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

Ever wanted to know how music affects your brain, what quantum mechanics really is, or how black holes work? Do you wonder why you get emotional each time you see a certain movie, or how on earth video games are designed? Then you’ve come to the right place. Each week, Sean Carroll will host conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. From neuroscientists and engineers to authors and television producers, Sean and his guests talk about the biggest ideas in science, philosophy, culture and much more.

Copyright: © Sean Carroll 2026

Latest Episodes:

185 | Arvid Ågren on the Gene's-Eye View of Evolution Feb 21, 2022

Show notes

One of the brilliant achievements of Darwin's theory of natural selection was to help explain apparently "purposeful" or "designed" aspects of biology in a purely mechanistic theory of unguided evolution. Features are good if they help organisms survive. But should we put organisms at the center of our attention, or the genetic information that governs those features? Arvid Ågren helps us understand the attraction of the "selfish gene" view of evolution, as well as its shortcomings. This biological excursion has deep connections to philosophical issues of levels and emergence.

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Arvid Ågren received his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Toronto. He is currently a Wenner-Gren Fellow at the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University. Previously he worked at Cornell and Harvard. His recent book is The Gene's-Eye View of Evolution.

184 | Gary Marcus on Artificial Intelligence and Common Sense Feb 14, 2022

Show notes

Artificial intelligence is everywhere around us. Deep-learning algorithms are used to classify images, suggest songs to us, and even to drive cars. But the quest to build truly "human" artificial intelligence is still coming up short. Gary Marcus argues that this is not an accident: the features that make neural networks so powerful also prevent them from developing a robust common-sense view of the world. He advocates combining these techniques with a more symbolic approach to constructing AI algorithms.

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Gary Marcus received his Ph.D. in cognitive science from MIT. He is founder and CEO of Robust.AI, and was formerly a professor of psychology at NYU as well as founder of Geometric Intelligence. Among his books are Rebooting AI: Building Machines We Can Trust (with Ernest Davis).

AMA | February 2022 Feb 10, 2022

Show notes

Welcome to the February 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable size — 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!

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183 | Michael Dine on Supersymmetry, Anthropics, and the Future of Particle Physics Feb 07, 2022

Show notes

Modern particle physics is a victim of its own success. We have extremely good theories — so good that it's hard to know exactly how to move beyond them, since they agree with all the experiments. Yet, there are strong indications from theoretical considerations and cosmological data that we need to do better. But the leading contenders, especially supersymmetry, haven't yet shown up in our experiments, leading some to wonder whether anthropic selection is a better answer. Michael Dine gives us an expert's survey of the current situation, with pointers to what might come next.

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Michael Dine received his Ph.D. in physics from Yale University. He is Distinguished Professor of Physics at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz. Among his awards are fellowships from the Sloan Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, American Physical Society, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Sakurai Prize for theoretical particle physics. His new book is This Way to the Universe: A Theoretical Physicist's Journey to the Edge of Reality.

182 | Sally Haslanger on Social Construction and Critical Theory Jan 31, 2022

Show notes

Reality is just out there — but how we perceive reality and talk about it depends on choices we human beings make. We decide (consciously or not) to conceptualize the world in certain ways, whether it's because those ways provide elegant predictive descriptions or because they serve a more subtle political purpose. To get at the true nature of reality, therefore, it's important to think about which aspects of it are socially constructed, and why. I talk with Sally Haslanger about these issues, and the techniques we can use to understand the world and make it a better place.

Update (22 March): Our discussion here could have (and did) leave some listeners with the wrong impression of how Sally and I feel about trans rights -- we are entirely for them! My fault for not making things more clear during the conversation. So I have added a brief note during the podcast intro to make our position perfectly explicit. Thanks to everyone who commented.

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Sally Haslanger received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the Ford Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among her awards are the Carus Lectureship, the Distinguished Woman Philosopher award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of several books, including Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique.

181 | Peter Dodds on Quantifying the Shape of Stories Jan 24, 2022

Show notes

A good story takes you on an emotional journey, with ups and downs along the way. Thanks to science, we can quantify that. Peter Dodds works on understanding the structure of stories and other strings of words (including Twitter) by analyzing the valence of individual words, then studying how they are strung together in different kinds of stories. Understanding these structures offers powerful insight into how people communicate and how to reach them. As Peter says, "Never bring statistics to a story fight."

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Peter Dodds received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently a professor of computer science at the University of Vermont and Director of the Vermont Complex Systems Center. He has won multiple teaching awards, and was elected a Fellow of the Network Science Society.

180 | Camilla Pang on Instructions for Being Human Jan 17, 2022

Show notes

Being a human is tricky. There are any number of unwritten rules and social cues that we have to learn as we go, but that we ultimately learn to take for granted. Camilla Pang, who was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at age eight, had a harder time than most, as she didn't easily perceive the rules of etiquette and relationships that we need to deal with each other. But she ultimately figured them out, with the help of analogies and examples from different fields of science. We talk about these rules, and how science can help us think about them.

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Camilla Pang received her Ph.D. in computational biology from University College London. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in pharmaceuticals and a volunteer cancer researcher at the Francis Crick Institute. She was awarded the Royal Society Prize for Science Books in 2020 for her book Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Relationships (US title: An Outsider's Guide to Humans: What Science Taught Me about What We Do and Who We Are).

179 | David Reich on Genetics and Ancient Humanity Jan 10, 2022

Show notes

Human beings like to divide themselves into groups, and then cooperate, socialize, and reproduce with members of their own group. But they're not very absolutist about it; groups tend to gradually (or suddenly) intermingle, as people explore, intermarry, or conquer each other. David Reich has pioneered the use of genetic data in uncovering the history of ancient humanity: what groups existed where and when, and how they interacted. The result is a picture of churning populations in constant flux, including "ghost populations" that no longer exist today.

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David Reich received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Oxford. He is currently a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. Among his awards are the Dan David Prize, the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology, the Wiley Prize, the Darwin-Wallace Medal, and the Massry Prize. He is the author of Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.

178 | Jody Azzouni on What Is and Isn't Real Jan 03, 2022

Show notes

Are numbers real? What does that even mean? You can't kick a number. But you can talk about numbers in useful ways, and we use numbers to talk about the real world. There's surely a kind of reality there. On the other hand, Luke Skywalker isn't a real person, but we talk about him all the time. Maybe we can talk about unreal things in useful ways. Jody Azzouni is one of the leading contemporary advocates of nominalism, the view that abstract objects are not "things," they are merely labels we use in talking about things. A deeply philosophical issue, but one that has implications for how we think about physics and the laws of nature.

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Jody Azzouni received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the City University of New York. He is currently a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. In addition to his philosophical work, he is an active writer of fiction and poetry.

Holiday Message 2021 | On Disciplines & Cocktails Dec 20, 2021

Show notes

As each December comes to a close, we wrap up another year of podcasts with the Mindscape Holiday Message. Nothing too profound, just some thoughts that wouldn't fit easily into a regular podcast. This year we're talking about academic disciplines and cocktails. What do they have in common, you may ask? Listen and find out!

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Mindscape will be dark on Monday December 27, and will resume regular programming on Monday January 3. Here are the two books I mentioned in the podcast, and the one essay:

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