The Big Picture

If you guys are really us, what number are we thinking of?

This is Sean Carroll's personal philosophy of “Poetic Naturalism”. In short, there is no supernatural world and meaning is what we conscious creatures make.

Sean Carroll is a fantastic science communicator and the majority of the book is spent explaining how we can make safe scientific assumptions about reality using observation and Bayesian inference. Larger systems emerge from smaller systems. Quantum fluctuations create atomic structure, which accumulate to form chemistry, which then transitions to biology and ultimately consciousness. At each level we can have different ways of talking and different modes of making meaning. Just as we don't need to invoke the physical properties of hydrogen and oxygen atoms to deal with the fluid dynamics of water, we don't need to talk about neurotransmitters and brain activity when talking about free will and love. It's pretty easy to go along for his Poetic Naturalism ride during the naturalism leg of the journey.

Where the ride starts to get a little bumpy is when it veers into the “poetics” portion of the trip. Here, Carroll gets a little too wishy-washy for my taste. Everything is constructed! What ought to be done is purely subjective! What is moral value? Whatever we decide it is! This leaves the poetic naturalist with almost no intellectual tools to grapple with real-world, difficult issues. People disagree constantly, and this book leaves me thinking a poetic naturalist is more comfortable giving the useless platitude “agree to disagree” than actually doing the hard work of constructing meaning.

It's a great book worth reading, but Dr. Carroll needs to be just as rigorous with his poems as he is with his science.