In the domain of bodies, most of us accept that common sense is wrong. We concede that apparently solid objects are actually mostly empty space, consisting of tiny particles and fields of energy. Perhaps the same sort of reconciliation will happen in the domain of souls, and it will come to be broadly recognized that our dualist belief system, though intuitively appealing, is factually mistaken. Perhaps we will all come to agree with Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and join the side of the "brights": those who reject the supernatural and endorse the world-view established by science.

But I am skeptical. The notion that our souls are flesh is profoundly troubling to many, as it clashes with religion. Dualism and religion are not the same: You can be dualist without holding any other religious beliefs, and you can hold religious beliefs without being dualist. But they almost always go together. And some very popular religious views rest on a dualist foundation, such as the belief that people survive the destruction of their bodies. If you give up on dualism, this is what you lose.

This is not small potatoes.

NEW NATURAL-BORN DUALISTS
A Talk with Paul Bloom

Paul Bloom Edge Video Broadband | Modem

NEW THE REALITY CLUB: Responses by Jesse Bering, Marvin Minsky, Jaron Lanier, Paul Harris, Pascal Boyer, Paul Bloom replies; Mark Mirsky

NEW "ARISTOTLE" (THE KNOWLEDGE WEB)
By W. Daniel Hillis

With the knowledge web, humanity's accumulated store of information will become more accessible, more manageable, and more useful. Anyone who wants to learn will be able to find the best and the most meaningful explanations of what they want to know. Anyone with something to teach will have a way to reach those who what to learn. Teachers will move beyond their present role as dispensers of information and become guides, mentors, facilitators, and authors. The knowledge web will make us all smarter. The knowledge web is an idea whose time has come.

NEW LEARNING TO EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED
A Talk with Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that's what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.

[Editor's Note: On April 8th, the day the 9/11 Commission heard testimony from Presidential advisor Condoleezza Rice, Taleb's Op-Ed piece, "Learning to Expect the Uniexpected", was published in The New York Times. After the testimony, he stopped by for a conversation. I am pleased to present both the Op-Ed and the discussion. —JB]

Nassim Taleb Edge Video Broadband | Modem

NEW THE REALITY CLUB: Stewart Brand; Nassim Taleb responds

EUDAEMONIA, THE GOOD LIFE
A Talk with Martin Seligman

The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is again knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There's no shortcut to that. That's what life is about. There will likely be a pharmacology of pleasure, and there may be a pharmacology of positive emotion generally, but it's unlikely there'll be an interesting pharmacology of flow. And it's impossible that there'll be a pharmacology of meaning.

Martin Seligman Edge Video Broadband | Modem

"This goes beyond all known schmoozing.
This is like some kind of virtual-intellectual conspiracy-in-restraint-of-trade."
— Bruce Sterling, "Third Culture Schmoozing"

"The dinner party was a microcosm of a newly dominant sector of American business." — Wired

THE BILLIONAIRES' DINNER — 2004
February 26th — Monterey, California

Ariane de Bonvoisin - Daniel Gilbert - Eva Wisten
(En route to The Billionaires' Dinner - 2004)

There's no such thing as a free lunch, or a free Billionaires' Dinner.

This year, a downsized (or, if you like, more exclusive) Edge dinner was convened in Monterey at the Indian Summer Restaurant.

The dinner, which for the past few years has been held during the annual TED Conference, always has a name attached to it. It began in 1984 as "The Millionaires' Dinner" (thanks to a page one article in The Wall Street Journal) in a Las Vegas Mexican restaurant during COMDEX Eventually it evolved to "The Digerati Dinner"; to "The World Domination, Corporate Cubism, and Alien Mind Control Dinner", to "The Billionaires' Dinner". Last year we tried "The Science Dinner". Everyone yawned. So this year, it's back to the money-sex-power thing with "The Billionaires' Dinner". I realize that "Billionaire" is tired and very '90s, but the name worked for this year's dinner. It was a coincidence that during the dinner, Google cofounder Larry Page received a message on his pager informing him that he and cofounder Sergey Brin had made the Forbes Magazine list of 157 billionaires.

The communications revolution occurring in the age of information and computation has not stopped, nor has it even slowed down. The markets crashed. The innovation continues. And a number of people who showed up for the dinner are really cooking: Jeff Bezos of Amazon; Google's CEO Eric Schmidt, Larry, Sergey, Lori Park, and Megan Smith; Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay; Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway; Steve Case, former Chairman of AOL Time-Warner who is now on to new adventures; and Jeffrey Epstein, who recently endowed The Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University which is involved in researching applications of mathematics and computer science to biology.

They were mixing it up with the cosmologists Alan Guth (inflationary universe), Leonard Susskind (the landscape of universes), and Paul Steinhardt (the cyclic universe); the physicist Seth Lloyd (quantum computing); the applied mathematician Steve Strogatz (synchronicity in nature); and the psychologists Mike Csikszentmihalyi (flow), Nancy Etcoff (perception of faces), Martin Seligman (positive psychology), Dan Gilbert (mis-wanting), as well as a number of technology and media journalists.

Also attending were Alisa Volkman of the literary-erotic website nerve.com, book packager Ariane de Bonvoisin, and Swedish journalist Eva Wisten. They spent the dinner in rapt conversation with the three cosmologists. "Where were they? I never saw them," said Kevin Kelly. But then Kevin was busy: he and Jeff Bezos, who attended with his mother Jackie, were producing a wall of sound from a table in the middle of the room that made quiet conversation impossible.

An interesting aspect of the dinner was that Seth Lloyd flew in from Tokyo (where he is spending a year) to join us. Seth was the only student of the late Heinz Pagels (who helped to start Edge, and was deeply involved in all its activities). Although I never met Seth when Heinz was alive, I vividly recall Heinz's descriptions of him as the brightest of the bright young physicists...of any generation. Heinz and I had several conversations about how Heinz was attempting to harness Seth's intelligence since he was one of those transcategorematic individuals. In other words, Heinz was telling me that Seth was unemployable.

Over the years things have worked out for Seth. His seminal work in the fields of quantum computation and quantum communications—including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer, demonstrating the viability of quantum analog computation, proving quantum analogs of Shannon's noisy channel theorem, and designing novel methods for quantum error correction and noise reduction—has gained him a reputation as an innovator and leader in the field of quantum computing. He has made the front pages of the world's newspapers several times; collaborates with Murray Gell-Mann; and is now Professor of Quantum-Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

My idea was to use the platform of "The Billionaires' Dinner" and Seth's visit to announce "The Quantum Internet" but I became so caught up in the high energy of of the occasion that I forgot all about it. I also forgot I had a new digital camera in my pocket and didn't take any pictures. Rather than deprive Edge readers of an inside look at the dinner, I sent the following email to the dinner guests:

"Sing for your supper!"

Instead of photos, I plan to run a text portrait. You can help out by responding to the following Edge question (a paragraph or two will
do):

"Who were you sitting with? What interesting things were discussed? What did you learn?"

I can recount my own conversation with Lenny Susskind, the father of string theory, who walked in wearing a new sports jacket. I looked at the jacket admiringly, and Lenny told me a story:

"I'm going to Holland next week where I'll have an honorary professorship. Three weeks ago the host called me up and said 'please, get yourself a nice set of clothes, because you're going to meet the queen.' "

" 'Wow,' I said, 'the Queen?'"

"'Yes, the Queen. She wants to meet a physicist,' said my host."

"'That's fantastic,' I replied. 'I'm going to be a guest of honor at a dinner given by the Queen of Holland!' "

"And all of a sudden on the other end of the phone, there's silence. And he says, 'no, Lenny, 'you don't understand; Brian Greene is going to be the guest of honor.' "

— JB

The Reality Club: Click here for comments by Seth Lloyd, Paul Steinhardt, Dan Dubno, Linda Stone, Dan Gilbert, J.P. Schmetz, Lenny Susskind, Steve Strogatz, Chris W. Anderson, NEW Steve Petranek [continue]

The problem lies in how we imagine our future hedonic states. We are the only animals that can peer deeply into our futures—the only animal that can travel mentally through time, preview a variety of futures, and choose the one that will bring us the greatest pleasure and/or the least pain. This is a remarkable adaptation—which, incidentally, is directly tied to the evolution of the frontal lobe—because it means that we can learn from mistakes before we make them. We don't have to actually have gallbladder surgery or lounge around on a Caribbean beach to know that one of these is better than another. We may do this better than any other animal, but our research suggests that we don't do it perfectly. Our ability to simulate the future and to forecast our hedonic reactions to it is seriously flawed, and that people are rarely as happy or unhappy as they expect to be.

AFFECTIVE FORECASTING...OR...THE BIG WOMBASSA: WHAT YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING TO GET, AND WHAT YOU DON'T GET, WHEN YOU GET WHAT YOU WANT
A Talk with Daniel Gilbert

Daniel Gilbert Edge Video DSL+ | Modem

February 2004
News&Curiosities

164 of the world's finest boffins have been asked by the "scientific salon" website Edge (www.edge.org) to produce their own eponymous laws (think Boyle, Newton, Murphy). Answers ranged from Richard Dawkins' observation that "Obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrnsic simplicity" to Steven Strogatz's arch "When you're trying to prove something, it helps to know it's true." Andy Clark wins the brevity prize for "Evrything leaks."

The Back Page
February 2, 2004

The online group Edge.org started the year by asking scholars, writers and other people with time on their hands to dream up some new universal truths. You know, like Murphy's Law. We like the one from John Maddox, the longtime editor of Nature magazine, which our editors have shortened to this: "Reviewers who are best placed to understand an author's work are ... prolific sources of minor criticism, especially the identification of typos."

Universal. We'd like to offer out own little universal law of commercial shipping. Every discount is paid for in another way, but never in a way the accounting department cares about.

On Computers
By Joy & Bob Schwabach
January 31, 2004

Internuts
• www.edge.org:

A fascinating site that conducts an annual solicitation of new “natural laws” from a variety of people, most of them well-known in some field. Here's one from Gerd Gigerenzer, a behavioral psychologist: “The world cannot function without partially ignorant people.” This is a condensation of observations from many behavioral studies. For example, he notes: “Ordinary people who selected stocks by name recognition outperformed most market experts and the Fidelity Growth Fund.”

My own favorite “law,” not listed on this site but well-suited to computers and many other subjects, was iterated many years ago by science fiction author Poul Anderson, who noted: “There is no subject, no matter how complex, which if looked at in just the right way, cannot be made more complex.”

(Queensland, Australia)
Eternal Search For Wisdom Generates Laws Unto Themselves
By Michael Duffy
January 31, 2004

JOHN Brockman is a New York literary agent specialising in those who practise and write about cutting-edge science and how it is changing the world. His website, www.edge.org, has a cult following and is a combination of magazine and online community.

Late last year he asked several hundred thinkers to propose laws about how the world works, some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some law-like pattern, either grand or small, that they had noticed in the universe that might be named after them. The results are coming in and they're fascinating ....

Brockman's project is a lot of fun, although if you tried to live by some of the laws thrown up by it you'd go mad. [continue]

For a long time the fields of biology and psychology have been quite separate, and only in the last few years people have started thinking about brain imaging and about how the brain and mind relate. But they haven't really thought that much about another part of biology: developmental biology. Brain imaging tells you something about how the brain works, but that doesn't tell you anything about how the brain gets to be the way that it is. Of course, we also have the human genome sequence and have made enormous advances in genetics and related fields, and what I've been trying to do in the last few years is to relate all of the advances in biology to what people have been finding out in cognitive development and language acquisition.

LANGUAGE, BIOLOGY, AND THE MIND
A Talk with Gary Marcus

Gary Marcus Edge Video DSL+ | Modem

From The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought by Gary Marcus:

"It is popular in some quarters to claim that the human brain is largely unstructured at birth; it is tempting to believe that our minds float free of our genomes. But such beliefs are completely at odds with everything that scientists have learned in molecular biology over the last decade. Rather than leaving everything to chance or the vicissitudes of experience, nature has taken everything it has developed for growing the body and put it towards the problem of growing the brain. From cell division to cell differentiation, every process that is used in the development of the body is also used in the development of the brain. Genes do for the brain the same things as they do for the rest of the body: they guide the fates of cells by guiding the production of proteins within those cells. The one thing that is truly special about the development of the brain—the physical basis of the mind—is its "wiring", the critical connections between neurons, but even there, as we will see in the next chapter, genes play a critical role.

"This idea that the brain might be assembled in much the same way as the rest of the body—on the basis of the action of thousands of autonomous but interacting genes (shaped by natural selection)—is an anathema to our deeply held feeling that our minds are special, somehow separate from the material world. Yet at the same time, it is a continuation, perhaps the culmination, of a long trend, a growing-up for the human species that for too long has overestimated its own centrality in the universe. Copernicus showed us that our planet is not the center of the universe. William Harvey showed that our heart is a mechanical pump. John Dalton and the 19th century chemists showed that our bodies are, like all other matter, made up of atoms. Watson and Crick showed us how genes emerged from chains of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus. In the 1990s, the Decade of the Brain, cognitive neuroscientists showed that our minds are the product of our brains. Early returns from this century are showing that the mechanisms that build our brains are just a special case of the mechanisms that build the rest of our body. The initial structure of the mind, like the initial structure of the rest of the body, is a product of our genes."

THE MOUNTAIN AND THE CLOCK
By Stewart Brand

As we spent more time climbing to the cliffs and hanging out on and around them, they rewarded us more and more. They taught us this: most of the amazingness of the Clock we can borrow from the amazingness of the mountain. The more we highlight and blend in with the most spectacular features of the mountain, the more memorable a Clock visit will be for the time pilgrims. It's a Mountain Clock. [more...]