The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself by Sean M. Carroll (PDF)

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The instant New York Times bestseller about humanity’s place in the universe—and how we understand it.“Vivid…impressive….Splendidly informative.”—The New York Times“Succeeds spectacularly.”—Science“A tour de force.”—SalonAlready internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on Higgs bosons and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions: Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void? Do human purpose and meaning fit into a scientific worldview?In short chapters filled with intriguing historical anecdotes, personal asides, and rigorous exposition, readers learn the difference between how the world works at the quantum level, the cosmic level, and the human level—and then how each connects to the other. Carroll’s presentation of the principles that have guided the scientific revolution from Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness, and the universe is dazzlingly unique. Carroll shows how an avalanche of discoveries in the past few hundred years has changed our world and what really matters to us. Our lives are dwarfed like never before by the immensity of space and time, but they are redeemed by our capacity to comprehend it and give it meaning.The Big Picture is an unprecedented scientific worldview, a tour de force that will sit on shelves alongside the works of Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett, and E. O. Wilson for years to come.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐“Life” and “consciousness” do not denote essences distinct from matter; they are ways of talking about phenomena that emerge from the interplay of extraordinary complex systems. (location 263)There is the conscious knowledge of human beings as opposed to the sense knowledge of animals. We can see with our eyes that animals can see and hear and solve simple problems. We know about the “conscious knowledge of human beings” because we can make ourselves the subject of our own knowledge. One is a scientific observation and the other is a metaphysical observation. There is a great track record of success with scientific questions. However, there is no such track record of success with metaphysical questions.We don’t know how life began, or how consciousness arose. (location 306)What caused life to begin is a question in science. What is consciousness and how it arose is a question in metaphysics. The answer is that we can comprehend what human consciousness is because we have it. But we can’t define human consciousness. Knowing that the sky is blue means more than that light is entering the eye and a signal is going to the brain. It means an awareness of this. What is this awareness? This is a metaphysical question for which there is no answer.We can’t decide whether an individual human life actually matters if we don’t know what we mean by “human being.” (location 355)There are three equivalent explanations of what a human being is: 1) Humans are indefinabilites that become conscious of their own existence. 2) Humans are embodied spirits. 3) The human soul or form is spiritual.Essentially, naturalism is the idea that the world revealed to us by scientific investigation is the one true world. (location 400)In other words, naturalism means rejecting the method of inquiry called metaphysics. According to metaphysics, humans are superior to animals because we have free will. Form or soul is the principle or incomplete being that makes us equal to one another. Matter or body is the principle or incomplete being that makes us different from one another. The human soul is spiritual because we can comprehend free will but can’t explain what the relationship is between our self and our body.Why does the universe exist at all? (location 428)The universe is a collection of molecules. It is not a being. The universe is many beings. The universe exists only in the mind of the human who uses the word universe.Are we sure it (a unified physical reality) is sufficient to describe consciousness, perhaps the most perplexing aspect of our manifest world. (location 432)There are two worlds: the manifest world of our sense observations and the metaphysical world that arises from our transcendence, that is, our ability to make our selves the subject of our own knowledge.But what if the table is made of atoms? Would it be fair to say that the atoms are real, but not the table? (location 1732)If we look at a table and create an image of the table, the image is a mental being. The image is not real. However, the table itself is a collection of molecules. The table is many beings. To be is to be one. Unity is a property of being. I exist (cogito ergo sum) and I am a single unified being.You may have heard that there is a long-running dispute about the relationship between “faith” and “reason.” (location 1967)Faith and reason refers to two kinds of knowledge. Faith is knowledge God gives us or reveals to us. An example is life after death. The other kind of knowledge is based on observations, questions, and theories supported by evidence.Thinking about God in a rigorous was is not an easy task. (location 2247)Human are finite beings. A finite being’s essence limits its existence. An infinite being (God) is a pure act of existence without a limiting essence.For the sake of keeping things simple, let’s divide all of the possible ways of thinking about God into just two categories: theism (God exists) and atheism (no he doesn’t). (location 2259)There is an argument, not a proof, of God’s existence that is based on the assumption or hope that the universe is intelligible. There is no need to make a decision about God’s existence. Because of the historical event called the Resurrection of Jesus, we only have to decide only whether or not there is life after death.But if that’s true, the fact that we do experience evil is unambiguous evidence against the existence of God. (location 2285)The existence of evil is a reason to not believe in life after death. However, it has nothing to do with whether or not God exists. Human beings exist because God created us. This raises the question of what motivated God to create us. The only thing that could motivate God to do any thing is self-love. God created humans because He loved Himself as giving. But God could just as well love Himself without giving. Since we can’t understand why God created us, it makes no sense to try to understand why God created so much evil and human suffering.…God’s essence is mysterious and impenetrable to our minds. (location 2300)God is a pure act of existence without a limiting essence. When Moses asked God what His name was God said: “This is what you shall tell the Israelites: I AM sent me to you” (Exodus 3.14).And there is no immaterial soul that could possibly survive the body. (location 2423)This is correct. Many Catholics mistakenly think that the human soul goes to purgatory after death. However, this is just theological speculation to account for the gap between death and the Second Coming of Jesus.After all, it seems pretty obvious that time does exist, and that it’s passing all around us. (location 3026)It is not obvious to me. Time has to do with change and with the past and the future. Only the present is real. The past and the future are mental beings.Essentially every working professional biologist accepts the basic explanation provided by Darwin for the existence of complex structures in biological organisms. (location 3422)Natural selection just explains the adaptation of species to the environment. It does not explain common descent because of how rapidly animals descended from bacteria. It takes two decades for a single fertilized human egg to produce all of the cells in the human body. Bacteria transformed into giraffes in 100 million decades. One hundred million does not even begin to describe the complexity of a mammal. Only non-biologists think a billion years is a long time and that natural selection explains common descent.Nevertheless, fine-tuning is probably the most respectable argument in favor of theism. (location 4574).There is no explanation to date for why the mass of an electron is exactly what it is (fine-tuning). This is evidence that the universe is not intelligible and that God does not exist. However, the Big Bang and fine-tuning is a reason to believe God inspired the human authors of the Bible because the bible says God created the universe from nothing.The special feature of self-awareness, the ability to have a rich inner life and reflect on one’s place in the universe, seems to demand a special kind of explanation. (location 4802)We have a drive as human beings to know and understand everything. The explanation for self-awareness is that humans are able to turn in on themselves and catch themselves in the act of their own existence. The explanation for why humans exist is that there is a being (God) that created humans and keeps us in existence but that itself does not need a creator.The idea of a unified physical world has been enormously successful in many contexts, and there is every reasons to think that it will be able to account for consciousness as well. (location 4812)Science is successful in question arising from sense observations. There is no track record of success in questions arising from our ability to make ourselves the subject of our own knowledge. We can’t even define the conscious knowledge of human beings, never mind explaining it.Memories are physical things, located in your brain. (location 4991)Memories are mental beings. Saying they are physical things is like the guy who is collecting minerals and arranging them according to their color. He builds a chest of drawers and labels the drawers the colors of the rainbow. He puts a red mineral in the red drawer, a blue mineral in the blue drawer, and so on. One day he finds a white mineral. He goes back to his chest and says, “White minerals don’t exist.”None of this will necessarily convince a determined Cartesian dualist who wants to believe in immaterial souls. (location 5039)There are four solutions to the mind-body problem. The most irrational one is dualism because there is no evidence of immaterial substances. Slightly less irrational is materialism. Idealism, the idea that the material world is an illusion, makes far more sense than materialism and dualism. The solution judged to be true by rational people and supported by the evidence is that the mind-body problem is a mystery with the understanding that there are no mysteries in science. In science, there are only unanswered questions.A person has knowledge of something if they can (more or less) answer questions about it correctly or carry out the actions associated with it effectively. (location 5340)Knowledge is the openness of being to the manifestation of being.Do I, at the end of the day, have free will? (location 5736)It is very clear that we have free will when we do something that takes a lot of will power, like sticking to a diet.The volunteers were also observing a clock, and could report precisely when they made their decisions. Libet’s results seemed to indicate that there was a telltale pulse of brain activity before the subjects became consciously aware of their decision. (location 5802)There are three kinds of causality. Free will involves a final cause. If you spend 15 minutes washing your car, the final cause is having a clean car. In metaphysics, cause precedes the effect in the order causality, not time. If the cause preceded the effect in the order of time, there would be a cause not causing anything and an effect not being effected by anything. In physics, a causal system is one where the energy is constant. If you know the position and speed of a mass falling under gravity at one point in time, you can calculate its speed and position at any other point in time.I believe in naturalism, not because I would prefer it to be true, but because I thing it provides the best account of the world we see. (location 5866)Of course it does. But the best account of the world finite beings know about from our ability to make ourselves the subject of our own knowledge (free will, our existence as a single unified being) is the existence of an infinite being.There is no simplistic, undivided self, no tiny homunculus in the brain steering us around…. (location 6445)There certainly is an “undivided self.” Descartes read contribution to metaphysics is: I think, therefore I am. But Descartes was wrong to think there was a spiritual little man inside the brain that controlled the body like a driver controls a team of horses. The driver and the horses are two beings. A human being is one being.

⭐Per Sean Carroll, the future is as solidly fixed as the past, so it may be pointless to urge everyone to read his book. But apparently that’s predetermined, too.It’s impressive work, far more ambitious and thoughtful than other physics “popularizers.” People who know and love Carroll from his captivating cosmology and entropy lectures will be surprised that in “The Big Picture,” he feels free to jump from black holes to philosophy by way of innumerable intervening mysteries of science. It could easily have been silly stuff, or pure speculation, but it isn’t, although his rigor definitely slips towards the end.The book has stirred up the usual backscatter of Jesus-wept reviews, but the fact that SC’s points are wide open to alert criticism, as well as not always persuasive, is no reason to one-star him, quite the opposite. Scientists who cultivate a popular following inevitably attract the snipers.SC calls his philosophy “poetic naturalism.” That raises a tiny flag: “poetic” is a squishy term not much favored in science. He means, though, that the same unyielding reality can be explained in many different ways depending on perspective. Time and Space may be emergent qualities beyond the quantum level, consciousness on the human level – and who knows what on the cosmic scale? But it’s all realism. Perhaps naturalism needs no qualifier. (Want poetry? Read Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons, and in a couple hours you’ll be no smarter.)Carroll says: Stick to Reality. It doesn’t have to be an election year for us to see that humans instinctively reject reality and prefer to stay safely within echo-filled parallel universes. But this is how, in a physics book, no less, we find a chapter on gender identity (“Who am I”). His point is, while facts are facts, A=A, how we relate to them is a matter of choice – a choice depending on usefulness. A man who thinks he is a woman can perhaps be accommodated; a man who thinks he is a unicorn, not so easily (unicorns don’t use bathrooms at all). As he says, the distinction between facts and human convention is crucial, though flagrantly violated in public discourse.What is reality, though? SC diligently reminds us that there is no “truth” in science (although there is in logic) – yet you can’t just make stuff up. We try to get the prediction to match the data as closely as we can, and then we call it “reality.” (SC slips into the vernacular from time to time, as do we all: “The purpose of science is to find the truth.” But, say, Darwin is no more “the truth” than Genesis is – just more useful. Try faith-based dog breeding.) There’s a whole prejudicial vocabulary we ought to eschew.So it’s odd that SC spends so much time arguing against the gods. His ending remarks cast some light on his own personal journey, but, really, we don’t expect a dentistry textbook to have a chapter repudiating the Tooth Fairy. All he needs to say is, “If your best answer to these fundamental physics problems is, “A god did it!” then you don’t belong in my class. Here we’re trying to do better.”(That said, much of modern cosmological speculation veers towards the untestable and unmeasurable: all possible universes may exist; undetectable universes pop up and back out; pretty soon you’re back to “Hey, a god did it.”)Surely the hardest point to grasp is the “Many-Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. SC is a confirmed Everettian and says you’d better go where the math (summed wave function) takes you. The universe doesn’t care if you like it or not, and admittedly MW is no weirder than much else. But the implications are unfathomable.SC brilliantly discusses the origin and rise of life within the context of the 2nd Law/TD. “The purpose of life is to hydrogenate CO2.” Or more “poetically,” to turn sunlight into turds in the pursuit of entropy. Yet it’s still hard to explain how replicating DNA began, and why it gained such unexpected complexity. Is there not some extropian principle at work? SC has to work pretty hard to convince himself that there isn’t. (And why does it seem to have happened just once? Why just DNA-based? SC favors hydrothermal vents and never mentions space origins.)Same with consciousness. SC dismisses the popular quantum consciousness theories, even Penrose’s, and he thinks panpsychia is silly (where’s the evidence?). Consciousness is just a phase transition that occurs when suitably complex machines get to ruminate on the past to estimate the future. But, since it is but crude “biologism” to reserve consciousness for DNA-based units, then we are now undergoing another phase shift into a global technosphere (nöosphere if you will), which, presumably, will soon decide that humans are more trouble than they are worth, and begin treating them like we treat bacteria. And then it will proceed on course to convert all matter into information processing, and then we are right back in panpsychia and the notion of the universe as a giant thinking machine.The philosophers love their thought experiments, but how they crash and burn when they hit reality! In Ethics, SC begins with the “terrible” dilemma of Abraham and Isaac. Well, if Isaac calls 911 and says his Dad is about to “sacrifice” him, we all know exactly what to do with that old nut Abe. Nothing to agonize over here. As for the trolley problem, the dilemma du jour, military targeteers work it 24/7. You decide who needs killed, and who needs spared, in order to maximize the utility function for your tribal coalition. There are a lot of unknown variables, and you can be wrong. The Law of all DNA is plain: survive and reproduce. Alone or joint is a tactical decision. “Ethics” is just calculation of each organism’s utility function.SC recognizes that interests may conflict, or may align, so there is never one “right” answer. Yet in human-speak, it’s “good” if it serves our purposes, “evil” if not. This is not the maligned “relative ethics,” but true relativistic ethics: the “right choice” is the one with the highest probability of serving a unit’s interests at a specified point and time. It will look different from different coordinates.Also, every event was baked into the universe from the beginning, so there’s no point complaining. In Darwinian terms, losers whine about the past; winners take precautions for the future. Unless whining works! (But why worry, Sean, if it’s all fixed…)Here’s where the flag goes up again, and one wonders if SC should have examined his point. Sure, all the cultural affectations and conventions (religion always being the easy pinata) are groan-worthy. But, they are as “real” as quarks and stars – they exist for a reason. So the smart DNA (Dawkins) rails against them; the smarter DNA (F de Waal) tries to explain them; and the truly clever DNA (preachers, politicians…) figures out how to package and sell them. Such collective memes serve someone’s interests, though not necessarily yours; they are natural attempts to gain leverage from the differential in human cognitive abilities. This differential ordering seems inevitable, since the emerging collective consciousness (global brain?) parallels the evolution of multicellular organisms. (But won’t such a global superorganism require great armies of subhuman drudges who do as they’re told in return for a diet of drivel? Just asking…)And that’s how we get to Moses, one of the first to codify the collective’s subjugation of the individual.Again, the warning flag: Perhaps reflecting some inner struggle, Carroll’s subtle goal seems to be to reconcile traditional, homespun worldviews with the stark, unyielding, largely incomprehensible universe science reveals. He might have been better off trash-canning everything pre-1905, and “sticking to reality.” SC is a superb explainer, especially of the inexplicable, but in the last section, his signal-to-noise ratio deteriorates markedly.Happily Carroll has a good sense of humor – otherwise his Moses-emulation might have fallen flat. The “Ten Considerations,” the Carolian Decalogue, aren’t controversial to reasonable people; they border on platitudes. (A bad one slipped through: “What matters is what matters to humans.” He’s lucky other species don’t read.) He really only needs the last one, “Reality Guides Us!” That can be shortened to “Think!” – but that’s what commandments are designed to prevent.The book ends with a dumb existentialist cliché, Camus’s “happy Sisyphus.” Carroll says, cheer up and roll that stone. But to complete his own thought-provoking discussion of zombies vs. consciousness: When Sisyphus makes that phase transition and figures out what’s going on, he ain’t happy no mo’…This book’s a feast: something to argue over on every page.

⭐This is as good an overview of science as one will find. Carroll is a very good communicator of science and philosophy.Carroll is obviously more at home in the physics parts of the book. That is where he shines. I disagree with his treatment of emergence in the book, but it is notable that in his recorded “book tour” talks on YouTube, he seems to be leaning more towards a stronger form of emergentism than one finds in the book.I’m less convinced by his chapters on biology (where reductionism doesn’t really find much grip). But still, a good overview.

⭐This is largely a philosophical work, not just philosophy of science but more generally. The author takes reasonable and balanced positions but the central role of Bayesian reasoning does not convince.David Deutsch’s works are more convincing.Also, all but one of the exponents are wrongly rendered in the kindle edition:

⭐I do think Prof Carroll goes out of his way to touch upon every weird theory that we have come up with, referring to his Baysean outlook to deal with most of the but running through it is a well constructed argument for poetic naturalism, which left a few questions in my mind. And the best explanation of the core theory for a non physicist I have seen. Great, if sometimes difficult, read.

⭐I just love Sean Carroll’s work. The way he communicates science phenomena is so unique and simple to grasp. This book will blow anyone’s mind if they’re looking for a deep explanation of our existence , and not only.

⭐Excellent

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