Critique of Sean Carroll’s “The Big Picture”

Sean Carroll has written a book, “The Big Picture, On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself“. In it, he weaves two themes together. The first theme is that everything in the universe from stars and galaxies evolved to human consciousness, meanings, and values is rooted in a process of emergence that is, in turn, grounded exclusively in what he calls the “core theory” (quantum field theory plus the “standard model” of contemporary particle physics), the second law of thermodynamics, and the “past hypothesis” (the early universe was in a very low-entropy state). The second theme is simply that no other theory, in particular that there is a God and our experience of the universe is partly a product of his designs, is at all reasonable because it is highly unlikely. My short Amazon review of Carroll’s book is here. This essay is a more detailed critique of his approach to that second theme.

Throughout the book Dr. Carroll makes much of “Bayesian inference“, a process by which one comes to refine probability assessments. If, for example, I ask you what is the “prior probability” of a fair coin coming up heads on a single toss, you would naturally say 50%. Now you flip the coin and it comes up tails. The question here is “is the coin fair”. You are asked, given your new data, to reassess your estimate of “prior probability”. One throw is not going to make a difference. If I throw the coin 10 times and it comes up tails 7 of them then what? Seven tails is not all that unlikely even given a fair coin. If after 1000 throws the coin comes up tails 699 times, you think that 50% prior probability was wrong and indeed the coin is not fair. This sort of reassessment works because we can count events. We can compare what we count with what we think should happen and reevaluate our original position. Carroll applies Bayesian reasoning to God, to the probability that he exists. What, exactly, is he counting here? Not events certainly.

Actually, he isn’t counting anything. He offers assertions made about God alongside various philosophical challenges already prejudged to count for or against the likelihood of God’s existence. These aren’t data exactly, but assertions about the world, some sensible and some not. Their sensibility is nowhere independently evaluated, nowhere placed into any context that might change how we think they count for or against God.

Dr. Carroll is too casual about what counts and in what direction it counts. Most of his examples are negative, Hume’s “argument from evil” and the historical fact of there being many different views of God for example. “Why not make himself plain” asks Carroll? That there are reasonable answers to those questions besides God’s non-existence he does not mention. He does adduce a few pieces of evidence in God’s favor, for example the fact that every people comes up with some sort of view of him even if it varies greatly from culture to culture. But his sympathies clearly lie on the negative side here. With regard to Hume’s “argument from evil”, he does allude to the matter of “free will”. He speculates that it might be important to God (though not to us apparently) but fails to appreciate its potential as a part of a full explanation (perspective in this case) in much of what he counts against God’s likelihood. As it happens, free will turns out to be a lynch pin issue for Carroll’s view.

Dr. Carroll is a materialist. He warns us constantly to be alert to cognitive bias, but fails to appreciate his own. He believes that if a phenomenon cannot be measured (at least in potential) by physical instruments ending in our sensory experience, that is intersubjectively by third parties, then it cannot be real. His argument for this is not merely that we don’t find anything but the physical with physical instruments, but what we do find actually explains everything (at least in potential) and so there remains no room for anything other than the physical. Even if such an other were to exist, it has no impact, no physically measurable interaction, with the physical! Why then would we need to posit it?

How did Carroll get here? He tells the story of being a little boy and wanting very much to project causal power directly from his mind to objects lying outside him. He wanted to “bend spoons”. What boy doesn’t? After a while he realized that this is just not something humans are given to do. But he mistakenly concludes (eventually) that if our mind’s cannot bend spoons then they cannot affect any change in any material reality. Coupled with this assumption is Carroll’s affinity for the present view in physics that there aren’t strictly causes in the universe. Of course it is perfectly reasonable for us to talk of cause, a convenient fiction, but really all that is going on in the physical world is the evolution of physical states, this being a natural product of time and the thermodynamic arc from a low entropy past to a high entropy future.

At that point in his life however his materialistic leanings must have been well formed because he missed one obvious alternative; that mind does in fact affect the disposition of matter-energy in exactly one place, in the functioning brains of creatures advanced enough to be conscious! He ultimately justifies his rejection by declaring that nothing of such an influence can be measured. That part is true, we can (as in quantum “virtual transactions” with which Carroll is comfortable) only measure their effects, in this case the subsequent behavior of a body.

We can measure all sorts of goings-on in the brain and we have done an amazing job of tying subjective states to certain kinds of brain-state correlations. But there is no guarantee that in all that we detect, some part of it, some part of what we do in fact measure, is actually caused by something non-material. All we see is physical activity and correlations. If some small part of the complex resonances of the brain were influenced by something that was not in fact material, how would we ever tell? Late in the book, in his chapter on free will, Carroll denies that libertarian free will is even possible precisely because if it was it would entail that some non-material entity made a difference to some material phenomenon. This is a crucial juncture for Carroll’s thought. If there is even one place in which a non-material entity (like a mind) has an influence on the physical world then that influence would be a genuine cause, not merely an evolution from a prior state because that trigger (’cause’ being a good name for it) is not fully determined by any prior state of the universe. This is why libertarian free will is the fulcrum on which Carroll’s whole argument hangs. If he is right and all states of the universe are evolutions from prior states, then libertarian freedom is impossible. But if libertarian free will is real, if we can be uncaused causes, then physics cannot be the ultimate explanation of everything. In particular there has to be something, at least in one place, where as he puts it, “ideas cause physics”.

Why should we, that is physics, accept that there is “one place” in the universe where genuine cause exists? We do not find it anywhere else, why should we believe it happens in relation to the behavior of our bodies? We cannot bend spoons with our mind, why should we think that our minds have an antecedent causal relation with the material entity we call our brain and from there (uncontroversially enough) our body? I can’t bend spoons by staring at them, but I can grab them in my hands and bend them. Why should physics accept that subjective mind is an effective cause in the latter case and not the former? The reason is simple enough, because it is the one place in the universe that we seem to experience it! We experience ourselves being causes, even original causes via control of a body and only via that mechanism. Perhaps this is illusion? Indeed this is entailed by Carroll’s claim that libertarian free will is impossible. But as we look around us in the world and ask from where, if anywhere, new causal chains seem to emerge, the answer is plain, from people.

Carroll asks, if God is so important (as most religions claim he is) then why isn’t his activity in the universe more obvious? Why are we able to tell the complete story of cosmic evolution in physical terms without seeming to leave anything out? Here he is being a bit disingenuous. There is one place, one source, through which God’s influence can be discerned, in the behavior of people, the only locus of genuine original cause in the physical universe. Carroll certainly would ask “where besides people”, and the answer is “nowhere else besides people”! Only people have libertarian free will and it is only by exercise (and by certain exercises and not others) of this will that God influences the world. Why God set things up this way is another question dealt with at length in my books. The issue as concerns Carroll is that he misses the possibility that God did indeed set things up this way, and in so doing renders original cause in the physical (our choice to act ends after all with a behavior of a physical body) compatible with a causeless physics.

Free will is the crux of the answer to the question of why God doesn’t “make himself plain” as Carroll puts it. Doing so would abridge exactly that power, libertarian free will, whose exercise does (loving one another) or does not (killing on another) incrementally bring the world into alignment with God’s desire to evolve a physical universe transformed from a pure competition for survival to one of universal loving cooperation. Done in this way, in the end, a physical universe of love comes about through the free willed choice and not coercion of genuinely independent minds. The combination of purposeless physical mechanism, libertarian free will, and perception of values (truth, beauty, and goodness) in mind go together. God (should he exist) has to be capable of direct and personal action in the physical. Perhaps he does this on occasion, but such occasions are either beneath our notice (see below on life), or very rare, enough so that we can effectively discount their effect in the day by day unfolding of physical process.

Certainly we do not detect the “influence of God” in much of human behavior. But it doesn’t have to be detected in every act. It is enough if it is present even sometimes. What would “the influence of God” look like? Suppose I act to do some kindness, some good, to a person I have every reason to hate. I do this good (let us suppose) for no other reason than that I believe he, like me, is a “child of God”. That sort of decision, taken freely, results in the sort of action that infuses God’s spirit (however much or little of it) into the world. That is what it would look like, people doing good and especially so when they would seem to have every reason to do the opposite.

Because our subjective minds are the one place in the universe over which some non-material entity has some antecedent causal control, the behavior of our bodies, also connected to those minds, are the material locus of novel causal chains. Of course not all of these chains need originate in an attempt to infuse the world with God’s spirit. It is enough that some do! It is also not necessary that any intellectual belief in God (as in the example above) underlie the act. It is enough that the act reflects some one or more of the values truth, beauty, or goodness. Every act of kindness, of unselfishness, of reverence for truth, or creation of beauty, is part of the process of infusing God’s spirit into the world. God doesn’t “make himself plain” precisely so that such acts fully and freely belong to us.

What about a believer who says “God ordered me to kill that man”, or “God has ordered that all heretics be put to the sword”. Put plainly, such declarations are false, lies, and for two reasons. First because the values, God’s spirit detected by our minds, are truth, beauty, and goodness. Killing might sometimes be necessary for material reasons (self defense for example) but it cannot ever reflect the “will of God”. No act that does not reflect one of more of the values results in a behavior that infuses God’s spirit into the world. Second, God doesn’t order anyone to do anything good or evil. That is what free will is for. God provides only spiritual pointers. A decision to do anything with or about them, positive or negative, is entirely up to us.

The general thrust of Carroll’s argument is that what physics has discovered about the universe must be true. This doesn’t mean the discoveries are the complete story of everything by any means. What he means here is that they must be a part of the truth and indeed a major part as concerns the cosmos over all. He notes that we live in a universe that, in its deep past, had a very low-entropy. Whether or not this was the literal beginning of our universe of some stage of a longer process he, and we, do not know, but at some point in the past entropy was very low. Thanks to this beginning, combined with the forces of the “core theory”, and the fact that the universe is not yet in thermodynamic equilibrium, we live in an age of developing complexity. From Carroll’s viewpoint, everything from the gathering of primordial particles into atoms, stars, and galaxies, to the appearance of life, consciousness, and love, is all merely the physical evolution of contingent (it might have happened otherwise) complexity thanks to the potentials made possible by the settings and regularities (laws) coupled with that moment in cosmological history in between a very low entropy beginning and a very high entropy future.

I have no doubt that the physical complexity we find around us, from stars to other people, even our own brains hangs on exactly what Dr. Carroll claims here. That is, the thermodynamic arc, coupled with the core theory not only allows for all of these possibilities, but also that they are indeed physically constructed (emerge) from them. Carroll is not alone here, a number of recent books, including one of my own, builds on the phenomenon of emergence.

In building complexity Carroll notes that, from our viewpoint, as the evolution of the physical results in information being compounded upon information we find value in describing phenomena at different levels. There are many examples of this. His favorite (an uncontroversial example, another being the relation between Newtonian mechanics and General Relativity he also mentions) is the language of “gas laws” (temperature and pressure) to describe the same phenomenon as are described at the level of individual molecules with “statistical mechanics”. Same phenomenon, different languages.

In truth, this transformation of viewpoints does carry all the way up from physics to chemistry, biology, and even sociology. The reason such language transformations work in these cases is precisely because we are able, as observers, to measure these phenomena! As we study the behavior of social systems (or gasses), we are able to measure what the people (or molecules) physically do, where the money (in paper or bits) flows, how ideas are exchanged. All of this has to do with observable (measurable) behavior. In fact, as I noted above, it is in observing the behavior of persons, assuming libertarian free will to be genuine, that we sometimes (if we know what we are looking for) detect the influence of God in the physical universe.

But Dr. Carroll confidently asserts that the same phenomenon is going on, that is, what we have is nothing more than an “alternative language”, as concerns such subjective phenomena as feelings, thoughts, qualia, and decisions. He insists, that these are “nothing more than ways of talking” about physical phenomena that can be measured (at least in potential), and that once we have actually measured all of them we will discover that there is nothing else to be said about subjective experience. He insists that one day we will, from a third-party perspective as observers, be able to explain ourselves in the same way that we connect up statistical mechanics to the gas laws and Newton with Einstein.

Plainly there is a difference here, a difference of which Carroll must be aware. Unlike the phenomena described by Boltzman or Einstein, we are not third party observers of subjective experience. By definition it is individual, subjective, available only in the first person. What makes our internal states different from such things as the gas laws is that they cannot be intersubjectively quantified. They can’t be measured by third parties. Of course we can measure the obviously physical phenomenon that underlie their appearance, the functioning brain, but we can never “connect up” a pain quale or a belief with a neural event in the same way as we can connect individual molecules with their average collective behavior because we cannot measure the other [subjective] side.

Solipcism (the notion that I alone am real or genuinely conscious and everyone else is some part of my dream), isn’t much taken seriously, but that we can entertain the notion and that we do not find it obviously incoherent demonstrates the uniqueness of our subjectivity, its inaccessibility from the outside. We can find correlations between neurons and subjective content, but we can never be sure that subjective content is “nothing more” than neurons because we can’t quantify the gap. We can measure that more C-fiber firing correlates with more intense pain, but we cannot show why chemicals spewing across a synapse should manifest as the subjective quality of pain.

In a later part of the book, Carroll declares that, like libertarian free will, there can be no such thing as post-mortal existence. He says there is nothing in physics, in the core theory or anything we observe to support this idea. Of course he is correct. There is nothing in physics to suggest any such a thing is possible, but the claim as concerns such survival has nought (usually) to do with physics. True, there are doctrines that say our bodies are ressurected. Those doctrines are, to put it bluntly, wrong. If anything survives mortal death it isn’t a physical entity. How the survival mechanism might go, I address in another essay. But whatever the mechanism, it has nothing to do with physics. Carroll claims there is nothing in physics that supports any concept of a post-mortal life. Limited to the idea of a physical post-mortal survival he is right. But he isn’t addressing the real issue which is the possibility of a non-physical survival mechanism. Science has no business being anything but neutral on this matter.

Carroll here isn’t content merely to claim that a post-mortal experience is impossible. He derides it with a story of a man who, upon dying, goes to heaven and decides to spend his days endlessly having sex, eating, and playing golf. Eventually the man grows bored and begins to contemplate suicide. Carroll’s story, meant to be humorous, is akin to a kindergardner who, having been told that her career aspirations will require another 20+ years of school, imagines that those 20 years will be filled with finger painting, naps, and story-time! Really Dr. Carroll? You are far past kindergarden and you cannot think of anything more adventurous and compelling as concerns growth toward perfection than more of the same, more finger painting, naps and story time? You could not imagine something more robust? Does death alone perfect us in God’s eyes?

In another shot at a straw man, Carroll asks, if God created us, a single planet populated by creatures that can (rightly or wrongly) contemplate him, why go on to create the rest of the physical universe of billions and billions of galaxies? The rejoinder here seems pretty obvious. The doctrine that we are alone in the universe, alone “created in God’s image” is, like the notion of a resurrected body above, simply wrong, another 2000 year-old notion whose time is long past. The universe is, or will be, inhabited. To be sure I am not speaking of every rock being populated, but billions of rocks have conditions suitable for life even as we understand it. Given that God seems to be intent on making over the universe based on the free will choices of suitable creatures, all of those rocks, if they are not already inhabited by personal beings (whatever their physiology) are evolving in that direction! This speculation leads to some testable predictions.

Let us say, broadly speaking, that there are three general mechanisms by which life appeared in the universe. The first is simply random accidental association, what most scientists on Earth today believe. That this is highly unlikely, but nevertheless possible (that is physically possible) is granted. Secondly, supposing God exists, perhaps he arranged things at the beginning of the universe such that life would not only be possible, but likely to arise in all (or most) more-or-less supporting environments. The assembly of life remains, in this view, strictly accidental, but now more of “an accident waiting to happen”, a not-uncommon accident once certain environmental conditions are met; conditions found in many places throughout the universe. This view is suggested by notions like the “anomalous monism” of Donald Davidson and Thomas Nagel, or panpsychism from David Chalmers. Carroll would undoubtedly note (and I would agree with him) that there is no evidence in physics for either of these views. The third possibility is that God (directly or indirectly) has a hand in initiating life (which evolves by Darwinian mechanism from that point forward) on each life bearing world.

In the first scenario, we expect life to be very rare. Of the billions and billions of potentially inhabitable worlds only a very few would exhibit life at all, and even fewer a life that advances to consciousness. We might also find once-living-now-dead worlds where life managed to begin but was snuffed out as environmental conditions evolved unfavorably. Mostly, however, we would expect to find no life present or past on most worlds.

The second scenario results in a much different outcome. Life would be everywhere (or nearly) in every supporting environment. We would also expect to find many once-living-now-dead worlds because life starts itself easily when conditions are right, even if they are not destined to remain so. Mars is a seminal possibility here. It is widely believed that the Martian environment was once life-supporting, but evolved away from that state. If this second scenario is true, then we would expect to find evidence of ancient and extinct past life on Mars. We would also expect, since God had a hand in this scenario, that any planet whose conditions were such as to support highly complex and conscious life would eventually do so. We might stumble on such a world in a primitive age prior to the evolution of complex forms, but if we could follow the planet for a few billion years and its geophysical evolution continued to be supportive, we would expect conscious life to evolve.

In the last scenario we would expect something very different again. We would expect either that a world is dead, having no present or past life if the present environment is not life supporting, or the world has life and both the physical conditions and that life always evolves to consciousness. On every world where life is to be found, consciousness follows eventually. Why? Because God “knows the end from the beginning”. Why would he initiate life on a world (for example Mars) that was destined to lose the capacity to support it? If God starts life on a world, he would know that world will evolve geophysically in parallel with biological evolution and eventually come to support complex (and conscious) life. This is not to say that every living world has at this time evolved complex life, but under this scenario, it will.

Even given the second or third scenarios above, there is no guarantee, indeed it remains highly unlikely, that we will ever be able to detect such life across light years of space. There are too many variables, and at least one of them, is not even on the minds of astronomers and astrobiologists. Why, if life is started where it has the potential to become conscious, have we not yet found evidence of it? There are three broad possibilities.

1. Life on the remote world has not reached an electronic stage or is not industrialized in a way that leaves detectable pollutant traces in its atmosphere.
2. Life on the remote world has reached an advanced and electronic stage but we cannot detect it because: (a) it is far away and the signals haven’t reached us yet, or (b) the signals, having reached us are just too weak to distinguish from any background.
3. Life on the remote world has reached an advanced stage, but it is not and will never become electronic.

The last is a distinction to which scientists and philosophers alike seem oblivious. They assume that “advanced life” is necessarily concomitant with industrialization and electronic signalling; a very provincial assumption. From God’s viewpoint an “advanced civilization” would be one in which all or most people freely choose to attempt to do his will, to love others and be generally successful in the attempt. It would be a world that has (among other things) long relegated such phenomena as war, bigotry, and crime to its distant past. There is nothing about this sort of advancement that entails electronics. I discuss this at some length in my first book, but the bottom line is that there is nothing about Earth’s particular historical path that suggests anything similar is implied by the notion of “advanced civilization” on other worlds.

I hope I am not being unfair to Dr. Carroll. He has contemporaries in the scientific community who become apoplectic at the mention of God. Carroll does not become apoplectic. He tries to make room for such a possibility while rejecting it as “highly unlikely”. He is brave enough, and does manage, to put his finger on the crux of the matter. If libertarian free will is real, then physics must be incomplete. By itself this wouldn’t prove that God exists, but it would, in Bayesian terms, set his prior-probability very high. Rather than accepting that libertarian free will is real, the evidence being our subjective experience of it, his cognitive bias leads him to reject it, essentially denying what must be his own experience. He is far from alone in this. To me there is considerable irony in scientists and philosophers (ordinary folks mostly don’t think about it) freely denying their freedom.

Carroll has a very nice website and blog. I have tried on occasion to engage him as concerns these matters, but he has been disinclined to respond. His cognitive bias is, after all, very strong. If there is a discussion of his book on his blog I will let him know about this critique in a comment. I don’t imagine I will hear from him, but I am open to being surprised.