Carroll's Considerations

Sean Carroll is one wise theoretical physicist and "poetic naturalist." His Ten Commandments Considerations, resisting the unfortunate human impulse to tell one another what to do, deferring instead to one another's mental freedom:

• Life Isn’t Forever.
• Desire Is Built Into Life.
• What Matters Is What Matters To People.
• We Can Always Do Better.
• It Pays to Listen.
• There Is No Natural Way to Be.
• It Takes All Kinds.
• The Universe Is in Our Hands.
• We Can Do Better Than Happiness.
• Reality Guides Us.

Naturalists accept that life is going to come to an end — this life is not a dress rehearsal for something greater, it’s the only performance we get to give. The average person can expect a lifespan of about three billion heartbeats. That’s a goodly number, but far from limitless. We should make the most of each of our heartbeats.

The finitude of life doesn’t imply that it’s meaningless, any more than obeying the laws of physics implies that we can’t find purpose and joy within the natural world. The absence of a God to tell us why we’re here and hand down rules about what is and is not okay doesn’t leave us adrift — it puts the responsibility for constructing meaningful lives back where it always was, in our own hands.

The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

Big Picture at Google (video)