329 | Steven Pinker on Rationality and Common Knowledge
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Release Date: 09/22/2025
352 | Bing Brunton on Connecting the Connectome to the Body
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
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 step to understanding how brains work, but a long way from the final answer. A big next step is understanding how neuronal circuits connect to and guide bodily behavior. Very recent work on mapping the fruit-fly connectome has brought us closer to that goal. I talk with neuroscientist Bing Brunton about the connectome, how we can study it to understand bodily motion in flies and other creatures, and where it's all taking us. Chubbies is...
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351 | Peter Singer on Maximizing Good for All Sentient Creatures
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
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 thinker of utilitarianism, and helped inspire the effective altruism movement. In this podcast episode, we try our best to talk about all of those things -- working from metaethical questions of consequentialism vs. other approaches, to specific flavors of utilitarianism, the practical demands that ethics places on people, the rights of animals, and the decisions we make at the end of our lives. Blog post with transcript: ...
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350 | J. Eric Oliver on the Self and How to Know It
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
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 "self" is. That's not too surprising, as selves are very complicated and we are burdened by all sorts of biases. Today's guest is J. Eric Oliver, who has been teaching a popular course at the University of Chicago called "." His academic specialty is political science, but he brings together ideas from psychology, neuroscience, and a broad swath of the humanities. His view is summarized in his recent book, . Take your personal data back...
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AMA | April 2026
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Welcome to the April 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by (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! Henson Shaving is offering 100 blades free with the purchase of a razor — just head to and or use code MINDSCAPE at checkout. Blog post with...
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349 | Daniel Harlow on What Quantum Gravity Teaches Us About Quantum Mechanics
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
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 general relativity with the framework of quantum mechanics. But a number of intriguing ideas have arisen along the way, including black hole radiation, the wave function of the universe, the AdS/CFT correspondence, and the role of quantum information theory. Theoretical physicist Daniel Harlow has made significant contributions to our understanding of information loss in black holes; in this conversation we turn those insights onto quantum...
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348 | Jessica Riskin on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Life as Creative Agency
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
"Lamarkism" is a term often attached to a seemingly discredited idea in evolutionary biology: that one organism could acquire characteristics (e.g., becoming stronger through exercise) that would then be inherited by its descendants. This is a different story than the one ultimately told by the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology, according to which inheritance passes through our genome (which doesn't know that we've been working out). In her book , historian of science Jessica Riskin argues that this picture is too simple, and that Lamarck made contributions we should still...
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347 | Andrew Guthrie Ferguson on How Your Data Will Be Used Against You
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
In the 18th century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham suggested the as a model of a prison where inmates could be constantly observed by just a single prison guard. Although his original idea was never built, the word has come to indicate any system of social control through constant surveillance. Nowadays, we are close to creating such a system, not for prisons, but for our everyday lives. The data about our whereabouts and doings is collected by our smart devices, and available for search by the authorities. I talk with law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson about the new reality,...
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346 | Erica Cartmill on How Human and Animal Minds Think and Play
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Intelligence is a many splendored thing, especially when it comes to comparisons between species. Chimpanzees are better than humans at some numerical tasks, but less good at understanding what numbers actually mean. One window on the ways that species differ is how they play amongst themselves. I talk with anthropologist and cognitive scientist Erica Cartmill about modes of play and other social behaviors among various species, and what they reveal about the ways we all think. Upgrade your denim game with Rag & Bone! Get 20% off sitewide with code MINDSCAPE at ....
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AMA | March 2026
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Welcome to the March 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by (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! Get twenty percent off your first purchase at when using the code MINDSCAPE at checkout! #sponsored Blog post with questions and...
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345 | Adam Elga on Being Rational in a Very Large Universe
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Behaving rationally involves facing up to conditions of uncertainty; we never navigate the world with perfect confidence. Sometimes we are uncertain about the way the world is, but we can also be uncertain about our place within the world. This kind of situation arises in cosmology (where the relevant world can extend very far in space or time), and also in quantum mechanics (where new worlds might be created at any measurement), but also when we are simply unsure about the future history of humanity or whether we live in a computer simulation. I talk with philosopher Adam Elga about how...
info_outlineGetting 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 are, but also that everyone else knows the rules, and that they know that we know the rules, and so on. Philosophers and game theorists refer to this as common knowledge. In Steven Pinker's new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..., he explores how common knowledge (or its absence) explains money, power, and a wide variety of subtextual human interactions.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/09/22/329-steven-pinker-on-rationality-and-common-knowledge/
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Steven Pinker received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University. He is currently the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He is the author of several best-selling books and recipient of several honorary doctoral degrees. Among his awards are Humanist of the Year (two different organizations) and the William James Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Psychological Science.