Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
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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 convers...
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430 епизода
356 | Andrea Wulf on Enlightenment, Nature, Romanticism, and Modernity
All ideas have a history, no matter how inevitable and well-entrenched they may seem to us today. The later Enlightenment was a heady time when people...
AMA | June 2026
Welcome to the June 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking...
355 | Solo: Looking Quantum Mechanics in the Eyeball
One of the major obstacles to understanding quantum mechanics is the difficulty we have in simply accepting what the theory itself is telling us. The...
354 | Christian List on Free Will and Levels of Reality
Did I have any freedom in choosing this particular podcast guest? At the level of particles, fields, and the fundamental laws of physics; no. At the l...
353 | Alvin Roth on the Economics of Morally Contested Markets
Economic markets are efficient ways of deciding fair prices, at least in ideal circumstances of perfect competition, information, and choice. But ther...
AMA | May 2026
Welcome to the May 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking...
352 | Bing Brunton on Connecting the Connectome to the Body
The connectome is the wiring diagram of a brain, a big matrix that tells us what neurons talk to what other neurons. Understanding it is an important...
351 | Peter Singer on Maximizing Good for All Sentient Creatures
Peter Singer has been an influential philosopher for a number of decades. He was a significant early voice in animal rights, has been a leading thinke...
350 | J. Eric Oliver on the Self and How to Know It
We are more familiar with ourselves than with anything else in the universe, but we generally don't come very close to really understanding what our "...
AMA | April 2026
Welcome to the April 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones askin...
349 | Daniel Harlow on What Quantum Gravity Teaches Us About Quantum Mechanics
There is something special about gravity. After decades of effort, there is still no convergence on the right way to reconcile Einstein's theory of ge...
348 | Jessica Riskin on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Life as Creative Agency
"Lamarkism" is a term often attached to a seemingly discredited idea in evolutionary biology: that one organism could acquire characteristics (e.g., b...
347 | Andrew Guthrie Ferguson on How Your Data Will Be Used Against You
In the 18th century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham suggested the Panopticon as a model of a prison where inmates could be constantly observed by just a s...
346 | Erica Cartmill on How Human and Animal Minds Think and Play
Intelligence is a many splendored thing, especially when it comes to comparisons between species. Chimpanzees are better than humans at some numerical...
AMA | March 2026
Welcome to the March 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones askin...
345 | Adam Elga on Being Rational in a Very Large Universe
Behaving rationally involves facing up to conditions of uncertainty; we never navigate the world with perfect confidence. Sometimes we are uncertain a...
344 | Adam Gurri on Liberal Democracy and How to Fight For It
It's possible to look at the course of history over the past few centuries and discern a movement toward increasing democracy, freedom, and individual...
343 | Tom Griffiths on The Laws of Thought
For all that human beings spend a lot of their time thinking, it's far from obvious what that process actually entails. Part of it amounts to classica...
AMA | Feb 2026
Welcome to the February 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones as...
342 | Rachell Powell on Evolutionary Convergence, Morality, and Mind
Evolution with natural selection involves an intricate mix of the random and the driven. Mutations are essentially random, while selection pressures w...
341 | Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold," wrote W.B. Yeats. I don't know about the centre, but the tendency of things to fall apart is pretty unive...
340 | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on What Matters and Why It Matters
At any given moment, an uncountable number of events are happening, but only some of them matter to us. What does it mean for something to matter, and...
339 | Ned Block on Whether Consciousness Requires Biology
It's become increasingly clear that the Turing Test -- determining whether human interlocutors can tell whether a conversation is being carried out by...
Holiday Message 2025 | The Romance of the University
Time for the holiday message! Rounding off the year with a brief and casual reflection on some issue that doesn't quite rise to the level of a full so...
AMA | December 2025
Welcome to the December 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones as...
338 | Ryan Patterson on the Physics of Neutrinos
The story goes that Wolfgang Pauli, who first proposed the existence of neutrinos, was embarrassed to have done so, as it was considered uncouth to hy...
337 | Kevin Zollman on Game Theory, Signals, and Meaning
Game theory is a way of quantitatively describing what happens any time one thing interacts with another thing, when both things have goals and potent...
336 | Anil Ananthaswamy on the Mathematics of Neural Nets and AI
Machine learning using neural networks has led to a remarkable leap forward in artificial intelligence, and the technological and social ramifications...
AMA | November 2025
Welcome to the November 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones as...
335 | Andrew Jaffe on Models, Probability, and the Universe
Science has an incredibly impressive track record of uncovering nonintuitive ideas about the universe that turn out to be surprisingly accurate. It ca...
334 | Daniel Whiteson on the Physics of and by Aliens
The universe as revealed by physics is objective: it's out there, existing and behaving in ways that are completely independent of human thought. But...
333 | Gordon Pennycook on Unthinkingness, Conspiracies, and What to Do About Them
Why are people wrong all the time, anyway? Is it because we human beings are too good at being irrational, using our biases and motivated reasoning to...
332 | Dmitri Tymoczko on the Mathematics Behind Music
Music is math that you can dance to. The fact that certain notes sound good when played together, or in succession, is related to the mathematical pro...
AMA | October 2025
Welcome to the October 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones ask...
331 | Solo: Fine-Tuning, God, and the Multiverse
Certain features of our universe seem unnatural to us. These include "constants of nature" such as the cosmological constant and the mass of the Higgs...
330 | Petter Törnberg on the Dynamics of (Mis)Information
A characteristic of complex systems is that individual components combine to exhibit large-scale emergent behavior even when the components were not s...
329 | Steven Pinker on Rationality and Common Knowledge
Getting along in society requires that we mostly adhere to certainly shared norms and customs. Often it's not enough that we all know what the rules a...
328 | Mary Roach on Replacing Parts of Our Bodies
Like any machine, bodies occasionally break down, and it's natural to go in search of a replacement part. Ancient societies featured simple prosthetic...
AMA | September 2025
Welcome to the September 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones a...
327 | Cass Sunstein on Liberalism
"Liberalism," divorced from its particular connotations in this or that modern political context, refers broadly to a philosophy of individual rights,...