Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas8 Juni 2020

100 | Solo | Life and Its Meaning

A podcast only hits the century mark once! And for Mindscape, this is it. There have been holiday messages and bonus episodes and the like. But this is the 100th officially-numbered episode. To celebrate, I decided to treat myself to a solo episode in which I reflect, somewhat non-systematically, on the age-old question of the meaning of life. I end up spending a lot (most?) of the time talking about the meaning of "life," i.e. what it means to be a living organism in a naturalistic universe. But then I go on to muse about the construction of human meaning in a world where values are not imposed on us or objectively grounded in physical facts.

I think life does have meaning, and it's important to understand what forms it might take. I settle largely on the idea that humans can conceive of different possible futures, assign value to them, and work against the natural order of things to create something that otherwise would not have been. This is far from the final word, even in my own mind; it's an invitation to think and converse in a reasonable way about some of the biggest questions there are. Just like the podcast in general.

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Here are some modern works offering other perspectives on the meaning of life:

Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World
Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why it Matters
Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction
Julian Baggini, What's It All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life
Thaddeus Metz, "The Meaning of Life" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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Avsnitt(427)

348 | Jessica Riskin on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Life as Creative Agency

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23 Mars 1h 15min

347 | Andrew Guthrie Ferguson on How Your Data Will Be Used Against You

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16 Mars 1h 8min

346 | Erica Cartmill on How Human and Animal Minds Think and Play

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9 Mars 1h 28min

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 asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patre...

2 Mars 3h 53min

345 | Adam Elga on Being Rational in a Very Large Universe

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23 Feb 1h 34min

344 | Adam Gurri on Liberal Democracy and How to Fight For It

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16 Feb 1h 21min

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 classical logical reasoning. But an even bigger part invol...

9 Feb 1h 19min

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 asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...

2 Feb 3h 10min