COMING SOON — THE EDGE ANNUAL QUESTION 2010 — PUBLICATION JANUARY 8TH

GROWING UP IN ETHOLOGY [12.18.09]
By Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins, age 7

For I became a secret reader. In the holidays from boarding school, I would sneak up to my bedroom with a book: a guilty truant from the fresh air and the virtuous outdoors. And when I started learning biology properly at school, it was still bookish pursuits that held me. I was drawn to questions that grown-ups would have called philosophical. What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? How did it all start? Biology comes closest to answering these deep questions, but that wasn't the reason I ended up in the biology stream at Oundle School.

RICHARD DAWKINS, an evolutionary biologist, recently retired as the former Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of New College. His books include The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion, and The Greatest Show On Earth.

Richard Dawkins's Edge Bio Page

[...]

FOUR SIDES TO EVERY STORY [12.18.09]
By Stewart Brand

The calamatists and denialists are primarily political figures, with firm ideological loyalties, whereas the warners and skeptics are primarily scientists, guided by ever-changing evidence. That distinction between ideology and science not only helps clarify the strengths and weaknesses of the four stances, it can also be used to predict how they might respond to future climate developments.

STEWART BRAND is cofounder and co-chairman of The Long Now Foundation. He is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of The Well, and cofounder of Global Business Network.

He is the original editor of The Whole Earth Catalog, (Winner of the National Book Award). His latest book is Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

Stewart Brand's Edge Bio Page

[...]

TO BEAT AL QAEDA, LOOK TO THE EAST [12.18.09]
By Scott Atran

Unlike Al Qaeda, the Taliban are interested in their homeland, not ours. Things are different now than before 9/11. The Taliban know how costly Osama bin Laden's friendship can be. There's a good chance that enough factions in the loose Taliban coalition would opt to disinvite their troublesome guest if we forget about trying to subdue them or hold their territory. This would unwind the Taliban coalition into a lot of straggling, loosely networked groups that could be eliminated or contained using the lessons learned in Indonesia and elsewhere. This means tracking down family and tribal networks, gaining a better understanding of family ties and intervening only when we see actions by Taliban and other groups to aid Al Qaeda or act outside their region.

SCOTT ATRAN, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, John Jay College and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, is the author of In Gods We Trust.

Scott Atran's Edge Bio Page

[...]

A FINAL WARNING FROM THE ARCTIC [12.7.09]
Slide Show — Words and Pictures — by Alun Anderson

The Greenland ice sheet is five kilometres thick and melting fast. The effect of adding all that water to the oceans may become terrifyingly apparent around the world in the coming decades, but the effects of climate warming are already clear in the Arctic itself. Here's the evidence, presented in words and pictures by Alun Anderson.

Ammassalik Island

A great place to begin a trip around the Arctic and discover more about its uncertain future is on top of this mountain above the town of Tasiilaq on Ammassalik Island. The view seems to stretch to infinity: behind me are the ice-sharpened high peaks and glaciers of eastern Greenland, to the west lies the great ice cap and the route taken by Fridtjof Nansen in 1888, on his way to become the first person to cross the ice all the way to western Greenland.

ALUN ANDERSON is Senior Consultant, and former Editor-in-Chief and Publishing Director of New Scientist. Previously he was the U.S. Editor of the journal Nature, and International Editor of the journal Science. He is the author of After the Ice: Life, Death and Geopolitics in the New Arctic.

Alun Anderson's Edge Bio Page

[...]

[Further reading on Edge: The Changing Arctic: A Response To Freeman Dyson's 'Heretical Thoughts']

CRYSTAL BALL FOR STAR INTELLECTUALS

"a stellar cast of intellectuals ... a stunning array of responses"

HOLIDAY BOOKS: This Will Change Everything edited by John Brockman;
John Brockman's annual question draws a bewildering array of responses from a stellar cast of intellectuals

by Michael Bond

LITERARY agent John Brockman assembles a stellar cast of intellectuals each year to answer a boundary-pushing question. His latest poser — "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?" — has drawn a stunning array of responses, from nuclear terrorism to in-vitro meat.

Some ideas are predictable (immortality, intelligent robots, designer children), some world-saving if they happened (oil we can grow) and some we'd be better off without (neuro-cosmetics). Many are self-indulgent technological fantasies. With contributions from Ian McEwan, Steven Pinker, Lee Smolin, Craig Venter, Richard Dawkins and 130 others of their ilk, the book is like an intellectual lucky dip.

Perfect for: anyone who wants to know what the big thinkers will be chewing on in 2010.

THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS

"brilliant ... captivating ... overwhelming"

Books to read (and give) now
SEED PICKS DECEMBER 1, 2009

This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future
Edited by John Brockman (Harper Perennial)

The latest prophetic collection from John Brockman of Edge.org invites scores of the world's most brilliant thinkers, including Richard Dawkins, Lisa Randall, and Brian Eno, to predict what game-changing events will occur in their lifetimes. Their speculations run the existential gamut, as some predict deliberate nuclear disaster or accidental climatic apocalypse and others foresee eternal life, unlimited prosperity, and boundless happiness. Between such extremes of heaven and hell lie more ambiguous visions: An end to forgetting, the creation of intelligent machines, and cosmetic brain surgery, to name a few. Pouring over these pages is like attending a dinner party where every guest is brilliant and captivating and only wants to speak with you—overwhelming, but an experience to savor.

TOXO [12.4.09]
A Conversation with Robert Sapolsky

[24:27 minutes]

...The parasite my lab is beginning to focus on is one in the world of mammals, where parasites are changing mammalian behavior. It's got to do with this parasite, this protozoan called Toxoplasma. If you're ever pregnant, if you're ever around anyone who's pregnant, you know you immediately get skittish about cat feces, cat bedding, cat everything, because it could carry Toxo. And you do not want to get Toxoplasma into a fetal nervous system. It's a disaster. ...

ROBERT SAPOLSKY is a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University and of neurology at Stanford's School of Medicine. His books include A Primate's Memoir, and Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: A Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases and Coping.

Robert Sapolsky's Edge Bio Page

IT SEEMS BIOLOGY (NOT RELIGION) EQUALS MORALITY [12.4.09]
by Marc D. Hauser

... Where I intend to be divisive is with respect to the argument that religion, and moral education more generally, represent the only — or perhaps even the ultimate — source of moral reasoning. If anything, moral education is often motivated by self-interest, to do what's best for those within a moral community, preaching singularity, not plurality. Blame nurture, not nature, for our moral atrocities against humanity. And blame educated partiality more generally, as this allows us to lump into one category all those who fail to acknowledge our shared humanity and fail to use secular reasoning to practise compassion. ....

MARC D. HAUSER an evolutionary psychologist and biologist, is Harvard College Professor, Professor of Psychology and Program in Neurosciences, and Director of Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory. He is the author of The Evolution of Communication, Wild Minds: What Animals Think, and Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong.

Marc Hauser's Edge Bio Page

[...]

Salon d'Ete, Hotel Ritz Paris

For the past twelve years my research team has been using all the brain research tools at its disposal, from functional MRI to electro- and magneto-encephalography and even electrodes inserted deep in the human brain, to shed  light on the brain mechanisms of consciousness.

I am now happy to report that we have acquired a  good working hypothesis. In experiment after experiment, we have seen the same signatures of consciousness: physiological markers that all, simultaneously, show a massive change when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information (say a word, a digit or a sound).

SIGNATURES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
A Talk by Stanislas Dehaene

[1hr 20 minutes]

Introduction
by John Brockman

On October 17, Edge organized a Reality Club meeting at The Hotel Ritz in Paris to allow neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene to present his new theory on how consciousness arises in the brain to a group of Parisian scientists and thinkers. The theory, based on Dehaene's past twelve years of brain-imaging research  is called the global neuronal workspace. It promises to offer new tools for diagnosing consciousness disorders  in patients.

"For the past twelve years",  says Dehaene, "my research team has been using every available brain research tool, from functional MRI to electro- and magneto-encephalography and even electrodes inserted deep in the human brain, to shed  light on the brain mechanisms of consciousness. I am now happy to report that we have acquired a  good working hypothesis. In experiment after experiment, we have seen the same signatures of consciousness: physiological markers that all, simultaneously, show a massive change when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information (say a word, a digit or a sound).

"Furthermore, when we render the same information non-conscious or "subliminal", all  the signatures disappear. We have a theory about why these signatures occur, called the global neuronal workspace theory. Realistic computer simulations of neurons reproduce our main experimental findings: when the information processed exceeds a threshold for large-scale communication across many brain areas, the network ignites into a large-scale synchronous state, and all  our signatures suddenly appear.

"But this is already more than a theory. We are now applying our ideas to non-communicating patients in coma, vegetative state, or locked-in syndromes. The test that we have designed with Tristan Bekinschtein, Lionel Naccache, and Laurent Cohen, based on our past experiments and theory, seems to reliably sort out which patients retain some residual conscious life and which do not.

"My laboratory is now pursuing this research intensively on patients, animals, human adults and young children, with the hope of turning our brain-imaging measurements into a real-time monitor of conscious experience. The time thus seems ripe to share this work with a broader audience of readers interested in cutting-edge science and technology, but also those concerned with the philosophical, personal and ethical implications of these findings."

Participating in the event (photos below) and joining the Edge dinner that followed were:

Noga Arikha, Historian of ideas; Author, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours
Patrick Cavanagh, University of Paris researcher on visual perception and its implications
Laurent Cohen, Neurologist, Hôpital de la Salpêtrière (Paris); Author, L'homme thermomètre (Thermometer Man), a science-based single-case study  similar to the work of Oliver Sachs
Emmanuel Dupoux, Director of Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP)
Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, CNRS,  Neuro-paediatrician and researcher studying  infant brain development
Janine di Giovanni, Journalist; Vanity Fair and The New York Times
Juan Enriquez, Life Sciences investor and Academic; Author, As the Future Catches Us
Etienne Klein, Physicist; Author of many books on epistemology and history of science
Katinka Matson, Cofounder, Edge
Lionel Naccache, Neurologist; Author, Le Nouvel Inconscient, (The New Unconscious), which establishes  a new science-based dialog between research on non-conscious processing and Freudian view
Gloria Origgi, Philosopher and Researcher, Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique
Sharon Pepperkamp, Linguist, University of Paris; Researcher, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique
Philip Pettit, Philosopher, Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton; Author, Made with Words: Hobbes on Mind, Society and Politics
Jaqui Safra, Investor, (Encyclopædia Britannica, Spring Mountain Vineyards); Movie Producer
Dan Sperber, Directeur de Recherche au CNRS, Paris, Social and Cognitive scientist; Author, Rethinking Symbolism; On Anthropological Knowledge; Explaining Culture
Aalam Wassef, Digital Artist, Music Composer, Network Designer

Edge is pleased to present the text and the entire video (1hr 20 minutes) of Stanislas Dehaene's Paris talk.

— JB

STANISLAS DEHAENE is a Professor at the Collège de France and Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology. His research  focuses on the cerebral bases of specifically human cognitive functions such as language, calculation, and reasoning. His work  centers on  the cognitive neuropsychology of language and reading, and his main scientific contributions include the study of the organization of the cerebral system for number processing.

He is the author of The Number Sense: How Mathematical Knowledge Is Embedded In Our Brains; and Reading in the Brain the Science and Evolution of a Cultural Invention.

Stanislas Dehaene's Edge Bio Page

[...]

THE REALITY CLUB: On "Signatures of Consciousness: A Talk by Stanislas Dehaene"

Daniel Kahneman, Sam Harris, George Dyson, Steven Pinker, Donald Hoffman, Arnold Trehub

ARNOLD TREHUB: I agree with Steve Pinker that a global workspace is a key function of consciousness, but it is not an explanation of consciousness. In order to understand consciousness we have to explain how the brain is able to represent a volumetric world filled with objects and events from our own privileged egocentric perspective — the problem of subjectivity. This challenge is compounded by the fact that we have no sensory apparatus for detecting the 3D space in which we live. [...]

DONALD HOFFMAN: ...his assumption that biological systems are too warm for quantum computing appears to be empirically false. His assumption of reductive functionalism, despite being widely shared by researchers in the field, is provably false. And his assumption that consciousness is accomplished by the brain, again widely shared by researchers in the field, needs to be tested by simulations of evolutionary games that investigate the shaping of perception by natural selection. [...]

STEVEN PINKER: I have always thought that the global-workspace theory is the best explanation of the function of consciousness, and coming from a completely different direction (language), I've argued, like Dehaene, that the ability of an analog brain to emulate a digital, combinatorial symbol processor is the key to human intelligence and perhaps the most profound problem in cognitive neuroscience. [...]

GEORGE DYSON: Why stop there? As Dehaene explains, numbers can be recognized by a computer while still in the brain. We know where this is going: thoughts, both conscious and subconscious, will be communicated directly with computers — as surely (if ever as mysteriously) as they are already communicated between the hemispheres of a single brain. [...]

SAM HARRIS: This was a very interesting talk, and Dehaene and colleagues are doing fascinating neuroscience. But as is often the case with neuroscientists engaged in fascinating research, Dehaene seems impatient with related problems in philosophy. Finding such problems boring is not the same as solving them, however. Dehaene may have added a few bars to the tune, but he is still whistling past the graveyard on the deeper problem of consciousness. [...]

DANIEL KAHNEMAN: Wonderful talk. ... Dehaene dismisses as myth the idea that unconscious suggestions can directly activate behavior, but there is now a lot of evidence of subtle and indirect effects. I would really like to eavesdrop on a conversation between him and John Bargh on this issue. Perhaps Edge will give all of us an opportunity to eavesdrop. ...

... I went into graduate school more than 50 years ago with the intention of studying unconscious perception, and my first (rightly rejected) paper, joint with my teacher Richard Lazarus, was on that topic. For all the years since that early attempt I thought of the question of "what consciousness is" as perennially interesting and futile. The phenomenological discussions seemed useless, and the discussions in terms of neural activity were either highly speculative or arbitrary in their mapping onto psychological observations. But this feels different. Congratulations! [...]

...For close to two decades Cass Seltzer has all but owned the psychology of religion, but only because nobody else wanted it, not anyone with the smarts to do academic research in psychology and the ambition to follow through. It had been impossible to get grants, and the prestigious journals would return his manuscripts without sending them out for peer review. The undergraduates crowded his courses, but that counted, if anything, as a strike against him in his department. The graduate students stayed away in droves. The sexy psychological research was all in neural network modeling and cognitive neuroscience. The mind is a neural computer and the folks with the algorithms ruled.

But now things had happened — fundamental and fundamentalist things — and religion as a phenomenon is on everybody's mind. And among all the changes that religion's new towering profile has wrought in the world, which are mostly alarming if not downright terrifying, is the transformation in the life of one Cass Seltzer.

First had come the book, which he had entitled The Varieties of Religious Illusion, a nod to both William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience and to Sigmund Freud's The Future of An Illusion. The book had brought Cass an indecent amount of attention. Time Magazine, in a cover story on the so-called new atheists, had ended by dubbing him "the atheist with a soul." When the magazine came out, Cass's literary agent, Sy Auerbach, called to congratulate him. "Now that you're famous, even I might have to take you seriously. ...

36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD [11.19.09]
By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

Introduction
by John Brockman

"What is this stuff, you ask one another," says the narrator in Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, "and how can it still be kicking around, given how much we already know?"

We have very short memories.

It was in April 2006 that President George W. Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and Senator John McCain all announced their support of teaching Intelligent Design in public schools. This assault on science and on the separation of church and state was a mobilizing moment for the Edge community which responded to this initiative with book of essays by 16 eminent scientists entitled Intelligent Thought, excerpts from which appeared on Edge.

At the time, three and a half years ago, no one was using the phrase "the new atheists". In fact, in early 2006 only Sam Harris's book The End of Faith (2004), and Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell (February, 2006) had been published. It was in response to the highly organized and well-financed campaign by the religious right that led champions of rational thinking such as Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, A.C. Grayling, and P.Z. Myers to mount an unrelenting campaign against the purveyors of superstition, supernaturalism, ignorance ... and their apologists (the self-proclaimed "moderates", or to use more apt terms, the "accommodationists", or the "faitheists").

The term "the new atheists" came into play in early 2007, followed by "I am an atheist, but". This is hardly the lingo of the far right. In fact, you don't have to leave the pages of Edge to read variations on this meme from some very distinguished and respected scientists. But what some appear to be saying is "I am an atheist but... other people, not as smart as I am, require religion (a) to get through the day, (b) to create sustainable societies, (c) to have moral values, etc. Others, intellectually lazy, afraid, or unable to invent their own personal narratives, simply wear their parents' old ideas like a hand-me-down suit, defaulting to the maudlin sentimentality that is the soundtrack to the American mind.

Now, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, known to Edge readers as a philosopher who has interesting things to say about Gödel and Spinoza, among others, enters into this conversation, taking on these and wider themes, and pushing the envelope by crossing over into the realm of fiction.

Goldstein isn't the first novelist to appear on Edge, nor the first to discuss religion. In October 1989, the novelist Ken Kesey came to New York spoke to The Reality Club. "As I've often told Ginsberg," he began, "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."

It's in this spirit that Edge presents a brief excerpt from the first chapter, and the nonfiction appendix from 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (21,250 words).

— JB

REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN is a philosopher, a novelist, and Edge contributor. She is the author of the nonfiction works Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, and Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel. Her other novels include The Mind-Body Problem and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics, and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's Edge Bio page

__

Further Readng on Edge:

"Reasonable Doubt: By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein" [7.29.06]
"Gödel and The Nature of Mathematical Truth: A Talk with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein" [6.8.05]

[...]

18.11.2009

Frank Schirrmacher: Payback

DIE ICH-ERSCHÖPFUNG
Von Andrian Kreye

[Google Translation]

Wenn der Kopf im Internet nicht mehr mitkommt: Frank Schirrmachers Buch "Payback" bringt die digitale Debatte zwar auf den neuesten Stand, aber nicht weiter.

Dabei ist Frank Schirrmacher keineswegs ein digitaler Außenseiter. Im Onlinemagazin Edge.org begegnet er digitalen Vordenkern wie George Dyson, Jaron Lanier and David Gelernter auf Augenhöhe. Man merkt auch seinem Text an, dass ihm die Grenzen der linearen Erzählform längst zu eng geworden sind, dass Klammern, Einschübe und Fußnoten die Thesengebäude gerade noch zusammenhalten können, bevor die vernetzten Gedanken die Buchform sprengen.

[...]

November 15, 2009

[...]

Inflation does not provide a natural explanation for why the early universe looks like it does unless you can give me an answer for why inflation ever started in the first place. That is not a question we know the answer to right now.  That is why we need to go back before inflation into before the Big Bang, into a different part of the universe to understand why inflation happened versus something else. There you get into branes and the cyclic universe. ... I really don't like any of the models that are on the market right now. We really need to think harder about what the universe should look like.

WHY DOES THE UNIVERSE LOOK THE WAY IT DOES?
A Conversation with Sean Carroll

[24:21 minutes]

SEAN CARROLL, a theoretical physicist, is a senior research associate at Caltech. His research interests include theoretical aspects of cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. He is the author of a Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity; and From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. And he is cofounder and contributor to the Cosmic Variance blog.

[...]

Leading scientists answer the question: What is your dangerous idea?
Climate change? Live to 200? Genetic engineering? Not necessarily. Leading scientists of our time to answer the question: What is your dangerous idea?

(German language original: Führende Wissenschafter beantworten die Frage: Was ist Ihre gefährlichste Idee?)

By Robert Buchacher

He is "a kind of thinker, that does not exist in Europe," said La Stampa, the international Turin newspaper. The New York writer, literary agent, corporate and political advisor, John Brockman, 68, is a sore thumb, a maverick brings people and ideas under the same roof, which at first glance don't go together at all. One of his many books is titled: Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein and Frankenstein (1993). Brockman loves the challenge, he is a great lover of art, science, technology, media and the Internet. An intellectual catalyst.

Fascinated by new and unusual ideas, he is an assiduous networker. According to his friend Richard Dawkins, he has "the most enviable address book in the English-speaking world." In 1997 he created with the Internet platform edge (www.edge.org) a sort of Facebook of thinkers, imagine where minds not just their own ideas and projects, but also comment on the thoughts of others, "deliberately in a spirit of provocation," as Brockman says. In his own words Edge presents "speculative ideas, explores new territory in the fields of evolutionary biology, genetics, computer science, neurophysiology, psychology and physics, and answers questions like: What are the origins of the universe, of life, the mind? For the most exciting answers Brockman has created a book that has recently appeared in German. Supplemented by contributions of high profile Austrian scientists we publish excerpts from the book entitled: "What is your dangerous idea? The leading scientists of our time to think the unthinkable", edited by John Brockman.

J. Craig Venter; Paul CW Davies; Rodney Brooks; Paul W. Ewald; Martin Rees; Samuel Barondes; John Horgan; Peter C. Aichelburg; Ray Kurzweil; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; Josef Smolen; Georg Wick; Clifford Pickover; Lawrence M. Krauss; Michael Freissmuth; Jordan Pollac; Haim Harari.

[...]

DAVID PESCOVITS
TECHNOLOGY

THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE

We make technology, but our technology also makes us. At the online science/culture journal Edge, BB pal John Brockman went deep -- very deep -- into this concept. Frank Schirrmacher is co-publisher of the national German newspaper FAZ and a very, very big thinker. Schirrmacher has raised public awareness and discussion about some of the most controversial topics in science research today, from genetic engineering to the aging population to the impacts of neuroscience. At Edge, Schirrmacher riffs on the notion of the "informavore," an organism that devours information like it's food. After posting Schirrmacher's thoughts, Brockman invited other bright folks to respond, including the likes of George Dyson, Steven Pinker, John Perry Barlow, Doug Rushkoff, and Nick Bilton. Here's a taste of Schirrmacher, from "The Age of the Infomavore" [...]

TERCERA CULTURA — CHILE [Google Translation page]
Un podcast divulgacion de la Cience Cognitiva Contemporanea

Who Are We?

Third Culture was born as a podcast in August 2009. Our idea was to spread the extraordinary findings, illuminations and epiphanies that we had throughout this decade in our studies of science of the mind.

Our ideas was to spread the extraordinary findings, illuminations and epiphanies that we had throughout this decade in our studies of science of the mind."Coming from the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Chile, we had the experience of being a somewhat rare beasts: interested in science in a humanistic environment. We found, in the concept of Third Culture (developed in CP Snow in the late fifties and sponsored by John Brockman in the nineties), a space where we could move easily and at the same time, share our experience students and our academic colleagues. ...

...We believe we can build a community around the issues of mind, not only among specialists of the six disciplines founding (if we ignore the hexagon of the Sloan Foundation in the seventies): Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychology, Linguistics and Anthropology, but also between those who come from the humanities, which, as you said people like Jonah Lehrer or Ian Richardson, have been turning the problem of the mind since time immemorial.

We know that the others can be seen as a kind of "sensationalism" intellectual, or syncretism, even as accommodationist: we believe that this is one of the greatest dangers. We also know that you can see the third culture as "selling the system" in the humanities, dominated by epistemological pessimism, not relying on scientific research. Finally we know that on that same line of reasoning, the third culture can be seen as an unconditional surrender to the dominant ideas of the traditional right, the market, and so on. We put it bluntly, we are people with leftist values, but we are not the guerrilla left ... we are from the Darwinian left (... that is, at bottom, we are only interested in sex ).

The page / blog terceracultura.cl is our third step in the dissemination of the Third Culture in Chile and Chilean in this space will links to programs, more extensive post blogs, discuss recent articles, open the door to debate and establish links with elsewhere. We expect maximum contact.

[...]

[ED. NOTE: A new podcast website from Chile on The Third Culture with entries about Danlel Gilbert, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Guns Germs and Steel, Darwin in Chile, among others. — JB]

We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on. There is one comment on Edge which I love, which is in Daniel Dennett's response to the 2007 annual question, in which he said that we have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them.

THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE (*) [10.27.09]
A Talk With Frank Schirrmacher

(*The term informavore characterizes an organism that consumes information. It is meant to be a description of human behavior in modern information society, in comparison to omnivore, as a description of humans consuming food. )

INTRODUCTION

The most significant intellectual development of the first decade of the 21st Century is that concepts of information and computation have infiltrated a wide range of sciences, from physics and cosmology, to cognitive psychology, to evolutionary biology, to genetic engineering. Such innovations as the binary code, the bit, and the algorithm have been applied in ways that reach far beyond the programming of computers, and are being used to understand such mysteries as the origins of the universe, the operation of the human body, and the working of the mind.

Enter Frank Schirrmacher, Editorial Director the editorial staff of the FAZ Feuilleton, a supplement of the FAZ on the arts and sciences. He is also one of the five publishers of the newspaper, responsible for the Feuilleton, and he has actively expanded science coverage in this section. He has been referred to as Germany's "Culture Czar", which may seem over the top, but his cultural influence is undeniable. He can, and does, begin national discussions on topics and ideas that interest him, such as genomic research, neuroscience, aging, and, in this regard, he has the ability to reshape the national consciousness.

I can provide a first-hand account of "the Schirrmacher treatment". ...

Frank Schirrmacher's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: Daniel Kahneman, George Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Nick Bilton, Nick Carr, Douglas Rushkoff, Jesse Dylan, Virginia Heffernan, Gerd Gigerenzer, John Perry Barlow, Steven Pinker, John Bargh, George Dyson, Annalena McAfee, John Brockman, David Gelernter, Evgeny Morozov

[...]

EVGENY MOROZOV: In a sense, dealing with personal failure — of any kind, whether real or imaginary — was much easier before social networking exploded: 5 or 10 or 15 years after college, your former pals may all be having nicer jobs and perks than you do — but that humiliating realization only happened once a year (if at all), usually at alumni reunions. Today we are constantly bombarded with new information about others, which plants more and more seeds of self-doubt deep into us. Self-denial — which is essential for letting us cope with the past — is no longer an option: all the evidence stares us in the face from our Facebook walls. [...]

DAVID GELERNTER: This is an observation about the invention of writing, not about "modern technology." Suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things." What stuff? Phonebooks? Calendars on paper? Clay tablets with cuneiform inscriptions? "Suddenly people start forgetting things." When did they ever not forget things? [...]

JOHN BROCKMAN: What exactly is "the cybernetic idea"? Well, it's not to be confused with the discipline of cybernetics, which hit a wall, and stopped evolving during the 1950s. And it's not your usual kind of idea. The cybernetic idea is an invention. A very big invention. The late evolutionary biologist Gregory Bateson called it the most important idea since the idea of Jesus Christ. [...]

ANNALENA MCAFEE: Unlike your best friend, or the long-vanished bookstore owner, or the former manager of the defunct record shop — all of whom made a number of unintentionally insulting errors of taste — these predictive programs get it right 90 per cent of the time. I am willing to trade my free will — surely already compromised by my birthplace, my parents' religion and circumstances, my genetic inheritance — for these time-saving and life-enriching programs. [...]

GEORGE DYSON: Response to John Bargh ... First we had digital representations of existing ideas. Then we had digital expressions of new, previously unrepresented ideas. And now we have network processes (including human collaboration) that might actually be ideas. ... [...]

JOHN BARGH: The discovery of the pervasiveness of situational priming influences for all of the higher mental processes in humans does say something fundamentally new about human nature (for example, how tightly tied and responsive is our functioning to our particular physical and social surroundings).  It removes consciousness or free will as the bottleneck that exclusively generates choices and behavioral impulses, replacing it with the physical and social world itself as the source of these impulses. [...]

STEVEN PINKER: I would suggest another way to look at the effects of technology on our collective intelligence. Take the intellectual values that are timeless and indisputable: objectivity, truth, factual discovery, soundness of argument, insight, explanatory depth, openness to challenging ideas, scrutiny of received dogma, overturning of myth and superstition. Now ask, are new technologies enhancing or undermining those values? [...]

JOHN PERRY BARLOW: I have always wanted to convey to every human being the Right to Know — the protected technical means to fulfill all curiosities with the best answers human beings had yet derived — but the Ability to Know (Everything) is a capacity we don't and won't possess individually. [...]

GERD GIGERENZER: We might think of mentality and technology as two sides of the same coin, as a system in which knowledge, skills, and values are distributed.  This requires a new type of psychology that goes beyond the individual and studies the dynamics of human adaptation to the very tools humans create. [...]

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN: ... there is a great deal of anxiety, irritation, unease and impatience in Internet use. There is even some self-loathing. What am I doing on the Web—when I used to read books bound in Moroccan leather; stroll in the sunshine; spend hours in focused contemplation of Hegel or Coleridge? [...]

JESSE DYLAN: How the human brain must adapt to the modern era and where those changes will take us are a mystery. What knowledge will a person need in the future when information is ubiquitous and all around us? Will Predictive technologies do away with free will. Google will be able to predict wether you are enjoying the Neil Young concert you are attending before you yourself know. Science fiction becomes reality. [...]

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: We continue to build and accept new technologies into our lives with little or no understanding of how these devices have been programmed. We do not know how to program our computers. We spend much more time and energy trying to figure out how to program one another, instead. And this is potentially a grave mistake. [...]

NICHOLAS CARR: "Importance is individualism," says Nick Bilton, reassuringly. We'll create and consume whatever information makes us happy, fulfills us, and leave the rest by the wayside. Maybe. Or maybe we'll school like fish in the Web's algorithmic currents, little Nemos, each of us convinced we're going our own way because, well, we never stop talking, never stop sharing the minutiae of our lives and thoughts. Look at me! Am I not an individual? [...]

NICK BILTON: The new generation, born connected, does not feel the need to consume all the information available at their fingertips. They consume what they want and then affect or change it, they add to it or negate it, they share it and then swiftly move along the path. They rely on their community, their swarm, to filter and share information and in turn they do the same; it's a communism of content. True ideology at it's best. [...]

JARON LANIER: To continue to perceive almost supernatural powers in the Internet (an ascendant perception, as Schirrmacher accurately reports) is to cede the future to reactive religious fanatics. [...]

GEORGE DYSON: When you are an informavore drowning in digital data, analog looks good. [...]

DANIEL KAHNEMAN: The link with Bargh is also interesting, because John pushes the idea that we are driven from the outside and controlled by a multitude of cues of which we are only vaguely aware — we are bathing in primes. [...]

STUTTGARTER ZEITUNG
October 22, 2009

CONTROVERSY

ARE THE DISCIPLINARY BOUNDARIES PERMEABLE?

Yes, the themes of science overlap and are often inter-disciplinary perspective.

By Gábor Paál

[Rough Translation:] The boundaries between the cultures blur. The spiritual has long been the subject of empirical science, the nature of the object interpretation for philosophers and other scholars. This is especially evident here, where it goes in the broadest sense to Information: In communication science, psychology, neuroscience, robotics and memory research. Information is the elementary unit of all mental processes, information processes can also often investigate with scientific methods and use technically versatile.

The boundaries blur also in those sciences, dedicated to the multifaceted development of human culture. The time scale in which evolutionary scientists and historians move, now go smoothly into one  another. Researchers describe the history of thought — and thus of the mind — not just today but also based on neuroscience and evolutionary models. And in the debates of today — bioethics, neuroethics, global change — meet representatives of the two "cultures".

There were also other points to approach. For Charles Percy Snow was an important difference between them in the manner of publications: scientists write short articles in professional journals, humanities scholars, on the other hand, wrote thick tomes. Scientists are also doing so today.Researchers such as Richard Dawkins and Gregory Bateson began doing so as early as the 1970s, and many more have been added since then: mathematicians like Roger Penrose, biologists such as Lynn Margulis, geographers such as Jared Diamond or psycholinguist Steven Pinker (only the Germans move slowly).

The literary agent John Brockman, formerly referred to this genus of scientists as representatives of a "third culture" who come from the "hard" sciences, and deal with fundamental questions of human existence. They write thick books in which they develop — as do the "real" social scientists — hundreds of pages of their own theses. Inspired by Brockman's thesis, FAZ began to cover scientific developments the Feuilleton in the late 90's. And around the same time Der Spiegel regularly began to cover "third-culture topics" and enticed its readers with articles on the origin of language, the end of the universe or neuro-theology.

However, at least according to the claim, this is not entirely new. Brockman's "third culture" corresponds almost exactly to what Hegel called Realphilosophie: the application of logic and exact thinking in the real world. The concept deserves a revival. In contrast to traditional philosophy with its focus on literary texts juggling with terms and notions, Realphilosophie can be understood as the systematic reflection on existential questions, based on hard empirical data. It pertains where the empirical science reaches its limits — at all levels of organization in the world, the cosmos, life, spirit and culture.

There is still untapped potential in Realphilosophie. It is often a complaint that too few young people are interested in science and technology. Accordingly, more practical instructional opportunities in these subjects are being used to gain more interest. At the same time, however, what's being missed is the opportunity to awaken the fascination with realphilosophical topics of interest and in this way to also communicate an understanding of modern scientific thinking.

Original German-language version

On "Are The Disciplinary Boundaries Permeable?"

DANIEL C. DENNETT
Philisopher, Tufts; Author, Breaking the Spell

Hey, Hegel got all his ideas from Plato. Didn't you know that all of Western culture (including science, I guess) is a series of footnotes to Plato? Somebody said something like that once. I forget who. Oh, it must have been Plato's idea in the first place. (Except of course he got all his ideas from Socrates, who got his from Parmenides.)

A student of mine once wrote, on an hour exam, "Parmenides is the one who said 'there's just one thing--and I'm not it." Well, yes, he does seem to say that. I never taught the Pre-Socratics again.

Ps. Jetlagged in Oslo.

MICHAEL NAUMANN
Co-Publisher, Die Ziet

I thought the idea by Gábor Paál's description of your role in the emergence of science writing within the realm of your "Third Culture" gave you a well-deserved credit. It was quite hilarious, though in drawing an affiliation to Hegel. He had lots of insights into the consequences of the industrial revolution yet his historical speculations tied him firmly into the Gnosticism of linear Eschatology. He represents the total opposite to the central motive of French enlightenment, clarté. If you are really looking for European intellectual predecessors, you are much better placed in the tradition of the encyclopaedicists. It is a neighborhood, if I were you, I'd definitely prefer.

STEVEN PINKER
Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; Author, The Stuff of Thought.

I'm glad to hear that the third culture is superior to traditional begriffsfokussierten !

GÁBOR PAÁL
German Radio Journalist; Author; Founder of the Network on Science and the Media

Response to Michael Naumann's comment

When Hegel wrote about Realphilosophie he was not historical — his examples came from astronomy and biology. But anyway a revival of "Realphilosophie" does not at all mean to postulate a revival of Hegel and his other ideas. It's not a matter of looking for a neighboorhood to any person but to a very special concept and to fill it, of course with modern content.