascinating. Physics was my favorite subject growing up—I actually topped my high school class in it, though that's not something to boast about😁. About a year ago, I started getting back into it, especially focusing on quantum gravity, which merges quantum theory and gravity. It’s an exciting field, as some believe the universe didn’t begin with the Big Bang but could be part of a cyclical process, with quantum gravity possibly proving that what we think was the Big Bang was actually the end of a previous universe.
I've been looking for books that make these complex ideas more accessible, and I came across 'Reality is Not What It Seems' by Carlo Rovelli. It was the best book I’ve read so far—it explains how knowledge has been passed down by scientists and philosophers over thousands of years to where we stand now in the world of science. Since this post was about how we can shape our world by looking inward, it made me think—learning new things shouldn't stop, right? I mean, you've written on this topic because of your curiosity and desire to learn. I think it’s important to balance both—embracing the unknown while continuously learning or did I simply misunderstand something here ?
Funny you mentioned excelling in physics because I was terrible at it in school! The subject always felt too abstract for me - and what a surprise to revisit the subject in my late 30s! Thank you for the recommendation on "Reality Is Not What It Seems" - love the approach of linking scientific thoughts from ancient Greek philosophers to modern quantum physics.
So yes, in essence, I'm all for never stop learning new things because a lot of what we 'claim' to know isn't certain nor permanent. I've come to realise over time that society often 'forces' us to act as if we're certain -- rewarding confidence over curiosity. And the fear that certainty can, sometimes, extinguish that "inner curious child" in many of us. We end up sticking to what's comfortable and stop learning. It's definitely a balance like you said - a forever dance between being curious in deep exploration mode but also find peace in being engulfed by the unknown.
Wow, this is the first time I've heard of this theory - that the Big bang might be cyclical 🤯 / Like nothing to everything and then everything collapsing into nothing. Rinse and repeat.
Carlo Rovelli is wonderful; his English translator is formidable. (For a first foray into his work, suggest to people 'Seven Brief Lessons on Physics', an exquisite appetizer.)
But after reading a slew of books on advanced theoretical physics, I've given up trying to understand everything about the Universe. I'm consoled by Feynman's words: "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."
PS. Relatedly, 'The Big Picture' (Sean Carroll) is the most deliciously rational book I know. You (and Chusana) may enjoy it. My brother's review trumps mine:
“We live in a reality that can be fruitfully talked about in many different ways. We have an extravagant assortment of theories, models, vocabularies, stories, whatever you prefer to call them. When we speak about a human being, we can describe them as a person with desires and tendencies and inner mental states; or we can describe them as a collection of biological cells interacting via electrochemical signals; or we can describe them as an agglomeration of elementary particles following the rules of the Core Theory [Quantum Field Theory].
…
The poetic-naturalist answer is that any of the stories we have stands or falls on its own terms as a description of reality.”
This book is Sean Carrol’s pitch for this philosophical approach: rigorous and serious in its testing of hypotheses of reality, but adamant at respecting all evidence-based theories in their “domain of applicability”. To throw away the idea of human decision-making because we are in a panic about what particle physics implies about free will would be incredibly silly, he believes, as we would lose a useful method of observing and discussing reality.
We also don’t need to seek nonmaterial explanations for these apparent incompatibilities—the behavior of ‘higher level’ systems (cells out of particles, consciousness out of cells, societies out of individuals) is just the emergent behavior of complex systems. We do not need to understand the component layer below a system in order to analyze and understand it.
All this is so much in line with my own thinking that I am not the target audience for this book. I’m baffled by the idea that consciousness requires anything more than the emergent properties of matter, and find all levels of reality very interesting to learn about without it giving my any anxieties about interpretations of other levels. (OK, quantum physics sometimes gives me anxiety at not understanding reality, but I’m okay again once I see a fat bird.)
But it’s all laid out quite clearly in a way that might actually convince a reasonable religious person that there is real value in this atheist philosophy, which is maybe the primary goal of the book. The book also makes an attempt to explain how good physics is at observing the world in an attempt to fight superstition, but I suspect that effort won’t work so well—we’re a superstitious people.
The end of the book condenses this all into a “meta-ethics”, lessons about how to find moral lessons, which is fine. He gets a little sloppy here, as he describes this as part of the “poetic naturalist” approach—but as he admits elsewhere, there is nothing stopping you having a concrete moral system (an ethics rather than a meta-ethics) as a poetic naturalist; you just need to recognize its non-universality, its basis on a particular set of principles. I’m just nitpicking, though; it wouldn’t make much sense for him to dive into his specific cultural and individual morals, and instead we get a meta-ethics approach that feels quite basic to me—but probably only because I already pretty much share it.
There is one significant place I depart from the author’s philosophy; he says “The construction of meaning is a fundamentally individual, subjective, creative enterprise, and an intimidating responsibility.” If this were the whole story, Sean Carrol would not have written a book, or quoted so many people in his book. We construct meaning collectively as well as individually, and it’s that collective part that has the most importance when we talk about how our philosophies affect the world. It is an intimidating responsibility, but much less intimidating if we stop imagining ourselves as Camus’s Sisyphus. Talk about your moral philosophies while cooking dinner with a friend, it’s not so terrifying and you’ll find your individual viewpoint is not the infallible tower it can seem like when you’re alone with no one to give you a new perspective.
- Uvron