Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

And here at Mindscape, we are members of what back in my day was referred to as the reality-based

community. We believe that there is a reality out there, there's a real world, you don't get to

pick reality at the fundamental level at least. But of course, we all know that when we examine

reality, when we talk about it, when we carve it up, when we turn it into useful little person-sized

chunks, there's a lot of human choice that goes into how we describe reality. Sometimes this is a

very trivial thing, right? You can describe reality at the level of particles and fields,

where you can describe the reality at the level of atoms and molecules all the way up to organisms

and societies and what have you. I would argue, I know I'm an extremist on this, not everyone agrees.

I think that even at the level of particles and fields, we human beings are making choices to

talk about reality in a certain way. The real way of talking about reality is as a single way

function in Hilbert space. But anyway, that's an extremist point of view, like I said. In physics,

in science more generally, these ways that we carve up realities to talk about them are more or

less fixed by the data, by our desire to fit our experience into some framework, which we call a

theory of physics or something like that, a theory of some other kind of science. But as you go

up and up and up toward the human level, as you become more and more macroscopic, we end up making

more and more choices about how to describe reality. Once you get to the level of people in societies

and countries and governments, then you're making things up right and left. We make up things like

rights and privileges and laws, right? Even when we describe the people around us, we make up

categories, categories of race or gender or class, which is fine. We need these categories. They

help us analyze the world. There's no choice about it. The problem is that two problems, actually.

One problem is sometimes we begin to think that the ways that we have chosen to conveniently

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