Waking Up with Sam Harris #124 - In Search of Reality with Sean Carroll

14:14 Poetic Naturalism 16:40 Downward Causation 18:47 Formation of Snowflakes 22:49 Philosophical Zombie Thought Experiment 30:00 Quantum Mechanics 32:29 Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics 49:40 The Platonic FOrm of a Chair 1:08:21 Ethical Questions and Meta Ethical Questions 1:12:00 POssible Worlds

I'd love to see another back and forth between Sam and Sean

1:19:35 "admit it.. it's ok... you'll be happier.. you SHOULD do it.. minimize the suffering of this crowd!"

Skip to 11:45 for the start of the podcast

What a great discussion! Two of my favorite modern intellectuals. It feels like an affront that more people haven’t watched this. Thank you for uploading these discussions.

Sam "aren't you happy you're not Saddam Hussein" Harris

Honest insights into one’s self.

We have free will so that we can align ourselves with Reality, or not, the choice is ours. The problem is if we do not align ourselves with Reality not just out of rebellion but out of ignorance the results and the suffering are the same. We do not get a free pass for being stupid.

Wow. This one is humbling for me. I’m about an hour in and feel like I’ve actually only really understood about 20% of it 😂

1:16:46 Ultimately, a conversation about how things come into being should consist in complete silence - it is the appropriate language game for talking about nothing, out of which things came to be

It was amazing to me in the middle of the Podcast Sean Carroll gave Sam Harris new information, that the Block Theory Of Time is the consensus theory. If it's the consensus theory how is it that no one seems to know about it but physicists? How is it that Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't laughing his way through this on late night TV?

Thanks Sam

Sean Rocks.

Problem: Action. Is: Specific Rule of Sufficient Disambiguation (Observation). Should: General Rule of Arbitrary Precision (Action).

I really liked how , even though they disagreed at the end about morality , there was actually no sign of tension. It wasn't uncofortable or anything. Both were calm af and stayed humorous. It was pretty cool. Can't say the same about the J.B. Peterson events.

"Some way in the back room to predict what we are going to do." Sean: "It could be done, but not by me." This seems related to me to Turing's halting problem? Like you have to play the program to know if it halts/arrives at the answer? (55:03)

Sooo daam trippy! Love Sam

51:25 this is so funny ahahhahaa

I would say MWI gives us a philosophical clue. It says that the measurement pointer and the measured thing agree on what the outcome is. Or, that we can actually do measurements.

When Sean mentions that we should maximize the suffering of conscious creatures, and Sam asks "who are we in this case". An interesting thought experiment and answer to this question could be; an A.I. with no subjective experience observing humans, and left to do what the laws of nature dictate it to do. Given maximal resources, it could learn everything about the physics, chemistry, biology of our world, but it could only ever differentiate between states of human existence, not prefer one over another. For example, it could tell (perhaps by analyzing our brain) that a human given an ice cream cone exhibits state "A", and a human dropped in a vat of acid exhibits state "B", but a preference for one or the other would have to be explicitly programmed in. In order for something to be science, it seems to me that it needs to be something derivable from a computational unit absent subjective experience.