Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

The worry about debates over free will is that they degenerate into semantics -- what do you mean by "free will," really? But there are important substantive issues that shouldn't be ignored. Do people deserve blame for doing wrong things? Can we make choices that create meaning for our lives? Philosopher Gregg Caruso denies the reality of free will, but is in favor of making good choices, as he discusses in his new book How to Live Well Without Free Will.

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Gregg Caruso received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the City University of New York. He is currently Professor of Applied Ethics and Management and Director of the Patrick J. Waide Center for Applied Ethics at Fairfield University, and Scientific Advisor, Center for Justice and Mental Well-Being, Nova Institute for Health. Among his awards are the Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Philosophical Association.

• Web site
• Fairfield web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Amazon author page
• PhilPeople profile

In all sorts of ways, the modern world makes it difficult to nurture our individual humanity and connect with the humanity of others. The disciplines that try to do so are, naturally enough, the humanities. Poet Elizabeth Alexander's new book, Signals Across Vast Distances, grapples with the question of how literature and other humanistic studies can help us build empathy and become better people, and why that task is crucial to a flourishing democratic society.

Blog post with transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/09/21/368-elizabeth-alexander-on-why-democracy-needs-imagination/

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Elizabeth Alexander received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to her work as a poet and writer, she is currently the President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She composed and read a poem for Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009. Among her honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Magazine Award, and several Pushcart Prizes for poetry.

• Web site
• Poetry Foundation page
• Amazon author page
• Wikipedia

Welcome to the September 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

Blog post with show notes and transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/09/14/ama-september-2026/

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The course of history is affected by many things, including the political and social situations of large groups of people, their biological and physical abilities, and their geographical and environmental contexts. Sometimes, it would seem, history -- or corporations, or religions, or sports teams -- can be affected by the actions of just a few influential persons. In his new book, Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings, Jared Diamond asks what effect leaders can have, and what it is that makes them successful (or not).

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Blog post with transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/09/07/367-jared-diamond-on-the-course-of-history-and-the-role-of-leaders/

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Jared Diamond received a Ph.D. in physiology from the University of Cambridge. He is currently a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his awards are the U.S. National Medal of Science, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Pulitzer Prize. His international bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel has sold over seven million copies.

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• UCLA web page
• Amazon author page
• Wikipedia

Everyone lives through time, but we continue to struggle to fully understand it. We remain unsure whether time is fundamental or emergent, why it has an arrow pointing from past to future, and how that arrow connects to our experience of time's passage. Jim Al-Khalili's new book is On Time: The Physics that Makes the Universe Tick. We discuss what time is at the most basic level, and how it connects to open questions in biology, cosmology, and quantum mechanics.

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Jim Al-Khalili received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Surrey. He is currently Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Physics at Surrey. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and has served as past president of the British Science Association. He has been awarded the Michael Faraday Prize by the Royal Society, and has been appointed an appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

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• University of Surrey web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Amazon author page
• Wikipedia
• YouTube

Black holes, as Stephen Hawking discovered, do grow old: they emit radiation, lose mass, and eventually evaporate away. But our fascination with black holes never grows old. This is especially true today, as we are seeing a flood of new data and intriguing theoretical ideas, which both tests the limits of Einstein's general relativity and teach us new things about the astrophysical universe. At the Center of Gravity at the University of Copenhagen, they are currently celebrating Black Hole Week, which provides an excellent opportunity to talk with Center director Vitor Cardoso about what we've been learning about these singular cosmic objects.

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Blog post with transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/08/24/365-vitor-cardoso-on-why-black-holes-are-special/

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Vitor Cardoso received his Ph.D. in physics from the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal. He is currently a Villum Investigator and Director of the Center of Gravity at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and a Distinguished Professor at Técnico.

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• University of Copenhagen web page
• Simons Collaboration page
• Google Scholar publications

One of the paradoxes of science is that it seeks objectively true understanding of the world, but its methodology is driven by ignorance, failure, and uncertainty. Some phenomena we understand pretty well, but interesting research happens at the boundary of what we do and don't know. And there is no foolproof algorithm for moving in the right direction; we need to make conjectures and test them against the world. Biologist Stuart Firestein has been advocating for a better public understanding of the true methods of science, most recently in his new book It Could Be Otherwise: Science In the Age of Uncertainty.

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Blog post with transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/08/17/364-stuart-firestein-on-how-science-relies-on-ignorance-and-failure/

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Stuart Firestein received his Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently Professor of Neuroscience at in the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, and Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Sloan Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His research studies cellular mechanisms of signal transduction and olfaction. His previous books include Ignorance: How It Drives Science and Failure: Why Science Is So Successful.

• Columbia web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Amazon author page
• Wikipedia

Large Language Models display an uncanny ability to construct human-sounding speech, and can synthesize concepts in novel ways. Is this because they are truly thinking like human beings in some way, or have they found a way to be human-like without reproducing the internal mechanisms of human thought? Chandra Sripada argues that LLM cognition is more human-like than we suppose, and offers evidence from the ways that cognitive scientists study actual humans.

Blog post with transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/08/10/363-chandra-sripada-on-how-llms-and-humans-are-cognitive-cousins/

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Chandra Sripada received an M.D. from the University of Texas and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Rutgers University. He is currently a professor of philosophy and psychiatry at the University of Michigan, where he holds the Theophile Raphael Research Professorship and directs the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science. He writes Cognition, Decoded, a Substack newsletter about AI, cognitive science, and philosophy.

• Web site
• Google Scholar publications
• PhilPeople profile

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Welcome to the August 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

People who live in large cities produce more patents per person than those who live in small towns. They also walk faster down the street, and use less infrastructure per person. Indeed, the relationships between these quantities and city population obey power laws with apparently universal exponents, reminiscent of scaling laws is biological organisms? Luis Bettencourt argues that they can be explained in similar ways, using ideas from complex systems and network theory.

Blog post with transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/07/27/362-luis-bettencourt-on-the-universal-properties-of-self-organizing-cities/

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Luis Bettencourt received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Imperial College London. He is currently the Lorna Puttkammer Straus Professor Department of Ecology and Evolution & Data Sciences Institute, as well as Associate Faculty and Special Friend in the Department of Sociology, at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Introduction to Urban Science: Evidence and Theory of Cities as Complex Systems.

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• University of Chicago web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Wikipedia