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

Longtime listeners will be aware of my personal point of view on questions of emergence and

fundamentality. There are things that are supposed to be fundamental to the universe, ideas,

concepts that you cannot do without in discussing the universe at the most comprehensive level.

And then there are emergent concepts that are useful to us at maybe a macroscopic level or some

other version of analysis. They were useful being very, very important here. You just don't just

make things up. They have to serve some purpose. Typically, in a scientific discussion, the

purposes are you can make predictions. They have causal relationships to other things in the world.

A table is an emergent concept. It's not anywhere in the standard model of particle physics or anything

like that. But by saying there's a table here that conveys a lot of information. I know things

like I could put a cup of coffee on it or sit down and read a book in front of it and so on.

So when it gets to human level questions like the self, that's something that it's a little bit

trickier to think about where it is. A more traditional way of thinking about the self would have

been that it's very fundamental to what nature is, how the universe works is that there is an

essence of each human being and maybe it changes with time or it evolves, but it's part of them.

There are plenty of cultures which things it survives after you die and so forth. I, of course,

do not want to say that. I don't think that the self is fundamental. I think it is very much emergent,

but that's not the end of this discussion. When you say, okay, something is emergent. There's a

lot of questions that get raised by that out of what does this concept emerge? Why is it useful?

What are the boundaries? How can you improve the definition of it or your understanding of it?

With the self, that's going to be an especially tricky thing. So we're going to think about that

today with Brian Lowry, who's a social psychologist at Stanford University. He's the author of a new

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