About Edge Foundation, Inc.

Dedication:
Heinz R. Pagels

Two forums were originally planned for the site: "Digerati" and "The Third Culture," which feature ongoing participation with, and interaction by, many, if not most, of the individuals included in print-related projects.

Digerati

"Digerati" is a living document. My book, Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber-Elite (1996), is the print spin-off. I planned to enlist the digerati in the book — along with additional members of the "cyber elite" — to participate in the "Digerati" Forum by adding interactive "chapters" on a regular basis in which new digerati present their work, their ideas, and their comments about the work and ideas of the digerati already on the site. They do so with the understanding that they are to be challenged. What emerges is rigorous discussion concerning crucial issues of the digital age in a highly-charged atmosphere where "thinking smart" prevails over the "anesthesiology of wisdom."

"Digerati" is an attempt to gather on one site, in an ongoing conversation, the cyber-elite, the critical mass of the doers, thinkers, and writers, connected in ways they may not even appreciate, who have tremendous influence on the emerging communication revolution surrounding the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web.

The Third Culture

The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.

In 1991 I published an essay, "The Emerging Third Culture," which received international attention and resulted in my writing a book of the same title, published in 1996. The book, in turn, has been the subject of a number of international seminars and press attention.

The plan was to expand the group of third culture thinkers who are in the book form to form the core of the site.

The format of the "Third Culture" Forum mirrors that of the "Digerati" Forum — a dynamical emergent system, a celebration of the ideas of the third culture thinkers who are defining the interesting and important questions of our times. They communicate their thoughts to the public and to one another. It is an exhibition of this new community of intellectuals in action.

The ideas presented are speculative; they represent the frontiers of knowledge in the areas of evolutionary biology, genetics, computer science, neurophysiology, psychology, and physics. Some of the fundamental questions posed are: Where did the universe come from? Where did life come from? Where did the mind come from? Emerging out of the third culture is a new natural philosophy, founded on the realization of the import of complexity, of evolution. Very complex systemsówhether organisms, brains, the biosphere, or the universe itself — were not constructed by design; all have evolved. There is a new set of metaphors to describe ourselves, our minds, the universe, and all of the things we know in it, and it is the intellectuals with these new ideas and imagesóthose scientists doing things and writing their own booksówho drive our times.