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Edge
can be read in the form of a Web publication or chronologically in the
form of the emails sent bi-monthly (usually) to the third culture mail
list (see Edge Editions). The emails are posted
to the Edge Editions
page in an easy-print form at the same time they are mailed to the list
and linked from the home page. The features, posted on the home page
in Web Publication form are archived below.
By
Name
DOUGLAS ADAMS (1952 - 2001) "Lament for Douglas" by Richard Dawkins I believe it falls to me to say something about Douglas's love of science. He once asked my advice. He was contemplating going back to university to read science, I think specifically my own subject of Zoology. I advised against it. He already knew plenty of science. It rings through almost every line he wrote and through the best jokes he made. As a single example, think of the Infinite Improbability Drive. Douglas's ear for science was finely tuned. He thought like a scientist, but was much funnier. It is fair to say that he was a hero to scientists. And technologists, especially in the computer industry. JAPAN, INC. MEETS THE DIGERATI A Talk with Izumi Aizu ("The Bridge") The
Japanese companies or business societies often form delegations, or
study groups, to the U.S. or Europe. It's not so much about interaction
as trying to absorb what's going on there, take it back, and use what
we can from the experience. This tour has a very unique, strange setup.
Officially, for international consumption, it's the Keidenren Tour.
Domestically it's a quiet tour - they cannot present it as Keidenren.
PER BAK 1948–2002 A Rememberance By Lee Smolin  Per Bak died on October 16, 2002, at the age of 54. Per was one of the founders and most influential contributors to the study of complex systems. Per made many contributions to science, but the best known was a general theory of self-organization, which he called, "self-organized criticality". CROSSING CULTURES A Talk With Mary Catherine Bateson People learn from stories in a different way from the way they learn from generalities. When I'm writing I often start out with abstractions and academic jargon, and purge it. The red pencil goes through page after page, while I try to make sure that the stories and examples remain to carry the kernel of the ideas, and in the process the ideas become more nuanced, less cut and dried. Sometimes reviewers seem to want the abstractions back, but I figure that if they were able to recognize what's being said, it didn't have to be spelled out or dressed up in pretentious technical language. DESIGN FOR A LIFE A Talk With Patrick Bateson Some people see the process of growth and development as very simple. They seem to think it is something that is read out of the genes, and that when the human genome project is completed we shall have the book of life, including an understanding of all human behavior. Others take the view that the developmental process is so immensely complicated that we shall never understand it properly. I take the view that although on the surface developmental processes may look complicated, the underlying rules are analogous to those that underlie a game like chess. The rules of chess are simple, but the games that can be generated by those rules are enormously complex. What we have to do as scientists is try to understand rules that produce a design for a life. THE END OF TIME A Talk with Julian Barbour The basic idea of my theory is that there isn't time as such. There is no invisible river of time that's flowing. But there are things that I would say that you could call an instant of time; or better, a now. As we live we seem to move through a succession of instants of time, nows, and the question is, what are they? They are where everything in the universe is at this moment, now. THE LAST DIGERATI DINNER— 2001 These days, it's open season on the Web. Where that will take us now is anybody's guess, but it won't be back to headier times, says John Brockman, a New York literary agent who became known in Silicon Valley over the past several years for throwing an annual "Billionaires Dinner".....He wants to change the name of the event. "This year," he says. "It's the 'Joy of the Ordinary Income Dinner.' .....Bon appetit and pass the Rolaids." — Kara Swisher, The Wall Street Journal THE ANNUAL "BILLIONAIRES' DIGERATI DINNER - 2000 "When the host, New York literary agent John Brockman, added three zeros to the dinner last year, there was more than a bit of giggly discomfort among the attendees.The general agreement was that the provocative Mr. Brockman, who also runs a discussion Web site called Edge.org, was poking fun more than offering a description." — Kara Swisher, The Wall Street Journal THE ANNUAL "BILLIONAIRES' DIGERATI DINNER" - 1999 The annual "Billionaires' Dinner" (upgraded from last year's "Millionaires' Dinner") was held on Thursday, February 18th at Cibo in Monterey. Among those emerging from the Gulfstream jets were Steve Case, Nathan Myhrvold, Jeff Bezos, Steve Riggio, Danny Hillis, Bran Ferren, Douglas Adams, Terry Gilliam, Kai Krause, and Joichi Ito. Fortunately, famed industry pioneer and gossip David Bunnell was there taking notes (with a pen, by the way). THE CLOCK OF THE LONG NOW A Talk with Stewart Brand Three years we've been working on building a ten-thousand-year clock and as of this year, '98, we're building a prototype eight feet tall, probably about the size of two refrigerators back to back, and we've got an invitation to debut it at the World Economic Forum in Davos next January, '99 - perfect place to get world leaders and corporate leaders and so on thinking in ten thousand year terms. HE CONFUSES 1 AND 2 THE 200 I.Q. Mr. Byars By Mr. Brockman 1. He
confuses 1 and 2 the 200 IQ. THE NEW HUMANISTS By John Brockman Something radically new is in the air: new ways of understanding physical systems, new ways of thinking about thinking that call into question many of our basic assumptions. A realistic biology of the mind, advances in physics, electricity, genetics, neurobiology, engineering, the chemistry of materials—all are challenging basic assumptions of who and what we are, of what it means to be human. The arts and the sciences are again joining together as one culture, the third culture. Those involved in this effort—scientists, science-based humanities scholars, writers—are at the center of today's intellectual action....They are the new humanists. THE DEEP QUESTION A Talk with Rodney Brooks The thing that puzzles me is that we've got all these biological metaphors that we're playing around with - artificial immunology systems, building robots that appear lifelike - but none of them come close to real biological systems in robustness and in performance. They look a little like it, but they're not really like biological systems. What I'm worrying about is that perhaps in looking at biological systems we're missing something that's always in there. You might be tempted to call it an essence of life, but I'm not talking about anything outside of biology or chemistry. BEYOND
COMPUTATION
A Talk with Rodney Brooks
Maybe
there's something beyond computation in the sense that we don't understand
and we can't describe what's going on inside living systems using
computation only. When we build computational models of living systems—such
as a self-evolving system or an artificial immunology system—they're
not as robust or rich as real living systems. Maybe we're missing
something, but what could that something be?COOL PEOPLE IN THE HOT DESERT A Conference Designed and Organized by Huburt Burda In June 1999, the German media entrepreneur and New Media visonary, Hubert Burda initiated the "Center for Innovative Communication" at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel. The Center's mandate was to enable and enhance a European-Israeli as well as an international New Media and High Tech, dialogue and exchange. HUBERT BURDA — GERMANY'S AGENT OF CHANGE By John Brockman
Burda has the discipline of Germany but he also has certain qualities that Powerful Germany may not have respected in the past. He is stirring the pot, bringing people together, searching for new ideas, making things happen. When he meets talented people he brings them into his network, combines them into his mix. This is his discipline. This is his power. In addition to new people, he attracts new ideas, brings fruitful chaos to a world of certainty, shakes things up, and makes a mess out of the old order, the old way of thinking. Science (and the technology that follows) does not have to be beautiful or pure. Things do not need to be symmetrical or deducible from first principles. That esthetic, a great motivating force in science since Plato, is over. The sciences of complexity, which are the hallmark of the third culture, can be very messy. Out of chaos comes creativity. Hubert Burda is Germany's agent of change. COMPETING FOR CONSCIOUSNESS: HOW THE SUBCONSCIOUS THOUGHTS COOK ON THE BACKBURNER A Talk with William Calvin Consciousness
is the tip of the iceberg, in the sense that many other things are
going on in the brain at the same time, hidden from view. There are
subconscious trains of thought that vie for attention. ENGINEERING FORMALISM AND ARTISTRY: THE YIN AND YANG OF MULTIMEDIA A Talk with Luyen Chou ("The Mandarin") What we've been struggling with as designers is, what makes education and scholarship really fun? What we keep coming back to is that real scholarship is like mystery work. When you're a scholar, what you're doing is, you're like an archeologist, you're piecing together clues - constituent clues - and you're trying to create a picture that makes sense. You're starting with constituent pieces and you're trying to construct a story. NATURAL BORN CYBORGS? By Andy Clark We cannot see ourselves aright until we see ourselves as nature's very own cyborgs: cognitive hybrids who repeatedly occupy regions of design space radically different from those of our biological forbears. The hard task, of course, is now to transform all this from (mere) impressionistic sketch into a balanced scientific account of the extended mind. GETTING HUMAN
NATURE RIGHT Certainly,
human nature is fixed. It's universal and unchanging — common
to every baby that's born, down through the history of our species.
But human behavior — which is generated by that nature —
is endlessly variable and diverse. After all, fixed rules can give
rise to an inexhaustible range of outcomes. Natural selection equipped
us with the fixed rules — the rules that constitute our human
nature. And it designed those rules to generate behavior that's
sensitive to the environment. So, the answer to 'genetic determinism'
is simple. If you want to change behavior, just change the environment.
And, of course, to know which changes would be appropriate and effective,
you have to know those Darwinian rules. You need only to understand
human nature, not to change it.
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY One aspect
of our culture that is no longer open to question is that the most
signigicant developments in the sciences today (i.e. those that affect
the lives of everybody on the planet) are about, informed by, or implemented
through advances in software and computation. This Edge event is an
opportunity for people in various fields such as computer science,
cosmology, cognition, evolutionary biology, etc., to begin talking
to each other, to become aware of interesting and important work in
other fields. TIME LOOPS As
providing an insight into the nature of reality, and the nature
of the physical universe, this whole area is really fascinating.
I've thought a lot about it over the years, and I'm still undecided
as to whether nature could never permit such a crazy thing, or
whether yes, these entities, these wormholes, or some other type
of gravitational system do at least in principle exist, and in
principle one could visit the past, and we have to find some way
of avoiding the paradox. Maybe the way is to give up free will.
Maybe that's an illusion. Maybe we can't go back and change the
past freely. Richard Dawkins Your Reith lecture saddened me. I have deep sympathy for your aims, and admiration for your sincerity. But your hostility to science will not serve those aims; and your embracing of an ill-assorted jumble of mutually contradictory alternatives will lose you the respect that I think you deserve. I forget who it was who remarked: "Of course we must be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out." SCIENCE, DELUSION AND THE APPETITE FOR WONDER A Talk by Richard Dawkins You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues. IS SCIENCE KILLING THE SOUL Richard Dawkins & Steven Pinker On February 10, 1999, The Guardian-Dillons Debate at the Westminster Central Hall in London featured Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker in an event chaired by Tim Radford, Science Editor of The Guardian. Sold out weeks in advance, the evening attracted 2,300 attendees, with hundreds waiting outside. It was one of the toughest tickets in London in years. WHAT ARE NUMBERS, REALLY? A CEREBRAL BASIS FOR NUMBER SENSE A Talk With Stanislas Dehaene In a recent book as well as in a heated discussion at the EDGE forum, the mathematician Reuben Hersh has asked "What is mathematics, really?". This is an age-old issue that was already discussed in Ancient Greece and that puzzled Einstein twenty-three centuries later. I personally doubt that philosophical inquiry alone will ever provide a satisfactory answer (we don't even seem to be able to agree on what the question actually means!). THE COMPUTATIONAL PERSPECTIVE Daniel C. Dennett "There are going to be things that meet those conditions that are not interestingly computational by anybody's standards, and there are things that are going to fail to meet the standards, which nevertheless you see are significantly like the things that you want to consider computational. So how do you deal with that? By ignoring it, by ignoring the issue of definition, that's my suggestion. Same as with life! You don't want to argue about whether viruses are alive or not; in some ways they're alive, in some ways they're not. Some processes are obviously computational. Others are obviously not computational. Where does the computational perspective illuminate? Well, that depends on who's looking at the illumination." DENNETT'S DEAL Daniel C. Dennett For several years, I have been posing the following choice for my fellow philosophers: if Mephistopheles offered you the following two options, which would you choose? ....... THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURE Daniel C. Dennett Cultures
evolve. In one sense, this is a truism; in other senses, it asserts
one or another controversial, speculative, unconfirmed theory of culture.
Consider a cultural inventory of some culture at some time ? say 1900AD.
It should include all the languages, practices, ceremonies, edifices,
methods, tools, myths, music, art, and so forth, that compose that
culture. Over time, that inventory changes. Today, a hundred years
later, some items will have disappeared, some multiplied, some merged,
some changed, and many new elements will appear for the first time.
A verbatim record of this changing inventory through history would
not be science; it would be a data base. That is the truism: cultures
evolve over time. Everybody agrees about that. Now let's turn to the
controversial question: how are we to explain the patterns to be found
in that data base? Are there any good theories or models of cultural
evolution? IT'S A MUCH BIGGER THING THAN IT LOOKS A Talk with David Deutsch However useful the theory [of quantum computation] as such is today and however spectacular the practical applications may be in the distant future, the really important thing is the philosophical implications — epistemological and metaphysical — and the implications for theoretical physics itself. One of the most important implications from my point of view is one that we get before we even build the first qubit [quantum bit]. The very structure of the theory already forces upon us a view of physical reality as a multiverse. Whether you call this the multiverse or 'parallel universes' or 'parallel histories', or 'many histories', or 'many minds' — there are now half a dozen or more variants of this idea — what the theory of quantum computation does is force us to revise our explanatory theories of the world, to recognize that it is a much bigger thing than it looks. I'm trying to say this in a way that is independent of 'interpretation': it's a much bigger thing than it looks. HOW TO GET RICH A Talk by Jared Diamond .... I also derive the principle of intermediate fragmentation: you don't want excessive unity and you don't want excessive fragmentation; instead, you want your human society or business to be broken up into a number of groups which compete with each other but which also maintain relatively free communication with each other. WHY DID HUMAN HISTORY UNFOLD DIFFERENTLY ON DIFFERENT CONTINENTS FOR THE LAST 13,000 YEARS? A Talk with Jared Diamond I've set myself the modest task of trying to explain the broad pattern of human history, on all the continents, for the last 13,000 years. Why did history take such different evolutionary courses for peoples of different continents? This problem has fascinated me for a long time, but it's now ripe for a new synthesis because of recent advances in many fields seemingly remote from history, including molecular biology, plant and animal genetics and biogeography, archaeology, and linguistics. THE COACH A Talk with John Doerr In less
than five years today's "information highway" and Internet will appear
just as primitive as those medieval roads. Today's congested 45 Mbps
IP backbones must become autobahns, real superhighways. 14% of American
homes are online, typically at 14.4 dialup. We should enter the next
century with high band connects available to at least 10% of American
homes. IS LIFE ANALOG OR DIGITAL? Question for Edge discussion group from Freeman Dyson Silicon-based life and dust-based life are fiction and not fact. I use them as examples to illustrate an abstract argument. The examples are taken from science-fiction but the abstract argument is rigorous science. The abstract concepts are valid, whether or not the examples are real. The concepts are digital-life and analog-life. The concepts are based on a broad definition of life. For the purposes of this discussion, life is defined as a material system that can acquire, store, process, and use information to organize its activities. In this broad view, the essence of life is information, but information is not synonymous with life. To be alive, a system must not only hold information but process and use it. It is the active use of information, and not the passive storage, that constitutes life. PROGRESS IN RELIGION A Talk By Freeman Dyson I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. GOLDSMITH VS. ZIMMERMAN By George Dyson I count nine bits of chad on the carpet after all the ballots are run. The chad may just have fallen innocently out of the innards of the machine, it may have fallen out of any number of punch positions which had nothing to do with the city council race, or one or more bits might have fallen out of the Zimmerman-Goldsmith positions. Who knows? The seconds tick by, and I am acutely conscious at this instant that language and reality sometimes coincide: in the punched card universe a "bit" really is a bit, and Gregory Bateson's definition of information as "any difference that makes a difference" is true indeed, as we await the count of how many bits of difference between card and not-card have just passed through the Cardamation machine. DARWIN AMONG THE MACHINES; OR, THE ORIGINS OF [ARTIFICIAL] LIFE A Presentation by George Dyson In examining the prospects for artificial intelligence and artificial life Samuel Butler (1835-1902) faced the same mysteries that permeate these two subjects today. "I first asked myself whether life might not, after all, resolve itself into the complexity of arrangement of an inconceivably intricate mechanism," he recalled in 1880, retracing the development of his ideas. "If, then, men were not really alive after all, but were only machines of so complicated a make that it was less trouble to us to cut the difficulty and say that that kind of mechanism was 'being alive,' why should not machines ultimately become as complicated as we are, or at any rate complicated enough to be called living, and to be indeed as living as it was in the nature of anything at all to be? If it was only a case of their becoming more complicated, we were certainly doing our best to make them so. CODE George Dyson & John Brockman: A Dialogue CODE is an attempt to get at the big issues of the Microsoft-Justice Department situation. George has a biological approach and I have my own points to make. The original dialogue was recorded on May 10th while driving from Connecticut to New York in a rainstorm. No one from inside the Industry was in sight. George and I plan to continue the conversation. A BIG THEORY OF CULTURE A Talk With Brian Eno What is cultural value and how does that come about? Nearly all of the history of art history is about trying to identify the source of value in cultural objects. Color theories, and dimension theories, golden means, all those sort of ideas, assume that some objects are intrinsically more beautiful and meaningful than others. New cultural thinking isn't like that. It says that we confer value on things. We create the value in things. It's the act of conferring that makes things valuable. Now this is very important, because so many, in fact all fundamentalist ideas rest on the assumption that some things have intrinsic value and resonance and meaning. All pragmatists work from another assumption: no, it's us. It's us who make those meanings. CODE II Doyne Farmer & Charles Simonyi: A Reality Club Dialogue (Simonyi): Doyne Farmer and I read two different metaphors from the biological / evolutionary analogy that George Dyson has advanced. (Farmer) ...the implications and consequences of this monopoly are much more far reaching than Rockefeller's control of the oil industry. This is much more than a( monopoly - it is control of society's replication machinery for ideas. TRUTH, BEAUTY, AND GOODNESS: EDUCATION FO ALL HUMAN BEINGS A Talk With Howard Gardner One
mistake that many people make, including me, is to equate education
to school. Of course schools are only one of many institutions involved
in education. In the United States the media probably do as much education
and miseducation as the schools; there are messages on the street,
there are messages in the family, church, all those other institutions.
A graduate school of education ought to be concerned about all of
those institutions which transmit what the culture, or some part of
the culture, values sufficiently that it wants its young people to
have. Richard Dawkins makes the distinction between genes and memes...
THE SECOND COMING — A MANIFESTO By David Gelernter Everything is up for grabs. Everything will change. There is a magnificent sweep of intellectual landscape right in front of us. Reality Club comments:
Stewart Brand, David Ditzel, John C. Dvorak, Feeman Dyson,
George Dyson, Douglas Rushkoff, Rod Brooks, Lee Smolin, Jaron Lanier,
David Farber, Danny Hillis, Vinod Khosla, John McCarthy. STREAMS David Gelernter
When we ask ourselves what the effect will be of time coming into focus the way space came into focus during the 19th century, we can count on the fact that the consequences will be big. It won't cause the kind of change in our spiritual life that space coming into focus did, because we've moved as far outside as we can get, pretty much. We won't see any further fundamental changes in our attitude towards art or religion all that has happened already. We're apt to see other incalculably large affects on the way we deal with the world and with each other, and looking back at this world today it will look more or less the way 1800 did from the vantage point of 1900. Not just a world with fewer gadgets, but a world with a fundamentally different relationship to space and time. From the small details of our crummy software to the biggest and most abstract issues of how we deal with the world at large, this is a big story. THE SECOND GLOBALIZATION DEBATE A Talk With Anthony Giddens
The second globalization debate is now upon us, and it's no longer just an academic debate. It's in the streets, as we know since Seattle, since the meetings in Washington, since the carnival against capitalism in London, and similar kinds of events all over the world. A NEW SCIENCE OF QUALITIES A Talk with Brian Goodwin Goethe as an artist knew that intuition was terribly important for organizing the data that we accumulate through sensory perception. We need a balance between the analytical way of knowing and the intuitive way of knowing, both of which can be cultivated systematically. In our educational system today, we focus on the analytical, and we just leave the intuitive alone. In fact we tend to deny or ignore it. Just as we've been kicking shit out of Nature for 400 years, we've been doing the same to that part of our own nature that we call subjectivity or intuition. Stephen
Jay Gould Stephen Jay Gould died on May 20 at his home in New York City. To remember and honor Steve, to think about his ideas, I present "The Pattern of Life's History", Chapter 2 in The Third Culture (Simon & Schuster, 1995). Included in the chapter are commentaries on Steve and his work by many other participants in the book such as Stewart Kauffman, Marvin Minsky, Niles Eldredge, Murray Gell-Mann, Francisco Varela, J. Doyne Farmer, Steven Pinker, Nicholas Humphrey, Brian Goodwin, Steve Jones, George C. Williams, and Daniel C. Dennett. A GOLDEN AGE OF COSMOLOGY Alan Guth Even though cosmology doesn't have that much to do with information It certainly does have to do with revolution and phase transitions, in fact phase transitions in both the literal and the figurative sense of the word. THE
INFLATIONARY UNIVERSE W.D. HAMILTON (1936-2000) By Richard Dawkins W D
Hamilton is a good candidate for the title of most distinguished Darwinian
since Darwin. Other candidates would have to include R A Fisher, whom
Hamilton revered as a young student at Cambridge. Hamilton resembled
Fisher in his penetrating biological intuition and his ability to
render it in mathematics. But, like Darwin and unlike Fisher, he was
also a superb field naturalist and explorer. I suspect that, of all
his twentieth century successors, Darwin would most have enjoyed talking
to Hamilton. Partly because they could have swapped jungle tales and
beetle lore, partly because both were gentle and deep, but mostly
because Hamilton the theorist was responsible for clearing up so many
of the very problems that had intrigued and tantalised Darwin.
A Talk with David Haig The area to which I've given the greatest attention is a new phenomenon in molecular biology called genomic imprinting, which is a situation in which a DNA sequence can have conditional behavior depending on whether it is maternally inherited—coming from an egg—or paternally inherited—coming through a sperm. The phenomenon is called imprinting because the basic idea is that there is some imprint that is put on the DNA in the mother's ovary or in the father's testes which marks that DNA as being maternal or paternal, and influences its pattern of expression—what the gene does in the next generation in both male and female offspring. HOW IS PERSONALITY FORMED? Judith Rich Harris Comments on Frank J. Sulloway's Talk As I
show in my book The Nurture Assumption, the strategies children work
out at home for getting along with their parents and siblings are
likely to be useless in the world outside their home. That is why
children's behavior differs systematically in different social contexts.
And that is why psychologists looking for birth order effects in modern
populations have again and again failed to find them. CHILDREN DON'T DO THINGS HALF WAY A Talk with Judith Rich Harris I'm prone
to making statements like this one: How the parents rear the child
has no long-term effects on the child's personality, intelligence,
or mental health. I guess you could call that an extreme statement.
But I prefer to think of myself as a defender of the null hypothesis.
ANIMAL MINDS A Talk With Marc D. Hauser Philosophers often like to use examples of animals to show how difficult it is to understand the representations and thoughts of creatures that lack language. Moreover, some philosophers will claim that in the absence of language, there can be no thought. If that's true we're in a very difficult bind when it comes to understanding animal thought. In fact, some would claim that the entire enterprise is bankrupt ...... What I argue is that some of the most profound problems having to do with the human mind can only be addressed by studying animals, not humans. HOW DOES THE BRAIN GENERATE COMPUTATION? Marc D. Hauser
For humans, Chomsky's insights into the computational mechanisms underlying language really revolutionized the field, even though not all would agree with the approach he has taken. Nonetheless, the fact that he pointed to the universality of many linguistic features, and the poverty of the input for the child acquiring language, suggested that an innate computational mechanism must be at play. This insight revolutionized the field of linguistics, and set much of the cognitive sciences in motion. That's a verbal claim, and as Chomsky himself would quickly recognize, we really don't know how the brain generates such computation. WHAT KIND OF A THING IS A NUMBER? A Talk With Reuben Hersh What is mathematics? It's neither physical nor mental, it's social. It's part of culture, it's part of history. It's like law, like religion, like money, like all those other things which are very real, but only as part of collective human consciousness. That's what math is. HOW DEMOCRACY WORKS (OR WHY PERFECT ELECTIONS SHOULD ALL END IN TIES) By W. Daniel Hillis Many people believe that democracy works by giving voters a chance to elect a candidate whose views match their own. Actually, this isn't true. In a perfectly functioning democracy, both candidates will appear equally imperfect, elections' voter turnout will often be low, and all elections will end in near ties. The illustrations below show why this is true. They also show why a two-party system is better than a many-party system. Voters are more likely to like their choice of candidates in a many-party system, but they are less likely to like the winner of the election. Reality Club: Jaron Lanier SPECIAL RELATIVITY: WHY CAN'T YOU GO FASTER THAN LIGHT? An Essay by W. Daniel Hillis What
is mathematics? It's neither physical nor mental, it's social. It's
part of culture, it's part of history. It's like law, like religion,
like money, like all those other things which are very real, but only
as part of collective human consciousness. That's what math is. DANNY HILLIS WINS $1,000,000 DAN DAVID PRIZE First Dan David Prize Winners Announced; Individuals and One Institution Selected for Three $1 Million Awards Recognizing Achievements in 'Past, Present or Future'. WHY I THINK SCIENCE IS ENDING A Talk by John Horgan Over the few months during which I've been following this website, various contributors have said various things about my book "The End of Science". These comments reflect some confusion about what it was that I really said. I therefore thought it might be useful for me to present a succinct summary of my end-of-science argument as well as a rebuttal of 10 common counter-arguments. REFLECTIONS ON MODERN TERRORISM By Gerald Holton
ON THE NATURE OF MATHEMATICAL CONCEPTS: WHY AND HOW DO MATHEMATICIANS JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS? A Talk with Verena Huber-Dyson While
engaged in the mathematical endeavor we simply jump, hardly ever asking
"why" or "how". It is the only way we know of grappling with the mathematical
problem that we are out to understand, to articulate as a question
and to answer by a theorem or a whole theory. What drives our curiosity
is a question for psychologists. GENETICS PLUS TIME A Talk With Steve Jones It does look as if Darwin was, more or less, right. Most new discoveries fit well into his ideas. At the end of the century biology looks like a more straight-forward science than it did even 20 years ago, which I find a bit surprising, because, to the public, life seems fundamentally a mess. Of course, if you concentrate only on the details they get more and more complicated. The DNA sequence is more of a mess than anyone would have ever imagined; It's not a pretty sight. But descent with modification, as Darwin put it, or genetics plus time, as we can rephrase him today, is still the foundation of life. Biology is not like physics; Newtonian physics is in a deep sense wrong, whereas Mendelism and Darwinism are in a deep sense right. A POSSIBLE SOLUTION FOR THE PROBLEM OF TIME IN QUANTUM COSMOLOGY Stuart Kauffman & Lee Smolin We argue that in classical and quantum theories of gravity the configuration space and Hilbert space may not be constructible through any finite procedure. If this is the case then the "problem of time" in quantum cosmology may be a pseudoproblem, because the argument that time disappears from the theory depends on constructions that cannot be realized by any finite beings that live in the universe. We propose an alternative formulation of quantum cosmological theories in which it is only necessary to predict the amplitudes for any given state to evolve to a finite number of possible successor states. The space of accessible states of the system is then constructed as the universe evolves from any initial state. In this kind of formulation of quantum cosmology time and causality are built in at the fundamental level. "THE THIRD CULTURE" by Kevin Kelly Yet science has always been a bit outside society's inner circle. The cultural center of Western civilization has pivoted around the arts, with science orbiting at a safe distance. When we say "culture," we think of books, music, or painting. Since 1937 the United States has anointed a national poet laureate but never a scientist laureate. Popular opinion has held that our era will be remembered for great art, such as jazz. Therefore, musicians are esteemed. Novelists are hip. Film directors are cool. Scientists, on the other hand, are ...nerds. KEN KESEY (1935 - 2001) As I've often told Ginsberg, you can't blame the President for the state of the country, it's always the poets' fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don't have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold. WHAT SHAPE ARE A GERMAN SHEPHERD'S EARS? A Talk with Stephen M. Kosslyn There is a gigantic project yet to be done that will have the effect of rooting psychology in natural science. Once this is accomplished, you'll be able to go from phenomenology. . . to information processing. . . to the brain. . . down through the workings of the neurons, including the biochemistry, all the way to the biophysics and the way that genes are up-regulated and down-regulated...This is going to happen; I have no doubt at all. When it does we’re going to have a much better understanding of human nature than is otherwise going to be possible. THE INTELLIGENT UNIVERSE Ray Kurzweil The universe has been set up in an exquisitely specific way so that evolution could produce the people that are sitting here today and we could use our intelligence to talk about the universe. We see a formidable power in the ability to use our minds and the tools we've created to gather evidence, to use our inferential abilities to develop theories, to test the theories, and to understand the universe at increasingly precise levels. ONE HALF OF AN ARGUMENT A Response to Jaron Lanier's ONE HALF A MANIFESTO and POSTSCRIPT REGARDING RAY KURZWEIL By Ray Kurzweil Jaron writes that "the whole enterprise of Artificial Intelligence is based on an intellectual mistake." Until such time that computers at least match human intelligence in every dimension, it will always remain possible for skeptics to say the glass is half empty. Every new achievement of AI can be dismissed by pointing out yet other goals have not yet been accomplished. Indeed, this is the frustration of the AI practitioner, that once an AI goal is achieved, it is no longer considered AI and becomes just a useful technique. AI is inherently the set of problems we have not yet solved. We
are entering a new era. I call it "the Singularity." It's a merger
between human intelligence and machine intelligence that is going
to create something bigger than itself. It's the cutting edge of
evolution on our planet. One can make a strong case that it's actually
the cutting edge of the evolution of intelligence in general, because
there's no indication that it's occurred anywhere else. To me that
is what human civilization is all about. It is part of our destiny
and part of the destiny of evolution to continue to progress ever
faster, and to grow the power of intelligence exponentially.To contemplate
stopping that — to think human beings are fine the way they
are — is a misplaced fond remembrance of what human beings
used to be. What human beings are is a species that has undergone
a cultural and technological evolution, and it's the nature of evolution
that it accelerates, and that its powers grow exponentially, and
that's what we're talking about. The next stage of this will be
to amplify our own intellectual powers with the results of our technology.
PHILOSOPHY IN THE FLESH A Talk with George Lakoff "We are neural beings," states Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff. "Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit. THE CENTRAL METAPHOR OF EVERYTHING? Jaron Lanier One of the striking things about being a computer scientist in this age is that all sorts of other people are happy to tell us that what we do is the central metaphor of everything, which is very ego gratifying. We hear from various quarters that our work can serve as the best understanding - if not in the present but any minute now because of Moore's law - of everything from biology to the economy to aesthetics, child-rearing, sex, you name it. I have found myself being critical of what I view as this overuse as the computational metaphor. My initial motivation was because I thought there was naive and poorly constructed philosophy at work. It's as if these people had never read philosophy at all and there was no sense of epistemological or other problems. ONE HALF OF A MANIFESTO By Jaron Lanier For the last twenty years, I have found myself on the inside of a revolution, but on the outside of its resplendent dogma. Now that the revolution has not only hit the mainstream, but bludgeoned it into submission by taking over the economy, it's probably time for me to cry out my dissent more loudly than I have before.....And so I'll here share my thoughts with the respondents of edge.org, many of whom are, as much as anyone, responsible for this revolution, one which champions the assent of cybernetic technology as culture. The
Reality Club: •
George
Dyson, Freeman Dyson. Cliff Barney, Bruce Sterling, Rod Brooks, Henry
Warwick, Kevin Kelly, Margaret Wertheim, John Baez, Lee Smolin, Stewart
Brand, Rod Brooks, Lee Smolin, Daniel C. Dennett, Philip W. Anderson A Talk with Joseph Ledoux We have to put emotion back into the brain and integrate it with cognitive systems. We shouldn't study emotion or cognition in isolation, but should study both as aspects of the mind in its brain. THE COMPUTATIONAL UNIVERSE Seth Lloyd Every physical system registers information, and just by evolving in time, by doing its thing, it changes that information, transforms that information, or, if you like, processes that information. Since I've been building quantum computers I've come around to thinking about the world in terms of how it processes information. HOW FAST, HOW SMALL, AND HOW POWERFUL?: MOORE'S LAW AND THE ULTIMATE LAPTOP A Talk with Seth Lloyd Something else has happened with computers. What's happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process. When I think of all the information being processed there, all the information being communicated back and forth over the Internet, or even just all the information that you and I can communicate back and forth by talking, I start to look at the total amount of information being processed by human beings — and their artifacts — we are at a very interesting point of human history, which is at the stage where our artifacts will soon be processing more information than we physically will be able to process. HOW CAN EDUCATED PEOPLE CONTINUE TO BE RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISTS? A Talk with David Lykken How is that some scientists, psychologists like Leon Kamin, biologists like Steven Rose, even the odd geneticist like Richard Lewontin, or the odd paleontologist like Stephen Gould, continue to believe with John Locke that the infant human mind is a tabula rasa. How can they suppose that baby brains are as alike as new Macintosh computers fresh from the factory; indeed, even more alike because the computers at least have operating systems and various ROMs already installed? How can anyone imagine that, sometime in the Pleistocene, evolution mysteriously stopped, but just for one sub-system of one mammalian genus, the nervous system of the genus homo? " INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION A Talk with Pattie Maes I started
out doing artificial intelligence, basically trying to study intelligence
and intelligent behavior by synthesizing intelligent machines, I realized
that what I've been doing in the last seven years could better be
referred to as intelligence augmentation, so it's IA as opposed to
AI. I'm not trying to understand intelligence and build this stand-alone
intelligent machine that is as intelligent as a human and that hopefully
teaches us something about how intelligence in humans may work, but
instead. COMPLEXITY AND CATASTROPHE A Talk with Sir John Maddox My guess is that if the question of human extinction is ever posed clearly, people will say that it's all very well to say we've been a part of nature up to now, but at that turning point in the human race's history, it is surely essential that we do something about it; that we fix the genome, to get rid of the disease that's causing the instability, if necessary we clone people known to be free from the risk, because that's the only way in which we can keep the human race alive. A still, small voice may at that stage ask, but what right does the human race have to claim precedence for itself. To which my guess is the full-throated answer would be, sorry, the human race has taken a decision, and that decision is to survive. And, if you like, the hell with the rest of the ecosystem. FORTY FLOWERS By Katinka Matson 
New technologies=new perceptions. For the past several years she has experimented with non-photographic techniques for creating images by utilizing input through a flatbed CCD scanner. (No photographs are employed in the process.) This presentation on Edge is the first public showing of this work. TWELVE FLOWERS By Katinka Matson Introduction By Kevin Kelly  When I saw Matson's images I was blown away. Erase from your mind any notion of pixels or any grainy artifact of previous digitalization gear. Instead imagine a painter who could, like Vermeer, capture the quality of light that a camera can, but with the color of paints. That is what a scanner gives you. Now imagine a gifted artist like Matson exploring what the world looks like when it can only see two inches in front of its eye, but with infinite detail! In her flowers one can see every microscopic dew drop, leaf vein, and particle of pollen—in satisfying rich pigmented color. (From the Introduction By Kevin Kelly.) WHAT EVOLUTION IS A Talk with Ernst Mayr Introduction by Jared Diamond
Now a third one of Darwin's great contributions was that he replaced theological, or supernatural, science with secular science. Laplace, of course, had already done this some 50 years earlier when he explained the whole world to Napoleon. After his explanation, Napoleon replied, "where is God in your theory?" And Laplace answered, "I don't need that hypothesis." Darwin's explanation that all things have a natural cause made the belief in a creatively superior mind quite unnecessary. He created a secular world, more so than anyone before him. Certainly many forces were verging in that same direction, but Darwin's work was the crashing arrival of this idea and from that point on, the secular viewpoint of the world became virtually universal. THE DEMISE OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AT UC BERKELEY:DISSECTING THE STALEMATE An Essay by John McWhorter I have
reluctantly come to suspect that the conviction in question is this
one: a quiet but fundamental sense among many African-Americans of
influence that the black student who aces the SAT and tolerates nothing
less than top grades is stepping outside of what it is to be a proper
African-American. SEXUAL SELECTION AND THE MIND A Talk with Goeffrey Miller My goal at this point really is to take evolutionary psychology the next step, and to apply standard of evolutionary theory as much as possible to explain the whole gamut of the human mind, human emotions, human social life, human sexual behavior as much as possible. I'm especially interested in looking at areas that have been relatively ignored or overlooked in the standard evolutionary psychology so far. CONSCIOUSNESS IS A BIG SUITCASE A Talk with Marvin Minsky My goal
is making machines that can think-by understanding how people think.
One reason why we find this hard to do is because our old ideas about
psychology are mostly wrong. THE EMOTION UNIVERSE Marvin Minsky To say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there's something wrong with questions like, "What caused the Universe to exist? RIPPLES AND PUDDLES By Hans Moravec Like
little ripples on the surface of a deep, turbulent pool, calculation
and other kinds of procedural thought are possible only when the turbulence
is quelled. Humans achieve quiescence imperfectly by intense concentration.
Much easier to discard the pesky abyss altogether: ripples are safer
in a shallow pan. Numbers are better manipulated as calculus stones
or abacus beads than in human memory. [Simultaneously
published in German by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung —
Frank Schirrmacher, Publisher.] GOOD BOOKS Toby Mundy Doomsayers persist in the belief that the book world has been overrun by philistinism. They are wrong. Publishers can rejoice in unprecedented levels of both quality and quantity. We are living in a golden age of the book. WHAT QUESTIONS ARE ON PSYCHOLOGISTS' MINDS TODAY? David G. Myers Inspired by last year's "The World Question Center", psychologist David G. Myers, asked his own version of the Edge Question of some of psychology's leading lights. He received responses from Eliot Aronson, Daryl J. Bem, Ellen Berscheid, Gordon Bower, Noam Chomsky, William C. Dement, Paul Ekman, Rochel Gelman, Jerome Kagan, Walter Kintsch, Elizabeth Loftus, Jay McClelland, Don Meichenbaum, George Miller, Martin E. P. Seligman, Mark Snyder, Larry Squire, Shelley Taylor, Endel Tulving, Phil Zimbardo. THE CHEF A Talk with Nathan Myhrvold The most interesting aspect of the Internet is none of the technology features; it's putting people in communication with one another, very broadly. Whether that's through Web sites that allow people to publish to a large audience with amazing efficiency and lower cost per unit people that you communicate with; or it's email or chat or other means to put people in more direct two-way communication. The strength of the Internet is with what people will do with that communication capability. A MUTUAL, JOINT-STOCK WORLD IN ALL MERIDIANS By James J. O'Donnell
SEX AND PHYSICS A Talk with Dennis Overbye
"What else is there? Sex and physics." A BIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN NATURE A Talk with Steven Pinker The main question is: "Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage? Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications to the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?" This idea has been met with demonstrations, denunciations, picketings, and comparisons to Nazism, both from the right and from the left. And these reactions affect both the day-to-day conduct of science and the public appreciation of the science. By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu. ORGANS OF COMPUTATION A Talk with Steven Pinker I see the mind as an exquisitely engineered device - not literally engineered, of course, but designed by the mimic of engineering that we see in nature, natural selection. That's what "engineered" animals' bodies to accomplish improbable feats, like flying and swimming and running, and it is surely what "engineered" the mind to accomplish its improbable feats. THE TWO STEVES- PINKER VS. ROSE — A DEBATE On January 21st, Steven Pinker and Steven Rose debated each other in an event chaired by Susan Blackmore and held at London University's Institute of Education under the sponsorship of Dillon's and The London Times. Over a thousand people attende — and the event was sold out within three days of being announced. I wish I had been there.....The Two Steves have serious disagreements. But whether it's Steve Pinker weighing forth on the notion that the "problems for our ancestors were subtasks of one big problem for their genes" or Steve Rose asserting that "it is in the nature of living systems to be radically indeterminate, to continually construct their-our-own futures," their debate, their disagreement sharpens and clarifies. SOFTWARE, PROPERTY & HUMAN CIVILIZATION Jordan Pollack It seems to me that what we're seeing in the software area, and this is the scary part for human society, is the beginning of a kind of dispossession. People are talking about this as dispossession that only comes from piracy, like Napster and Gnutella where the rights of artists are being violated by people sharing their work. But there's another kind of dispossession, which is the inability to actually buy a product. The idea is here: you couldn't buy this piece of software, you could only licence it on a day by day, month by month, year by year basis; As this idea spreads from software to music, films, books, human civilization based on property fundamentally changes. SOFTWARE IS A CULTURAL SOLVENT How Our Artifacts Will Be Able To Interact With Our Biological Forms A Talk with Jordan Pollack
I work on developing an understanding of biological complexity and how we can create it, because the limits of software engineering have been clear now for two decades. The biggest programs anyone can build are about ten million lines of code. A real biological object — a creature, an ecosystem, a brain — is something with the same complexity as ten billion lines of code. And how do we get there? MIRROR NEURONSand imitation learning as the driving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution V.S. Ramachandran The discovery
of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential
relevance to human brain evolution ??which I speculate on in this
essay ? is the single most important "unreported" (or at least, unpublicized)
story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology
what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and
help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained
mysterious and inaccessible to experiments. REBOOTING CIVILIZATION II A Edge Event On July 21, Edge held an event at Eastover Farm which included the physicists Seth Lloyd, Paul Steinhardt, and Alan Guth, computer scientist Marvin Minsky, and technologist Ray Kurzweil. This year, I noted there are a lot of "universes" floating around. Seth Lloyd: the computational universe (or, if you prefer, the it and bit-itty bitty-universe); Paul Steinhardt: the cyclic universe; Alan Guth: the inflationary universe; Marvin Minsky: the emotion universe; Ray Kurzweil: the intelligent universe. THE ULTRA EARLY UNIVERSE: MARTIN REES The boisterous variety of ideas being discussed—branes, inflation, etc.—makes clear that the issues are fascinating, but also we’re still a long way from the right answer. We’re at the stage where all possibilities should be explored. It’s worthwhile to consider the consequences of even the most flaky ideas, although the chance of any of them actually panning out in the long run is not very high. THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF HUMAN HISTORY A Talk with Colin Renfrew Lately I've been interested in the possibility of unifying our separate visions of the human past. When we look at the archeological record, we have some story that emerges from the archeological record about human prehistory. The archeological picture of the past is a very concrete one, and it's very well dated, because of radiocarbon dating, but it doesn't actually say much about language. SMART MOBS Howard Rheingold The big battle coming over the future of smart mobs concerns media cartels and government agencies are seeking to reimpose the regime of the broadcast era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to create and left only with the power to consume. That power struggle is what the battles over file-sharing, copy protection, regulation of the radio spectrum are about. Are the populations of tomorrow going to be users, like the PC owners and website creators who turned technology to widespread innovation? Or will they be consumers, constrained from innovation and locked into the technology and business models of the most powerful entrenched interests? RESCUING MEMORY A Talk with Steven Rose One of the things that I was doing at Cold Spring was talking about a new molecule that we've discovered — a little peptide, five amino acids long, which seems to be able to rescue the memory loss that you get with the disorder of the Alzheimer proteins. What started as a sheer intellectual excitement also looks like it's going to have rather significant human payoff, and that's good news. THE CURATOR A Talk with Doug Rowan What's
new is that the whole premise of Corbis is to take pictures, put them
in a digital form, and make the access to them, that is the search
and finding and use of them, quite different from the prior model
of the way pictures were used, which was in film form. So everything
at Corbis is about digital. The pictures are digital, the data is
digital, the access is digital. The customer search is digital, the
viewing of the potential selections, whether it be for entertainment,
education, or professional licensing use-these are all digital. It
is of a size that is unique, and the very nature of the way the pictures
are organized is quite unique. THE THING THAT I CALL DOUG A Talk with Douglas Rushkoff The most dangerous thing about a "Just Do It "society is that it compels us to act on reflex not intention. We are led to believe we are acting from the gut. That we are somehow connecting with our emotions and bypassing our neuroses. But this isn't true at all. We are merely moving impulsively. It's not from the gut. And the more impulsively we act, the more easily we can be led where we might not truly want to go. People who act automatically are the easiest to control by marketers, by anyone. There's less intention and thus less life involvement. THE DISRECTED STUDENT— OR —THE NEED FOR A VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY A Talk with Roger Schank We know that Virtual U will serve up electronic courses, and therein lies the excitement. People are actually thinking about designing courses in a new way. What exactly should the offerings of a university be? What should a course be? Should there be courses at all? How can we make education better? BEYOND 2001: HAL's LEGACY FOR THE ENTERPRISE GENERATION By Frank Schirrmacher Who, if not the Europeans, who, if not the Germans, is in a position to talk about the power role that models can acquire over reality? Wars have been fought over them and whole generations incited to violence in their name. We have studied the images and the language which gave the pioneers of the industrial revolution their confidence and we have encapsulated its life cycle — from the discovery of electricity to the sinking of the Titanic — in parables. WAKE-UP FOR EUROPE TECH By Frank Schirrmacher The European intelligentsia is entering the 21st century in silence, stubbornly or clumsily avoiding the issue. It is easy to imagine one of these intellectuals, fumbling over a new word-processing package: the infuriation at this "not coping", the alleged lack of "technical know-how," the antipathy (often justified) which sets in at the slightest whiff of leads and sockets. All this also characterizes prevailing attitudes to the revolutionary paradigm shift itself. The new age didn't come to us Europeans in a flash of inspiration, it came as a "retraining program": from typewriter to computer, from computer to Internet. Reality Club comments: George
Dyson, Stewart Brand, Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer, Dave Myers, Clifford
Pickover, Kai Krause, Jason McCabe Calacanis. Charles Simonyi, Mihalyi
Csikszentmihalyi, J.C. Herz, Lee Smolin. SCIENCE AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BELIEFS A Talk with Michael Shermer The one thing we've learned from the last three decades of research is that science is socially and culturally embedded and thus biased. Still, it's the best system we have for understanding causality in all realms, in all fields. So despite the fact that it's loaded with biases, there is a real world out there that we can know and the best way to know it is through science. The reason for that is because there's at least a method, an attempt to corroborate one's own subjective perceptions. There's a way to find out if you and I are seeing the same colors when we see red. There's actually a way to test these things, or at least try to get at them. That's what separates science from everything else. INTENTIONAL PROGRAMMING A Talk with Charles Simonyi ("The WYSIWYG") The "first law" of intentional programming says: For every abstraction one should be able to define an equal and opposite "concretion". So repeated abstraction or parameterization need no longer create "Turing tarpits" where everything eventually grinds to a halt due to the overhead introduced by the layers. In IP, the enzymes associated by the abstractions can optimize out the overhead, based on the enzymes' domain specific knowledge. The overhead associated with abstraction has always been the bane of the very-high-level languages in the past. 10 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT SECURITY, PRIVACY AND ENCRYPTION A Talk with Richard M. Smith Until the '60s, governments were not really involved in car design. Then people like Ralph Nader started noticing that a lot of people were being killed in cars and made it clear why this was happening. We have spent the last 35 years or so designing safety into cars, and it's had a pretty dramatic effect. . . We're in that same era now with security on computer systems. We know we have a problem and now we need to focus on design. INFORMATION AND COMPUTATION Lee Smolin
As a theoretical physicist, my main concern is space, time and cosmology. The metaphor about information and computation is interesting. There are some people in physics who have begun to talk as if we all know that what's really behind physics is computation and information, who find it very natural to say things like anything that's happening in the world is a computation, and all of physics can be understood in terms of information. There's another set of physicists who have no idea what those people are talking about. And there's a third set — and I'm among them — who begin by saying we have no idea what you're talking about, but we have reasons why it would be nice if it was useful to talk about physics in terms of information. THE CYCLIC UNIVERSE Paul Steinhardt I...in the last year I've been involved in the development of an alternative theory that turns the cosmic history topsy-turvy. All the events that created the important features of our universe occur in a different order, by different physics, at different times, over different time scales—and yet this model seems capable of reproducing all of the successful predictions of the consensus picture with the same exquisite detail. HOW IS PERSONALITY FORMED? A Talk with Frank Sulloway "During
the last two decades I have experienced a major shift in my career
interests. I started out as a historian of science and was primarily
interested in historical questions about people's intellectual lives.
In trying to understand the sources of creative achievement in science,
I gradually became interested in problems of human development and
especially in how Darwinian theory can help us to understand the development
of personality. I now consider myself a psychologist, in addition
to being an historian." BIRTH ORDER AND THE NATURE MISASSUMPTIION: FRANK SULLOWAY RESPONDS TO JUDITH RICH HARRIS Where
Harris and I disagree is over the nature of the specific environmental
influences that are important in personality development. Harris ascribes
these environmental sources almost entirely to the peer group - that
is, to influences operating outside of the family environment.
THE UNKNOWN AND THE UNKNOWABLE A Talk with Joseph Traub A central
issue is the relation between reality and models of reality. I like
to talk about this in terms of four worlds. There are two real worlds:
the world of natural phenomena and the computer world, where simulations
and calculations are performed. There are two model worlds: a mathematical
model of a natural phenomenon and a model of computation. The mathematical
model is an abstraction of the natural world while the model of computation
is an abstraction of a physical computer. THE ECONOMICS OF DREAMS Two Questions for the Edge Community by Joseph "Yossi" Vardi "Mr. Brockman," he said in a thick accent. "Being an Israeli, I must respond to your question not with an answer but with two more questions, which I would like to adress to your faithful readers. First: Where are we right now on the enclosed chart (see "The Economics of Dreams" below). Second: How long will it be until the stock market begins to go up?" THE EMERGENT SELF FRANCISCO VARELA [1946-2001] "Why do emergent selves, virtual identities, pop up all over the place, creating worlds, whether at the mind/body level, the cellular level, or the transorganism level? This phenomenon is something so productive that it doesn't cease creating entirely new realms: life, mind, and societies. Yet these emergent selves are based on processes so shifty, so ungrounded, that we have an apparent paradox between the solidity of what appears to show up and its groundlessness. That, to me, is the key and eternal question. THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER — 1998 Dedicated to the Memory of James Lee Byars (1932-1997) WHAT QUESTIONS ARE YOU ASKING YOURSELF? Everything
has been explained. There is nothing left to consider. The explanation
can no longer be treated as a definition. The question: a description.
The answer: not explanation, but a description and knowing how to
consider it. Asking or telling: there isn't any difference.
THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER — 1999 WHAT IS TODAY'S MOST IMPORTANT UNREPORTED STORY? "Don't
assume for a second that Ted Koppel, Charlie Rose and the editorial
high command at the New York Times have a handle on all the pressing
issues of the day....when Brockman asked 100 of the world's top thinkers
to come up with pressing matters overlooked by the media, they generated
a lengthy list of profound, esoteric and outright entertaining responses." THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER — 2000 WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT INVENTION IN THE PAST TWO THOUSAND YEARS? A year ago I emailed the participants of The Third Culture Mail List for help with a project which was published as "The World Question Center." I asked them: "what questions are you asking yourself?" The project was interesting, worthwhile....and fun. This year, beginning on Thanksgiving Day, I polled the list on (a) "What Is The Most Important Invention In The Past Two Thousand Years?" ... and (b) "Why?". More than 100 responses have been received to date..... THE
WORLD QUESTION CENTER — 2001 For its fourth anniversary edition — "The World Question Center 2001" — Edge has reached out to a wide group of individuals distinguished by their significant achievements and asked them to respond to the following question: "What Questions Have Disappeared?" WHAT NOW? I believe that the Edge community can mount a serious conversation about the catastrophic events of the past week that might do some good. Within the community is invaluable expertise in many pertinent areas, not to mention the intelligence that the "Edgies" can bring to the subjects. THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER — 2002 "I can repeat the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?" "WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION? ... WHY?" The 5th Annual Edge Question reflects the spirit of the Edge motto: "To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." The 2002 Edge Question is: "WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION? ... WHY?" I have asked Edge contributors for "hard-edge" questions, derived from empirical results or experience specific to their expertise, that render visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefine who and what we are. The goal is a series of interrogatives in which "thinking smart prevails over the anaesthesiology of wisdom." THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER — 2003 "I can repeat the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?" "WHAT ARE THE PRESSING SCIENTIFIC ISSUES FOR THE NATION AND THE WORLD, AND WHAT IS YOUR ADVICE ON HOW I CAN BEGIN TO DEAL WITH THEM?" —GWB I wish the above was really an email from President Bush. It is not. It's the set-up for this year's Edge Annual Question — 2003, and because this event receives wide attention from the scientific community and the global press, the responses it evokes just might have the same effect as a memo to the President....that is, if you stick to science and to those scientific areas where you have expertise... I am asking members of the Edge community to take this project seriously as a public service, to work together to create a document that can be widely disseminated to begin a public discussion about the important scientific issues before us. THE EVOLUTION OF COOKING A Talk with Richard Wrangham [2.28.01] One
of the great thrusts of behavioral biology for the last three or
four decades has been that if you change the conditions that an
animal is in, then you change the kind of behavior that is elicited.
What the genetic control of behavior means is not that instincts
inevitably pop out regardless of circumstances; instead, it is that
we are created with a series of emotions that are appropriate for
a range of circumstances. The particular set of emotions that pop
out will vary within species, but they will also vary with context,
and once you know them better, then you can arrange the context...
It's much better to anticipate these things, recognize the problem,
and design in advance to protect.
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