Episode 049 - Craig Lent: physics and humanity

0:00 - Introduction 1:00 - The power of physicalism/reductionism: a tremendously powerful method 2:00 - Course on physicalism and Catholicism; Sean Carroll's least hysterical "poetic naturalism" 3:00 - The lack of evidence for "emergence" in the sense of "downward causation" 3:30 - Soft and hard emergence 10:15 - Materialism vs. physicalism and reductionism: philosophical materialism 13:00 - Are human beings exhausted by this account of reality? 14:00 - The break with the mechanical universe of 19th century physics underappreciated 15:00 - Laplace's demon 16:30 - Thermodynamics 17:30 - Future not contained in the present 19:00 - Einstein & hidden variables 20:00 - Bell inequality experiments 24:00 - Entanglement 26:00 - Human experience: both, as physical, but also as having choices 27:00 - Quantum physics on many body systems 28:00 - The hard problem of consciousness 29:00 - The explanatory gap 31:00 - The tendency to explain the brain as "just like" some recent piece of technology 33:00 - Complexity of neurons, the continuing relevance of physical laws amid the complexity 35:00 - Continuing relevance of quantum effects at the level of neurotransmitter molecules, etc. 36:00 - Quantum effects in weather and rock mechanics