Stephen Hawking's Collaborator Challenges Sean Carroll on Reductionism

In a recent episode of the podcast 'Theories of Everything', cosmologist George Ellis, co-author with Stephen Hawking, took on physicist Sean Carroll over the limits of reductionism. Ellis argued that top-down causation is real and essential to understanding complex systems, from biology to society, and that many scientists overlook it due to cultural bias. The conversation delved into whether physics alone can explain consciousness and the arrow of time, with Ellis maintaining that emergent properties require explanations beyond particle physics.