Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

185 | Arvid Ågren on the Gene’s-Eye View of Evolution

21 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

One of the brilliant achievements of Darwin’s theory of natural selection was to help explain apparently “purposeful” or “designed” aspects ...

184 | Gary Marcus on Artificial Intelligence and Common Sense

14 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Artificial intelligence is everywhere around us. Deep-learning algorithms are used to classify images, suggest songs to us, and even to drive cars. Bu...

AMA | February 2022

10 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to the February 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...

183 | Michael Dine on Supersymmetry, Anthropics, and the Future of Particle Physics

07 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Modern particle physics is a victim of its own success. We have extremely good theories — so good that it’s hard to know exactly how to move beyon...

182 | Sally Haslanger on Social Construction and Critical Theory

31 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Reality is just out there — but how we perceive reality and talk about it depends on choices we human beings make. We decide (consciously or not) to...

181 | Peter Dodds on Quantifying the Shape of Stories

24 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

A good story takes you on an emotional journey, with ups and downs along the way. Thanks to science, we can quantify that. Peter Dodds works on unders...

180 | Camilla Pang on Instructions for Being Human

17 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Being a human is tricky. There are any number of unwritten rules and social cues that we have to learn as we go, but that we ultimately learn to take ...

179 | David Reich on Genetics and Ancient Humanity

10 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Human beings like to divide themselves into groups, and then cooperate, socialize, and reproduce with members of their own group. But they’re not ve...

178 | Jody Azzouni on What Is and Isn't Real

03 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Are numbers real? What does that even mean? You can’t kick a number. But you can talk about numbers in useful ways, and we use numbers to talk about...

Holiday Message 2021 | On Disciplines & Cocktails

20 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

As each December comes to a close, we wrap up another year of podcasts with the Mindscape Holiday Message. Nothing too profound, just some thoughts th...

AMA | December 2021

15 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to the December 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...

177 | Monika Schleier-Smith on Cold Atoms and Emergent Spacetime

13 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

When it comes to thinking about quantum mechanics, there are levels. One level is shut-up-and-calculate: find a wave function, square it to get a prob...

176 | Joshua Greene on Morality, Psychology, and Trolley Problems

06 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We all know you can’t derive “ought” from “is.” But it’s equally clear that “is” — how the world actual works — is going to matter...

175 | William Ratcliff on Multicellularity, Physics, and Evolution

29 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We’ve talked about the very origin of life, but certain transitions along its subsequent history were incredibly important. Perhaps none more so tha...

174 | Tai-Danae Bradley on Algebra, Topology, Language, and Entropy

22 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Mathematics is often thought of as the pinnacle of crisp precision: the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle isn’t “roughly” the sum of ...

AMA | November 2021

17 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to the November 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...

173 | Sylvia Earle on the Oceans, the Planet, and People

15 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

It’s a well-worn cliché that oceans cover seventy percent of the surface of Earth, but we tend to give them secondary consideration when thinking a...

172 | David Goyer on Televising the Fall of the Galactic Empire

08 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Science and storytelling have a long and tumultuous relationship. Scientists sometimes want stories to be just an advertisement for how awesome scienc...

171 | Christopher Mims on Our Interconnected Industrial Ecology

01 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

As the holidays approach, we are being reminded of the fragility of the global supply chain. But at the same time, the supply chain itself is a truly ...

170 | Priya Natarajan on Galaxies, Black Holes, and Cosmic Anomalies

25 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

There is so much we don’t know about our universe. But our curiosity about the unknown shouldn’t blind us to the incredible progress we have made ...

169 | C. Thi Nguyen on Games, Art, Values, and Agency

18 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Games are everywhere, but why exactly do we play them? It seems counterintuitive, to artificially invent goals and obstacles just so we can struggle t...

AMA | October 2021

14 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to the October 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also th...

168 | Anil Seth on Emergence, Information, and Consciousness

11 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Those of us who think that that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known tend to also think that consciousness is a...

167 | Chiara Marletto on Constructor Theory, Physics, and Possibility

04 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Traditional physics works within the “Laplacian paradigm”: you give me the state of the universe (or some closed system), some equations of motion...

166 | Betül Kaçar on Paleogenomics and Ancient Life

27 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In the question to understand the biology of life, we are (so far) limited to what happened here on Earth. That includes the diversity of biological o...

165 | Kathryn Paige Harden on Genetics, Luck, and Fairness

20 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

It's pretty clear that our genes affect, though they don't completely determine, who we grow up to be; children’s physical and mental characteristic...

AMA | September 2021

16 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to the September 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also ...

164 | Herbert Gintis on Game Theory, Evolution, and Social Rationality

13 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

How human beings behave is, for fairly evident reasons, a topic of intense interest to human beings. And yet, not only is there much we don’t unders...

163 | Nigel Goldenfeld on Phase Transitions, Criticality, and Biology

06 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Physics is extremely good at describing simple systems with relatively few moving parts. Sadly, the world is not like that; many phenomena of interest...

162 | Leidy Klotz on Our Resistance to Subtractive Change

30 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

There is no general theory of problem-solving, or even a reliable set of principles that will usually work. It’s therefore interesting to see how ou...

161 | W. Brian Arthur on Complexity Economics

23 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Economies in the modern world are incredibly complex systems. But when we sit down to think about them in quantitative ways, it’s natural to keep th...

160 | Edward Slingerland on Confucianism, Daoism, and Wu Wei

16 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Plato and Aristotle founded much of what we think of as Western philosophy during the fourth and fifth centuries BCE. Interestingly, that historical p...

AMA | August 2021

12 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to the August 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the...

159 | Mari Ruti on Lack, Love, and Psychoanalysis

09 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Neuroscience has given us great insights into how our brains work. But there is still room for purely humanistic disciplines to help us think through ...

158 | David Wallace on the Arrow of Time

02 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The arrow of time — all the ways in which the past differs from the future — is a fascinating subject because it connects everyday phenomena (memo...

157 | Elizabeth Strychalski on Synthetic Cells and the Rules of Biology

26 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Natural selection has done a pretty good job at creating a wide variety of living species, but we humans can’t help but wonder whether we could do b...

156 | Catherine D’Ignazio on Data, Objectivity, and Bias

19 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

How can data be biased? Isn’t it supposed to be an objective reflection of the real world? We all know that these are somewhat naive rhetorical ques...

155 | Stephen Wolfram on Computation, Hypergraphs, and Fundamental Physics

12 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

It’s not easy, figuring out the fundamental laws of physics. It’s even harder when your chosen methodology is to essentially start from scratch, p...

AMA | July 2021

09 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to the July 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the o...

154 | Reza Aslan on Religion, Metaphor, and Meaning

05 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Religion is an important part of the lives of billions of people around the world, but what religious belief actually amounts to can vary considerably...

153 | John Preskill on Quantum Computers and What They’re Good For

28 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Depending on who you listen to, quantum computers are either the biggest technological change coming down the road or just another overhyped bubble. T...

152 | Charis Kubrin on Criminology, Incarceration, and Hip-Hop

21 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

It’s all well and good to talk abstractly about morality and justice, but at some point you have to sit down and figure out what to do about people ...

151 | Jordan Ellenberg on the Mathematics of Political Boundaries

14 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Any system in which politicians represent geographical districts with boundaries chosen by the politicians themselves is vulnerable to gerrymandering:...

AMA | June 2021

10 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to the June 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the o...

150 | Simon DeDeo on How Explanations Work and Why They Sometimes Fail

07 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You observe a phenomenon, and come up with an explanation for it. That’s true for scientists, but also for literally every person. (Why won’t my c...

149 | Lee Smolin on Time, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality

31 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The challenge to a theoretical physicist pushing beyond our best current theories is that there are too many ways to go. What parts of the existing pa...

148 | Henry Farrell on Democracy as a Problem-Solving Mechanism

24 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Democracy posits the radical idea that political power and legitimacy should ultimately be found in all of the people, rather than a small group of ex...

147 | Rachel Laudan on Cuisine, Culture, and Empire

17 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

For as much as people talk about food, a good case can be made that we don’t give it the attention or respect it actually deserves. Food is central ...

AMA | May 2021

13 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to the May 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the on...

146 | Emily Riehl on Topology, Categories, and the Future of Mathematics

10 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

“A way that math can make the world a better place is by making it a more interesting place to be a conscious being.” So says mathematician Emily ...

145 | Niall Ferguson on Histories, Networks, and Catastrophes

03 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The world has gone through a tough time with the COVID-19 pandemic. Every catastrophic event is unique, but there are certain commonalities to how suc...

144 | Solo: Are We Moving Beyond the Standard Model?

26 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

I’ve been a professional physicist since the 1980’s, and not once over the course of my career has a particle-physics experiment produced a comple...

143 | Julia Galef on Openness, Bias, and Rationality

19 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Mom, apple pie, and rationality — all things that are unquestionably good, right? But rationality, as much as we might value it, is easier to aspire...

AMA | April 2021

14 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to the April 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ...

142 | Charlie Jane Anders on Stories and How to Write Them

12 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Telling a story seems like the most natural, human thing in the world. We all do it, all the time. And who amongst us doesn’t think we could be a fa...

141 | Zeynep Tufekci on Information and Attention in a Networked World

05 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In a world flooded with information, everybody necessarily makes choices about what we pay attention to. This basic fact can be manipulated in any num...

140 | Dean Buonomano on Time, Reality, and the Brain

29 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

“Time” and “the brain” are two of those things that are somewhat mysterious, but it would be hard for us to live without. So just imagine how ...

139 | Elizabeth Anderson on Equality, Work, and Ideology

22 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Imagine two people with exactly the same innate abilities, but one is born into a wealthy family and the other is born into poverty. Or two people bor...

138 | Daryl Morey on Analytics, Psychology, and Basketball

15 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You might think that human beings, exhausted by competing for resources and rewards in the real world, would take it easy and stick to cooperation in ...

AMA | March 2021

10 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to the March 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the que...

137 | Justin Clarke-Doane on Mathematics, Morality, Objectivity, and Reality

08 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

On a spectrum of philosophical topics, one might be tempted to put mathematics and morality on opposite ends. Math is one of the most pristine and rig...

136 | Roderick Graham on Cyberspace, Race, and Cultural Conservatism

01 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The internet has made it so much easier for people to talk to each other, in a literal sense. But it hasn’t necessarily made it easier to have rewar...

135 | Shadi Bartsch on Plato, Vergil, Confucius, and Modernity

22 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In our postmodern world, studying the classics of ancient Greece and Rome can seem quaint at best, downright repressive at worst. (We are talking abou...

AMA | February 2021

17 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to the February 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the ...

134 | Robert Sapolsky on Why We Behave the Way We Do

15 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

A common argument against free will is that human behavior is not freely chosen, but rather determined by a number of factors. So what are those facto...

133 | Ziya Tong on Realities We Don't See

08 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

It’s a truism that what we see about the world is a small fraction of all that exists. At the simplest level of physics and biology, our senses are ...

Bonus | AIP Oral History Interview

04 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Here is a special bonus punishment treat for Mindscape listeners: an interview of me, by David Zierler of the American Institute of Physics’...

132 | Michael Levin on Growth, Form, Information, and the Self

01 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

As a semi-outsider, it’s fun for me to watch as a new era dawns in biology: one that adds ideas from physics, big data, computer science, and inform...

131 | Avi Loeb on Taking Aliens Seriously

25 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The possible existence of technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations — not just alien microbes, but cultures as advanced (or much more)...

130 | Frank Wilczek on the Present and Future of Fundamental Physics

18 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What is the world made of? How does it behave? These questions, aimed at the most basic level of reality, are the subject of fundamental physics. What...

129 | Solo: Democracy in America

11 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The first full week of 2021 has been action-packed for those of us in the United States of America, for reasons you’re probably aware of, including ...

128 | Joseph Henrich on the Weirdness of the West

04 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We all know stereotypes about people from different countries; but we also recognize that there really are broad cultural differences between people w...

Holiday Message 2020 | The Screwy Universe

21 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to the third annual Mindscape Holiday Message! Just a chance for me to be a little more chatty and informal than usual, although as it turned ...

127 | Erich Jarvis on Language, Birds, and People

14 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Many characteristics go into making human beings special — brain size, opposable thumbs, etc. Surely one of the most important is language, and in p...

AMA | December 2020

09 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Getting into the swing of things here with monthly Ask Me Anything episodes. If you missed the explanation last month, there is a Patreon page&nb...

126 | David Stasavage on the Origin and History of Democracy

07 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Those of us living in democracies tend to take the idea for granted. We forget what an audacious, radical idea it is to put government power into the ...

125 | David Haig on the Evolution of Meaning from Darwin to Derrida

30 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Aristotle conceived of the world in terms of teleological “final causes”; Darwin, or so the story goes, erased purpose and meaning from the world,...

124 | Solo: How Time Travel Could and Should Work

23 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Time! It doesn’t stop, psychological effects of being under lockdown notwithstanding. How we experience time depends on our situation, but time itse...

AMA | November 2020

20 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

As you have likely heard me mention before, I have an account on Patreon, where people can sign up to donate a dollar or two per episode of Minds...

123 | Lisa Feldman Barrett on Emotions, Actions, and the Brain

16 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Emotions are at the same time utterly central to who we are — where would we be without them? — and also seemingly peripheral to the “real” wo...

122 | David Eagleman on Tapping Into the Livewired Brain

09 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Imagine you were locked in a sealed room, with no way to access the outside world but a few screens showing a view of what’s outside. Seems scary an...

121 | Cornel West on What Democracy Is and Should Be

02 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

This episode is published on November 2, 2020, the day before an historic election in the United States. An election that comes amidst growing worries...

120 | Jeremy England on Biology, Thermodynamics, and the Bible

26 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Erwin Schrödinger’s famous book What Is Life? highlighted the connections between physics, and thermodynamics in particular, and the natu...

119 | Musa al-Gharbi on the Value of Intellectual Diversity

19 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In the service of seeking truth, there would seem to be value in intellectual diversity, both in keeping ourselves honest and in the possibility of ne...

118 | Adam Riess on the Expansion of the Universe and a Crisis in Cosmology

12 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Astronomers rocked the cosmological world with the 1998 discovery that the universe is accelerating. Well-deserved Nobel Prizes were awarded to Saul P...

117 | Sean B. Carroll on Randomness and the Course of Evolution

05 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Evolution is a messy business, involving as it does selection pressures, mutations, genetic drift, and the effects of random external interventions. S...

116 | Teresa Bejan on Free Speech, Civility, and Toleration

28 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

How can, and should, we talk to each other, especially to people with whom we disagree? “Free speech” is rightfully entrenched as an important val...

115 | Netta Engelhardt on Black Hole Information, Wormholes, and Quantum Gravity

21 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Stephen Hawking made a number of memorable contributions to physics, but perhaps his greatest was a puzzle: what happens to information that fall...

114 | Angela Chen on Asexuality in a Sex-Preoccupied World

14 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Sexuality is, and always has been, a topic that is endlessly fascinating but also contentious. You might think that asexuality would be more...

113 | Cailin O'Connor on Game Theory, Evolution, and the Origins of Unfairness

07 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can’t always get what you want, as a wise person once said. But we do try, even when someone else wants the same thing. Our lives as people, and...

112 | Fyodor Urnov on Gene Editing, CRISPR, and Human Engineering

31 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Not too long ago nobody carried a mobile phone; now almost everybody does. That’s the kind of rate of rapid progress we’re seeing with our ability...

111 | Nick Bostrom on Anthropic Selection and Living in a Simulation

24 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Human civilization is only a few thousand years old (depending on how we count). So if civilization will ultimately last for millions of years, it cou...

110 | Neil Johnson on Complexity, Conflict, and Infodemiology

17 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Physicists have traditionally simplified systems as much as possible, in order to shed light on fundamental properties. But small, simple parts build ...

109 | Jason Torchinsky on Our Self-Driving Future

10 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

It’s easy to foresee that technological progress will change how we live; it’s much harder to anticipate exactly how. Self-driving cars represent ...

108 | Carl Bergstrom on Information, Disinformation, and Bullshit

03 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

We are living, in case you haven’t noticed, in a world full of bullshit. It’s hard to say whether the amount is truly increasing, but it seems tha...

107 | Russ Shafer-Landau on the Reality of Morality

27 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Despite occasional and important disagreements, most people are in rough agreement about what it means to be moral, to do the right thing. There’s m...

106 | Stuart Bartlett on What "Life" Means

20 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Someday, most likely, we will encounter life that is not as we know it. We might find it elsewhere in the universe, we might find it right here on Ear...

105 | Ann-Sophie Barwich on the Science and Philosophy of Smell

13 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

We gather empirical evidence about the nature of the world through our senses, and use that evidence to construct an image of the world in our minds. ...

104 | David Rosen and Scott Miles on the Neuroscience of Music and Creativity

06 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Creativity is one of those things that we all admire but struggle to define or make concrete. Music provides a useful laboratory in which to examine w...

103 | J. Kenji López-Alt on Cooking As and With Science

29 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Cooking is art, but it’s also very much science — mostly chemistry, but with important contributions from physics and biology. (Almost like a well...