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Apr 18 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Mindscape 193 | Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert @Daniels on Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. This week our multiverse is a cinematic one. #MindscapePodcast
preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/0…
Audio player: art19.com/shows/sean-car…
Everything Everywhere All at Once is Daniels' new film, starring the amazing Michelle Yeoh. See it if you haven't already: endlessly inventive, provocative, and warmly human.
a24films.com/films/everythi…
We talk about the multiverse and general themes of the movie, but no real spoilers.

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More from @seanmcarroll

Sean Carroll Profile picture
Apr 20
Anti-free-will people have to stop leaning on determinism. It's perhaps the most wrong that an argument can be.

1) The world is not deterministic. Quantum mechanics exists. When there is hidden determinism (MWI, Bohm), it's hidden! Irrelevant to what people experience. (1/n)
Determinism can be a good approximation for macroscopic dynamics sometimes. So what? Sometimes it's not. You don't want to base arguments about something as fundamental as free will or its absence on a principle that is just a good approximation sometimes. (2/n)
2) The question of whether the laws of nature are deterministic is utterly irrelevant to the question of whether there is libertarian free will. All that matters is whether there are laws. Stochastic laws don't allow for free will any more than deterministic ones do. (3/n)
Read 6 tweets
Sean Carroll Profile picture
Apr 3
Brad provides an excuse to mention something interesting about quantum mechanics: why we observe some things and not others. I suspect even Sydney (my brilliant former teacher) didn't know the complete answer, since it's not completely known! And he doesn't mention decoherence.
When you set up Schrödinger's Cat to be in a superposition of awake & asleep, then open the box, the miracle of quantum measurement is that you never *see* the cat in such a superposition. You only see definitely awake or definitely asleep. Why?
There are two levels of mystery here!

First level: why do you see something other than the original superposition? That's the quantum measurement problem, very interesting but let's move on to the second level.
Read 10 tweets
Sean Carroll Profile picture
Dec 28, 2021
A good year for #MindscapePodcast! Here's a list of the topics covered in case you missed any.

128 Western psychology
129 Democracy threatened
130 Fundamental physics
131 Alien artifacts
132 Growth and form
133 Invisible realities
134 Behavior and the mind
135 Plato in China
136 Cyberspace sociology
137 Foundations of math
138 Sports analytics
139 Equality and ideology
140 Neuroscience of time
141 Networks and attention
142 Writing stories
143 Bias and rationality
144 Particle physics
145 History and catastrophes
146 Topology and category theory
147 Cuisine and empire
148 Democracy and problem-solving
149 Time and reality
150 Explanations
151 Mathematics of gerrymandering
152 Criminology and incarceration
153 Quantum computers
154 Religion and meaning
155 Hypergraph physics
156 Data feminism
Read 7 tweets
Sean Carroll Profile picture
Sep 29, 2021
It is not a remarkable use of rationality to find justifications for opinions we already have or which reassure us. More impressive would be to use rationality to reach conclusions that discomfit ourselves.
nytimes.com/2021/09/29/boo…
Some folks like to celebrate the use of rationality to reach uncomfortable conclusions, but the discomfort usually seems to be for other people.
Of course others might want to find racism even where it isn't. That's why rationality is hard. The test of whether a conclusion makes us feel good or bad about ourselves is far from conclusive, but it's a reasonable first thing to check.
Read 5 tweets
Sean Carroll Profile picture
Mar 14, 2021
Dark matter exists -- an occasional reminder.

The first evidence for dark matter came from the dynamics of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. But these days that is not our *best* evidence. 1/n
For galaxies and clusters, you can imagine modifying gravity instead of positing dark matter. Every physicist and astronomer knows this. It is not a radical new idea. A number of people have built explicit models, and hundreds of people have thought about the possibility.
And it could potentially work, because in both cases you need only change the strength of gravity as a function of distance, not the direction of the gravitational force. Not natural from a field-theory point of view, but worth contemplating.
Read 17 tweets
Sean Carroll Profile picture
Jan 6, 2021
Personal news: I'll be leaving Caltech at the end of the next academic year. Caltech is great, and I've known wonderful people there. They would be happy for me to stay (as far as I know!), but this specific position is no longer a good fit for me, so I've decided to move on.
I honestly don't know where I will be next - there are possibilities, but various wave functions have not yet collapsed. But I'll still be writing physics papers and philosophy papers, hopefully doing real research in more interdisciplinary areas as well, from whatever perch.
And writing, talking, podcasting, etc. And still an external professor at Santa Fe. Things will be pretty much unchanged from an outside-world perspective. But it does mean I'm not taking on students or postdocs at the moment, sorry about that.
Read 6 tweets

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