Sean Carroll: belief

Transcript context

…Right. It feels like a lot of pressure that if this is the only universe and we’re here, one of the few intelligent civilizations, maybe the only one, it’s the old theories that we’re the center of everything, it just feels suspicious. That’s why many-worlds is exciting to me because it is humbling in all the right kinds of ways. It feels like infinity is the way this whole thing runs. There’s one pitfall that I’ll just mention because there’s a move that is made in these theoretical edges of cosmology that I think is a little bit mistaken, which is to say I’m going to think about the universe on the basis of imagining that I am a typical observer. This is called the principle of typicality, or the principle of mediocrity, or even the Copernican principle. Nothing special about me, I’m just typical in the universe. But then you draw some conclusions from this, and what you end up realizing is you’ve been hilariously presumptuous because by saying, “I’m a typical observer in the universe,” you’re saying, “Typical observers in the universe are like me,” and that is completely unjustified by anything. I’m not telling you what the right way to do it is, but these kinds of questions that are not quite grounded in experimental verification or falsification are ones you have to be very careful about. That to me is one of the most interesting questions. And there’s different ways to approach it, but what’s outside of this? How did the big mess start? How do we get something from nothing? That’s always the thing you’re sneaking up to when you’re studying all of these questions. You’re always thinking that’s where the black hole and the unifying, getting quantum gravity, all this kind of stuff, you’re always sneaking up to that question, where did all of this come from?…

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