Sean Carroll

You have two books coming out within a month of each other?

You can still do book signings where you sign both at once.

That's okay.

That makes perfect sense.

So in other words, can we sort of simplify it down to we would like to use Bayes' theorem to update our beliefs, but that's hard and that takes a lot of resources.

So evolution and biology have equipped us with certain shortcuts.

We did have Carl Fristen on the podcast some time ago talking about the free energy principle.

Is that an example of the brain trying to solve these hard problems in an efficient way?

Sort of thinking in terms of probabilities and rewards.

I mean, I guess I've never really thought about it this way, but when you are computer programming, the resource limitations are obvious.

You have a certain amount of time, certain amount of memory, right?

A certain amount of whatever data.

But of course, the same things are going to apply to human brains where we can imagine ideal thoughts, but actually having them is something that's going to be probably too resource intensive.

Yeah, I think that's a reasonable way of thinking about it.

And so what is your, I mean, you've said a little bit about this, but what do we do?

What are our strategies?

Living in an imperfect world, not being able to be exact Bayesians at all times, do we have, what are the shortcuts that actual human people use?

So sorry, in some sense, we all have a goal that could be idealized as live the best possible life.

But you're saying that as a strategy for getting there, that's not really reasonable.

We can't actually be Doctor Strange in the Avengers and go through every possible part of the multiverse.