Sean Carroll

I can imagine a principled—

understanding of downward causation that was relevant to a human level and a collective national level or something like that.

There are plenty of examples you can point out.

The Constitution of the United States affects the lives of individuals, right?

I don't think you can deny that.

But what you can deny is that

Well, you cannot deny that that statement is true, understood in its own right.

You can deny that it's the right kind of statement to make because you can try to take a hardcore point of view that says the Constitution is a piece of paper.

Yeah.

It has no effect whatsoever on people's lives unless they're literally reading the Constitution.

What happens in the world is that people have ideas in their head because of what we attribute to the Constitution.

And it's those people that have effects on our lives, right?

So in other words, you can always reframe the discussion in terms of the Constitution or laws or whatever.

in terms of individual people and their beliefs and their actions.

The question is, is that the most efficient way to do it?

Are you losing something important when you do that?

So I'm very open to a rigorous discussion of why downward causation is the best possible way of understanding the relationship between levels at that level.

I've not seen such a discussion, and we didn't do it ourselves.

Peter 42 says, if it turns out there's no singularity at the center of a black hole and none at the start of the Big Bang, do we still need a theory of quantum gravity?

Yeah, sure.