80 | Jenann Ismael on Connecting Physics to the World of Experience
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll | Wondery
4.8 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 January 2020
⏱️ 87 minutes
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Summary
Physics is simple; people are complicated. But even people are ultimately physical systems, made of particles and forces that follow the rules of the Core Theory. How do we bridge the gap from one kind of description to another, explaining how someone we know and care about can also be “just” a set of quantum fields obeying impersonal laws? This is a hard question that comes up in a variety of forms — What is the “self”? Do we have free will, the ability to make choices? What are the moral and ethical ramifications of these considerations? Jenann Ismael is a philosopher at the leading edge of connecting human life to the fundamental laws of nature, for example in her recent book How Physics Makes Us Free. We talk about free will, consciousness, values, and other topics about which I’m sure everyone will simply agree.
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Jenann Ismael received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University. She is currently Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Her work includes both the foundations of physics (spacetime, quantum mechanics, symmetry) and the philosophy of mind and cognition. She has been awarded fellowships from Stanford University, the Australian Research Council, the Scots Philosophical Association, and the Center for Advanced Study in Social and Behavioral Sciences, as well as an Essay Prize from the British Society for the Philosophy of Science.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone and welcome to the Minescape Podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | I'm your host Sean Carroll. |
| 0:06.0 | If any of you have read my book The Big Picture, you know I make a big deal in there about |
| 0:10.2 | different ways of talking about the universe. |
| 0:13.9 | This is a very old idea that's been talked about in different ways, itself, as it were, |
| 0:19.4 | but the point is that there is sort of a way of talking about the universe at the fundamental |
| 0:23.0 | physical level, or you might talk about a wave function, or quantum fields, or something |
| 0:27.0 | like that. |
| 0:28.0 | And then there are emergent levels on top of that. |
| 0:30.7 | There's sort of a biological level where there are cells and organs and so forth, individual |
| 0:35.2 | organisms. |
| 0:36.2 | There's kind of a human level with psychology, and there's even superhuman levels where |
| 0:41.1 | you talk about sociology or politics or economics or whatever. |
| 0:45.8 | And everyone kind of agrees that those levels exist, but the relationship between them |
| 0:50.8 | can be a tricky one. |
| 0:52.2 | In particular, there can be a little bit of reluctance in some circles to think of human |
| 0:57.2 | beings as stuff that just obeys the laws of physics. |
| 1:01.4 | And on the other hand, there is a tendency in other circles to what I would call overclaim, |
| 1:08.1 | the extent to which we should just think of ourselves as things obeying the laws of physics, |
| 1:14.1 | in the sense that we should not abandon or modify the vocabulary of fundamental physics |
| 1:19.1 | even when we talk about individual people. |
| 1:22.0 | As I explain in the book, you obviously need have consistency between how we talk about |
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