Sean Carroll: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay. The possibility of the future versus what the reality is. I mean, the future is a concept, so you can … Time is just a concept, so you can play with that. Time is just a concept so you can play with that. But yes, reality. So, to you … So for example, I love asking this. So, Donald Hoffman thinks that the entirety of the conversation we’ve been having about space-time is an illusion. Is it possible for you to steelman the case for that? Can you make the case for and against reality, as I think he writes, that the laws of physics as we know them with space-time, is it interface to a much deeper thing that we don’t at all understand and that we’re fooling ourselves by constructing this world? Well, I think there’s part of that idea that is perfectly respectable and part of it that is perfectly nonsensical and I’m not even going to try to steelman the nonsensical part. The real part to me is what is called structural realism, so we don’t know what the world is at a deep fundamental level. Let’s put ourselves in the minds of people living 200 years ago, they didn’t know about quantum mechanics, they didn’t know about relativity, that doesn’t mean they were wrong about the universe that they understood, they had Newton’s laws, they could predict what time the sun was going to rise perfectly well. In the progress of science, the words that would be used to give the most fundamental description of how you were predicting the sun would rise changed because now you have curved space-time and things like that and you didn’t have any of those words 200 years ago. But the prediction is the same, why? Because that prediction, independent of what we thought the fundamental ontology was, the prediction pointed to something true about our understanding of reality. To call it an illusion is just wrong, I think. We might not know what the best, most comprehensive way of stating it is but it’s still true. Is it true in the way, for example, belief in God is true? Because for most of human history, people have believed in a God or multiple gods and that seemed very true to them as an explanation for the way the world is, some of the deeper questions about life itself with the human condition and why certain things happen, that was a good explainer. So, to you, that’s not an illusion?…

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